Socialism is a doctrine based at root not on love for the poor but on hatred for the creators, meaning anyone who makes money.
To start, let me make a key point: socialism at its root is not about economics. (I will use the term socialism and Communism interchangeably).This is why endless attempts by conservative publications to promote better economic education fall on deaf ears among leftists. The conservatives claim socialism has failed, but the socialists say, “No, it hasn’t. You capitalists are focusing on the wrong outcome.”
In fact, economic education is only useful if the culture and its leadership value wealth creation. Socialists do not. Every socialist “experiment” in history has been a failure with respect to abolishing poverty. It is quite clear that socialism has created and sustained poverty everywhere it has been tried, as for instance, by Russia and China. under pure Communism. In recent years, tired of mass poverty both have allowed some capitalism. Russia backed gangster capitalism and even that has made them somewhat better off economically (though not politically) than before. They are now undermining their economy by promoting a senseless and vicious war. China has allowed some capitalism under very strict Communist supervision accompanied by frequent threats against successful capitalists. Cuba and Venezuela have stuck defiantly with pure Communism and poverty. Millions of people who want chance in life have been fleeing from both countries
So, what is behind socialism? It is motivated by a certain ideal, a certain view of morality, which is the opposite of capitalist morality. Socialism is based on the doctrine of altruism, the morality of self-sacrifice. (Altruism, which means that your life belongs to others, is not the same as helping valued friends and relatives, as I’ll explain in another article.) In contrast, capitalism is based on the morality of self-interest, which means the right to trade freely with others and to profit from trade. In a free, capitalist country, everyone is better off but everyone does not come out exactly the same because people differ in their family circumstances, ability, ambition, effort, persistence, and integrity.
Is there a way around the fact that everyone does not start life in the same circumstance? Consider the policy of ancient Sparta. Children were taken by law from their parents at birth, raised in state institutions, and released at about age eighteen. This is a form of totalitarianism that even the communists did not stoop to, although they did something similar by making all children go to communist schools.
Socialists do want to promote universal literacy. This may sound appealing; who could be against teaching every child to read and write? But what is the real motive of making all kids go to socialist-run schools?
To understand the motive for socialist education, we first must understand socialist politics. Socialism means that the government owns the means of production. (To this end, calling Sweden socialist is simply dishonest; it is a welfare state just like most free countries, though with a higher tax rate than some.) Socialism may occur as a result of a violent revolution or through initial elections. Socialists who first get elected do so under the promise that everyone will have some degree of political freedom and some sort of a guaranteed life, which includes a good standard of living.
But the economic promise cannot be met because socialism always causes and sustains mass poverty. When the voters see they have been deceived, they start to complain; this threatens the whole socialist state. To protect their power, socialists must start by limiting, controlling, or abolishing freedom of the press, the airwaves, public debate, and open Internet communication.
Socialist governments also work to fix subsequent elections. They limit who can run for office. They limit or abolish airtime for unapproved candidates. They take control over counting ballots. They may check on how people vote and can even make such necessities as food dependent on voting the right way.
Disillusioned people may oppose the government, so demonstrations are outlawed. Eventually, the government must set up a force of secret police to ferret out troublemakers. (Venezuela uses Cuban and Russian secret police to keep order.) The police are used to identify harass, threaten, torture, imprison, and kill dissidents. Some socialist states allow emigration—after all, there are fewer people to feed and to make trouble. One way or another, the best, most ambitious, and skilled people frequently get out as soon as they can.
Now let us go back to education. Ideally, education involves giving children basic skills, which include learning how to think. But just teaching people how to think is too risky under socialism. People must be taught to obey socialist dogma. Otherwise, people might start thinking for themselves. They might expose government failures, contradictions, lies and corruption. They might want more freedom.
More freedom cannot be allowed. So schooling, whatever else it does, must include large doses of socialist propaganda. As a “bonus,” students who complain can be immediately threatened and are readily targeted as possible future dissidents. In short, rather than encourage the development of the mind, socialist schools work to stultify or rigidify the mind in the realm of politics.
Independent thinking is discouraged or forbidden and replaced with orders to memorize and spout socialist (Marxist) propaganda. As noted, when emigration is allowed, millions of people, those who want freedom of thought and opportunity, move to countries where they have the right to live as human beings.
Socialists claim that they will bring people to a higher moral plane. But that plane is actually lower. Citizens must constantly look for “traitors” to the cause—those who expose corruption or want freedom—and inform on them, including on their neighbors and even family members who dare express dislike for the rulers. The failure to turn in so-called “traitors” could result in threats, prison terms, torture, or death.
