“I don’t feel like I’ve left the label; it’s just more that it’s left me.”
An interesting line with a lot of history to it from Sen. Jon Fetterman on dumping the “progressive” label he used to use.
“I don’t feel like I’ve left the label; it’s just more that it’s left me.”
President Reagan would often quip, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” Similar lines have been used by everyone from Bill Maher, “It’s not me who’s changed, it is the left” to Elon Musk.
It’s hard to say exactly what’s going on with Fetterman after his medical issues, but a dividing line seems to have been the Left’s support for Hamas, but he’s also embraced a species of economic populism, fighting against land sales to China, and Japan’s takeover of U.S. Steel.
While Fetterman had never been a foreign policy guy, he did explicitly break with the far left on Israel during his campaign.
“I would also respectfully say that I’m not really a progressive in that sense,” he added. “Our campaign is based on core Democratic values and principles, and always has been, and there is no daylight between myself and these kinds of unwavering commitments to Israel’s security.”
Still, Fetterman said he was “eager to affirm” his positions on the record, lest there be any uncertainty among supporters of Israel who have similar questions. “I want to go out of my way to make sure that it’s absolutely clear,” he told JI, “that the views that I hold in no way go along the lines of some of the more fringe or extreme wings of our party.”
The Left did not take that seriously and assumed he was just pandering. Now they’re finding out that he really meant it.
So this did not come out of nowhere. And it’s not just about Israel.
He has also publicly encouraged Democrats in recent days to engage in border negotiations with Republicans, talks that have outraged progressives who object to efforts to clamp down on migration through the United States border with Mexico.
“I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have a secured border,” Mr. Fetterman said in the interview, conducted over Zoom. “I would never put Dreamers in harm’s way, or support any kind of cruelty or mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people. But it’s a reasonable conversation to talk about the border.”
Now this may be a canny rebranding.
A moderate Democrat who emphasizes economic populism, border security and steers clear of crazier leftist stuff, has much better odds of holding on to a Pennsylvania Senate seat.
Fetterman would never have taken office if Republicans hadn’t run a Turkish Muslim leftist trainwreck like Mehmet Oz who appealed to no one except Oprah viewers (and they mostly vote Democrat anyway). Next time, Republicans may actually find a candidate that people might actually vote for. But next time around is a long time away and Fetterman doesn’t need to be picking fights with the Left.
The short version seems to be that he may be a leftist, but he’s an old-school leftist who actually doesn’t much like the Left.
The media castigates him for associating with Bernie Sanders, but Bernie was actually an old-school leftist who used to be against identity politics, culture wars and open borders. Under pressure, he jettisoned all of his views and became a generic woke. (At which point most people lost interest in him. Eventually so did the Left.)
Fetterman has pushed back against the pressure. Unlike Bernie, he refuses to be intimidated by people screaming at him.
Despite the headline, he hasn’t left the Left, but he’s not interested in the progressive label which tends to signify upper class wokeness.
The Pennsylvania senator said he still aligns with many progressive goals, including a $15 minimum wage, universal health care, legalizing marijuana and abolishing the Senate filibuster.
But he said he no longer relates to the overarching label of “progressive” — especially as the left has become more interested in demanding what he described as “purity tests.”
“It’s just a place where I’m not,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’ve left the label; it’s just more that it’s left me.
“I’m not critical if someone is a progressive,” he added. “I believe different things.”
Fetterman is currently for fracking, and also for lots of social welfare. That is old-school leftism. It’s also fairly popular.
There’s a whole lot more support for social welfare than there is for culture wars, drag queens and Islamic terrorism. Not to mention radical environmentalism.
The old progressives used to argue (not even all that long ago) that they should run on a straight class warfare platform while shedding all the other garbage. This used to be the main argument for a Bernie Sanders campaign. Except that garbage is hard to shed. Just ask Bernie.
Fetterman is shedding a lot of the garbage. This doesn’t make him an ex-leftist or a friend to conservatives, but it makes him something worse: a serious threat to the Left as it currently is.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2023-12-23 06:34:502023-12-23 06:53:07Fetterman: I Didn’t Leave the Left, It Left Me
After decades of forced sterilizations followed by feeble apologies, California is shifting to the endgame of its century-long sterilization program: taxing innocent citizens to pay off its victims.
It is a commonsense view that government spending is generally inefficient compared to spending by private people and businesses. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously argued, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”
This point about economic efficiency may be true, but it often lets government officials off the hook far too easy. A chilling example of this is how California is currently dealing with its long history of forcing sterilization on unwilling victims and then legislatively immunizing themselves from responsibility.
If you were a taxpayer in the Golden State as recently as 2010, your earnings probably helped fund the forced sterilizations of hundreds of inmates such as the Native American woman Moonlight Pulido.
“While in prison in 2005, Pulido said a doctor told her he needed to remove two ‘growths’ that could be cancer,” the Associated Pressreported earlier this month. “She signed a form and had surgery. Later, something didn’t feel right. She was constantly sweating and not feeling like herself. She asked a nurse, who told her she had had a full hysterectomy, a procedure that removes the uterus and the cervix, and sometimes other parts of the reproductive system.”
“I felt like less than a woman,” Pulido told reporter Adam Beam. “We’re the only life-givers, we’re the only ones that can give life and he stole that blessing from me.”
Pulido was not alone. Other victims of this ghoulish policy shared stories with media, including Kimberly Jeffrey, who recalled resisting a tubal ligation procedure while she was sedated and strapped to an operating table.
“Being treated like I was less than human produced in me a despair,” Jeffrey told NPR.
Kelli Dillon, a former inmate at Central California women’s facility, explained how she found out that her ovaries had been removed in 2001 without her knowledge or consent after she was told surgeons were going to take a biopsy and remove a cyst.
“It was like my life wasn’t worth anything. Somebody felt I had nothing to contribute to the point where they had to find this sneaky and diabolical way to take my ability to have children,” Dillon told the Guardian in 2021.
It was not until years later, while still a member of the California State prison system, that Dillon began to realize other inmates were receiving hysterectomies and sterilization procedures without their knowledge, often after being told the procedures “were necessary to look for cancers or correcting gynecological issues.”
If the perpetrators of these violations were held accountable for their actions, such atrocities would be less likely to happen. But instead of being brought to justice for their malfeasance, the California State government is forcing innocent people to pay the price and getting off virtually scott free themselves. It is this sort of application for the expropriation of funds from private and productive citizens that has allowed governments to terrorize their citizens since time immemorial—a pattern that will have no reason to end until measures have been taken to eliminate the power of governments to enact such cruel legislation.
Timeline: California’s Forced Sterilization
1909: The state government of California created a sterilization program that became the largest eugenics movement in the United States, sterilizing more than 20,000 unwilling victims and also inspiring eugenics practices in Nazi Germany. The practices were carried out in public hospitals and other tax-funded institutions for the disabled and mentally ill, because people with disabilities or mental illnesses were deemed unfit for reproduction.
1927: By now the eugenics movement had become mainstream in the United States. It was widely thought among elite American policymakers that the human population could be improved by coercively preventing the reproduction of disliked demographics such as the disabled, the poor, the “feebleminded,” and even people deemed “sexual deviants” such as rapists, prostitutes, or even women who had sex out of wedlock. California’s constitutional right to continue its eugenics practices was enshrined by the United States Supreme Court in the Buck v. Bell case, in which the right of the state of Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck (who the state falsely declared “feebleminded”) against her will was upheld—and with it the rights of other state governments to make similar decisions for their inhabitants.
Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (considered an idol of “progressivism” in his time and still by some today) stated, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”
And thus, he concluded in a famous line that, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
1968-1974: Although the eugenics movement had peaked in the 1930s, California government officials oversaw continued tax-funded sterilizations into the later half of the 20th century. For example, according to an official document released by Los Angeles County five years ago apologizing for a series of sterilizations county officials had overseen between 1968 and 1974, “Over 200 women who delivered babies at the Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center, the majority of whom were low income and born in Mexico, were possibly coerced into getting postpartum tubal ligations. At least some of the women were not aware they had been sterilized, and only learned that they had lost their reproductive rights during subsequent doctors’ visits. It is significant and necessary to acknowledge the irreparable harm inflicted onto the women who were subjected to these coerced sterilizations at Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center, and to their families.“
1979: California’s eugenics laws were repealed, supposedly ending the practice of state-funded eugenics in CA.
1999 – 2010: California’s eugenics movement was mysteriously revived, but this time under the guise of prison healthcare. According to the Associated Press less than two years ago, “Sterilizations in California prisons appear to date to 1999, when the state changed its policy for unknown reasons to include a sterilization procedure known as “tubal ligation” as part of inmates’ medical care. Over the next decade, women reported they were coerced into this procedure, with some not fully understanding the ramifications.”
