My mother taught me TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE .

“If you’re going to kill each other, do it outside. I just finished cleaning.”

2. My mother taught me RELIGION .

“You better pray that will come out of the carpet.”

3. My father taught me about TIME TRAVEL .

“If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to knock you into the middle of next week!”

4. My father taught me LOGIC .

” Because I said so, that’s why .”

5. My mother taught me MORE LOGIC .

“If you fall out of that swing and break your neck, you’re not going to the store with me.”

6. My mother taught me FORESIGHT .

“Make sure you wear clean underwear, in case you’re in an accident.”

7. My father taught me IRONY .

“Keep crying, and I’ll give you something to cry about.”

8. My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS .

“Shut your mouth and eat your supper.”

9. My mother taught me about CONTORTIONISM .

“Just you look at that dirt on the back of your neck!”

10. My mother taught me about STAMINA .

“You’ll sit there until all that spinach is gone.”

11. My mother taught me about WEATHER .

“This room of yours looks as if a tornado went through it.”

12. My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY .

“If I told you once, I’ve told you a million times, don’t exaggerate!”

13. My father taught me the CIRCLE OF LIFE .

“I brought you into this world, and I can take you out.”

14. My mother taught me about BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION .

“Stop acting like your father!”

15. My mother taught me about ENVY .

“There are millions of less fortunate children in this world who don’t have wonderful parents like you do.”

16. My mother taught me about ANTICIPATION .

“Just wait until we get home.”

17. My mother taught me about RECEIVING .

“You are going to get it from your father when you get home!”

1 8 . My mother taught me MEDICAL SCIENCE .

“If you don’t stop crossing your eyes, they are going to get stuck that way.”

19. My mother taught me ESP .

“Put your sweater on; don’t you think I know when you are cold?”

20. My father taught me HUMOR .

“When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don’t come running to me.”

21. My mother taught me HOW TO BECOME AN ADULT .

“If you don’t eat your vegetables, you’ll never grow up”

22. My mother taught me GENETICS .

“You’re just like your father.”

23. My mother taught me about my ROOTS .

“Shut that door behind you. Do you think you were born in a barn?”

24. My mother taught me WISDOM .

“When you get to be my age, you’ll understand.

25. My father taught me about JUSTICE .

“One day you’ll have kids, and I hope they turn out just like you!”

This should only be sent to the over 60 crowds because the younger ones would not believe we truly were told these “EXACT” words by our parents…

Anonymous

Wall Street veteran and Alpha Investor Editor Charles Mizrahi talked to MRC Business about his frustrations with the media’s leftist agenda using the coronavirus to attack American capitalism.

Talking heads like Financial Times Editor Roula Khalaf had argued that “capitalism needs a reset.” The socialist-lovingFT Editorial Board had said that “Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy.” Mizrahi, an observant Jew, wasn’t buying any of it. He argued based on a powerful op-ed he wrote for RealClearReligion headlined “Prosperity and Generosity: The Biblical Roots of Capitalism.” His main point is that the media is “just plain wrong. They’re using a hammer when they should be using a screwdriver. The government is not for that.” https://c8436c1a6812fe7bbdc8841adad66a00.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Mizrahi laid out his case why American capitalism is the most moral of any approach to deal with the economic recovery. Mizrahi’s question to the media: “Where do we have a better system? Could you point me in the direction of a better system than our capitalist system built on Judeo-Christian values?”

Mizrahi: Why do people get on rafts, climb walls, dig tunnels, struggle through mountain ranges and deserts in order to come to our country? Because it’s a socialist country? Because we’re giving everyone three hot meals and a bed? Absolutely not! They’re coming here because America is the land of opportunity, as it has been for the past 200-plus years. Every wave of immigration that came into this country came because of religious persecution or economic persecution. They came to make better lives for themselves.

The Wall Street icon used his family’s own immigration history from the Soviet Union to underscore why people come to America in the first place. According to Mizrahi, “My grandparents didn’t board a ship and sail across the Atlantic in steerage in the bottom of a ship in 1922 because America was a socialist state. They were fleeing communism. They were getting out of the Soviet Union. They came to this country not expecting anything, just opportunity. And that’s what they were given.”

Mizrahi asked. “If you came from Mars and had no bias, and you would just look, just look at the top GDPs in the world, we’re number one. Why is that? Is it because our government is so benevolent to every person? No.” Mizrahi said one of the reasons the U.S. is number one is because “government intervention is kept to a minimum.”

Mizrahi took aim at the Financial Times for promoting socialist policies.

Mizrahi: You say that government will have to accept a more active role in the economy. Where exactly? Isn’t that what communism is all about? They tried to do that, and it failed. The government tried to run an economy, and in 1989 the wall was torn down, and Russia is no longer communist. Where does that work?

Mizrahi  also took on New York Times leftist economist Paul Krugman, lambasting him for his July 27, article headlined “The Cult of Selfishness is Killing America.” Krugman had written that Republicans are against extending unemployment benefits because it would be an “admission that lucky Americans should help their less-fortunate fellow citizens.”

Mizrahi said that Krugman was “misguided.” He stated, “His conclusion that he first draws here” is “just plain silly.” Mizrahi’s view was that continuing to extend unemployment benefits and aid will only disincentivize work.

He then tied everything back to a Biblical case for capitalism:

Mizrahi: The Bible totally understood that there will always be an underbelly of society. There will always be a segment of society in chapter 15 of Deuteronomy, verse 11: ‘There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore, I command you to be open-handed towards your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.’

Mizrahi said that “with wealth comes responsibility” in helping the poor.  But, for Mizrahi, “this wasn’t a perpetual state of poverty that you were supposed to keep them in [the poor].” The Jewish perspective stipulates that “the highest form of charity one can do is put someone into a business or make them a partner in a business, because then they become self-sufficient.”