People quickly learn to censor themselves when they see what the consequences of speaking openly will be. Integrity must be crushed at all costs.
Of course, socialist leaders themselves may be hypocrites by secretly accumulating millions of dollars in wealth, often through drug dealing, theft, or running quasi-capitalist businesses on the side. George Orwell’s Animal Farm illustrates the hypocrisy of socialism, but in the end, this book is not really a critique of socialism at all. The Pigs who take more than their fair share of the common food are only condemned because they take too much. By implication, things would have been fine if they all had shared equally. Hypocrisy is not socialism’s main failing. The collectivist morality, by which everyone must selflessly share rather than being in charge of their own farms and trading freely with others, is never questioned.
What about socialist health care? We know that in Venezuela, the whole system has collapsed because there is not enough money to fund it. Donors from outside the country heavily support the few medical resources that are available. As for Cuba, finding trustworthy data is impossible because the government manipulates data as it wishes. But isn’t Cuba praiseworthy for training medical professionals? No. Their main purpose for training professionals is to send them to other countries as indentured servants—with the government taking most of the salaries. (Many of these health workers defect.)
So, if creating wealth for all, political freedom, quality health care, and education that promote thinking are not what socialism is fundamentally about, what is the ultimate motive behind it? It is not just power for power’s sake: after all, lots of dictators of various political persuasions seek that.
The deepest motive of socialists is negative: it is to destroy capitalism, which means to destroy the process of wealth creation as such.The true socialist’s core agenda is to prevent anyone (except selected socialist rulers) from earning more money than anyone else, even at the cost of keeping everyone at the near subsistence level.Socialism is a doctrine based at root not on love for the poor but on hatred for the creators, meaning anyone who makes money. (For more on this subject see “The Age of Envy” in Rand, 1993, Ch. 9).
What is the evidence that destroying capitalism is the number-one priority? The giveaway is that socialists are indifferent to the poverty they create; they are fine with everyone being equally poorso long as capitalism is wiped out. The duty of each citizen is to obey, to sacrifice his own hopes, goals, and plans for the sake of the collective—to be selfless, to give up wanting anything for himself except what the state permits.
At the deepest level, socialism entails the destruction of the human soul—which means the destruction of the mind, of rights, of values, of hope, of freedom—the turning of helpless victims into frightened, selfless beggars hoping for a crust of bread. This is the deepest meaning and motive of socialist “idealism.” Socialism is nihilism.
Socialists claim they are for “social justice.” But what does that mean?
Economically, social justice for the left means that no one should do better than anyone else. Some people may work harder than others, but they should not be allowed to benefit. Everything goes in the collective pot, which means everyone gets what someone else earns.
Economically, this is social injustice.
Compare this to capitalism in the context of free society where everyone gets what is earned through voluntary trade. This is real justice. Socialists have twisted the concept of justice into its opposite: getting what you did not earn is justice; getting what you earned is social injustice.
Edwin A. Locke is Dean’s Professor of Leadership and Motivation Emeritus at the R.H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the American Psychological Association, the Society for Industrial & Organizational Behavior, and the Academy of Management. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (Society for I/O Psychology), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Management (OB Division), the J. M. Cattell Award (APS) and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Academy of Management. He, with Gary Latham, has spent over 50 years developing Goal Setting Theory, ranked No. 1 in importance among 73 management theories. He has published over 320 chapters, articles, reviews and notes, and has authored or edited 13 books including (w. Kenner) The Selfish Path to Romance, (w. Latham) New Directions in Goal Setting and Task Performance, and The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators. He is internationally known for his research on motivation, job satisfaction, leadership, and other topics. His website is: EdwinLocke.com
If musicians and concertgoers are upset by the so-called “deceptive” practices of a “monopoly” like Ticketmaster and want the government to do something, they actually may want to redirect their attention towards another entity with monopoly power that also attempts to hide fees. That entity is … the government.
If only we had a thinker who could portray (again, in a best-selling book, later made available for free) what benevolence, respect, and happiness could be achieved when people come to live as free, moral equals, swearing by their life and love of it to “never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
The United States Has Been Destroyed by Its Ruling Elites
Paul Craig Roberts
Against the backdrop of the United States’ recognition of the investigation against Donald Trump as politically motivated, structural and ideological controversies, and concerns that the American economy will enter a recession, the GEOFOR editorial board asked Paul Craig Roberts, Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy (USA), a PhD in Economics and US Undersecretary of Treasury in the Reagan administration, to share his views on America’s future.