2003: While the California government was still funding involuntary sterilizations in their state prisons, California Governor Gray Davis apologized on behalf of “the people of California” for the government’s “past” eugenicist actions. “To the victims and their families of this past injustice, the people of California are deeply sorry for the suffering you endured over the years,” the apology read. “Our hearts are heavy for the pain caused by eugenics. It was a sad and regrettable chapter in the state’s history, and it is one that must never be repeated again.”
2013: The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR, now Reveal) discovered that between 1997 and 2010 California state officials spent at least $147,460 of taxpayer funds to sterilize 148 female inmates. The above-quoted Moonlight Pulido, Kimberly Jeffrey, and Kelli Dillon were just three among them. Many of the records of these sterilizations were “lost or destroyed,” the Associated Press reports. NPR notes that the true number of illicit sterilizations during that period may have been significantly higher than reported, and that the operations appeared to disproportionately target repeat offenders.
The CIR’s claims were denied by the few state officials who commented in this early phase of the scandal. Valley State Prison’s former OB-GYN Dr. James Heinrich claimed that all sterilized inmates had consented to the operations. He even justified this use of tax dollars in a way that seemed to echo Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s disregard for the value of human life back in 1927. “Over a 10-year period, [$147,460] isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children — as they procreated more,” Heinrich said according to NPR.
2014: Prompted by the CIR’s findings, auditors conducted their own investigation to confirm or disconfirm the CIR’s claims. “A state audit found 144 women were sterilized between 2005 and 2013 with little or no evidence they were counseled or offered alternative treatments,” the audit found. The auditors’ report, published at www.auditor.ca.gov, found that the misconduct had occurred with the oversight of either the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation or California Correctional Health Care Services.
“This report concludes that during our eight-year audit period, 144 female inmates were sterilized by a procedure known as bilateral tubal ligation, a surgery generally performed for the sole purpose of sterilization,” the auditors wrote.
Later that year, in response to the revelations, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill supposedly written to prohibit future involuntary sterilizations in California prisons. However, as reporting from the Guardian noted, “While the bill passed unanimously, its carefully negotiated language allowed the state to escape further responsibility.”
2021: The California government approved legislation intended to compensate its sterilization victims through tax-funded reparations payments. The program will pay out at least $15,000 to any applicant who can prove to have been one of the victims.
2022-2023: California is searching for the victims that are still alive today, of which there are believed to be more than 600, according to reporting from the Associated Press in 2021 (although many of the victims never knew what was done to them, so it is unclear how they would know to apply for reparations). The government’s search strategy consists of sending posters, flyers, and fact sheets to libraries, prisons, and other establishments across the state, the AP reported this month.
After a year of searching, the government has approved only 51 out of 310 reparations applicants, denied 103 people’s applications, and closed three incomplete applications. According to the AP, “They say it’s difficult to verify the applications as many records have been lost or destroyed.” Therefore, according to Executive Officer of the California Victim Compensation Board Lynda Gledhill, “We try to find all the information we can and sometimes we just have to hope that somebody maybe can find more detailed information on their own. We’re just sometimes not able to verify what happened.”
Of the 51 victims who have been approved for reparations payments, three were sterilized under California’s eugenics laws that were repealed in 1979. The rest were sterilized more recently.
2024: The $4.5 million reparations program, for which an additional $2 million is being spent on advertising, will end.
Any victims still unpaid will have lost their chance to be compensated for the damages to their bodies, sexual identities, human dignity, and potential to pass their genes onto future generations.
Allowing the Unthinkable to Happen
The “public servants” governing California appropriated funds from innocent citizens against their will, used those funds to capture and sterilize involuntary victims, “lost or destroyed” the associated records, passed legislation to protect themselves from responsibility (after being caught), finally decided to pay reparations but passed the cost onto unwilling innocent citizens instead of facing any financial or legal repercussions themselves, and have only paid 51 out of at least 600 living victims now that about half the term of the reparations program has passed.
The above history of self-serving legislation and empty apologies confirms the suspicion common sense should lead us to anyway—namely that California government institutions cannot be trusted to legislatively protect the citizenry from continued atrocities given that the atrocities in question are often perpetrated by the government institutions themselves.
When unjustified coercion is consistently used by a group of people, the way to stop them is to impose costs on the guilty individuals that they themselves must suffer until their transgressions are atoned for. It is good that (albeit grossly inadequate) reparations are being paid, but until the perpetrators of the crimes are the ones to pay the price, the crucial lessons will not be learned and the crucial incentives not imposed.
There are several destructive institutions that allowed these eugenics operations to take place, but among them is the practice of government taxation itself. It allowed the perpetrators to conduct their operations without incurring personal expense, and through taxation the innocent many are now being scapegoated to protect the guilty few from what punishments they might otherwise be forced by the outrage of the public to endure.
If the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity aren’t going to be jailed for life or otherwise severely punished as any private citizen likely would for committing the same offenses, then at the very least the citizens who involuntarily pay their salaries and fund the programs of their twisted imaginations could be struggling to end the forced involvement of the citizenry that finances such programs with their tax payments.
If your tax dollars were spent solely to improve the health, education, and protection from violence of your fellow countrymen, instead of often funding the exact opposite of all these things as has been the case in California, then opposing the predation of tax collectors would not be quite so urgent. But in the real world, those malevolent enough (or those sufficiently under the sway of malevolent ideas) to think they should get to spend your money against your will often turn out to be malevolent in many other ways as well.
There are plenty of reasons one might struggle against government taxation. Perhaps you’re a poor or middle-class laborer at pains to afford your childrens’ education. Perhaps you’re a visionary entrepreneur trying to fund some world-changing new technological or medical research.
But at least as good a reason as any to oppose your wealth being confiscated is to prevent institutions such as the California State government from spending another dime on their campaigns of terror and reproductive destruction.
Saul Zimet is a Website and Data Coordinator for HumanProgress.org at the Cato Institute and a graduate student in economics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2023-02-04 14:20:342023-02-04 14:20:34A Brief History of California’s Eugenics Program (1909-2013)
Politics isn’t exempt from the allure of the deadly sins. Some political systems even magnify the allure…
The nineteenth-century philosopher Joseph de Maistre once wrote “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” This is true in a sense because, as Ludwig von Mises later wrote, “public opinion is ultimately responsible for the structure of government.” The beliefs and values of a people determine the institutions they embrace or accept.
The influence goes the other way, too. Different systems of government create different incentives. Some institutions foster virtue, while others foment vice.
Let’s consider some historically important political ideologies and the moral qualities they reflect and promote.
1. Socialism
Socialism is, as Winston Churchill put it, “the gospel of envy.” A people afflicted with envy and resentment will gravitate toward socialism.
Psychologist Jordan B. Peterson discussed the connection between envy and Marxist socialism in particular:
“There is the dark side of it, which means everyone who has more than you got it by stealing it from you. And that really appeals to the Cain-like element of the human spirit. ‘Everyone who has more than me got it in a manner that was corrupt and that justifies not only my envy but my actions to level the field so to speak, and to look virtuous while doing it.’ There is a tremendous philosophy of resentment that I think is driven now by a very pathological anti-human ethos.”
Socialists are wrong to think that “leveling the field” will lift up the have-nots. But even if they are disabused of that economic error, envy may drive them to cling to socialism anyway, out of a malicious desire to harm the “haves.”
As Mises wrote of socialists:
“Resentment is at work when one so hates somebody for his more favorable circumstances that one is prepared to bear heavy losses if only the hated one might also come to harm. Many of those who attack capitalism know very well that their situation under any other economic system will be less favorable. Nevertheless, with full knowledge of this fact, they advocate a reform, e.g., socialism, because they hope that the rich, whom they envy, will also suffer under it.”
Just as envy advances socialism, socialism stimulates envy by inviting the masses to participate in “legal plunder” (as the French economist Frédéric Bastiat put it) of the rich and affluent.
2. Fascism
In the twentieth century many countries fearfully turned to fascism to protect themselves from communism. Many in those countries believed that if communists and their ideas were violently suppressed, their revolution would be nipped in the bud. Fear turned to wrath, as anti-communist fascists violently cracked down on any dissent that might destabilize the state.
“The great danger threatening domestic policy from the side of Fascism,” as Mises wrote, “lies in its complete faith in the decisive power of violence.”
The wrath and violence of fascism is ultimately self-defeating.
“Repression by brute force,” Mises wrote, “is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect — better because they alone give promise of final success. This is the fundamental error from which Fascism suffers and which will ultimately cause its downfall.”