He then related this back to America, “the only Judeo-Christian country in the world.” Mizrahi concluded: “Why is it that the United States, the Americans, the American people are the most charitable people on the face of the earth? Total charitable giving in this country is $410 billion dollars, and that was in 2017. That’s 2 percent of our GDP. But here’s the kicker: individuals gave 70 percent of that — individuals!” 

Mizrahi then challenged the media and Krugman: “You’re saying the American people are not a generous people? Well, the facts show differently.”

The market economy—capitalism—is based on private ownership of the material means of production and private entrepreneurship. The consumers, by their buying or abstention from buying, ultimately determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. They render profitable the affairs of those businessmen who best comply with their wishes and unprofitable the affairs of those who do not produce what they are asking for most urgently. Profits convey control of the factors of production into the hands of those who are employing them for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers, and losses withdraw them from the control of the inefficient businessmen. In a market economy not sabotaged by the government the owners of property are mandataries of the consumers as it were. On the market a daily repeated plebiscite determines who should own what and how much. It is the consumers who make some people rich and other people penniless.

Inequality of wealth and incomes is an essential feature of the market economy. It is the implement that makes the consumers supreme in giving them the power to force all those engaged in production to comply with their orders. It forces all those engaged in production to the utmost exertion in the service of the consumers. It makes competition work. He who best serves the consumers profits most and accumulates riches.

In a society of the type that Adam Ferguson, Saint-Simon, and Herbert Spencer called militaristic and present-day Americans call feudal, private property of land was the fruit of violent usurpation or of donations on the part of the conquering warlord. Some people owned more, some less and some nothing because the chieftain had determined it that way. In such a society it was correct to assert that the abundance of the great landowners was the corollary of the indigence of the landless.

But it is different in a market economy. Bigness in business does not impair, but improves the conditions of the rest of the people. The millionaires are acquiring their fortunes in supplying the many with articles that were previously beyond their reach. If laws had prevented them from getting rich, the average American household would have to forgo many of the gadgets and facilities that are today its normal equipment. This country enjoys the highest standard of living ever known in history because for several generations no attempts were made toward “equalization” and “redistribution.” Inequality of wealth and incomes is the cause of the masses’ well-being, not the cause of anybody’s distress. Where there is a “lower degree of inequality,” there is necessarily a lower standard of living of the masses.

Demand for “Distribution”

In the opinion of the demagogues inequality in what they call the “distribution” of wealth and incomes is in itself the worst of all evils. Justice would require an equal distribution. It is therefore both fair and expedient to confiscate the surplus of the rich or at least a considerable part of it and to give it to those who own less. This philosophy tacitly presupposes that such a policy will not impair the total quantity produced. But even if this were true, the amount added to the average man’s buying power would be much smaller than extravagant popular illusions assume. In fact the luxury of the rich absorbs only a slight fraction of the nation’s total consumption.

The much greater part of the rich men’s incomes is not spent for consumption, but saved and invested. It is precisely this that accounts for the accumulation of their great fortunes. If the funds which the successful businessmen would have ploughed back into productive employments are used by the state for current expenditure or given to people who consume them, the further accumulation of capital is slowed down or entirely stopped. Then there is no longer any question of economic improvement, technological progress, and a trend toward higher average standards of living.

When Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto recommended “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax” and “abolition of all right of inheritance” as measures “to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie,” they were consistent from the point of view of the ultimate end they were aiming at, viz., the substitution of socialism for the market economy. They were fully aware of the inevitable consequences of these policies. They openly declared that these measures are “economically untenable” and that they advocated them only because “they necessitate further inroads” upon the capitalist social order and are “unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production,” i.e., as a means of bringing about socialism.

But it is quite a different thing when these measures which Marx and Engels characterized as “economically untenable” are recommended by people who pretend that they want to preserve the market economy and economic freedom. These self-styled middle-of-the-road politicians are either hypocrites who want to bring about socialism by deceiving the people about their real intentions, or they are ignoramuses who do not know what they are talking about. For progressive taxes upon incomes and upon estates are incompatible with the preservation of the market economy.

The middle-of-the-road man argues this way: “There is no reason why a businessman should slacken in the best conduct of his affairs only because he knows that his profits will not enrich him but will benefit all people. Even if he is not an altruist who does not care for lucre and who unselfishly toils for the common weal, he will have no motive to prefer a less efficient performance of his activities to a more efficient. It is not true that the only incentive that impels the great captains of industry is acquisitiveness. They are no less driven by the ambition to bring their products to perfection.”

Join us in preserving the principles of economic freedom and individual liberty for the rising generationSupport FEE’s Mission

Supremacy of the Consumers

This argumentation entirely misses the point. What matters is not the behavior of the entrepreneurs but the supremacy of the consumers. We may take it for granted that the businessmen will be eager to serve the consumers to the best of their abilities even if they themselves do not derive any advantage from their zeal and application. They will accomplish what according to their opinion best serves the consumers. But then it will no longer be the consumers that determine what they get. They will have to take what the businessmen believe is best for them. The entrepreneurs, not the consumers, will then be supreme. The consumers will no longer have the power to entrust control of production to those businessmen whose products they like most and to relegate those whose products they appreciate less to a more modest position in the system.

If the present American laws concerning the taxation of the profits of corporations, the incomes of individuals and inheritances had been introduced about sixty years ago, all those new products whose consumption has raised the standard of living of the “common man” would either not be produced at all or only in small quantities for the benefit of a minority. The Ford enterprises would not exist if Henry Ford’s profits had been taxed away as soon as they came into being. The business structure of 1895 would have been preserved. The accumulation of new capital would have ceased or at least slowed down considerably. The expansion of production would lag behind the increase of population. There is no need to expatiate about the effects of such a state of affairs.

Profit and loss tell the entrepreneur what the consumers are asking for most urgently. And only the profits the entrepreneur pockets enable him to adjust his activities to the demand of the consumers. If the profits are expropriated, he is prevented from complying with the directives given by the consumers. Then the market economy is deprived of its steering wheel. It becomes a senseless jumble.

