In order to discuss the “future of capitalism,” we must first decide what the meaning of the term “capitalism” really is. Unfortunately, the term “capitalism” was coined by its greatest and most famous enemy, Karl Marx. We really can’t rely upon him for correct and subtle usage. And, in fact, what Marx and later writers have done is to lump together two extremely different and even contradictory concepts and actions under the same portmanteau term. These two contradictory concepts are what I would call “free-market capitalism” on the one hand, and “state capitalism” on the other.

The difference between free-market capitalism and state capitalism is precisely the difference between, on the one hand, peaceful, voluntary exchange, and on the other, violent expropriation. An example of a free-market exchange is my purchase of a newspaper on the corner for a dime; here is a peaceful, voluntary exchange beneficial to both parties. I buy the newspaper because I value the newspaper more highly than the dime that I give up in exchange; and the newsdealer sells me the paper because, he, in turn, values the dime more highly than the newspaper. Both parties to the exchange benefit. And what we are both doing in the exchange is the swapping of titles of ownership: I relinquish the ownership of my dime in exchange for the paper, and the newsdealer performs the exact opposite change of title. This simple exchange of a dime for a newspaper is an example of a unit free-market act; it is the market at work.

In contrast to this peaceful act, there is the method of violent expropriation. Violent expropriation occurs when I go to the newsdealer and seize his newspapers or his money at the point of a gun. In this case, of course, there is no mutual benefit; I gain at the expense of the victimized newsdealer. Yet the difference between these two transactions—between voluntary mutual exchange, and the holdup at gunpoint—is precisely the difference between free-market capitalism and state capitalism. In both cases we obtain something—whether it be money or newspapers—but we obtain them in completely different ways, ways with completely different moral attributes and social consequences.

Here I can’t resist the temptation of pointing out that I have an entirely different interpretation of Jefferson and Hamilton from that of Professor Averitt. I don’t regard Jefferson as some sort of early Franz Boas–type, an early Left-Wing anthropologist. He wasn’t. My reading of Jefferson is completely different; on my reading, Jefferson was very precisely in favor of laissez-faire, or free-market, capitalism. And that was the real argument between them. It wasn’t really that Jefferson was against factories or industries per se; what he was against was coerced development, that is, taxing the farmers through tariffs and subsidies to build up industry artificially, which was essentially the Hamilton program.

Jefferson, incidentally, along with other statesmen of his time, was a very learned person. He read Adam Smith, he read Ricardo, he was very familiar with laissez-faire classical economics. And so his economic program, far from being the expression of bucolic agrarian nostalgia, was a very sophisticated application of classical economics to the American scene. We must not forget that laissez-faire classicists were also against tariffs, subsidies, and coerced economic development.

Furthermore, the term “equality,” as used by Jefferson and Jeffersonians, was employed in the same sense as Jefferson’s friend and colleague George Mason used when he framed the Virginia Declaration of Rights shortly before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence:

“that all men are by nature equally free and independent.” In other words, “equality” did not then mean what we often mean by equality now: equality of condition or uniformity. “Equality” meant that each person has the right to be equally free and independent, to enjoy the right to “equal liberty,” as Herbert Spencer would phrase it a century later. In other words, again what I am saying is that the Jeffersonian wing of the Founding Fathers was essentially free-market, laissez-faire capitalists.

To return to the market: the free market is really a vast network, a latticework, of these little, unit exchanges which I mentioned before: such as exchanging a dime for a newspaper. At each step of the way, there are two people, or two groups of people, and these two people or groups exchange two commodities, usually money and another commodity; at each step, each benefits by the exchange, otherwise they wouldn’t be making it in the first place. If it turns out that they were mistaken in thinking that the exchange would benefit them then they quickly stop, and they don’t make the exchange again.

Another common example of a free market is the universal practice of children swapping baseball cards—the sort of thing where you swap “two Hank Aaron[s]” for “one Willie Mays.” The “prices” of the various cards, and the exchanges that took place, were based on the relative importance that the kids attached to each baseball player. As one way of annoying liberals we might put the case this way: liberals are supposed to be in favor of any voluntary actions performed, as the famous cliché goes, by “two consenting adults.” Yet it is peculiar that while liberals are in favor of any sexual activity engaged in by two consenting adults, when these consenting adults engage in trade or exchange, the liberals step in to harass, cripple, restrict, or prohibit that trade. And yet both the consenting sexual activity and the trade are similar expressions of liberty in action. Both should be favored by any consistent libertarian. But the government, especially a liberal government, habitually steps in to regulate and restrict such trade.

It is very much as [though] I were about to exchange two Hank Aarons for one Willie Mays, and the government, or some other third party, should step in and say: “No, you can’t do that; that’s evil; it’s against the common good. We hereby outlaw this proposed exchange; any exchange of such baseball cards must be one for one, or three for two”—or whatever other terms the government, in its wisdom and greatness, arbitrarily wishes to impose. By what right do they do this? The libertarian claims by no right whatsoever.

In general, government intervention can be classified in two ways: either as prohibiting or partially prohibiting an exchange between two people—between two consenting adults, an exchange beneficial to both parties; or forcing someone to make an “exchange” with the government unilaterally, in which the person yields something up to the government under the threat of coercion. The first may include outright prohibition of an exchange, regulating the terms—the price—of the exchange, or preventing certain people from making the exchange. As an example of the last intervention, in order to be a photographer in most states, one must be a duly licensed photographer—proving that one is of “good moral character” and paying a certain amount of moolah to the state apparatus. This in order to have the right to take somebody’s picture! The second kind of intervention is a forced “exchange” between us and the government, an “exchange” that benefits only the government and not ourselves. Of course, taxation is the obvious and evident example of that. In contrast to voluntary exchange, taxation is a matter of leaping in and coercively seizing people’s property without their consent.