Wrath drives fascism, but fascism also stirs up wrath by fomenting tribalism and inviting members of society to use political violence to settle their differences.
3. Progressivism
Progressivism is alluring to those who imagine they can “optimize” people through social engineering. But, as Leonard E. Read illustrated in his classic essay “I, Pencil,” society is so vastly complex, that this is a pipe dream. To think one can centrally plan society, one must fancy themselves to have quasi-divine omniscience. In simple terms, progressivism is an ideology of excessive pride. As Sen. Ron Johnson put it:
“The arrogance of liberal progressives is that they’re just a lot smarter and better angels than the Stalins and the Chavezes and the Castros of the world, and if we give them all the control, and they control your life, they’re going to do a great job of it. Well, it just isn’t true.”
Progressives are incorrect in their assumption that they know how to run other people’s lives better than those people themselves. Even if they were hypothetically smarter and more ethical than any single member of the rest of society, they would still be wrong.
The amount of information any expert can handle at a given moment is infinitesimal in comparison to the sum of information all individuals have. Letting individuals be free to cooperate through the price system decentralizes the use of knowledge and actually results in more information being used than a centrally planned system of experts. As Friedrich Hayek explained:
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naïve mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.”
Thus, the progressive’s faith in technocratic power stems from supreme epistemic arrogance.
“It is insolent,” Mises wrote, “to arrogate to oneself the right to overrule the plans of other people and to force them to submit to the plan of the planner.”
Progressivism not only stems from pride, but stimulates it, because overweening power tends to go to people’s heads.
An Alternative?
Must we pick from among political systems that are afflicted by one vice or another? Thankfully not. There is a virtuous alternative: namely, classical liberalism. Whereas socialism, fascism, and progressivism are dominated by the “deadly sins” of envy, wrath, and pride, classical liberalism embodies the “capital virtues” of charity, temperance, and humility.
Where socialism is based on envy, classical liberalism fosters charity. Classical liberals believe in voluntary exchange of goods and services which provides avenues for philanthropy. One can only be charitable when there is a choice to donate or help others. Forced charity is not truly charitable, for there never was a choice, just as giving away something you don’t actually possess is not a sign of selflessness.
As Murray Rothbard wrote, “It is easy to be conspicuously compassionate when others are forced to pay the cost.”
Where fascism is wrathful, classical liberalism has temperance. Fascists see dissent and difference as dangerous. Classical liberals see peaceful debate and competition as the key to progress. Classical liberalism embodies temperance in the way it upholds the rights of everyone, even those who are illiberal. Under fascism, violent hostility toward differences is the rule; under classical liberalism, peaceful voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit is the rule.
Where progressivism is prideful, classical liberalism has humility. Classical liberalism is humble because it doesn’t presuppose what society should value; it assumes that all individuals have goals that they alone know best how to achieve. Classical liberalism knows the limits of what any individual can know and consequently finds no reason to bestow power to any expert over the rest of society. As Hayek wrote, “All political theories assume […] that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ […] in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.”
As it says in the Bible, “the wages of sin are death.” And indeed, the sin-ridden ideologies of socialism, fascism, and progressivism have yielded a staggering death toll. In contrast, the blessings of liberty include, not only peace and prosperity, but the encouragement and freedom to lead a virtuous life.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2022-11-01 15:29:252022-11-03 09:13:16The Deadly Sins of Socialism, Fascism, and Progressivism
In his new book “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital,” Steve Soukup’s explores the rise of progressivism as a cultural force and explains why corporations increasingly are taking sides in politics.
How did corporate America, long considered one of the most conservative American institutions, become a lead protagonist in a culture war over all manner of progressive activism?
We now have a routine spectacle of corporate social responsibility seminars and environmental, social, and governance—or ESG—conferences, where widget makers of all kinds commit to promoting climate activism, identity politics, union labor, and sundry other causes. Somehow, selling an honest product at a fair price seems like a secondary concern in a corporate America increasingly focused on an array of stakeholders with such diffuse boundaries as “the local community,” “the global environment,” and “society at large.”
How did we get here?
Finance professional and political analyst Steve Soukup gives us a fascinating and in-depth answer in his disquisition on modern politicized investing, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital.
The first half of Soukup’s book is a high-intensity sprint through about a century and a half of intellectual history that name-checks everyone from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Woodrow Wilson, Theodor Adorno, Saul Alinsky, and Milton Friedman. In Soukup’s telling, the shift began when Johns Hopkins University was founded in the image of Germany’s Heidelberg University in the late 19th century, and progressive political theory began to grow in popularity in the United States. The same trends later accelerated when a new generation of continental Marxism hit the US in the mid-20th century.
These developments brought about a revolution in how left-leaning theorists viewed the functions of government—and other large institutions like corporations.
First, in the progressive view, neither the old aristocracy nor liberal democracy were equipped to achieve the necessary goals of society. Rather, a professionally educated elite of administrators and bureaucrats was needed. This was the progressivism of theorists like Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, and John Dewey. They carved out a large realm of governmental authority for administrators, but still considered their role to be outside of politics itself.
Eventually, however, political scientists and management experts, led by academics like Syracuse University’s Dwight Waldo, decided that expertly implementing democratically chosen policies was no longer enough. A subsequent generation of experts would be expected to substitute their own ethical and philosophical standards for those supported by voters.
“Public servants should become active, informed, politically savvy agents of change,” as one of Waldo’s colleagues would later put it.
This is the recipe for what critics of big government have come to call a permanent governing class—civil servants with effective lifetime tenure, collaborating with like-minded activists outside of government, who place their own judgment ahead of that of the voters and their elected representatives.
Yet, the trend of enlightened university graduates turning institutions toward progressive goals wasn’t confined to government agencies. The same logic would eventually apply to the management of corporations as well.
Soukup also recounts how, at the same time that American scholars of public administration and management were expanding their disciplines, self-proclaimed radicals like Antonio Gramsci in Italy, György Lukács in Hungary, and Max Horkheimer in Germany were attempting to revive Marx’s reputation and influence by explaining away many of Marxist theory’s failed predictions. When the German academics of the infamous Frankfurt School went into exile in the United States during Hitler’s rise to power, they began to exert significant influence on academics and writers in the US, culminating with unlikely pop-culture celebrity Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse was widely associated in the popular imagination with political movements in the 1960s, from student radicalism on college campuses to free love on communes and beach blankets across America. While Soukup argues that he was less of a direct influence on left-wing politics than some have given him credit for, his ideas about the evils of capitalism and bourgeois society were very much part of the liberation politics that swept much of the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell lamented the increasing anti-business influence of radical leftists in his 1971 memo to the US Chamber of Commerce, one of the few people he criticized by name, besides Ralph Nader and Eldridge Cleaver, was Marcuse.
This revolution held that not only was a capitalist economy inherently exploitative, as classical Marxism teaches, but the entirety of modern society is repressive and dehumanizing, with everything from the nuclear family, organized religion, and formal schooling conspiring to circumscribe our essential natures and limit our infinite potential.
With so much of “the system” losing credibility, it was not surprising that public attitudes toward business, ambivalent even in the best of times, turned more hostile. Unfortunately for people with anti-establishment attitudes, there are never enough university fellowships and socialist newsletter editorial positions to go around. Well over 70 percent of Americans work in the profit-seeking private sector, once we subtract everyone who works for government agencies and non-profit organizations. This means that anti-capitalist ideas are coming from inside the building.
This conflict, in which many people—at both the entry-level and management-level—work at companies about which they feel morally ambivalent isn’t entirely a product of progressive ideology, but the academic theory behind it certainly didn’t help. My Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Fred L. Smith, Jr. has written extensively on this problem—business leaders afflicted with an inferiority complex over their chosen profession and feel the need to “buy back” their moral standing in the world with leftist virtue signaling.
The second half of The Dictatorship of Woke Capital catalogs a series of controversial activist campaigns by some of the biggest names of Wall Street: Apple, Disney, and Amazon. The issues are varied, but the overall trend is nevertheless worrying. Rather than concentrating on what they know best and staying neutral in the culture wars, major companies have hitched their brands to one side of a contentious political divide. The verdict on whether this will ultimately be good for business is still very much uncertain.
Specific issues aside, the influence of all of those progressive and Marxist scholars the book documents can be seen in the modern claim that no institution should be outside the political realm. Soukup writes that “this battle is between those who believe that politics is and should be the overriding force in all human interactions and those who believe that politics is just part of the human experience, a part that is best kept as narrow and limited as possible.”
Attempting to turn every corporation in the world into a political combatant will not make the world a better place. One doesn’t have to be a conservative, like Soukup, or a free-market warrior of any description, to appreciate that.