People can consume only what has been produced. The great problem of our age is precisely this: Who should determine what is to be produced and consumed, the people or the State, the consumers themselves or a paternal government? If one decides in favor of the consumers, one chooses the market economy. If one decides in favor of the government, one chooses socialism. There is no third solution. The determination of the purpose for which each unit of the various factors of production is to be employed cannot be divided.

Demand for Equalization

The supremacy of the consumers consists in their power to hand over control of the material factors of production and thereby the conduct of production activities to those who serve them in the most efficient way. This implies inequality of wealth and incomes. If one wants to do away with inequality of wealth and incomes, one must abandon capitalism and adopt socialism. (The question whether any socialist system would really give income equality must be left to an analysis of socialism.)

But, say the middle-of-the-road enthusiasts, we do not want to abolish inequality altogether. We want merely to substitute a lower degree of inequality for a higher degree.

These people look upon inequality as upon an evil. They do not assert that a definite degree of inequality which can be exactly determined by a judgment free of any arbitrariness and personal evaluation is good and has to be preserved unconditionally. They, on the contrary, declare inequality in itself as bad and merely contend that a lower degree of it is a lesser evil than a higher degree in the same sense in which a smaller quantity of poison in a man’s body is a lesser evil than a larger dose. But if this is so, then there is logically in their doctrine no point at which the endeavors toward equalization would have to stop.

Whether one has already reached a degree of inequality which is to be considered low enough and beyond which it is not necessary to embark upon further measures toward equalization, is just a matter of personal judgments of value, quite arbitrary, different with different people and changing in the passing of time. As these champions of equalization appraise confiscation and “redistribution” as a policy harming only a minority, viz., those whom they consider to be “too” rich, and benefiting the rest—the majority—of the people, they cannot oppose any tenable argument to those who are asking for more of this allegedly beneficial policy. As long as any degree of inequality is left, there will always be people whom envy impels to press for a continuation of the equalization policy. Nothing can be advanced against their inference: If inequality of wealth and incomes is an evil, there is no reason to acquiesce in any degree of it, however low; equalization must not stop before it has completely leveled all individuals’ wealth and incomes.

The history of the taxation of profits, incomes and estates in all countries clearly shows that once the principle of equalization is adopted, there is no point at which the further progress of the policy of equalization can be checked. If, at the time the Sixteenth Amendment was adopted, somebody had predicted that some years later the income tax progression would reach the height it has really attained in our day, the advocates of the Amendment would have called him a lunatic. It is certain that only a small minority in Congress will seriously oppose further sharpening of the progressive element in the tax rate scales if such a sharpening should be suggested by the Administration or by a congressman anxious to enhance his chances for re-election. For, under the sway of the doctrines taught by contemporary pseudo-economists, all but a few reasonable men believe that they are injured by the mere fact that their own income is smaller than that of other people and that it is not a bad policy to confiscate this difference.

There is no use in fooling ourselves. Our present taxation policy is headed toward a complete equalization of wealth and incomes and thereby toward socialism. This trend can be reversed only by the cognition of the role that profit and loss and the resulting inequality of wealth and incomes play in the operation of the market economy. People must learn that the accumulation of wealth by the successful conduct of business is the corollary of the improvement of their own standard of living and vice versa. They must realize that bigness in business is not an evil, but both the cause and effect of the fact that they themselves enjoy all those amenities whose enjoyment is called the “American way of life.”

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) taught in Vienna and New York and served as a close adviser to the Foundation for Economic Education. He is considered the leading theorist of the Austrian School of the 20th century.

Whole Word (one of almost a dozen aliases) was first introduced into public schools circa 1931.  The official goal required that students memorize at least 500 sight-words each year.  Two insurmountable problems showed up immediately.  For nearly all children, this goal is impossible to reach.  Even if someone did reach 500, that’s not nearly enough.

Wait, it gets much worse.  Throughout the following decades, the official goal was reduced again and again.  The typical goal now is about 100 sight-words per year.  Even for good students, sight-words are hard, tedious work, like memorizing phone numbers and chemical compounds.  Only children with near photographic memories can easily master 100 sight-words per year.  However, even this low number rarely adds up to even 1,200 at the end of high school, because new words tend to overprint earlier words.  So that’s 12 years of hard work and struggle.  But you still can’t be called literate because you can’t read the typical book or newspaper except in a slow, unpleasant way.

Another huge defect is that sight-word lists for grades 1 to 6 usually include only lowercase words, mostly short.  How were children supposed to learn Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and Independence Day?  Sight-words seem designed to undercut not just reading, but also the study of geography, history, and science.

So it’s easy to see that sight-words, from the start, were hostile to traditional education.  Why did the education commissars recommend a ride on this garbage scow?  The simplest explanation is that Progressives prefer leveling and mediocrity, presumably because it facilitates their social engineering schemes.

What we know for sure is that some cunning minds were and still are devoted to perpetuating this fraud.  Scan some of the many hundreds of sites promoting sight-words.  Old alibis and new propaganda are dispensed with confident abandon.  If children are cognitively confused by sight-words, we are told that the real problem is dyslexia, something you are born with.  If children misbehave in the classroom, Ritalin and such are prescribed.  The bogus instructional method itself is not questioned.https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=www.americanthinker.com&width=692

In 1940, Dr. Robert Seashore conducted research on how many words children know (see Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, Chapter 10).  The psychologist startled everyone by showing that first-grade children have a listening and speaking vocabulary of close to 25,000 words!  This amount increases by about 5,000 words a year until you find college graduates knowing roughly 150,000.  Imagine you are part of an Education Establishment that wants to teach children a measly few hundred words a year using a painful and awkward method.  You look like a fool.  What do you do?

To protect sight-words, the professors continually tried to discredit phonics, from 1931 to now.  For one example, some clever, diabolical people invented “barking at print,” a gimmick that claims that a child might read words phonetically but have no idea what they mean.  (This happens only in the sense that adults could read a paragraph by Wittgenstein and not understand what he is saying.)