It is true that many people seem to believe that taxation is not imposed without our consent. They believe, as the great economist Joseph Schumpeter once said, that taxes are something like club dues, where each person voluntarily pays his share of the expenses of the club. But if you really think that, try not paying your taxes sometime and see what happens. No “club” that I know of has the power to come and seize your assets or jail you if you don’t pay its dues. In my view, then, taxes are exploitation—taxes are a “zero-sum” game. If there’s anything in the world that’s a zero-sum game, it’s taxation. The government seizes money from one set of people, gives it to another set of people, and in the meanwhile of course lops off a large chunk for its own “handling expenses.” Taxation, then, is purely and pristinely robbery. Period.

As a matter of fact, I challenge any of you to sit down and work out a definition of taxation that would not also be applicable to robbery. As the great libertarian writer H. L. Mencken once pointed out, among the public, even if they are not dedicated libertarians, robbing the government is never considered on the same moral plane as robbing another person. Robbing another person is generally deplored; but if the government is robbed all that happens, as Mencken put it, “is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.”

The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, who wrote a magnificent little book called The State, put the case brilliantly. In essence, he said, there are only two ways for men to acquire wealth. The first method is by producing a good or a service and voluntarily exchanging that good for the product of somebody else. This is the method of exchange, the method of the free market; it’s creative and expands production; it is not a zero-sum game because production expands and both parties to the exchange benefit. Oppenheimer called this method the “economic means” for the acquisition of wealth. The second method is seizing another person’s property without his consent, i.e., by robbery, exploitation, looting. When you seize someone’s property without his consent, then you are benefiting at his expense, at the expense of the producer; here is truly a zero-sum “game”—not much of a “game,” by the way, from the point of view of the victim. Instead of expanding production, this method of robbery clearly hobbles and restricts production. So in addition to being immoral while peaceful exchange is moral, the method of robbery hobbles production because it is parasitic upon the effort of the producers. With brilliant astuteness, Oppenheimer called this method of obtaining wealth “the political means.” And then he went on to define the state, or government, as “the organization of the political means,” i.e., the regularization, legitimation, and permanent establishment of the political means for the acquisition of wealth.

In other words, the state is organized theft, organized robbery, organized exploitation. And this essential nature of the state is highlighted by the fact that the state ever rests upon the crucial instrument of taxation.

I must here again comment on Professor Averitt’s statement about “greed.” It’s true: greed has had a very bad press. I frankly don’t see anything wrong with greed. I think that the people who are always attacking greed would be more consistent with their position if they refused their next salary increase. I don’t see even the most Left-Wing scholar in this country scornfully burning his salary check. In other words, “greed” simply means that you are trying to relieve the nature-given scarcity that man was born with. Greed will continue until the Garden of Eden arrives, when everything is superabundant, and we don’t have to worry about economics at all. We haven’t of course reached that point yet; we haven’t reached the point where everybody is burning his salary increases, or salary checks in general. So the question then becomes: what kind of greed are we going to have, “productive greed,” where people produce and voluntarily exchange their products with others? Or exploitative greed, organized robbery and predation, where you achieve your wealth at the expense of others? These are the two real alternatives.

Returning to the state and taxation, I would point out incidentally that Saint Augustine, who is not famous for being a libertarian, did however set forth an excellent libertarian parable. He wrote that Alexander the Great had seized some pirate, and asked the pirate what he meant by seizing possession of the sea. And the pirate boldly replied: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a little ship, I am called a robber, while you, because you do it with a great fleet are called an emperor Here Augustine highlights the fact that the state is simply robbery writ large, on an enormous scale, but robbery legitimated by intellectual opinion.

Take, for another example, the Mafia, which also suffers from a bad press. What the Mafia does on a local scale, the state does on an enormous scale, but the state of course has a much better press.

In contrast to the age-old institution of statism, of the political means, free-market capitalism arrived as a great revolutionary movement in the history of man. For it came into a world previously marked by despotism, by tyranny, by totalitarian control. Emerging first in the Italian city-states, free market capitalism arrived full scale with the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, a revolution that brought about a remarkable release of creative energy and productive ability, an enormous increase of production. You can call that “greed” if you wish; you can attack as “greed” the desire of someone on a poverty level who wishes to better his lot.

This reminds me of an interesting point on “greed” that cuts across the usual “Left-Right” continuum. I remember when Russell Kirk first launched the contemporary conservative movement in this country, in the mid-1950s. One of the leading young conservatives of that era addressed a rally, and opined that the whole trouble with the world, and the reason for the growth of the Left, is that everyone is “greedy,” the masses of Asia are “greedy,” and so on. Here was a person who owned half of Montana, attacking the mass of the world population, who were trying to rise above the subsistence level, to better their lot a bit. And yet they were “greedy.”