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Russian born American writer and novelist Ayn Rand wrote, “The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other – until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.”
Janie Johnson posted the above photo of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors on her Twitter page. Janie wrote, “On [the] bottom of the signs is the inscription: revcom.us. To see who printed them, go to: http://www.revcom.us/.”
The organization that printed these BLM posters is the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP-USA). The stated strategic approach of the RCP-USA is to:
“Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution…to take up a revolutionary viewpoint and revolutionary values and morals as they join with others to resist this system’s crimes and build up the basis for the ultimate all-out revolutionary struggle to sweep this system away and bring in a whole new way of organizing society, a whole new way of being…to become emancipators of humanity.” [Emphasis RCP-USA]
The RCP-USA signs brought to mind several banners carried by BLM protestors in Ferguson, Missouri.
In the photo above (thanks to Kay), Leftist demonstrators relate the strife in Ferguson to the “Palestinian” jihad. And Pamela Geller has a great deal of information on how Islamic jihadists and supremacists, including the Hamas-linked terror organization CAIR, have tried to co-opt the Ferguson riots as part of their own jihad. Most noteworthy is the active presence in Ferguson of “Palestinian” jihad activist Bassem Masri.
The connection between Ferguson and “Palestine” (and the global jihad in general) is clear: both the Islamic supremacists and the Ferguson rioters think that the American system is corrupt and must be brought down.
Islamic State banner carried by Black Lives Matter protestors in Ferguson, Missouri. Photo: CNN
This spiral of death and destruction scenario is used across the globe to incite riots, mayhem and violence. It is used to recruit those with real or perceived grievances against those in authority. It is being used by the Islamic State to recruit in Ferguson, Missouri.
Ferguson is the beginning of the American intifada in the black community. This same strategy is being used by terrorist organizations like HAMAS, Hezbollah, Boko Haram and al Qaeda. Grab the headlines and make your point via political violence. The problem is the narrative is routinely false, even based upon lies, but by the time the facts are presented it is too late. The damage has already been done.
Lessons learned from Ferguson:
Appeasement of the protesters leads to more violence.
Coalitions of outside organizations including radical homosexual, Muslim and minority groups makes for a deadly mix.
The targets are the law and law enforcement. The demand is for two legal systems, one for minorities and one for whites.
The creation of no-go zones where police and firefighters cannot or will not go due to the threat of violence.
The manipulation of the media in the name of “equality” and “social justice” to create a scenario where a radical agenda may be furthered that denies both.
The use of violence even when blacks, like President Obama, call upon their fellow blacks to be non-violent.
The creation of a atmosphere where law enforcement officers will hesitate to enforce the law or ignore the law in order not to become a target.
Lawlessness with an anarchist’s political objective – to destroy the status quo.
A race war is upon America because some minorities want it more than they want to be Americans.
I fear that these groups will once again come together in Cleveland to disrupt the Republican National Convention and Donald Trump’s nomination. This Red/Green/Rainbow alliance has already showed itself at Trump rallies. The Red/Green/Rainbow alliance is emboldened and becoming more violent.
These protestors want to bring a civil war to America in order to fundamentally transform the country.
America is a land of laws and requires order. Protest if one wishes but to become violent demands police action and people, organizations and institutions to be held accountable.
We shall see what happens in Cleveland. Stay tuned.
George J. Marlin writes about the shadows that envelope Progressivism: a legacy of elitist eugenics and racism.
In early March, I had the privilege of attending the oral arguments in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole at the U.S. Supreme Court. It was both an extraordinary and eerie experience.
The eight justices questioned Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller and pro-abortion advocate Stephanie Toti about a 2013 Texas law – passed in response to the gruesome Gosnell revelations and trial in Philadelphia – which requires abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at hospitals within a thirty mile radius of the place at which the abortion is being performed.
I was seated in one of the seven guest rows, where most attendees were pro-abortion. To my left: Planned Parenthood C.E.O. Cecile Richards. Fives minutes before the justices took their seats, President Obama’s top aide, Valerie Jarrett, came in and sat down in front of me.
President Woodrow Wilson
The issue before the Court was whether the Texas law imposes “undue burden” on women seeking abortions. The progressive justices’ cross-examinations were very clinical. In fact, I have never heard the word “abortion” used so often in such a detached manner.
For instance, when Solicitor General Keller pointed out that the law would save the lives of victims of botched abortions, Justice Stephen Breyer dismissed the argument as immaterial because there were only 200 such instances out of Texas’ 70,000 abortions per year.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor snapped at Keller, asking sarcastically, “The slightest benefit is enough to burden the lives of a million women. That’s your point?” In other words, all lives don’t matter.
By the end of this morbid session, I thought I was in a eugenics court. Then it dawned on me, I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, the modern Progressive movement has been dominated by a self-anointed elite, like several of the justices, who had contempt for the common people. In the early 20th century, they even promoted social and economic policies driven by anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic impulses.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/progressivism-e1459591857423.jpg344630Dr. Rich Swierhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngDr. Rich Swier2016-04-02 06:11:582016-04-02 06:11:58Progressivism’s Dark Side by George J. Marlin
Willie Sutton was one of the most infamous bank robbers in American history. Over three decades, the dashing criminal robbed a hundred banks, escaped three prisons, and made off with millions. Today, he is best known for Sutton’s Law: Asked by a reporter why he robbed banks, Sutton allegedly quipped, “Because that’s where the money is.”
Sutton’s Law explains something unusual about Bernie Sander’s tax plan: it calls for massive tax hikes across the board. Why raise taxes on the middle class? Because that’s where the money is.
The problem all politicians face is that voters love to get stuff, but they hate to pay for it. The traditional solution that center-left politicians pitch is the idea that the poor and middle class will get the benefits, and the rich will pay for it.
This is approximately how things work in the United States. The top 1 percent of taxpayers earn 19 percent of total income and pay 38 percent of federal income taxes. The bottom 50 percent earn 12 percent and pay 3 percent. This chart from the Heritage Foundation shows net taxes paid and benefits received, per person, by household income group:
But Sanders’ proposals (free college, free health care, jobs programs, more Social Security, etc.) are way too heavy for the rich alone to carry, and he knows it. To his credit, his campaign has released a plan to pay for each of these myriad handouts. Vox’s Dylan Matthews has totaled up all the tax increases Sanders has proposed so far, and the picture is simply staggering.
Every household earning below $250,000 will face a tax hike of nearly 9 percent. Past that, rates explode, up to a top rate of 77 percent on incomes over $10 million.
Paying for Free
Sanders argues that most people’s average income tax rate won’t change, but this is only true if you exclude the two major taxes meant to pay for his health care program: a 2.2 percent “premium” tax and 6.2 percent payroll tax, imposed on incomes across the board. These taxes account for majority of the new revenue Sanders is counting on.
But it gets worse: his single-payer health care plan will cost 80 percent more than he claims. Analysis by the left-leaning scholar Kenneth Thorpe (who supports single payer) concludes that Sanders’ proposal will cost $1.1 trillion more each year than he claims. The trillion dollar discrepancy results from some questionable assumptions in Sanders’ numbers. For instance:
Sanders assumes $324 billion more per year in prescription drug savings than Thorpe does. Thorpe argues that this is wildly implausible.
“In 2014 private health plans paid a TOTAL of $132 billion on prescription drugs and nationally we spent $305 billion,” he writes in an email. “With their savings drug spending nationally would be negative.”
So unless pharmaceutical companies start paying you to take their drugs, the Sanders administration will need to increase taxes even more.
Analysis by the Tax Foundation finds that his proposed tax hikes already total $13.6 trillion over the next ten years. However, “the plan would [only] end up collecting $9.8 trillion over the next decade when accounting for decreased economic output.”
And the consequences will be truly devastating. Because of the taxes on labor and capital, GDP will be reduced 9.5 percent. Six million jobs will be lost. On average, after-tax incomes will be reduced by more than 18 percent.
Incomes for the bottom 50 percent will be reduced by more than 14 percent, and incomes for the top 1 percent will be reduced nearly 25 percent. Inequality warriors might cheer, but if you want to actually raise revenue, crushing the incomes of the people who pay almost 40 percent of all taxes isn’t the way to go.
These are just the effects of the $1 trillion tax hike he has planned — and he probably needs to double that to pay for single payer. Where will he find it? He’ll go where European welfare states go.
Being Like Scandinavia
Sanders is a great admirer of Scandinavian countries, such as Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and many of his proposals are modeled on their systems. But to pay for their generous welfare benefits, they tax, and tax, and tax.
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden all capture between 20-26 percent of GDP from income and payroll taxes. By contrast, the United States collects only 15 percent.