The dirty trick here is to discredit the most gifted readers in the classroom and downgrade them into failures and phonies.  I’ve talked to teachers who swore they had a “dog” in their class.  “He could read anything you put in front of him.  Of course, he didn’t understand a word he said.  He was just barking.”

I see this old sophistry discussed in a recent blog, as if it were a new breakthrough: “When your child is reading to you, are you sure they … are actually understanding what they are reading, or are they just barking at print?  i.e. Reading the words correctly but not actually decoding them, so they really have no idea what they are reading.  It is very easy to be fooled into thinking your child is a good reader.”  See?  Your smart, high-achieving kid is nothing but a dog.

This sophistry is an emblem of the sight-word hoax.  Every kid’s a dog, but not one kid actually barked.  This reality-twisting is a kind of genius.

In 2000 the Education Establishment staged a strategic retreat.  In the future, schools would teach Balanced Literacy, which promotes a mix of phonics and sight-words.  Most of the teachers in America have been convinced that all children learn differently, so you can’t use just one method.  These teachers expect confused children to switch easily from one reading style to another.  In fact, it’s disorienting, like rubbing your stomach and patting your head.

In recent years, there has been a clear return to phonics.  But my impression is that the hoaxsters are digging in.  They will hang on to this clunker as long as they can manage it.  Don’t help them.

The biggest problem in American education is illiteracy.  Good news: It’s the easiest problem to fix.  Teach systematic phonics in the first grade.  Find a program that is short, simple, and cheap.  (Don Potter, phonics guru, says the best is Blend Phonics by Hazel Loring.)

For a short introduction to phonics, see Pre-emptive Reading.

Don’t be misled by the anti-phonics hustle.  These people want to make everything complicated, murky, and painfully slow.  In fact, children should typically learn to read in the first year of school.  Anything less than that, you’re fighting the sight-word Ponzi scheme. 

Sight-words are a Ponzi scheme because, at first, progress can seem rapid.  This illusion turns out to be a curse.  Children can’t escape from their bad habits, and they rarely become good readers.

Bruce Deitrick Price is the author of  Saving K–12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?, a lively short explanation of problems in K–12.

In order to understand the liberal and progressive agenda, one must know something about their world vision and values. Let’s examine some of the evidence. Why the 1970s struggle to ban DDT? Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, wrote in a 1990 biographical essay: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use.

In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Dr. Charles Wurster, former chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, was once asked whether he thought a ban on DDT would result in the use of more dangerous chemicals and more malaria cases in Sri Lanka. He replied: “Probably. So what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and [malaria] is as good a way as any.”

According to Earthbound, a collection of essays on environmental ethics, William Aiken said: “Massive human diebacks would be good. It is our duty to cause them. It is our species’ duty, relative to the whole, to eliminate 90 percent of our numbers.” Former National Park Service research biologist David Graber opined, “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet.… We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.

Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” Speaking of viruses, Prince Philip—Duke of Edinburgh and patron of the World Wildlife Fund—said, “If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”

The late Jacques Cousteau told The UNESCOCourier: “One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.” That represents the values of some progressives, but what about their predictions?

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome to warn that the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987, and petroleum, copper, lead, and natural gas by 1992. It turns out that each of these resources is more plentiful today.

Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book, The Doomsday Book, said that Americans were using 50 percent of the world’s resources and that “by 2000 [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them.” In 1975, the Environment Fund took out full-page ads warning, “The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000.” Harvard University Nobel laureate biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

Former Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, warned, in Look magazine (1970), that by 1995, “somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

In 1974, the US Geological Survey said the United States had only a ten-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter, according to the American Gas Association, is that there’s more than a 110-year supply.

In 1986, Lester Brown, who had been predicting global starvation for forty years, received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, along with a stipend. The foundation also gave Dr. Paul Ehrlich, who predicted millions of Americans would die of starvation, the “genius” award in 1990. Note that these $300,000 to $400,000 awards were granted well after enough time had passed to demonstrate that Brown and Ehrlich were insanely wrong.

Just think: Congress listens to people like these and formulates public policy on their dire predictions that we’re running out of something.

Walter E. Williams, Genius and Prolific Author

If a pure market economy is so good, why does it not already exist? If governments are so bad, why are they dominant throughout the world today? Indeed, is the widespread adoption of free markets ever likely to occur?

Many recent authors, including Tyler Cowen,1 Cowen and Daniel Sutter,2 Randall G. 3Holcombe, and Andrew Rutten4, question the feasibility of a pure libertarian society.5 They maintain that such a system cannot arise or persist because some people will always have both the incentive and the ability to use force against others. These authors offer several reasons why, even if society starts out in a perfect libertarian world without any states (as Murray Rothbard and others advocate),6 competing groups will eventually form a coercive government.

If we are lucky, this will be not too dissimilar from what we have today, but it could be even worse. Government may not be just or desirable, but “government is inevitable.”7 While these objections have been aimed specifically at radical libertarian ideas, they apply more broadly and are relevant to the general issue of social change.

We believe that the neoclassical framework of most of these authors, particularly Holcombe, Cowen, and Sutter, causes them to overlook perhaps the most important driving force of social change. When analyzing why people make choices, economists distinguish between people’s preferences and people’s incentives. Yet, when considering ways to alter behavior, almost all economists limit their focus exclusively to incentives. Changing preferences is ignored as an option in the strict neoclassical point of view.8

This limited framework is found among neoclassical economists across the board, from advocates of radical change, such as David Friedman,9 to accepters of the status quo, such as George Stigler.10 A large part of the agenda of normative public choice and constitutional economics is to build “knave-proof institutions” that are immune to people acting as the “opportunistically rational economic man.”11

Although most neoclassical economists are willing to discuss changing incentives through constraints, we believe that changing incentives is not the only way to alter people’s behavior, and it may not always be the easiest way. Consider the government campaign against smoking. Not only does the government attempt to change incentives with increased taxes but it also attempts to change preferences by convincing people that smoking is not a good thing.