At any rate, free-market capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, saw an enormous outpouring of productive energies, an outpouring that constituted a revolution against the mercantilist system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact the mercantilist system is essentially what we’ve got right now. There is very little difference between state monopoly capitalism, or corporate state capitalism, whatever you want to call it, in the United States and Western Europe today, and the mercantilist system of the pre–Industrial Revolution era. There are only two differences; one is that their major activity was commerce and ours is industry. But the essential modus operandi of the two systems is exactly the same: monopoly privilege, a complete meshing in what is now called the “partnership of government and industry,” a pervasive system of militarism and war contracts, a drive toward war and imperialism; the whole shebang characterized the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The really key difference is that they didn’t have a gigantic P.R. apparatus; they didn’t have a fleet of intellectuals trumpeting to all and sundry the wonders of the system: how it promotes the common good and the general welfare, how this is Liberalism In Action. They said, “We’re out to shaft the public and we’re doing it!” They were very honest in those days. It’s really refreshing, by the way, to go back and read the material before 1914 and bask in the honesty of the period.

One of the concepts important in this connection is that of Albert Jay Nock, a great libertarian thinker and follower of Franz Oppenheimer. Nock coined two concepts: what he called “social power” on the one hand, and “state power” on the other. Social power is essentially what I have been talking about: the productive energies released by the free market, by voluntary exchanges, people interacting voluntarily and peacefully. “State power” is parasitism, exploitation, and the state apparatus in general—organized taxes, regulation, etc. And Nock saw history as essentially a race between social power and state power. In the Industrial Revolution period, for example, from various circumstances state power was minimal, and this allowed social power to take a tremendous burst upward. And what has happened in the twentieth century is essentially that state power has caught up; they’ve moved in on society and started crippling it once again.

What, then, is my view of the “future of capitalism”—our topic for today? My view of the future is highly optimistic. I really think that free-market capitalism, even though it is supposed to be a reactionary, Neanderthal institution, is the wave of the future. For one thing, it was the wave of the future a hundred and two hundred years ago, and what we have now is only a reactionary reversion to the previous system. The present system is not really “progressive” at all.

Second, it was discovered by Ludwig von Mises back in 1920 that socialism—the other polar alternative to our present neomercantilism—cannot run an industrial system. An agricultural system can be run indefinitely by almost anyone, as long as you leave the peasants alive. You can have almost any kind of tyrannical system over the peasants. But in an industrial system you need much more than that: you need a market, you need profit-and-loss tests, you can’t run the system haphazardly. And Mises proved that a socialist system cannot calculate economically, because it doesn’t have a price system for capital goods, and therefore socialism will not be able to run an industrial system. All the textbooks say that Mises was quickly refuted by Oskar Lange and others, but he really wasn’t refuted. I haven’t got time to go into the theoretical argument. But in practice what has happened is that, in response to industrialization, there has been a tremendous shift in the last fifteen years in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe away from socialism and towards a free market.

For a believer in freedom and the free market, this shift is one of the most exciting developments of the past two decades. Now there are only two interpretations of this development: either you have to say, as the Chinese do, that the Yugoslavs, the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Hungarians have all sold out to capitalism—they’ve gone in secret to the American Embassy and received their pay. Or you have to say that something deeper is happening, that what is essentially happening is that they tried socialism and it didn’t work, especially as the economies began to industrialize. They found in practice, pragmatically, without reading Mises (though there’s evidence that they’ve read Mises by this time) and Hayek and others, that socialism can’t calculate, they came to that conclusion themselves.

Lenin, indeed, came to that conclusion very early, when “War Communism” was scrapped in 1921. “War Communism” was an attempt, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, to leap into full communism, into an economy without money and without prices, in which everyone was supposed to—and in practice was forced to—present his goods to the common heap, and withdraw from that heap to satisfy his needs. The system of War Communism proved to be a total disaster–not because of the Civil War (that rationalization only came much later), but because of the communist system itself.1

Lenin soon realized what was happening, and quickly instituted the New Economic Policy, which was essentially a return to a quasi-free-market system. And now the Eastern European countries, especially Yugoslavia, have been moving very rapidly since the 1950s away from socialism and central planning and toward a free-market system.

In Yugoslavia, for example, agriculture, still the main industry, is almost completely private; a flourishing private sector exists in trade and small manufacturing; and the “public sector” has been turned over in fact as well as in law by the state to the ownership of the workers in the various plants—essentially functioning as producers’ cooperatives. Furthermore, there is substantially a free market between these producers’ co-ops, with a flourishing price system, stern profit-and-loss tests (when a firm loses enough money, it goes bankrupt). Moreover, the most recent Yugoslav economic reform, which began in 1967 and is still underway, saw a tremendous drop in the rate of taxation of their co-ops—a drop from the previous approximately 70 percent income tax rate to about 20 percent. This means that the central Yugoslav government no longer exercises complete control over investment: investment, too, has been decentralized and destatized. As a matter of fact, if one reads the Communist economists in Yugoslavia—especially in the relatively industrialized areas of Croatia and Slovenia—they sound very much like Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan. “Why should we productive Croats or Slovenes,” they ask, “be taxed in order to subsidize those lazy slobs down in Montenegro?” And: “why should we build uneconomic (‘political’) factories? Everyone should stand on their own feet,” etc. The next step in Yugoslavia is that the banks—which, incidentally, are largely competitive private co-ops owned by their business clients—are agitating for a stock market in a Communist country, which would have been considered incredible ten or twenty years ago. And what they are proposing to call this system—literally—is “socialist people’s capitalism.”