GEOFOR: Special Counsel John Durham “acquitted” Donald Trump on the so-called “Russiagate”, writing in his report that the FBI investigation was politically motivated. How will this news affect the Democrats’ fight against Trump?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The Special Counsel’s vindication of Donald Trump and denunciation of the FBI for conducting a politically motivated investigation devoid of any evidence should collapse the equally fraudulent Biden regime investigation of Trump on fake documents charges and the New York state prosecution of Trump on alleged expense misreporting charges. It has been clear for a long time that the list of fake charges against Trump, supported by the media, are propaganda to prevent Trump again running for President and to teach all future potential presidential candidates that they will be destroyed if they attempt to represent the people instead of the unelected ruling oligarchy.
However, the Democrat Party and the presstitutes that service them have no respect whatsoever for truth. Facts simply do not matter to them. This is true also of American Universities, law associations, medical associations, the CIA, FBI, NSA, the State Department, the regulatory agencies such as NIH, CDC, FDA, the large corporations, and many establishment Republican members of the House and Senate who serve the economic interests that pay them, not truth. It is also the case with a high percentage of Democrat voters who have been conditioned by propaganda to hate Trump. To Democrats what matters is not facts, but getting Trump. Truth is not permitted to prevent the destruction of Trump.
Consequently, the US is moving toward a fatal split in the society from which recovery is impossible. Trump represents ordinary Americans who prefer peace to the neoconservatives’ wars, who want their jobs back that the greed-driven capitalist global corporations sent to China and Asia, who want their children properly educated instead of indoctrinated with sexual perversion, Satanism, and told that they are racists. In contrast, the Democrats are increasingly Woke–people who believe that truth is an oppressive tool of white supremacy, that Christian morality is tyrannical and discriminatory against pedophiles and other sexual perverts, and that, as “President” Biden himself has said, white people are the greatest threat to America. See: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/05/15/us-navy-enlists-drag-queen-for-digital-ambassador-role-to-attract-more-recruits-2/
Now that official investigations by the House Republicans have brought the utter corruption of Biden and his son to light (see: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/05/16/bank-records-show-biden-family-received-10-million-in-payments-from-china-foreign-interests-house-oversight/ ), the Democrats, the dangerous and corrupt military/security complex, and the complicit whore American media, are desperate. They all stand as being exposed. So, rather than apologize for their mistreatment of Trump and his supporters–1,000 of whom the Democrats have illegally imprisoned–they will likely strike out while they still control the Executive Branch, the US Senate, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and federal agencies such as the IRS that have been armed and militarized.
Alternatively, the corrupt and threatened Democrats might cause war between the US and Russia, or Iran, or China in the hopes that a war will unify even Trump supporters, especially the super-patriots among them, around the “President” against “foreign enemies.”
GEOFOR: Recently there were reports that former Vice President Mike Pence seriously intends to compete with Donald Trump in the presidential race of 2024. How do you assess his chances and why did he decide to take such a step?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: Mike Spence has no chance whatsoever of prevailing over Donald Trump. Pence is running as a service to the ruling establishment. Spence is a pretend Christian Evangelical. Evangelicals don’t oppose Armageddon, because they believe they will be wafted up to Heaven, while those still on earth get consumed in fire. The Ruling American Oligarchy hopes that Spence will draw off the Christian Evangelicals from the Trump vote, thus reducing Trump’s margin of victory so that the Democrats can again steal the presidential election. As evangelicals are not very astute, the Democrats might succeed in derailing Trump and the American people. Pence, of course, would not become president.
GEOFOR: We can’t help but ask about the migration problem. After the abolition of Section 42, analysts predict a new influx of refugees from Mexico and Latin America. What will such problems lead to and will they affect the election of the head of the White House next year?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The Biden regime is spending billions of dollars “to defend Ukraine’s borders,” but won’t spend one penny to defend America’s borders. The Democrats want the Hispanic and Black immigrants, who they will give the vote, because the immigrant-invaders water down the white majority population and destroy the ethnic basis of the US. Instead of a unified nation, there is a Tower of Babel.
As the Democrats control the major cities in most states and thereby the election rules and vote counting, It doesn’t matter how people vote. As Stalin said, the only thing that matters is who counts the vote. Only a total fool would expect Democrats to count votes that gave victory to Republicans.