As advocates of a laissez-faire society, we hardly endorse this government campaign, but it illustrates how advocates of change focus on incentives and preferences rather than incentives alone. Libertarians who oppose taxes on cigarettes but who also wish fewer people smoked readily recognize that they must rely on educational campaigns aimed at the preferences of smokers.12

Moreover, even if political economists want to change people’s incentives, to do this they need to change policy or institutions, and they can only do that by first changing people’s preferences about institutions. Unless one simplistically reduces all of history to a deterministic model in which all institutional change results solely from changes in external constraints (consider, for instance, Avner Greif,13 and, with greater sophistication and scope, Douglass North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast14), political economists must look at preferences to explain social change. Holcombe, Cowen, and Sutter evade any consideration of ideology and other factors that may affect preferences, but we believe that social change without changes in preferences is rare. The notion that you can change policy without changing preferences is an illusion.

History provides many examples where preferences of enough people changed so that the result was significant changes in policy. By eliminating this analytical straightjacket imposed by neoclassical economics, economists could have a lot more to offer about how to improve the world. We are not arguing that libertarianism requires convincing 100 percent of people to support a free society. Instead, following Murray Rothbard,15 we argue that libertarianism (or for that matter any system) requires the support of a certain critical mass. When enough people support a free society and withdraw their support from governments, the ability of would-be predators to create government is diminished.

The Argument for Pessimism

Why might one adopt a pessimistic view about the possibility of social change toward a pure market economy? Reasons differ, but let us focus on the pessimism of two classical-liberal economists who have published a series of articles on this topic. Cowen and Sutter is the latest contribution to a string of papers related to the viability of a state-free society.16 Much of their reasoning applies to more limited free markets as well. The initial arguments for pessimism are in Cowen,17 who maintains that, without a government monopoly over the use of force, competing groups that can cooperate to resolve disputes can also collude to exercise coercion.

Cowen and Sutter follows up with the more general claim that the very factors, such as cooperation, that might make a libertarian society possible can also make government likely.18 Cowen and Sutter summarize,

If civil society can use norms to enforce cooperative solutions, that same society will be prone to certain kinds of cartels. In other words, cooperation-enhancing social features will bring bad outcomes as well as good outcomes. To provide a simple example, the Nazis relied on cooperation in addition to their obvious coercive elements in perpetrating their crimes. The ability to organize therefore is a mixed blessing.19

The Nazi example should have alerted Cowen and Sutter to the crucial role of ideology. Instead they conclude that a libertarian society is unlikely to survive because of a “paradox of cooperation.” Some people will be able to cooperate enough to threaten others with government or private force. Cowen and Sutter consider this problem a virtually unavoidable feature of a stateless society.

Some authors have questioned Cowen and Sutter’s claims about network industries facilitating cartels,20 but the authors reply that cartels are possible in network industries that use force.21 They argue that even if most people were peaceful, more powerful groups could threaten others, who would have little choice but to back down.

They represent this scenario using simple game theory. Although victims would be best off not being victimized at all, victims are better off being victimized without retaliating, rather than fighting back, because confrontations are costly. This is likely why most people pay the mugger or the tax collector even though they would prefer not to; losing one’s cash is better than prompting a confrontation and potentially losing one’s life.

As evidence that some will always threaten while others will always back down, Cowen and Sutter point to the existence of governments around the globe:

We must take seriously the fact that governments exist all around the world, for better or worse. … History shows that “cooperating to coerce” is relatively easy to establish, regardless of the exact path to that final state of affairs.22

This position is similar to that of authors writing in the public-choice tradition, including Holcombe and Rutten, who argue that some form of coercion will necessarily persist.23

In no uncertain terms, Holcombe writes, “Without government — or even with a weak government — predatory groups will impose themselves on people by force and create a government to extract income and wealth from these subjects,” concluding that “government is inevitable.”24 In a similar vein, Cowen writes, “Orderly anarchy again implies collusive anarchy,” stating, “libertarian ideology does not provide a safeguard against the emergence of government.”25

Most recently, Cowen has coined what he calls the “Paradox of Libertarianism,” which essentially maintains that libertarian success may have contributed to bigger government. Changes in government policy in the last few decades have moved in a libertarian direction, causing “much greater wealth and much greater liberty,” which, ironically, has increased public demand for government.26

For all these authors, libertarians are at an impasse. Even if people recognize that markets are good and coercion is bad, some will always attempt to use coercive government because it will be in their interest to do so. These critics might be called the pessimistic admirers of libertarianism. Libertarian ideals are nice, but they are impossible in practice.

The Argument Against Pessimism

Forgive us for favorably quoting a politician and a general, but as Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Pessimism never won any battle.” Just because libertarianism has not fully triumphed anywhere in the world today does not mean that striving for it is futile. Cowen and Sutter’s analysis notably leaves out the importance of ideology and public opinion as constraints on government.

Within certain narrow assumptions, Cowen and Sutter’s 2005 and Cowen’s 2007 analyses all but guarantee the existence of government. In Cowen and Sutter, the payoffs of using coercion are positive because there are no external constraints, and in Cowen, government becomes more popular as income increases. But if the assumptions are different, the predicted payoffs are different, and the “inevitability” of statism becomes “inevitable” only under certain conditions.

This problem is starkest in Cowen’s most recent article, in which he takes current political opinion as fixed and assumes that the majority considers government a normal good like so many others. In the current world this may be true. But suppose that advocates of free markets are correct that markets are more civil and humane27 and that the more sophisticated or cultured point of view is to support liberty over coercion. This is an open question, but as people’s incomes increase and they become more educated they might be more likely to become less statist.28 Under these circumstances, statism would not be a normal good, but an inferior good.

Or consider Cowen and Sutter’s assumption about the positive payoffs of coercion. In the current world, one need not look further than the many rich government officials around the globe to see the truth in this. But the payoffs themselves are at least partly a function of institutions and are hardly constant for all time. Altering the institutions can alter the level and even the ranking of the payoffs.