On this point, a few years ago I was teaching a course in Comparative Economic Systems. Naturally, I spent the term praising the free market, and attacking socialism and central planning. Finally, I invited an exchange professor from Hungary—an eminent Communist economist—to give a guest lecture, and the kids felt: “Ah, at least we’re going to get the other side of the picture.” And what did the Hungarian economist do? He spent the entire lecture praising the free market and attacking central planning. He said almost exactly what I had been saying up till then.

In Eastern Europe, then, I think that the prospects for the free market are excellent—I think we’re getting free-market capitalism and that its triumph there is almost inevitable. In the United States, the prospects are a little more cloudy, but here too we see the “New Left” picking up a lot of the positions that we “extreme Right-Wingers” used to have. Much of the position that used to be called “extreme Right-Wing” twenty years ago is now considered quite leftish.

As a result, I, with the same position I had then, have been shifted bodily from extreme right to left without any effort on my part at all. Decentralization; community control; attack on Leviathan government, on bureaucracy, on government interference with each person’s life; attack on the state-ridden educational system; criticism of unionism, which is tied up with the state; opposition to militarism, war, imperialism, and conscription; all these things that the Left is now beginning to see, [are] precisely what we “extreme Right-Wingers” have been saying all along. And, as far as “decentralization” goes, there is nothing that is so decentralized as the free market, and perhaps this too will come to the attention of the public.

And so, I’m very optimistic about the future of free-market capitalism. I’m not optimistic about the future of state capitalism—or rather, I am optimistic, because I think it will eventually come to an end. State capitalism inevitably creates all sorts of problems which become insoluble; as Mises again has pointed out, one intervention into the system to try to solve problems only creates other problems, which then demand further interventions, etc., and so the whole process keeps snowballing until you have a completely collectivist, totalitarian system. It’s very much like the escalation in Vietnam, by the way; the principle, as we all know by this time, is that government intervention in Vietnam creates problems which demand further escalation, etc. The same thing happens in domestic intervention, the farm program being a splendid example of this process.

Both in Vietnam and in domestic government intervention, each escalating step only creates more problems which confront the public with the choice: either press on further with more interventions, or repeal them—in Vietnam, withdraw from the country. Now in Yugoslavia and the rest of Eastern Europe, they have taken the opposite path: of progressive deëscalation, of continuing repeal of one intervention after another, and on toward the free market. In the United States we have so far taken the path of accelerating interventions, of ever greater hobbling of the free market. But it is beginning to become evident that the mixed system is breaking down, that it doesn’t work. It’s beginning to be seen, for example, that the Welfare State does not tax the rich and give to the poor; it taxes the poorer to give to the richer, and the poor in essence pay for the Welfare State. It is beginning to be seen that foreign intervention is essentially a method of subsidizing favored American corporations instead of helping out the poor in the undeveloped countries. And it is now becoming evident that the Keynesian policies only succeeded in bringing us to the present impasse of inflation-cum-recession, and that our Olympian economists have no way of getting out of the present mess at all, except to cross their fingers and their econometric models and pray. And, of course, we can look forward to another balance-of-payments crisis in a couple of years, another episode of inflationary crisis in a couple of years, another episode of gold-outflow hysteria.

Thus, we have a lot of crises looming in America, some on their way, others imminent or already here. All of these crises are the products of intervention, and none of them can really be solved by more intervention. Again, I believe that we will eventually reverse our present course—perhaps taking Yugoslavia as our paradigm. Incidentally, Professor Averitt mentioned the Great Depression. The Great Depression has always been considered as the product of free-market capitalism of the 1920s. It was the result of very heavy government intervention in the 1920s, an intervention, by the way, that is very similar to the current intervention. In the 1920s, we had the newly imposed Federal Reserve System, which all the Establishment economists of the day assured us would eliminate all future depressions; the Federal Reserve System would henceforth manipulate prices and the money supply and iron out business cycles forever. Nineteen twenty-nine and the Great Depression were the results of that manipulation guided by the wise hands of Establishment economics—they were not the results of anything like free-market capitalism.

In short, the advent of industrialism and the Industrial Revolution has irreversibly changed the prognosis for freedom and statism. In the pre-industrial era, statism and despotism could peg along indefinitely, content to keep the peasantry at subsistence levels and to live off their surplus. But industrialism has broken the old tables; for it has become evident that socialism cannot run an industrial system, and it is gradually becoming evident that neomercantilism, interventionism, in the long run cannot run an industrial system either. Free-market capitalism, the victory of social power and the economic means, is not only the only moral and by far the most productive system; it has become the only viable system for mankind in the industrial era. Its eventual triumph is therefore virtually inevitable.

Murray N. Rothbard

Interesting little development in my neck of the woods, and also the town where Joe Biden owns a beach house. The mayor of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, was decisively defeated yesterday in his reelection bid for mayor. For months, the mayor has throttled, harassed and threatened small town businesses over COVID, even as the death numbers for the mostly nonfatal virus have gone down, down, down. He has ruined the boardwalk and shopping district for the summer (their prime earnings season), and has already driven some restaurants into bankruptcy.

At one low point last spring, the mayor threatened to build a wall blocking the view of the ocean from the boardwalk (Joe Biden’s oceanfront view would remain intact, of course). Earlier in the summer, he forced sunbathers on the beach to wear face diapers (excuse me, face masks) and after the ensuing outcry he defensively replied that at least “you don’t have to wear them in the water.” He was forced to back down on this one, but ordered the police to harass vacation goers who refused to wear face diapers.