GEOFOR: Passions around the American public debt, inflation, jobs and the possible new collapses of American banks are only growing. Tell us, please, what awaits the American economy in the foreseeable future? After all, the recession in the United States will have an impact on the whole world one way or another…
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The United States, despite my best efforts and the efforts of others for decades, has been destroyed by its ruling elites for the sake of short-term profits and short-term growth in power over the people. By offshoring its manufacturing jobs, the global corporations destroyed the American middle class and the ladders to upward mobility that had made America the “opportunity society.” Today many former American manufacturing and industrial cities look like the remains of bombed cities.
As US corporations produce the goods abroad that they market to Americans, the goods enter the US as imports. Thus, offshoring production for the home market worsens the trade deficit.
The trade deficit has to be financed. This is no problem for the US as long as the dollar is in demand as the reserve currency by all countries in order to pay for their international transactions, and countries with trade surpluses keep their monetary surpluses in US Treasury bonds, thus financing both the US trade and budget deficits. Washington in an act of incredible stupidity has driven a dagger through the heart of the US dollar as world reserve currency, thus ending Washington’s ability to pay its bills by printing money. The dagger was the Biden regime’s Russian and other sanctions and the seizure of Russia’s central bank deposits. This finally convinced the rest of the world that holding dollar balances exposed a country to the risk of expropriation or control by Washington.
The consequence is that the world is moving away from the use of the dollar, instead settling their trade balances in their own or other currencies. Therefore, the demand for dollars is declining, but the supply is rising because of the US trade and budget deficits.
Sooner or later the US dollar’s exchange value will fall, setting off high inflation in the US that is outside the control of the central bank. American living standards will fall, and the US will begin to look like India in 1900.The hatred of white people that Democrats have taught to blacks and immigrant-invaders will result in internal war. The only question is whether white Americans will have been so indoctrinated with their guilt that they are unable to defend themselves.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts – Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy, US economist and ex-Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, a member of the Cold War Committee on the Present Danger.
Serge Duhanov is a journalist, specializing in international relations and national security issues. Не worked as the NOVOSTI Press Agency’s own correspondent in Canada (Ottawa, 1990-1992) and the US Bureau Chief (Washington, 1996-2001) of the newspapers Business MN, Delovoy Mir and Interfax-AiF.
The official RIP date for America was 2020. I have not felt like an American since that year. We are an occupied country, not a free republic.
We need a Constitutional convention. It’s provided for in our Constitution. Check out conventionofstates.com and decide for yourself. Its purpose is NOT to rewrite any of the Constitution. Its purpose is to RESTORE the Constitution by massively rolling back federal power and spending.
It might fail. But we won’t know until we try. Failure is CERTAIN on our current course. The country is like an airplane falling out of the sky and hurtling toward the earth. This may be our last chance to avoid civil war, totalitarian dictatorship, or both. On our current course, it is 100 percent certain that your life will become miserable and the lives of your children will be unthinkable.
Michael Munger recently raised an issue of the utmost importance: proponents of classical liberalism have forsaken the task of making the moral case for capitalism. Thinking that drawing everyone’s attention to capitalism-induced prosperity is enough to capture minds and hearts, as Iain Murray elaborated, all we did was throw economic logic at people, “hoping it will stick.” But with that we left a moral vacuum which progressives and collectivists were eager to fill with their vision of a good society. We need, as George Leef summarized, “teachers and professors who will make the moral case for liberty.”
If only there were a radical proponent of individual rights who could help accomplish the task. Someone who would spend her life advocating capitalism as the only moral system, who would call capitalism the “Unknown Ideal,” sell millions of books dramatizing and explaining the virtues of individualism and capitalism, and inspire thousands of minds. If only there were someone who could have warned the new intellectuals that they “must fight for capitalism, not as a ‘practical’ issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it.”
Maybe such a thinker could explain the “moral meaning of the law of supply and demand,” which is that in a free market the economic value of man’s work is determined by one principle: “the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return.” Or maybe, she could demonstrate that money, “those pieces of paper, which should have been gold,” are not just a medium of exchange or store of value, but “a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce,” and that your wallet is a “statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money.” Maybe, just maybe, such a thinker could help the advocates of classical liberalism and free markets rethink and put their positions in moral terms.
“Near total lack of empirical lived experience with socialism’s manifest defects,” Munger points out, contributes to the rising interest in socialism. Imagine if that same thinker, having suffered socialism herself, could convey the horrific experience of living (or more precisely, slowly dying) under socialism to those who, hopefully, would never have to? She could, say, write a novel, a tool humanity invented to immortalize stories and experiences. A catchy title like We the Living could seize the attention of millions of readers, while educators today would only need to order some copies to their classrooms for free and hand them out to students. That would be something.