Scandinavia’s tax rates themselves are not that much higher than the United States’. Denmark’s top rate is 30 percent higher, Sweden’s is 18 percent higher, and Norway’s is actually 16 percent lower — and yet Norway’s income tax raises 30 percent more revenue than the United States.
The answer lies in how progressive the US tax system is, in the thresholds at which people are hit by the top tax rates. The Tax Foundation explains,
Scandinavian income taxes raise a lot of revenue because they are actually rather flat. In other words, they tax most people at these high rates, not just high-income taxpayers.
The top marginal tax rate of 60 percent in Denmark applies to all income over 1.2 times the average income in Denmark. From the American perspective, this means that all income over $60,000 (1.2 times the average income of about $50,000 in the United States) would be taxed at 60 percent. …
Compare this to the United States. The top marginal tax rate of 46.8 percent (state average and federal combined rates) kicks in at 8.5 times the average U.S. income (around $400,000). Comparatively, few taxpayers in the United States face the top marginal rate.
The reason European states can pay for giant welfare programs is not because they just tax the rich more — it’s because they also scoop up a ton of middle class income. The reason why the United States can’t right now is its long-standing political arrangement to keep taxes high on the rich so they can be low on the poor and middle.
Where the Money Is – And Isn’t
As shown by the Laffer Curve, there is a point at which increasing tax rates actually reduces tax revenue, by discouraging work, hurting the economy, and encouraging tax avoidance.
Bernie’s plan already hammers the rich: households earning over $250,000 (the top 3 percent) would face marginal rates of 62-77 percent — meaning the IRS would take two-thirds to three-quarters of each additional dollar earned. His proposed capital gains taxes are so high that they are likely well past the point of positive returns. The US corporate tax rate of 40 percent is already the highest in the world, and even Sanders hasn’t proposed increasing it.
The only way to solve his revenue problem is to raise rates on the middle and upper-middle classes, or flatten the structure to make the top rates start kicking in much lower. You can see why a “progressive” isn’t keen on making more regressive taxes part of his platform, but the money has to come from somewhere.
The bottom fifty percent don’t pay much income tax now (only $34 billion), but they also don’t earn enough to fill the gap. Making their taxes proportionate to income would only raise $107 billion, without even considering how the higher rates would reduce employment and income.
The top 5 percent are pretty well wrung dry by Sanders’ plan, and their incomes are going to be reduced by 20-25 percent anyway. It’s hard to imagine that there’s much more blood to be had from that stone.
But households between the 50th and the 95th percentile (incomes between $37,000 to $180,000 a year) earn about 54 percent of total income — a share would likely go up, given the larger income reductions expected for top earners. Currently, this group pays only 38 percent of total income taxes, and, despite the 9 percent tax hike, they’re comparatively spared by the original tax plan. Their incomes are now the lowest hanging fruit on the tax tree.
As they go to the polls this year, the middle class should remember Sutton’s Law.
Daniel Bier is the editor of Anything Peaceful. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/bernie-sanders-raise-taxes-middle-class-e1454494960833.jpg400640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2016-02-03 05:23:442016-02-03 05:25:36Why Bernie Sanders Has to Raise Taxes on the Middle Class by Daniel Bier
In the days since last week’s debate between candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, some commentators have suggested that Americans have seen enough, that no additional Democrat debates are necessary. In one respect, those commentators are right. In just a few seconds during the debate, the two candidates who harbor the most extreme views on guns showed why they shouldn’t be entrusted with our country’s highest elected office.
Of the five candidates onstage, the only supporter of the right to arms, former U.S. senator and Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb—who had already answered a question about gun control by saying that people have the right to defend themselves—said that the enemy he was most proud to have had was the one who wounded him with a grenade during the Vietnam War. Webb didn’t elaborate, but he was referring to an occasion on which, as a Marine Corps 1st Lieutenant, he led an attack against a communist bunker system, an action for which he was awarded the Navy Cross “for extraordinary heroism.”
However, the other four candidates—gun control supporters one and all—reflexively associated the word “enemy” not with America’s overseas adversaries, but with other Americans.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee tempered their answers, at least, Sanders saying only that “Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry . . . do not like me,” Chafee saying that the “the coal lobby” is a group he’s “at odds with.”
By stark contrast, however, Hillary Clinton and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, far and away the most extreme gun control supporters running for president, showed no such restraint. O’Malley said his enemy is the five million member “National Rifle Association.” Clinton went further, naming not only “the NRA,” but also the health insurance companies, the drug companies, Republicans, and only one group of people who are not Americans, “the Iranians.”
How things have changed. In 2004, during the keynote speech at the Democratic Party National Convention, then-Illinois state senator Barack Obama said, albeit with questionable sincerity, “We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.” In 2007, presidential candidate Obama claimed that he wanted to unify the country and break it out of what he called “ideological gridlock.”
Today, tempted with the opportunity to indulge herself in the deadly sin of hate before a national TV audience, the leading candidate for the same party’s presidential nomination did so without hesitation or remorse. She gleefully said that she considers tens of millions of Americans to be the “enemy.” She equated the NRA, American business interests, and Republicans with those whose signature chant is “Death to America.” And the party faithful in the debate hall cheered her with the same enthusiasm Obama’s “one America” speech received 11 years ago.
It was an ugly moment, but it shouldn’t define the character of our political disputes going forward. In deciding to whom to entrust the presidency of the United States between now and Election Day 2016, all Americans, regardless of viewpoint, should hold candidates to a standard higher than what Hillary Clinton appears capable of delivering.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/omally-hillary-e1445672930605.jpg356640NRA Institute for Legislative Actionhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngNRA Institute for Legislative Action2015-10-24 03:48:092015-10-24 03:49:02Clinton, O’Malley Say Americans Are Their Enemies
That’s Bill de Blasio, the current mayor of New York City, who was elected in 2013 after running unabashedly as the progressive, socially democratic candidate. I find it interesting that people are surprised by the mayor’s illiberal stands on many (though not all) of the major issues he has faced in his short time in office.
One of the latest is his proposal to return cars to Times Square Plaza, in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, by razing the outdoor space created by the administration of his Republican predecessor, Michael Bloomberg. You see, Mayor Bill says he doesn’t like the goings-on there, which lately include women soliciting topless on the street and people dressed as Elmo hustling tourists. His solution? We can’t control all the hucksterism, so let’s shut the whole thing down!
Justin Davidson, the author of that New York magazine article, says it well:
If de Blasio really believes that the best way to deal with street performers in Times Square is to tear up the pedestrian plaza, may I suggest he try reducing homelessness by eradicating doorways and subway grates?
My point goes beyond Times Square Plaza, of course, although that controversy is instructive, as are others (such as his recent attempt to rein in Uber).
The approach the mayor takes in this and similar matters is characteristic of any political ideology that views unrestrained political power as a legitimate tool of social change. That includes neoconservatism and other modern political ideologies, including progressivism.
While it’s a caricature to say that what progressives would not forbid, they would make mandatory, they show a pattern of using force to ban what they don’t like and of mandating what they do. If you think that sounds illiberal, you’re right. Progressivism isn’t liberalism, especially of the classical variety. But even the watered-down liberalism of campus radicals of the 1960s paid more heed to the principle of tolerance than progressives today do.
Progressives have a low tolerance for opposing points of view. Unfortunately, so do some libertarians, but for the most part libertarians do not endorse using political power to eradicate what they believe are disagreeable public activities. Libertarians are much closer to genuine liberals than progressives are.
To a genuine liberal, tolerance means more than endorsing a wide range of beliefs and practices. It means allowing nonviolent people to say and do things that we strongly disagree with, disapprove of, or find highly offensive. It means not assuming our own moral superiority over the wickedness or stupidity of our ideological opponents. English writer Beatrice Evelyn Hall captured that liberal spirit when she (and not Voltaire) wrote, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
The plaza and the streets it encompasses were, of course, the creation of government, so we’re not talking about the municipality bulldozing private property. But it’s not the government-created structure the mayor is objecting to; it’s the purely voluntary — “unregulated” — activities going on in it that he doesn’t like and wants to wipe out with heavy hands and hammy fists.
Closing the Gap Economy
The activity in Times Square Plaza is related to what I called in a recent column the “gap economy,” which refers to the unregulated, money-making activities that arise in the free spaces left open by government regulation and that complete with businesses that have adapted themselves to the mixed economy. Progressives like Mayor de Blasio seem to fear what they cannot regulate and control. They don’t understand that in the free market, there is regulation and that the regulatory principle is not coercion but persuasion, competition, and reputation.