It’s the kind of disgusting tyranny and thuggery disguised as compassion and concern that has dominated blue states and cities in particular throughout what was once our land of liberty. Rehoboth Beach is a pretty Democratic area, but they still threw the arrogant prick out. It’s a gleam of hope for November. If people are this angry in Joe Biden’s summer beach home, hopefully they’re mad as hell everywhere. While I know next to nothing about the mayor’s successor, kudos to Rehoboth Beach voters for putting out the trash.

Michael J. Hurd

Liberals are suddenly realizing that “cancel culture” can snap back – and it hurts. The liberal idea was to “cancel” people who raise “offensive” or “objectionable” topics, summarily ending unwanted discussions by intimidating people into abandoning free speech rights. It was always anti-American. Now, it turns out the left’s beast, is eating them too.

Upending the First Amendment by spurning people with different views is a dead end – legally, politically, and socially. Interestingly, conservatives generally offer to debate while liberals stifle dialogue. Now, they are being stifled.

Last week, some noted liberals wrote an “open letter” decrying how unthinking, zealous leftists were shutting them down. Former New York Times editor Bari Weiss and Harper’s columnist Thomas Williams were joined by Harry Potter’s J.K. Rowling, activist Noam Chomsky, and feminist Gloria Steinem, in this conservative turn. They rediscovered the First Amendment.

Suddenly, having been shunted off stage, out of newsrooms, and denied the right to opine, they took to Bill Maher’s show to say “open debate without fear of repercussions might be a good idea,” since the absence of free expression might lead to violence. Behold – an epiphany.

While the left swarms America’s streets, these liberals penned a letter. Said Weiss, their letter was a “warning cry from inside the institutions,” signaling the need to reverse course. Free speech apparently does matter, after all. Why? Because blocking it is “social murder” these enlightened liberals professed on Maher’s show – a curious venue for lefty confessions.

Weiss explained. “What is going on now with this culture of illiberalism is different from criticism.” Criticism is good, but “cancel culture is not criticism, it is about punishment … making a person radioactive… taking away their job.” She decried her former employer.

For background, a New York Times “editorial page editor” resigned in June, after “more than 1,000 staffers” signed a letter condemning him for allowing a column by conservative US Senator Tom Cotton on restoring law and order, if necessary with the military. In July, Weiss resigned, citing an internal “civil war,” pitting “social justice warriors” against “free speech.”

Could it be that “cancel culture” is biting the hand that fed it? On Maher’s show, Weiss perfectly described socialism. She noted “cancel culture” amounts to “punishing the person for being insufficiently pure,” pushing a “secondary boycott of people who would deign to speak to that person or appear on a platform with that person.” Suddenly, this is highly offensive.

She noted this kind of “politics” does not “get us” very far. She warned about where extremism goes. “If conversation with people that we disagree with becomes impossible, what is the way we solve conflict? … It’s violence.” She may have something there.

Weiss, the enlightened liberal, continued. She said politics has evolved into a “religious identity,” suggesting liberals who fail to push to “defund the police” are considered “heretics.” One hears an awakening in her voice to socialism’s hallmark, intimidation.

As if just washing over her, she explained: “That is an enormous problem … because it is … the collapse of moderates.” There is another idea. Could “cancel culture,” intimidating those not sufficiently “pure” to defend leftist violence, be a problem in America?

The effect, she said, is “collapse of the center and the retribalization of this country …,” now inside newsrooms. One could argue that she is a little late, but seeing the light is good. She observed that America is “exceptional… with all of its flaws.” Wisdom, indeed.

Unable to defend “patriotism,” she edged up to it. Returning to high school history – apparently missed by her peers – she said: “There is something bigger than lineage or kin or the political tribe we belong to…” Yes – and we call that America. She added, we are in “a very scary moment.” Right again, no thanks to her former employer. Could media bear responsibility?

These enlightened liberals – pilloried by former friends – now argue, “it is up to us to defend the ideas that made this country unique, and a departure from history.” “Cancel culture” – blotting out what we do not like – “stifles open discussion.” Extraordinary discovery, is it not?

Her epiphany was almost too much. One liberal decried where extremes lead. “We are in danger of reinvesting in the idea that race is real and that it cannot be escaped,” and “defines us.” Making those alive pay for past sins is “not a world that I want to create,” said a panelist.

Finally, the panel host chimed in. He offered a timeless nugget: “Being able to speak freely is the lifeblood not only of democracy, of really just our way of life.” Remarkable, liberals are now teaching liberals high school history – and why the First Amendment counts.

To be clear, there is nothing new about free speech being good, socialist intimidation bad. That is not news. The news is recognition by liberals – as they turn on one another – that free speech matters, and that canceling socialist “cancel culture” might be a good idea.

Does this represent a bend in the road for liberal thinking? Could we be returning to the idea that free speech protects societies which protect it? Maybe. Predictably, liberals who signed that letter are facing intense criticism from the left. The only thing worse than not being a pure socialist, of course, is calling out those who are.

What we are hearing, for the first time, is some liberals discovering “cancel culture” is a bad choice. Empowering socialist intimidation is dangerous. Suppression is catchy. Wisdom often comes to individuals and societies slowly, but this is a start. Small steps toward enlightenment are worth noticing – and this was one. Now, our nation must awaken to the profound risks of socialism in Congress, and stand firmly against it.

Robert B. Charles

In an article on children, philosopher Stephen Hicks makes an interesting case against homework for school-aged kids. “Everyone says that they want children to grow up able to live independent lives and pursue their chosen careers passionately. But that aspiration does not fit with a traditional practice of education that teaches children to follow instructions – above all – without asking “why”.