Sure, this thinker could still do more. As Iain Murray said, if we were to make a moral case for capitalism, we might need “to look at the foundations of moral thinking” itself. Maybe she would even need to be so extreme as to call for “nothing less than a moral revolution,” pointing out that, on the basis of altruistic morality, “capitalism had to be–and was–damned from the start”? This radical new view, of course, would put her at odds with, and lead her to be ignored by those unwilling to challenge conventional morality, which ascribes moral importance only to pain, need, suffering, self-abnegation, and sacrifice. Imagine, however, if she did not waver, and proceeded to lay the foundations of a new morality that designates the pursuit of one’s own happiness, ambition, success, and achievement — everything capitalism allows and celebrates — not as morally irrelevant (at best), but as supreme values.
We lack “a liberal Utopia…a truly liberal radicalism,” Munger quotes F.A. Hayek saying. Hear, hear. If only we had a thinker who could portray (again, in a best-selling book, later made available for free) what benevolence, respect, and happiness could be achieved when people come to live as free, moral equals, swearing by their life and love of it to “never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
If, back in 1998, I had told you, “A time will come in America, in 25 years or so, when these two seem like harmless pranksters compared to the volume and magnitude of totalitarian psychopathy sweeping the Western world,” you would have shuddered in horror.
Yet here we are!
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Congress: DEFUND the FBI. Arrest and prosecute those who violated the Constitution. NOW.
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Economist Larry Kudlow says Republicans must start “sticking to their guns.”
Guns? What guns? Republicans, leaving aside a couple of admirable exceptions, have no guns. You want guns? I’ll show you guns. How about a real revolution?
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“If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent, simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have cross a line to stand alongside tyrants.”
The system of public education could be abolished over the course of a generation, in a way that need not impose financial hardship on the parents of any child alive at the time of the abolition’s commencement.
Finally, it is necessary to turn to the subject of separation of state from education, science, and religion.
Abolition of Public Education
The system of public education could be abolished over the course of a generation, in a way that need not impose financial hardship on the parents of any child alive at the time of the abolition’s commencement. The method would be the enactment of state laws declaring that as of the end of the seventh school year following the enactment of the law, that state and its localities will no longer be responsible for the financing of the first-grade education of any student; that a year after that, they will no longer be responsible for the financing of the second-grade education of any student; and so on, through all the elementary, secondary, and college grades. This procedure would enable the parents of children alive at the time of the enactment of the phase-out legislation to go on using the public education system if they wished; it would give prospective new parents a year’s notice that they would be responsible for the cost of their children’s education.
The abolition of public education should be preceded by the recognition of the right of parents to educate their own children and by the abolition of educational licensing requirements. It would also be proper if the public schools were to be made to begin charging tuition fees to those who could afford them, which would be progressively increased, until they reflected the public school system’s costs. The fee system would permit steadily increasing competition and growth on the part of private schools, which would then be in a position easily and totally to displace the public schools.
One of the most immediate points to fight for in connection with the abolition of public education is the abolition of the federal Department of Education and all federal aid to education. These measures would create an immediate improvement in education by eliminating a major layer of bureaucracy and by forcing the elimination of unnecessary courses and unsound educational methods that are fostered, if not mandated, by the availability of federal funds. They would thus bring about a renewed concentration on the three R’s and other serious subjects.
In the struggle against public education, an important principle to stress is that the public education system is inherently unsuited to teach any subject about which there is controversy. This is because teaching such a subject necessarily entails forcing at least some taxpayers to violate their convictions, by providing funds for the dissemination of ideas which they consider to be false and possibly vicious. On the basis of this principle, the public schools should be barred from teaching not only religion, but also history, economics, civics, and biology. In the nature of things, only private schools, for whose services people have the choice of paying or not paying, can teach these subjects without violating the freedom of conscience. The fact that barring the public schools from teaching these subjects would leave them with very little to teach, and place them in a position in which they may as well not exist, simply confirms the fact that public education should be abolished.
Separation of Government and Science
The above principle concerning the government’s violation of the freedom of conscience in supporting the promulgation of controversial ideas also constitutes an argument for the abolition of practically all government support of the arts and sciences. There is great controversy concerning the artistic merit of various schools of literature, painting, and sculpture. There is significant and growing controversy even over the various theories of natural science, such as the controversy between the supporters of the “Big-Bang” theory of the origin of the universe and the supporters of the steady-state theory of the universe, which holds that the universe did not have an origin. For the government to finance any artistic or scientific activity means to compel taxpayers who hold the activity to be artistically or scientifically worthless, and perhaps immoral as well, to finance it nonetheless.