Progressives profoundly mistrust the spontaneous, especially when it’s the result of people acting out of self-interest. But that’s the hallmark and the essence of urban life. New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman sees it this way:
Time and again, Mr. de Blasio leaves an impression that he understands very little about the dynamics of urbanism and the physical fabric of the city — its parks and plazas, its open spaces, libraries, transit network and streetscape, which all contribute to issues he cares most about, like equity and social mobility.
He doesn’t understand because he probably thinks in terms of specific, static objectives (such as his so-called “Vision Zero,” which I write about in “Um, Scarcity?”) rather than what Kimmelman rightly refers to as “the dynamics of urbanism.” As the urbanist (and libertarian friendly) Jane Jacobs explained, those dynamics are messy and inherently unpredictable.
It doesn’t seem to matter to the mayor that ordinary people have demonstrated their preference for Times Square Plaza by showing up in record numbers, just as it doesn’t matter that ordinary New Yorkers have gained from gap-economy activities such as Uber or Airbnb. What concerns progressives like the mayor is that it’s not happening the way they want it to happen. (In the case of Uber, thank goodness, the truly liberal elements of New York soundly defeated the progressive forces.)
Davidson writes,
I understand that the mayor doesn’t care for the carnival atmosphere at Times Square — neither do I. But eradicating a pedestrian plaza because you don’t like who’s walking there is like blasting away a beach because you object to bikinis or paving a park because you hate squirrels. It represents such a profound misunderstanding of public space that it makes me question the mayor’s perception of what counts as progressive.
It’s not the mayor Davidson should be questioning so much as the principles that motivate him. De Blasio just happens to illustrate progressivism in a particularly glaring way.
Sandy Ikeda is a professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/nyc-mayor-de-blasio.png315630Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-09-16 14:03:412015-09-16 14:54:48Progressivism Is Illiberal: Modern Liberalism Is at Odds with Peaceful Interaction by Sandy Ikeda
Pope John Francis’ upcoming visit to the U.S. is generating quite a bit of excitement here, especially among his Catholic faithful. But for me and many others, his visit is generating consternation, not excitement.
Usually, most people tend to have great respect and affection for the Pope. He is usually viewed by the public as a beacon of moral guidance, even for those who are non-Catholics. This is definitely a view I once had of previous Popes.
But I must admit that my respect for this current Pope, John Francis is somewhat diminished.
I am totally confused by his constant advocating for policies that goes against the Catholic Church’s own teachings. On the issue of homosexuality his position is, “Who are we to judge?” Though church doctrine is very clear on this issue.
He is a fanatical supporter of open borders; in his view people have an inherent right to enter illegally into any country they choose as long as the ends justify the means.
He rabidly promotes theories in support of global warming, despite the fact that he is one of the biggest contributors to it. When the Pope travels, he normally charters an Alitalia A320 jet. It is estimated that the pope travels about 100,000 miles per year. So this means based on the type of plane the Pope flies, he emits 20 pounds of CO2 for every mile of flight which is 2,000,000 pounds a year.
Every denomination has their own precepts that their members must abide by. Likewise, nations have laws that their citizens or visitors must abide by.
Poverty or wanting a better life is not sufficient reason for people to break our laws to enter into our country. The Pope expects Catholics to abide by the rules of Catholicism; so why should America expect anything less from those who seek entry into our country?
So, by the Pope’s standard I, as a Baptist, should still be able to participate in all things Catholic; even though I don’t adhere to Catholicism.
The Pope, in many ways, is operating just like Obama is in the U.S. They both are picking and choosing which rules and laws they want to abide by.
Forgive me for not being able to get beyond the fact that the Pope has spent very little time dealing with the child abuse that has taken place in his church; but yet he seems to have plenty of time to meet with illegals, homosexuals and promote global warming
Am I the only one who finds it offensive that the Pope will be meeting with some of those in the U.S. illegally, but will not be meeting with families that have had family members killed, raped, or maimed by illegals?
Am I the only one who finds it offensive that the Pope will not be meeting with any of the victims of sexual abuse from within the Catholic Church?
Am I the only one who finds it offensive that the Pope constantly talks about income inequality and the need for employers to pay their employees more money; but he has never discussed what is the obligation of employees to their employers (more productivity and more efficiency, etc.)?
The Pope should not be aligned to a political agenda, but rather what is right or wrong.
America has no moral obligation to allow those who enter our country illegally to stay in our country no more so than the Pope allowing someone who refuses to abide by the rules of Catholicism should be allowed to say they are a member of the Catholic Church.
Furthermore, the Bible is very clear, a man’s first responsibility is for the well being of his family, not his neighbor’s family.
The Pope seems to be on a global tour to promote an entitlement agenda as opposed to being a beacon for right and wrong. Even if you are poor and downtrodden, you still are responsible for being responsible.
Many of the illegals coming to the U.S. are having children that they can’t afford to provide for. How many speeches has the Pope given on individual responsibility?
How many speeches has the Pope given on the need to fire and prosecute every priest that has molested or covered up sexual abuse of kids in the Catholic Church?
How many speeches has the Pope given about what are an employee’s obligations to his employer?
I really believe the Pope’s heart is in the right place, but the issues he is focusing on should be subservient to the more critical issues listed above.
I definitely think the church can and should play a constructive role in our society, especially to those who are in need. In many respects, I think the faith community is better equipped to deal with a lot of the social ills of our society than our government is.
But the Pope cannot shine the light on my darkness until he is first willing to shine the light on his on darkness. Until then, the Pope’s moral compass is pointing in the wrong direction.
Stalin’s policy of Divide and Conquer has been implemented in many different areas and aspects of our society, including a racial division. The events in Ferguson, Baltimore, Wisconsin and Cleveland had confirmed it. It is a continuation of WWIII against America the Beautiful designed by our Founding Fathers. There are several factors that inflamed the predicament, yet nobody is talking about the major one–Stalin’s ideology of Soviet Fascism to obtain control of the local law-enforcement to nationalize and federalize it, like Stalin did in the Soviet Union. Obama began this policy within his first five years–dozens of agencies are being investigated. To know the source of that policy, the Stalin’s era must be studied by the next generations, as Stalin’s socio-political idea impacted the world during the last hundred years. Be prepared for the open season on the policemen and remember the definition of the Soviet Mafia, where politics intertwine with organized crime. The police already feel under the siege. Be prepared for a lot of killings and mob rules in America.
Blacks vs. Whites
It is for a reason, I have started this series with Marxist ideology. Karl Marx’s theory of Socialism and Communism is both a fraud and a utopia. Yet…the idea in the beginning of his historical research of socio-economic stages within the development of civilization was a logical one. While teaching in New York City, I have presented the idea to my students. Baltic Winds, Xlibris, 2002. In short, Marx as a historian was searching for productive forces in history. I accept his theory of history up to his fantasy of Socialism and Communism. As a matter of fact, his idea of productive forces in history maybe actually presents a factual development of the stages within our civilization. It sounded logical and reasonable to me. But I am not a philosopher or sociologist and I will present it in a possibly simplistic way. So…
The primitive men had difficulties in finding food alone. Therefore, human beings created rudimentary form of organization known in the modern terms as tribes to ease their existence. Marx called it the first stage of the human civilization. To achieve more productivity greater numbers of people were organized to create and improve a more productive force. The second socio-economic stage of civilization Marx identified as a slavery. Please keep in mind, the slavery took place worldwide at a certain time, regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity. For your information: slavery or serfdom in Russia was abolished by Alexander II- Liberator in the exact time slavery was abolished by President Abraham Lincoln in the U.S. The next stage of civilization was supposed to provide the huge number of people with food. Marx called the third stage of civilization feudalism–the interactions or contracts between land-lords and vassals in developing the agricultural productive forces to provide the populace with the food. The fourth stage of human civilization was capitalism. To me those stages sounds logical, as they reflect the world history.
The word slavery has been forgotten in Russia, Brazil, and in the rest of the world with homogeneous populations. In America, contrary to the rest of the world the notion of slavery intensified the racial hostility. My explanation is a simple one: None of the other countries of the world had such a visual difference as a COLOR. The COLOR is the inflammatory factor. In addition to that, the majority of the Blacks were brought to America from the second stage of civilization to the forth one, from slavery to capitalism, missing one stage in the development of civilization–feudalism. This is a very important factor. Do not talk to the Black crowd in Ferguson and Baltimore, including the prosecutor of Baltimore, they can’t understand this factor, they need time and the civic education, which Europe went through during 500 years. For them it is easy to destroy, loot, and burn cars than to create and produce. Look objectively at the statistics of crime among Blacks in America. Our homicide rate is equal to that of Yemen. The picture will confirm my point—Blacks are killing Blacks—11 percent of Blacks commit 70 percent of crimes. The role of the police becomes even more significant under these circumstances. Obama’s actions against the police are totally contradictory and inconsistent with the American national interests.