What kind of education will prepare students for order-following and self-stultifying jobs? Simple: One which requires rigidly defined school projects assigned by “authorities”. When kids do the schoolwork primarily because they have been told to do so, homework then becomes nothing more than an additional imposition. Kids learn that life is about doing tasks, whether they like it or not, and following orders. No wonder independent and critical thinking is slowly disappearing from many young people.

In the latter system, most children will learn to accept and go along, hopefully grudgingly, and to that extent let subside their potential for a life fully lived. Only a few will fight to preserve their potential for self-actualization by rebelling — often obnoxiously because of their youth — against their teachers, parents, and other perceived representatives of the system.” [http://www.thesavvystreet.com/the-case-against-homework/]

Interesting. We seem to have created a generation of children whose aspirations and expectations are immensely high, but whose initiative and follow-through are incredibly low. More young people are living at home with their parents than at any time since the 1930s. Yes, some of this is economic, but it goes deeper than that.

As a therapist, I hear stories every day from people about their kids. When I started training as a family therapist in the late ‘80s, I never heard of kids living at home with their parents; lacking direction and purpose – unless there was some kind of medical illness or, even more frequently, a drug or alcohol addiction.

Today, it’s different. I routinely hear stories of people whose kids (or whose friends’ or relatives’ children) are home well into their 20s and even their 30s. They’re not ill, and they don’t abuse drugs or alcohol. Many of them completed college. They’re not particularly irresponsible, but they do seem frightened and insecure while—oddly enough —entitled to a level of comfort that nobody can attain as easily as they seem to assume.

Even when grown kids are moved out and working, it’s typical for me to hear complaints from the older generation that we didn’t hear in the past. “My son [or daughter] has such grand expectations. He can’t understand why he’s not making a million dollars so quickly.” It seems that young expectations have of have never been higher, while initiative has never been weaker.

So here’s a theory: Schools for recent and current generations do it the old way, but with a new twist. The old way was to create passivity and ultimately resentment, with a command-and-control school system (see the Hicks quote above). But more recently, added to that uninspiring approach has been an emphasis on badly defined “self-esteem”. The prevailing definition of self-esteem has been (and still is) to make someone “feel good” about themselves. But when you use a subjective standard to define self-esteem, you convey unrealistic – and unattainable – ideas like, “You can be anything you want to be,” or “You’re entitled to be happy.” But today’s “good little citizen” education doesn’t provide the tools to actually do that.

The silver lining is that many young people challenge this Pollyanna phoniness when they reach young adulthood. But sadly, many come to believe it. They expect huge levels of wealth and achievement, but they lack the follow-through required to make it happen. They want ends without means; results without effort. To some extent all people (of any generation) are subject to this problem, but in the present generation this appears to have reached epidemic proportions.

Hicks brilliantly sums it up when he says: “So we should listen carefully and read between the lines, so to speak, when our children start saying self-assertive things like; ‘You’re not the boss of me!’ And we should reply, ‘Damned straight, kid. You are the boss of your own life, and our job as adults is to help you become better at it.’” Exactly.

Michael J. Hurd

Something is deeply wrong in our society. The political situation is horrible, obviously. But it’s deeper than that. For example, there’s the psychological state of most American adults. Something has to be off. Nearly all of us have been trained by media, government and government-run schools to think and feel like children. To feel helpless. To feel dependent. To feel, think and say things like, “Well, I’ve just about had it with these masks and lockdowns. I can’t wait until it’s over. I don’t know anyone with this COVID. I’m sure somebody has it, but it can’t be that horrible. There aren’t mass deaths. When will they let us go back to normal?”

“When will they LET us?” THAT’S not the mentality of a free adult. That’s the mentality of a child. Or of a person who is treated like a child by his government. But in the end, we’re our own victimizers. In America, which was once a free country, it wouldn’t be possible to turn adults into children without their consent. Free adults think this way: “The virus overreaction is all B.S. It’s about the election, and it’s about control. Of course there’s a virus. But most aren’t dying from it. It does not justify anything that’s going on. And what the hell is it with these riots? You can rape, loot, pillage and burn without consequences now, in many of our cities? This is insane. We should storm the palace gates of these governors and mayors — literally, if necessary — until they do their job or get the hell out. Much of our country is being run by thugs. Or people who support and enable thugs, which is the very same thing!”

Do some people think and feel like free adults? Of course. I do. Most of the people reading this post do. But many, many others do not. Because the palace gates have not been stormed. Nor has there been any discernable noncompliance or rebellion. Everywhere you go, people put up with it. Many resent it; but they’ll never rebel. They’ll never fail to comply. Others — the sick ones — don’t mind it; they actually like being pushed around. But that’s their problem. It should not be everyone else’s too.

Let’s be real. The Democrats and the leftists are — as of this moment — winning. I’m not saying they will win, in the end. But the longer we put up with THEIR manufactured crises, THEIR dictatorship and tyranny and THEIR open endorsement of thugs, the sooner the end of freedom will come. I hope like anything we haven’t lost our freedom for good. But it sure FEELS like we have, given all the things we can no longer do that we used to be able to do in this free country. Remember schools? Theaters? Restaurants? Ball games? Church? Large parties? Even if you didn’t participate in all these things, wasn’t it nice to have the option to do so … not with government consent, but as your BIRTHRIGHT?