More fundamentally, our opposition to government involvement in art and science–and in education–is based on Ayn Rand’s principle that force and mind are opposites. Matters of truth and value can be determined only by the voluntary assent of the human mind. Yet government is essentially a policeman with a gun and club. It settles matters by means of force. This is directly contrary to the nature of knowledge. It has no place in the laboratory, the lecture hall, or the art gallery. The determination of what is true or false, or possessing or lacking in value, simply cannot properly be decided by government officials. Nor can it properly be decided by majorities in voting booths. Such a thing is further contrary to the nature of knowledge, which always begins as the discovery of just one mind, and which is as yet totally unknown to the entire rest of the human race. Governments and majorities must not be allowed to crush the isolated individual, who is the source of all new knowledge and improvement. Yet precisely this is the outcome of government support of science and art, which scoops up the limited funds available for the support of such activities and arbitrarily dictates how they are to be spent.
As to the tactics to be used to remove the government from these areas, the most important is the continuous demonstration of the contrary nature of government force, on the one side, and knowledge and value freely assented to, on the other.
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An important step in reducing and ultimately eliminating government interference in science would be to require that all alleged scientific studies financed in any way by any government agency or department prominently state that fact. This might be required in the form of an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act. The requirement should extend to all press releases and public announcements made by the government or any of its employees concerning the study. In this way, the study could be easily identified as coming from the government or associated with the government. The requirement would serve, in effect, as a warning label. In addition, all information relevant to the study’s being undertaken, including the initial application for a government grant, and all correspondence and internal government documents pertaining to the study, should be identified in an appendix to the study, and copies made readily available to any member of the public wishing to see them. The study should also be required to include an appendix providing an intelligible explanation of the methodology on which it was based. These requirements would make it possible to scrutinize and judge the scientific seriousness of such studies far more easily than is possible today, and thus to enable people much more readily to distinguish government propaganda from science.
An important first step in the eventual abolition of such agencies as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be a law severely limiting their powers to ban drugs and chemical substances. The law would nullify the power of the agency’s adverse ruling in any case in which similar agencies in, say, two or more modern foreign countries, such as Canada, Switzerland, and Great Britain, have found no reason to ban a substance. In other words, it would subject these agencies to a form of liberalizing “peer review.” In such cases, in order to ban a substance, the FDA and EPA would have to prove their case before a court of law. The principle that the FDA and EPA and their staffs are not endowed with any form of divine guidance could be progressively extended–to the point where any one private individual was free to act on his contrary opinion. (After all, why should the opinions of American citizens be viewed as inferior to those of foreign bureaucrats?)
Perhaps the best way ultimately to abolish the FDA and the EPA would be to demand their conversion to private agencies, having no powers of compulsion and supported exclusively by private funds. They would then operate as advisory agencies, in competition with other such private advisory agencies, free to pronounce whatever opinions they wished about any subject, but not free to have force used to back their opinions–except when they could go before a court of law, as any other private citizen, and prove the existence of a danger to the lives or property of parties not willing to take the risk of such danger.
Separation of State and Church
Our opposition to government involvement in religion is based on the same foundation as our opposition to government involvement in education and science. Indeed, government-sponsored religion represents the most naked kind of use of force against the mind. Religion is based on faith. The use of force to impose it or its values is always the use of force in order to compel acceptance of what cannot be proved or denial of what can be proved.
The supporters of capitalism must take the lead in the battle against the current incursions of religion into politics and government. Nothing could be more vital to progress toward the establishment of a capitalist society. The old stereotypes of the advocates of socialism as enlightened liberals and the advocates of capitalism as religious conservatives need to be decisively broken. From now on, in accordance with the actual facts, the advocates of capitalism must be viewed as the representatives of enlightenment, and the socialists as the representatives of irrationalism and the Dark Ages.
In the 1930s and 1940s, to be sure, the seemingly enlightened Left was able to depict its opponents as virtual Ma and Pa Kettles, living on a farm somewhere, totally cut off from modern civilization, and projecting utter ignorance and contempt for science and technology. Exactly that image is what the New Left has chosen to wrap itself in, ever since it joined the ecology movement. We should be sure that the public eventually understands this fact and that it is with the New Left that those who place faith above reason belong.