Furthermore, the level of the payoffs is not the only relevant consideration in light of the subjective nature of people’s preferences. The subjective ranking of payoffs can change with preferences. Suppose that some external, ideological constraints, embedded in a widely recognized legal code, were placed on coercion. If these constraints were important enough, even would-be opportunists would decline to use coercion.

Cowen and Sutter might answer that by assuming no government they have already specified the relevant institutional constraints. But the varied legal regimes that stateless societies have exhibited throughout history belie this claim. Cowen initially dismissed “reliance upon libertarian ideology alone to defend the survival of anarchy” as a “deus ex machina.”29 But Cowen and Sutter admit that “cooperative efficacy relates only to the ability of a community to engage in collective action; the selection of projects to pursue is a separate question.”30 In other words, people conceivably can cooperate to achieve public goods or public bads. The Nazis sought public bads, but this result is not universal.

What factors influence a society’s mix of public goods and bads? According to Cowen and Sutter, this “separate question” is decided by “community leaders and public officials” based on which projects “suit their own interests.” Then what determines their interests? Here we are back again implicitly at institutions and ideology, unless Cowen and Sutter want to replace ideology with the deus ex machina of the preferences of leaders and officials.

Another striking example of how ideology implicitly enters the analysis of neoclassical economists, despite their best efforts to keep it out, comes from a critic of Cowen. Friedman, in his classic brief for anarchism, projects a polylegal order in which competing private courts and police enforce different codes of law that compete like “brands of cars.”31 These legal codes need not be libertarian, in Friedman’s view, although he argues that unlibertarian law will be more expensive to enforce than libertarian law. Therefore, self-interest will tend to drive polylegal anarchism toward libertarian outcomes.

But notice that Friedman’s private courts and police do obey at least one universal law, despite his failure to acknowledge as much. None of them collects taxes. Otherwise, his system collapses into the international anarchy we observe in the world today. How could such a uniform constraint against taxation arise except through a widely held ideological aversion to taxation?

Could preferences ever change so that people demand less statism or more constraints on government? If one adopts the narrow neoclassical public-choice assumptions of Cowen and Sutter, the answer is likely to be “no,” as preferences are static in strict neoclassical models. But this position overlooks two important facts about the world, namely that public opinion often changes, and public opinion does matter.

Caplan and Stringham contrast the mainstream public-choice view that interests rule the world with the views of Ludwig von Mises and Frédéric Bastiat, who believe that ideas rule the world. According to the Mises-Bastiat view, governments are able to get away with as much as they do only because they have the support of enough people. Bad policies persist only because the median voter prefers them.32

But the current demand for bad policies does not imply their inevitability any more than the current demand for Ford automobiles implies that Ford will forever retain its current market share. If people’s preferences can be changed, then big government is not necessarily something people will always demand. This is important because if enough people withdraw their support for various big government policies, then the state will have a difficult time imposing its policies on the unwilling masses. As Rothbard,33 Jeffrey Rogers Hummel,34 and others have argued, government officials get away with as much as people let them.

Herein lies the key to changing society — changing public opinion or people’s preferences toward government. And the only way people are likely to change their preferences is through education and persuasion; force is ineffective. This is why libertarian economists of different stripes believe that economic education plays such a crucial role.

Most people in the general public support various government policies because they truly believe that government needs to solve social problems. Only infrequently do they consider the possibilities that government may be the cause of problems or making problems worse.35 Nor do they consider the possibility that voluntary action may be capable of solving many so-called market failures.

If free markets can do wonders, as libertarian economists believe,36 then there is no inherent reason that the public needs to forever demand or even tolerate the state. Frédéric Bastiat maintains that the general public has been sold a bill of goods.37 The general public has been persuaded to believe in the necessity of government intervention in many areas.

Yet, if free-market economists had their way, the public would believe and behave otherwise. When a problem arose, the public would not immediately turn to the state to solve it. When the state tried to take on new roles, people would balk. A small group of people might try to use force to impose their will on the public, but without general support or general acceptance by the public that minority would have a difficult time getting its way.38 As Rothbard wrote, “The emperor’s clothes of supposed altruistic concern for the common weal would then be stripped from him.”39

At one level, our argument seems obviously true. As one of our colleagues associated with the Review of Austrian Economics wrote to us, “the central thesis of the paper is that libertarian anarchy will prevail where everyone is a libertarian anarchist. This point is uncontroversial.” Yet, as we have demonstrated, the point is indeed controversial. The objections of those who question the attainability or stability of a state-free society (as opposed to its desirability) all rest on an explicit or implicit rejection of the truism that ideas have consequences.

It is likely that every society will always have some people who want to use force. But we believe that people can only get away with force on a large scale if they have the support of enough people. Without widespread support, the ability to create governments is diminished.

If those who think a libertarian society is unattainable truly abandon the notion of preferences being fixed forever, their only alternative is to invoke the public-goods problem, or one of its many other variants, such as the prisoner’s dilemma or path dependency. Such problems allegedly prevent changes in people’s ideas from having strong impacts on the political outcome. But this raises an across-the-board objection to all sorts of improvements in policy.

Yet history is littered with examples in which public-spirited mass movements overcame free-rider incentives to achieve significant gains against state power …. Nobel Laureate Douglass C. North has observed that “casual observation … confirms the immense number of cases where large group action does occur and is a fundamental force for change.”40 Once one recognizes that people do not always behave in a narrowly self-interested manner; that they are sometimes (if not always) capable of ideological altruism or otherwise working to achieve goals whose material rewards will not fully compensate them for their efforts; that in a word, preferences are indeed flexible, then the power of ideas becomes paramount, as Hummel, Caplan and Stringham, Higgs, and North have all pointed out at length.