Here’s a quote from Daren Jonescu that sums up the Democratic leftist desire to turn us into children:

“Among the various ways that modern leftism benefits from its systematic promotion of infantilism is that perpetual children lack the basic courage that is essential to the maintenance of liberty. A courageous adult will not trade his freedom, let alone that of others, for a ‘social safety net.’ Thus, leftists are deeply invested in cowardice.”

Yes, leftists NEED and WANT us to be cowards. To be weak. To be compliant, selfless and non-assertive.

If we’re to overthrow our oppressors, we must want to overthrow them. And to do that, most of us first have to grow up.

I sure hope there’s a silent majority out there. But if the silent majority doesn’t speak up with a ferocious roar — and soon — we will find ourselves silenced forever.

Michael J. Hurd

It’s not enough that public school teachers and the college professors who train them are increasingly prone to teaching leftist absurdities like “2+2=5” or presenting the mendacious 1619 Project as legitimate American history. Teachers unions are now trying to blackmail the entire country into meeting a set of leftist political demands for reopening the schools this fall, using COVID-19 as their excuse.

Of course, the pandemic certainly presents challenges for re-opening schools, but other sectors of society have managed to rise to the occasion over the past several months to keep the country running. Grocery stores clerks, truck drivers, warehouse workers, and of course police, firefighters, doctors, and nurses—all have kept working, sometimes under tough conditions and sometimes at great personal risk.

Then there are teachers unions. More than any other group during this pandemic, teachers unions have shown themselves to be abjectly selfish, hyper-political, and totally intransigent about teaching during the pandemic. They are willing to lie about the science behind COVID-19 transmission and shamelessly stoke fear to advance their partisan agenda. Just about the last thing these unions seem to care about is educating children or helping the country get back on its feet.

On Monday, an alliance of teachers unions and leftist groups in dozens of states staged a “National Day of Resistance,” issuing a series of demands that they say must be met before their members will return to the classroom. What do they want? Rents and mortgages canceled, a “massive infusion of federal money” from “taxing billionaires and Wall Street,” moratoriums on new charter schools and voucher programs and standardized tests, and of course “police-free schools,” among other things.

Some teachers unions have gone a step further. In New York City, one group is demanding teachers not be required to return to school until a minimum of 14 days have passed after any new COVID-19 cases, claiming their lives are at risk if schools open (despite evidence to the contrary in Europe and Asia). During protests Monday, hundreds of NYC teachers marched with handmade coffins and a guillotine, chanting wording to slogans like “children can’t learn if they’re dead.”

Elsewhere in the country, it’s more of the same. In Massachusetts, the state’s second-largest teachers union is demanding remote-only instruction. In Austin, Texas, the teachers union has issued a lengthy list of demands including no in-person instruction until mid-November at least, a guarantee of full pay with no layoffs or furloughs, and all employees having the right to refuse to return to work if they feel unsafe. Earlier this month, a large teachers union in Los Angeles demanded everything listed above as well as things the city’s school district has no power to do, like the passage of Medicare for All, a California wealth tax, a federal bailout of the school district, and defunding the local police.

Beyond these nakedly political demands, many unions want their teachers to get paid for not working. According to a report last week in The New York Times, some unions are trying to limit the amount of time teachers have to spend teaching online each day, all while getting paid in full.

Take Power From Teachers Unions and Give It to Parents
All this amounts to political blackmail. The teachers unions know that millions of parents can’t afford to stay home from work to educate their kids, nor can many afford private school or private tutors. They think they have leverage—and in many places they do, if only because city and state elected officials are unwilling to stand up to them.

What all this presents, for leaders willing to see it, is an opportunity to bust the teachers unions and give power to parents and families. Instead of acceding to the unions’ outrageous demands—many of which have nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with politics—elected officials, either at the state or local level, could issue vouchers to families and let them decide how best to educate their children this fall.

Specifically, they could create education savings accounts, which simply give parents a savings account dedicated to their kids’ education. The state deposits the child’s public education dollars into the account and parents can use it for various things like online classes, a private tutor, private school tuition, whatever. Especially during the pandemic, it’s a nimble way to help people fit their child’s education to specific local circumstances.

This idea isn’t new but it does have new urgency given the extortion scheme teacher unions are running. It’s especially important that parents of underprivileged and special-needs students—who have fared the most poorly with remote learning—be given a chance to find in-person instruction for their kids.

Those who claim to care about such students should be forced to choose a side. Do lawmakers care more about appeasing teachers unions or ensuring our kids get an education? We’re about to find out.

Jonathan Turley, Constitutional Law Professor at George Washington University, issued a dire warning at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday: “Antifa is winning.”

“If you go through the antifa handbook and look at their literature, it’s quite express, as stated in the handbook, they reject the premise of what they call a classical liberal view of free speech,” Turley said. “Specifically they object to statements like, ‘I may disagree with what you have to say, but I would give my life to defend it.’ They reject that. They believe that free speech itself is a tool of oppression.”

“And that has been the message on campuses. What I thought was disturbing about these statements that antifa is a myth is that many of us on campus have been dealing with antifa for years. And antifa is winning,” Turley continued. “I’ve been teaching for 30 years. I have never seen the level of fear and intimidation on campuses that we see today. Faculty are afraid to speak out about issues. We can’t have a dialogue about the important issues occurring today because there’s a fear that you might be accused of being reactionary or racist.”