Previous discussion in this book and in Ayn Rand’s The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution provide the essential basis for the transformation of the view of which side wears the mantle of Reason. They clearly show how the ecology movement, which is the last gasp of the Left, is thoroughly riddled with irrationalism and hostility to science and technology. Furthermore, the whole of this book and all of the writings of von Mises, of the other Austrian and classical economists, and of Ayn Rand, show beyond a shadow of a doubt that capitalism in no sense whatever depends on the acceptance of any form of faith or denial of reason. The case for capitalism is thoroughly rational.
In view of the fact that socialism has demonstrated its failure and that as a result its advocates have largely given up the banner of reason, means that the success of a rational, capitalist political program should be all the more rapid. By the admission of both sides, capitalism is the only system to which advocates of reason can turn.
Furthermore, the projection of a rational, capitalist political program, actually capable of solving major national and world problems, will stand as a major philosophic affirmation of the power of the human mind. Thus, it can be an important source of gaining recruits for all aspects of a rational philosophy. As previously shown in connection with the ecology movement, the cultural surge in blatant irrationality that has taken place in recent decades is due in no small measure to the demonstrated failure of socialism as a politico-economic system. Socialism is what most intellectuals have regarded as the system called for by logic and reason. As a result, its failure has served to shake their confidence in reason, and thus to open the floodgates to irrationalism. By the same token, a resurrection of respect for the potential of reason in the politico-economic realm will promote the case for reason everywhere.
* * *
The advocates of capitalism should take the lead in the defense of the freedoms of press and speech. At the same time that we seek to protect it for purveyors of “prurient” literature, we should seek to protect it for the writers of financial newsletters, whom the SEC wants to censor; for corporations, whom the Congress and the Federal Elections Commission want to censor by denying them the right to support political candidates of their choice; for unpopular speakers whom student thugs want to censor by denying them the ability to be heard by their audience; for ordinary citizens whom the Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to censor for speaking out against government-sponsored projects in their neighborhoods. We should demand the freedoms of speech and press for all advertisers, including cigarette advertisers.
We should place the establishment of full freedom of the press and of the more recent forms of communication, such as movies, radio, and television, in the forefront of our fight for a capitalist society. Long before the establishment of a fully capitalist society, we should seek the establishment of a fully free press and media as the pattern for all other industries later to follow. We should demand their exemption from all government regulation immediately–that is, we should demand that these industries, because of the intellectual nature of their products and services, be freed at once from the income tax, the antitrust laws, the labor laws, and every other form of government regulation and interference, so that they may advance their ideas totally without fear of punitive action of any kind being taken against them.
Copyright 1996 George Reisman. All rights reserved. The encyclopedic Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is a required reference for every Capitalist’s library. Reisman’s treatise is now available in two volumes: Volume I (focuses on microeconomic issues) and Volume II (focuses on macroeconomic issues).
In Fossil Future, Alex Epstein refutes literally hundreds of myths about fossil fuels. Here are 20 myths that 11,000,000 people heard on Joe Rogan’s podcast this year, refuted.
The system of public education could be abolished over the course of a generation, in a way that need not impose financial hardship on the parents of any child alive at the time of the abolition’s commencement.
Finally, it is necessary to turn to the subject of separation of state from education, science, and religion.
Abolition of Public Education
The system of public education could be abolished over the course of a generation, in a way that need not impose financial hardship on the parents of any child alive at the time of the abolition’s commencement. The method would be the enactment of state laws declaring that as of the end of the seventh school year following the enactment of the law, that state and its localities will no longer be responsible for the financing of the first-grade education of any student; that a year after that, they will no longer be responsible for the financing of the second-grade education of any student; and so on, through all the elementary, secondary, and college grades. This procedure would enable the parents of children alive at the time of the enactment of the phase-out legislation to go on using the public education system if they wished; it would give prospective new parents a year’s notice that they would be responsible for the cost of their children’s education.
The abolition of public education should be preceded by the recognition of the right of parents to educate their own children and by the abolition of educational licensing requirements. It would also be proper if the public schools were to be made to begin charging tuition fees to those who could afford them, which would be progressively increased, until they reflected the public school system’s costs. The fee system would permit steadily increasing competition and growth on the part of private schools, which would then be in a position easily and totally to displace the public schools.