There is another factor that aggravates the racial hostility as well– Stalin’s ideology of Divide and Conquer. With the lack of the historical development in America, Blacks have some resemblance to the Muslim world that has not been reformed since the seventh century. This resemblance is very important as Stalin’s ideology and strategy have been applied to all minorities within Russia and outside the country. The KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, a devoted Stalin’s disciple created the myth of a “Palestinian Nation” against Israel. One of his statements illustrated it the best: “the Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch. Terrorism and violence against Israel and her master, American Zionism, would flow naturally from the Muslims’ religious fervor.” Russian Footsteps, by Ion Mihai Pacepa, National Review Online, August 24, 2008.)
A couple of days ago, I heard Dr. Ben Carson, a Black candidate of the Republican Party for the presidency of the United States, who said: “My Mother did not want to be a victim.” A victim and victimology are the key words in the resemblance of the big group of the Blacks with the Muslims. The Blacks were indoctrinated by the ideology of Soviet Fascism the same way that the part of the Muslims were indoctrinated for several decades. Ben Carson is a uniquely qualified for the presidency of our country–he is a contemporary Uncle Tom and the majority of Blacks will not vote for him. Of course, there are some differences between the large group of Blacks and Islamic Jihadists, yet both, for different reasons are fighting America the Beautiful. Have you heard the President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi? He, a Muslim himself had admitted that Islam itself has a problem and should be reformed. Have you heard any similar statements from the Black leaders of America? No, on the contrary—division is the only their motive.
Some Blacks called the White people the Oppressors, some are talking about “White Privileges” some “wanted to see cops dead.” I saw them all in Ferguson and Baltimore and I am glad that the notions of “the agents of influence” and the Soviet Mafia, designed by Soviet Fascism are already known to you. If you dig deeper the backgrounds of Sharpton and J. Jackson, you will find their quite strange political connections. Just think and research the root causes and history of the Black movement and you’ll be able to see how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. I did it in my books discussing Soviet Fascism. All factors mentioned by me, are reinforce one another. Only actual knowledge can solve the problem—both the Blacks and the political Islamite are indoctrinated with totalitarian ideology, I called Stalinism or Soviet Fascism. Knowledge of this ideology is a must.
As a young girl, I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the slavery in the far away America, it disgusted me, though it was a story of the past. Yet, it was something, I had never imagined and the negative feeling for slavery was left in my memory forever. Then I did not know that driven by a passionate hatred of slavery, “Bitchier Stow found time to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which became the most influential novel in American history and a catalyst for radical change both at home and abroad.” Living in America I found a complete revers of her ideas. Today,” the book has a decidedly different reputation, thanks to the popular image of its titular character, Uncle Tom — whose name has become a byword for a spineless sellout, a black man who betrays his race.”
What do you think? Who divided Black Americans on the crowd of Blacks and a group of Uncle Toms? The crowd of the Blacks, as a rule are not well educated supporters of the Democrats. Who did give the name of the other group of the Blacks Uncle Toms? Who are Uncle Toms? The answer is in the encyclopedia– “A black man who will do anything to stay in good standing with “the whites.” For me it is a good characterization of the group, the group is for unity with the rest of America. The group comprised of the educated Blacks is predominantly Republican. The unity bequeathed by the Founding Fathers is a must for them. Yet our Unity is the crux of the matter for those who are implementing the ideology of DIVISION. The division is not only racial, but more of an ideological one. “Black citizens appear to conclude that they do not share common political values with Republicans, whether black or not,” said the study. “As a consequence, black Republican candidates simply do not evoke the same response from black citizens as black Democratic candidates.” Do you recognize the division, the ideology of Soviet Fascism perpetrated by the Democrats making Blacks the victims of the society? Read more here.
Excerpts from Cuba Mi Patria Que Adoro, Amazon.com, 2012, P. 108. Translated by. Angela M. Aguirre, Ph.D.:
Those unsuspecting Cubans
That helped the traitor Fidel
They brought together with him
The horrendous communism….
He [Castro] urged blacks to start a fight
Against white with such hatred
Thus turning the whole society
Into a racial war.
The jackal came out of Oriente
To disunite all the Cubans
That were like brothers and sisters
Blacks and whites, all united.
We all lived in harmony
Like lawful citizens should.
But he brought much more:
He brought many criminals
From Russia and other countries,
To govern in our Cuba.
In his intent in punishing us,
He destroyed our nation.
Imposing a firing squad
That is always in action,
Killing blacks and whites alike
Without any distinction.
Media That Serves One Party System
Somewhere in 2011, I wrote an article titled The Communist Ideological Department; The Art of Brainwashing. I did it to acquaint you with the atmosphere of the life under Soviet Fascism. We, the former citizens of the socialist countries are constantly finding the events in America that resemble the ideological proceedings in our native countries: Cuba, the Soviet Union, Poland, Bulgaria or Venezuela. We often call mass media in America a leftist one. Alas, it is more than that. Just look at the recent article published in Huffington Post: Scientists Find Alarming Deterioration in DNA of the Urban Poor, by Nico Pitney, 05/08/02015.
I am not a scientist, but I have already written about the Soviet pseudo-science as an element of Soviet Fascism. The article in Huffington Post is attempting to explain that environment causing and changing human DNA. I think that this is the Stalin’s trick, promoted by the Democrats in their arguments for the redistribution of wealth in America. Fighting poverty have already cost American taxpayers $12-22 trillion with no result. I have already written about the same ideological trick in the Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s. Here it is: “I can’t omit another significant feature of the Soviet Socialism—pseudo-science. Have you ever heard about Academician Lysenko? To perceive all the agricultural troubles of the Soviet Union and the essence of the pseudo-science you have to know that name. A mediocre intriguer, a biologist from Ukraine, Trofim Lysenko had been building his career on the corpses of civilians dying from starvation in 1930.
“He led the campaign against geneticists of the world and exploited the ideological tenets. Stalinists had undermined the entire Soviet agriculture. In cahoots with the party bosses on the wave of Stalinist repressions and using the Marxist-Leninist ideology, he had begun a slanderous and vicious campaign against the geneticist’s scholars worldwide who proclaimed, ‘No ideology and politics in science.’ Of cause, the first were the Soviet Geneticists of the Soviet Academy of Science. Academician Vavilov was the main target of Lysenko’s campaign.” What is Happening to America, pp.80-81.Doesn’t it also remind you of the “climate change” hysteria in America?
This is not the only example of ideological infiltration into our American soil and culture. Have you heard about “bikes gangs” in Texas and killing of people there? I have addressed the issue of gangs 20 years ago when I saw two American movies of how gangs of different ilk, including drug-trafficking gangs and street gangs, are working in coordination with the political mafia, growing on our soil since the ‘50s. Stanley Kramer had warned Americans about the danger of gangs in his marvelous movie The Wild One, 1953. Nobody took it seriously. I did, watching the movie, I had sensed “an enemy’s sub-culture.” No American could conceive the situation where mobsters, gangs of organized crime, and political party would have shared a common purpose and agenda. Americans had no idea of Stalinism, Soviet Fascism, and WWIII.
Times have changed: We live in a more threatening atmosphere fifty years later and we should learn that the policy of containment we had always hoped for has never worked. It failed at its inception. The Soviets/Russians had not always moved their army of gangs into a foreign territory, they were infiltrating and using the American ones. And we gave the Soviet mafia the time to polish their criminal skills on our land. Do you remember the Soviet document of 1955? I have introduced it several times in this series. Organized crime as conceived by Stalin’s ideology has become a formidable force to fight Western civilization since the 1955. Beside organized crime, infiltration of the enemy forces was spread into different areas and aspects of life in America.
I had predicted in 1999 that the scale of Russian crimes against the world will quadruple, especially in the cyber space. Here it is: “Watch also for the further assaults on the regions rich with oil and attacks on our cyber systems, especially in California, to undermine our communication and economic power. Yet oil remains the first target—the lines for gasoline in the ‘’70s are still vivid in the mind of our enemies to create a raging and chaotic situation in America again.” The Russian Factor, Xlibris, 2006, pp.103-104. Today we found out that Russia infiltrated the cyber space of out IRS. I was talking about IRS in connection with Russia years ago. To win a war on terror we must know Russia and its Stalinist ideology, because Russia is the Evil Empire of Global Terrorism. Wake up America, we live in the 21st century!