Thus, the ultimate factor in this worldview is public opinion. The more people adopt a culture of enterprise, the more able a system of free markets is to come about. Is the world where most people support a pure market economy inevitable, as Fukuyama implies in his argument for the inevitability of liberal democracy?41 We do not believe that any world is inevitable, but we believe that changing preferences to support a pure market economy is certainly possible.

[This article is excerpted from Stringham and Hummel, “If a Pure Market Economy is So Good, Why Doesn’t It Exist? The Importance of Changing Preferences versus Incentives in Social Change,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 2010, vol. 13, no. 2.]

The violence, looting and mayhem that this nation has seen over the last several months has much of its roots in academia, where leftist faculty teach immature young people all manner of nonsense that contradicts commonsense and the principles of liberty. Chief among their lessons is a need to attack free speech in the form of prohibitions against so-called hate speech and microaggressions. Here are examples of microaggressions: “You are a credit to your race.” “Wow! How did you become so good in math?” “There is only one race, the human race.” “I’m not racist. I have several black friends.” “As a woman, I know what you go through as a racial minority.”

It is a tragic state of affairs when free speech and inquiry require protection at institutions of higher learning. Indeed, freedom in the marketplace of ideas has made the United States, as well as other Western nations, a leader in virtually every area of human endeavor. A monopoly of ideas is just as dangerous as a monopoly in political power or a monopoly in the production of goods and services.

We might ask what is the true test of a person’s commitment to free speech? The true test does not come when he permits people to say those things he deems acceptable. The true test comes when he permits people to say those things that he deems offensive. The identical principle applies to freedom of association; its true test comes when someone permits others to voluntarily associate in ways that he deems offensive.https://2086de16525fd7aba7199ed9fde8650b.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

While free speech has been under attack, we are beginning to see some pushback. More than 12,000 professors, free speech leaders and conservative-leaning organization leaders have signed “The Philadelphia Statement.”

The 845-word document says in part: “Similarly, colleges and universities are imposing speech regulations to make students ‘safe,’ not from physical harm, but from challenges to campus orthodoxy. These policies and regulations assume that we as citizens are unable to think for ourselves and to make independent judgments. Instead of teaching us to engage, they foster conformism (“groupthink”) and train us to respond to intellectual challenges with one or another form of censorship. A society that lacks comity and allows people to be shamed or intimidated into self-censorship of their ideas and considered judgments will not survive for long. As Americans, we desire a flourishing, open marketplace of ideas, knowing that it is the fairest and most effective way to separate falsehood from truth. Accordingly, dissenting and unpopular voices — be they of the left or the right — must be afforded the opportunity to be heard. They have often guided our society toward more just positions, which is why Frederick Douglass said freedom of speech is the ‘great moral renovator of society and government.'”null

The recognition of the intellectual elite attacking free speech is not new. In a 1991 speech, Yale University President Benno Schmidt warned: “The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.”

Tyrants everywhere, from the Nazis to the communists, started out supporting free speech rights. Why? Because speech is important for the realization of leftist goals of command and control. People must be propagandized, proselytized and convinced. Once leftists have gained power, as they have in most of our colleges and universities, free speech becomes a liability. It challenges their ideas and agenda and must be suppressed.https://2086de16525fd7aba7199ed9fde8650b.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Attacks on free speech to accommodate multiculturalism and diversity are really attacks on Western values, which are superior to all others. The indispensable achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights, the idea that individuals have certain inalienable rights that are not granted by government. Governments exist to protect these inalienable rights. It took until the 17th century for that idea to arise and mostly through the works of English philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume. And now the 21st century campus leftists are trying to suppress these inalienable rights.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at http://www.creators.com.

The COVID Internment, the rise of Mask Empire, and the normalization of Black Lives Matter and Antifa violence have clarified in spades that critical thinking, as opposed to mindless emoting, is more necessary than ever.

It is misleading to suggest that feelings or emotions are of no consequence.  The difference between the critical thinking and feeling is that whatever feelings a person experiences at any given moment are no substitute for clear, honest, and authentic thinking.

Feelings in and of themselves, divorced from reason and the sensitivity to contextual considerations, undermine the God-endowed dignity of the human person by diverting the mind away from truth.

Just because a person feels this or that most definitely does not mean, as the feelers among us assume, that their feelings are infallible.  Feelings can be based upon a warped understanding of reality.

It is critical thinking that is a selfless activity, for the engagement of critical thinking is a mode of self-transcendence.  If human beings possess an inviolable dignity, it is because they are made in the image of the God Who created them.  And if they are made in God’s image, then this is because humans, unlike plants and animals, possess two faculties that distinguish them from the rest of living things on Earth: reason and will.  Yet even if one is put off by talk of God, one will still grant that, fundamentally, humans are persons because of their ability to think, to reason.https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=www.americanthinker.com&width=692

Intrinsic to thinking are canons of logic and rationality that are of no one’s choosing and that aren’t in the least impacted by one’s subjective emotions.  The critical thinker seeks to trade in a universally human currency.  Moreover, because critical thinking, like the language in which it occurs, is always, inescapably, interpersonal, the critical thinker seeks to make of others joint enterprisers in the search for truth.

The feelers, on the other hand, can’t get beyond themselves.  Far from welcoming discourse with others, they are conversation-killers; they render intellectual intercourse with other human beings impossible.

In the Age of the Great UnReason, critical thinking is as necessary as it has ever been.  But it is hard.  The costs — lost relationships, being on the outs with the herd — are considerable.  Most will not rise to the occasion.  But the rewards are great: by engaging higher capacities, critical thinkers emancipate themselves from their animal nature; affirm their dignity and that of those with whom they enter into dialogue; and acquire such virtues as good faith, analytical prowess, humility, honesty, civility, and courage. 

Hannah Arendt famously noted that it wasn’t the stupidity of Adolph Eichmann that led to his monstrous actions.  Eichmann wasn’t stupid.  Rather, the architect of the Holocaust suffered from “a curious, but quite authentic, inability to think.” 