“We’ve had law professors who have been physically attacked, have required police protection. That’s the environment that we’re developing,” Turley continued. “And for people that think that antifa and groups like it can be allies, they don’t know antifa. Those of us who have been teaching on campuses can tell you about these groups. And the alarm that I have is because I’m watching my profession, the teaching profession, die, with free speech. … We’re seeing, many of these speakers are being prevented from speaking on campus under various theories. And the message is clear to faculty; it’s clear to students – there’s a new orthodoxy that you should not confront and you certainly shouldn’t disagree with.”

“There are some Democratic politicians that have not only failed to denounce antifa, but have actually, in that case, seemed to give it a shout out,” Turley concluded. “If you go to campuses today, you will find more advocates for limiting speech than protecting it. They’re winning … it’s very disturbing because antifa’s not coming after … Democrats, they’re coming after Republicans, conservatives, and those of us in the free speech community. They’re coming after us. But don’t think we’ll be the last ones. That’s not how this works.”

Democrats are “facilitating” riots and violence in major American cities and encouraging “radical leftists” who are threatening Americans, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said Tuesday on “Hannity.”

Precisely. This is why we must face the difficult truth we are already in a civil war. Or simply a war against an organized, invasive enemy with no regard whatsoever for individual rights or the U.S. Bill of Rights. Leftist mayors and governors tyrannize citizens with a mostly nonfatal virus as an excuse. And they terrorize cities by aiding, encouraging and possibly even planning violent attacks against lives and property.

They have shut down most businesses and schools, and are literally holding Americans hostage so they may use “cheat by mail” as a means of acquiring full power–a coup– without being legitimately elected. But even a legitimate election would not legalize or justify their efforts to defy the U.S. Constitution and turn America into a socialist prison camp.

If the Democrats are not America’s Nazis, then what would American Nazis look like?

Michael J. Hurd

A staple of ancient Greek tragedy is a plot twist in which a protagonist attempting to avoid a negative result inadvertently brings that result into being. Over the last decade, the American left has been engaged in just such a tragedy. Critical race theory, with its arsenal of white privilege and cultural appropriation, was intended to decenter whiteness in our society and create more equitable and multicultural social norms. But in practice, the exact opposite is occurring.

Let’s take the example of cultural appropriation. Generally speaking, the concept is meant to give ownership of cultural phenomena to members of the racial group that created it. Through this, the goal is to resist assimilation of minority cultures into the broader American culture and to assure that cultural symbols stay, in a sense, “pure.”

But one vital exception to this rule undermines the broader project of decentering whiteness. That is, of course, that cultural appropriation does not apply to white culture.

This creates an essential imbalance that does two very harmful things. First, it defines whiteness as a cultural default. Indeed, perhaps the only way to define “white culture” is that which no other culture can claim. Second, in so doing it makes white culture the only culture that is universal. That is to say, white culture is anything that everyone, regardless of race, may partake of freely and without paying some tribute to the racial group that created it.

The musical “Hamilton” is a perfect example of this. There is no, or at least almost no, objection to black and brown actors playing the white Founding Fathers. However, were a play to be cast with a white actor as Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman, there clearly would be objections to this. While this is meant to protect the cultural legacy of black Americans, it does so by putting it in a cage and stunting its growth and cultural impact.

The concept of cultural appropriation is rooted in what was historically a very real problem. We can take an example from American music in the mid-20th century. Elvis Presley can be credibly accused of appropriating the song “Hound Dog” from Big Momma Thornton.

But the problem with that was not that Presley created a new version of the song, but that the music industry of the time privileged his version with more air time, opportunity, and pay than it did hers. The answer to this problem is to level the playing field, not to segregate artistic output.

What makes this problem even worse is that white culture, or again, cultural output that no non-white group can claim, becomes the only one that everyone can engage in. This makes absolutely no sense especially given that year-by-year America becomes less white and more ethnically varied.

Minority cultural output is protected only in the sense that Victorian-era women were protected. They were put on a pedestal and praised for their purity, but also denied freedom in an effort to maintain that purity.

We saw the negative results of this way of thinking at work in a recent poster created by the Smithsonian Institution, which purported to explain elements of whiteness. Among the signs of whiteness it listed were individualism, hard work, objectivity, and delayed gratification. Critics were quick to point that this is pretty much exactly how a white supremacist would go about describing whiteness. But how did it happen? Why did the museum think these were traits of whiteness to begin with?

It goes back to the definition of whiteness being what everyone can partake in. The museum was certainly not suggesting that non-whites cannot or should not value or exhibit these qualities, but that because these qualities are not “owned” by any specific non-white group they are universal and therefore white.

The fundamental fallacy at work here is the belief that cultural output is the result of some innate racial difference, either biological or environmental, that locks what is created by non-whites into a proprietary box. But as the country becomes more diverse and as more mixed-race people are born, this effort to maintain the purity of cultural output becomes impossible without instituting segregation, something that the left now often embraces in ways that 25 years ago would have been anathema to it.

The American left has traditionally prided itself on being on the right side of history, but today their efforts to make sure that everyone stays in one racial or cultural lane puts them in the position of standing athwart history shouting “Stop!” Their opposition to an America in which cultures blend to create a national identity runs counter not only to our nation’s traditions but also to the cold reality of cultural and racial mixing.

In the long run, this is a fight they can’t win, but that doesn’t mean they can’t cause a good deal of harm and discord in the short term. The sooner they desist with these futile efforts, the healthier and more equal our society will be.

David Marcus, The Federalist

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)