I’d like to end the column with two interesting stories of the year 2015. One is about President Obama. He received an offer from a young Kenyan man, a proposal to marry Obama’s daughter Maliyah. The Kenyan man saw her when she was ten years old and fell in love with her. He promised to give for her 50 pigs and 100 cows. I do not know the Obama response yet. The second story is a simple one. Western civilization commemorates 800 years of Magna Carta in the year 2015.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Stalin-lenin.jpg360640Simona Pipkohttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngSimona Pipko2015-06-02 09:00:382015-06-03 08:02:29Stalinism and the Destabilization of America
In the short term, robotics will cause some job dislocation; in the long term, labor patterns will simply shift. The use of robotics to increase productivity while decreasing costs works basically the same way as past technological advances, like the production line, have worked. Those advances improved the quality of life of billions of people and created new forms of employment that were unimaginable at the time.
Given that reality, the cry that should be heard is, “Beware of monopolies controlling technology through restrictive patents or other government-granted privilege.”
Actually, they are here already. Technological advance is an inherent aspect of a free market in which innovators seeks to produce more value at a lower cost. Entrepreneurs want a market edge. Computerization, industrial control systems, and robotics have become an integral part of that quest. Many manual jobs, such as factory-line assembly, have been phased out and replaced by others, such jobs related to technology, the Internet, and games. For a number of reasons, however, robots are poised to become villains of unemployment. Two reasons come to mind:
1.Robots are now highly developed and less expensive. Such traits make them an increasingly popular option. The Banque de Luxembourg News offered a snapshot:
The currently-estimated average unit cost of around $50,000 should certainly decrease further with the arrival of “low-cost” robots on the market. This is particularly the case for “Baxter,” the humanoid robot with evolving artificial intelligence from the U.S. company Rethink Robotics, or “Universal 5” from the Danish company Universal Robots, priced at just $22,000 and $34,000 respectively.
Better, faster, and cheaper are the bases of increased productivity.
2.Robots will be interacting more directly with the general public. The fast-food industry is a good example. People may be accustomed to ATMs, but a robotic kiosk that asks, “Do you want fries with that?” will occasion widespread public comment, albeit temporarily.
Comment from displaced fast-food restaurant workers may not be so transient. NBC News recently described a strike by workers in an estimated 150 cities. The workers’ main demand was a $15 minimum wage, but they also called for better working conditions. The protesters, ironically, are speeding up their own unemployment by making themselves expensive and difficult to manage.
Compared to humans, robots are cheaper to employ—partly for natural reasons and partly because of government intervention.
Among the natural costs are training, safety needs, overtime, and personnel problems such as hiring, firing and on-the-job theft. Now, according to Singularity Hub, robots can also be more productive in certain roles. They “can make a burger in 10 seconds (360/hr). Fast yes, but also superior quality. Because the restaurant is free to spend its savings on better ingredients, it can make gourmet burgers at fast food prices.”
Government-imposed costs include minimum-wage laws and mandated benefits, as well as discrimination, liability, and other employment lawsuits. The employment advisory Workforce explained, “Defending a case through discovery and a ruling on a motion for summary judgment can cost an employer between $75,000 and $125,000. If an employer loses summary judgment—which, much more often than not, is the case—the employer can expect to spend a total of $175,000 to $250,000 to take a case to a jury verdict at trial.”
At some point, human labor will make sense only to restaurants that wish to preserve the “personal touch” or to fill a niche.
The tech site Motherboard aptly commented, “The coming age of robot workers chiefly reflects a tension that’s been around since the first common lands were enclosed by landowners who declared them private property: that between labour and the owners of capital. The future of labour in the robot age has everything to do with capitalism.”
Ironically, Motherboard points to one critic of capitalism who defended technological advances in production: none other than Karl Marx. He called machines “fixed capital.” The defense occurs in a segment called “The Fragment on Machines” in the unfinished but published manuscript Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy).
Marx believed the “variable capital” (workers) dislocated by machines would be freed from the exploitation of their “surplus labor,” the difference between their wages and the selling price of a product, which the capitalist pockets as profit. Machines would benefit “emancipated labour” because capitalists would “employ people upon something not directly and immediately productive, e.g. in the erection of machinery.” The relationship change would revolutionize society and hasten the end of capitalism itself.
Never mind that the idea of “surplus labor” is intellectually bankrupt, technology ended up strengthening capitalism. But Marx was right about one thing: Many workers have been emancipated from soul-deadening, repetitive labor. Many who feared technology did so because they viewed society as static. The free market is the opposite. It is a dynamic, quick-response ecosystem of value. Internet pioneer Vint Cerf argues, “Historically, technology has created more jobs than it destroys and there is no reason to think otherwise in this case.”
Forbespointed out that U.S. unemployment rates have changed little over the past 120 years (1890 to 2014) despite massive advances in workplace technology:
There have been three major spikes in unemployment, all caused by financiers, not by engineers: the railroad and bank failures of the Panic of 1893, the bank failures of the Great Depression, and finally the Great Recession of our era, also stemming from bank failures. And each time, once the bankers and policymakers got their houses in order, businesses, engineers, and entrepreneurs restored growth and employment.
The drive to make society static is a powerful obstacle to that restored employment. How does society become static? A key word in the answer is “monopoly.” But we should not equivocate on two forms of monopoly.
A monopoly established by aggressive innovation and excellence will dominate only as long as it produces better or less expensive goods than others can. Monopolies created by crony capitalism are entrenched expressions of privilege that serve elite interests. Crony capitalism is the economic arrangement by which business success depends upon having a close relationship with government, including legal privileges.
Restrictive patents are a basic building block of crony capitalism because they grant a business the “right” to exclude competition. Many libertarians deny the legitimacy of any patents. The nineteenth century classical liberal Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk rejected patents on classically Austrian grounds. He called them “legally compulsive relationships of patronage which are based on a vendor’s exclusive right of sale”: in short, a government-granted privilege that violated every man’s right to compete freely. Modern critics of patents include the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard and intellectual property attorney Stephan Kinsella.
Pharmaceuticals and technology are particularly patent-hungry. The extent of the hunger can be gauged by how much money companies spend to protect their intellectual property rights. In 2011, Apple and Google reportedly spent more on patent lawsuits and purchases than on research and development. A New York Timesarticle addressed the costs imposed on tech companies by “patent trolls”—people who do not produce or supply services based on patents they own but use them only to collect licensing fees and legal settlements. “Litigation costs in the United States related to patent assertion entities [trolls],” the article claimed, “totaled nearly $30 billion in 2011, more than four times the costs in 2005.” These costs and associated ones, like patent infringement insurance, harm a society’s productivity by creating stasis and preventing competition.
Dean Baker, co-director of the progressive Center for Economic Policy Research, described the difference between robots produced on the marketplace and robots produced by monopoly. Private producers “won’t directly get rich” because “robots will presumably be relatively cheap to make. After all, we can have robots make them. If the owners of robots get really rich it will be because the government has given them patent monopolies so that they can collect lots of money from anyone who wants to buy or build a robot.” The monopoly “tax” will be passed on to impoverish both consumers and employees.
Ultimately, we should return again to the wisdom of Joseph Schumpeter, who reminds us that technological progress, while it can change the patterns of production, tends to free up resources for new uses, making life better over the long term. In other words, the displacement of workers by robots is just creative destruction in action. Just as the car starter replaced the buggy whip, the robot might replace the burger-flipper. Perhaps the burger-flipper will migrate to a new profession, such as caring for an elderly person or cleaning homes for busy professionals. But there are always new ways to create value.
An increased use of robots will cause labor dislocation, which will be painful for many workers in the near term. But if market forces are allowed to function, the dislocation will be temporary. And if history is a guide, the replacement jobs will require skills that better express what it means to be human: communication, problem-solving, creation, and caregiving.
Summary
The use of robotics to increase productivity while decreasing costs works basically the same way as past technological advances, like the production line, have worked. Those advances improved the quality of life of billions of people and created new forms of employment that were unimaginable at the time.
Compared to humans, robots are cheaper to employ—partly for natural reasons and partly because of government intervention. Natural costs include training, safety needs, overtime, and personnel problems such as hiring, firing and on-the-job theft. Unnatural, non-market costs stem from cronyism dispensed by governments.
An increased use of robots will cause labor dislocation, which will be painful for many workers in the near term. But if market forces are allowed to function, the dislocation will be temporary.
The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is proud to partner with Young America’s Foundation (YAF) to produce “Clichés of Progressivism,” a series of insightful commentaries covering topics of free enterprise, income inequality, and limited government. See the index of the published chapters here.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/20150218_robotengineerdetail.png313631Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-02-20 11:36:202015-02-20 11:36:20CLICHÉS OF PROGRESSIVISM #45 – “Robots and Computerization Cause Unemployment” by WENDY MCELROY
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