This phenomenon, she made a point of arguing, was hardly limited to Eichmann, the Nazis, and their sympathizers.  It is endemic.  It is also connected to moral character in that those who can’t think beyond memes, bumper stickers, clichés, and the conventional wisdom are that much more susceptible than the critical thinker to conform, to go along to get along.

They are that much more prone to become complicit in all manner of evil.

If Arendt were alive today, in 2020, in the Age of the Great UnReason and the COVID Scare, she would undoubtedly regard her thesis as having been vindicated in spades.

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This is an excerpt from “The Case Against the State,” by Tanner Cook.

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on – because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.” ~ Noam Chomsky

Proposition: The original intended purpose of our current “educational” system was designed to train children in obedience and for nationalist indoctrination, not education. Furthermore, as evidenced by the data and the cost of education, the State has proven to be most inefficient in its alleged attempt at public education.

Reasoning: Most of us received our history lessons from the public education system, so it’s safe to assume that most don’t know the history of this system. In order to understand the current education sysdeliberate art for fashioning in man a stable and infallible good will.

That is its first characteristic. …The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty.”[3] It was made explicitly clear that the primary purpose of this new method of compulsory schooling was to shape the “will” of the child, not to educate.

By the 1830s, the Prussian educational system was fully operational, and other governments began to take notice. Martin Brimmer, a Boston city government official, displayed the prevailing sentiment and general theme of the virtue of moral instruction and State servitude in the following passage: “Happy the people whose sons and daughters may be well instructed at the public charge; and happy, thrice happy that community, all of whose children shall receive a physical, moral, and religious education, to the glory of God, and the service of the state.”[4]

Horace Mann, a politician from Massachusetts, spent six weeks in Europe evaluating the various school systems, and upon visiting Prussia, endorsed his support for their compulsory education.[5] Mann was highly instrumental in the establishment of public schools and is often referred to as the “Father of American Education.”[6] Mann admitted a desire for social engineering and wished to bend the will of others. In a letter published by his wife, Horace Mann confesses: “I have abandoned jurisprudence, and have betaken myself to a larger sphere of mind and morals. Having found the present generation composed of materials almost unmalleable, I am about transferring my efforts to the next. Men are cast-iron, but children are wax. Strength expended upon the latter may be effectual, which would make no impression upon the former.”[7] precisely what the Prussians were searching for when implementing their educational reforms.

Johann Fichte, a German philosopher who took a leading role in the German nationalist movement, said this in his Addresses to the German Nation about the new educational system: “The education proposed by me, therefore, is to be a reliable and with Horace Mann leading the charge, in 1852, the State of Massachusetts adopted the Prussian Education System and compulsory attendance laws.[8] The rest of the country quickly followed suit. Mann’s sales pitch to legislatures was that universal public education was the best way to turn the nation’s unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens.[9] The passion for implementing compulsory schools seemed much more focused on social engineering and control rather than actual education. The origins of compulsory public education are not very inspiring, but how do schools fare in modern practice? Turns out, not well at all.

As a report in U.S. News explains, “Since World War II, inflation-adjusted spending per student in American public schools has increased by 663 percent. Where did all of that money go? One place it went was to hire more personnel. Between 1950 and 2009, American public schools experienced a 90 percent increase in student population. During that time, public schools increased their staff by 386 percent – four times the increase in students. The number of teachers increased by 252 percent, over 2.5 times the increase in students. The number of administrators and other staff increased by over seven times the increase in students. …This staffing surge still exists today. From 1992 to 2014 – the most recent year of available data – American public schools saw a 19 percent increase in their student population and a staffing increase of 36 percent.

This decades-long staffing surge in American public schools has been tremendously expensive for the taxpayers, yet it has not led to significant changes in student achievement. For example, public school national math scores have been flat (and national reading scores declined slightly) for 17-year-olds since 1992. In addition, public high school graduation rates experienced a long and slow decline between 1970 and 2000. Today, graduation rates are slightly above where they were in 1970.”[10] It’s clear that the State’s attempt to forcefully educate children has been a complete failure at its foundation, yet, the importance of educating future generations is still just as strong; the market demand for this type of service is unrelenting. Without the State assuming this role, could the private sector satisfy this need?

A report examining the effectiveness of private schools to public schools from the Journal of Development Economics sheds some light on the issue: “Controlling for observable personal characteristics and school selection, we find that graduates of private secondary schools perform better in the labor market. This is contrary to the widely held belief, in Indonesia, that public secondary schools are superior. Our findings, coupled with the existing literature on private school cognitive and cost advantages, suggest the need for greater private participation in the education sector.”[11] An article from the Journal of Economic Perspectives also states that, “Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong.

In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the ‘dynamic vitality’ of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s failed to see the dangers of socialism in part because they focused on the role of prices under socialism and capitalism and ignored the enormous importance of ownership as the source of capitalist incentives to innovate. Moreover, the concern that private firms fail to address ‘social goals’ can be addressed through government contracting and regulation, without resorting to government ownership. The case for private provision only becomes stronger when competition between suppliers, reputational mechanisms, the possibility of provision by private not-for-profit firms, as well as political patronage and corruption, are brought into play.”[12]

When the facts are brought to light, as important as education is, the system of indoctrination implemented by the State, at significant already exist, and they outperform public schools. The State’s compulsory educational system does not appeal to reason and evidence. It is nothing but a tool for control.

As Friedrich Nietzsche once said: “The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school.”

Far be it from me to advance a conspiracy theory. But I do seek to understand the objective medical explanation for how COVID, after all these months, suddenly strikes the White House all in one concentrated period of a few days. I do know one thing for certain: Democratic Party operatives are totally amoral, and capable of literally ANYTHING in their quest for unlimited power over individuals. Proof of my assertion has been on display ALL of 2020. And just imagine all the things we may never know; and that are yet to come. I deeply hope a large majority of Americans will start to grasp, before Election Day, that today’s Democratic Party and its elite supporters are the greatest threat to American freedom since World War II.

Michael J. Hurd