One of the most immediate points to fight for in connection with the abolition of public education is the abolition of the federal Department of Education and all federal aid to education. These measures would create an immediate improvement in education by eliminating a major layer of bureaucracy and by forcing the elimination of unnecessary courses and unsound educational methods that are fostered, if not mandated, by the availability of federal funds. They would thus bring about a renewed concentration on the three R’s and other serious subjects.
In the struggle against public education, an important principle to stress is that the public education system is inherently unsuited to teach any subject about which there is controversy. This is because teaching such a subject necessarily entails forcing at least some taxpayers to violate their convictions, by providing funds for the dissemination of ideas which they consider to be false and possibly vicious. On the basis of this principle, the public schools should be barred from teaching not only religion, but also history, economics, civics, and biology. In the nature of things, only private schools, for whose services people have the choice of paying or not paying, can teach these subjects without violating the freedom of conscience. The fact that barring the public schools from teaching these subjects would leave them with very little to teach, and place them in a position in which they may as well not exist, simply confirms the fact that public education should be abolished.
Separation of Government and Science
The above principle concerning the government’s violation of the freedom of conscience in supporting the promulgation of controversial ideas also constitutes an argument for the abolition of practically all government support of the arts and sciences. There is great controversy concerning the artistic merit of various schools of literature, painting, and sculpture. There is significant and growing controversy even over the various theories of natural science, such as the controversy between the supporters of the “Big-Bang” theory of the origin of the universe and the supporters of the steady-state theory of the universe, which holds that the universe did not have an origin. For the government to finance any artistic or scientific activity means to compel taxpayers who hold the activity to be artistically or scientifically worthless, and perhaps immoral as well, to finance it nonetheless.
More fundamentally, our opposition to government involvement in art and science–and in education–is based on Ayn Rand’s principle that force and mind are opposites. Matters of truth and value can be determined only by the voluntary assent of the human mind. Yet government is essentially a policeman with a gun and club. It settles matters by means of force. This is directly contrary to the nature of knowledge. It has no place in the laboratory, the lecture hall, or the art gallery. The determination of what is true or false, or possessing or lacking in value, simply cannot properly be decided by government officials. Nor can it properly be decided by majorities in voting booths. Such a thing is further contrary to the nature of knowledge, which always begins as the discovery of just one mind, and which is as yet totally unknown to the entire rest of the human race. Governments and majorities must not be allowed to crush the isolated individual, who is the source of all new knowledge and improvement. Yet precisely this is the outcome of government support of science and art, which scoops up the limited funds available for the support of such activities and arbitrarily dictates how they are to be spent.
As to the tactics to be used to remove the government from these areas, the most important is the continuous demonstration of the contrary nature of government force, on the one side, and knowledge and value freely assented to, on the other.
* * *
An important step in reducing and ultimately eliminating government interference in science would be to require that all alleged scientific studies financed in any way by any government agency or department prominently state that fact. This might be required in the form of an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act. The requirement should extend to all press releases and public announcements made by the government or any of its employees concerning the study. In this way, the study could be easily identified as coming from the government or associated with the government. The requirement would serve, in effect, as a warning label. In addition, all information relevant to the study’s being undertaken, including the initial application for a government grant, and all correspondence and internal government documents pertaining to the study, should be identified in an appendix to the study, and copies made readily available to any member of the public wishing to see them. The study should also be required to include an appendix providing an intelligible explanation of the methodology on which it was based. These requirements would make it possible to scrutinize and judge the scientific seriousness of such studies far more easily than is possible today, and thus to enable people much more readily to distinguish government propaganda from science.
An important first step in the eventual abolition of such agencies as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be a law severely limiting their powers to ban drugs and chemical substances. The law would nullify the power of the agency’s adverse ruling in any case in which similar agencies in, say, two or more modern foreign countries, such as Canada, Switzerland, and Great Britain, have found no reason to ban a substance. In other words, it would subject these agencies to a form of liberalizing “peer review.” In such cases, in order to ban a substance, the FDA and EPA would have to prove their case before a court of law. The principle that the FDA and EPA and their staffs are not endowed with any form of divine guidance could be progressively extended–to the point where any one private individual was free to act on his contrary opinion. (After all, why should the opinions of American citizens be viewed as inferior to those of foreign bureaucrats?)
Perhaps the best way ultimately to abolish the FDA and the EPA would be to demand their conversion to private agencies, having no powers of compulsion and supported exclusively by private funds. They would then operate as advisory agencies, in competition with other such private advisory agencies, free to pronounce whatever opinions they wished about any subject, but not free to have force used to back their opinions–except when they could go before a court of law, as any other private citizen, and prove the existence of a danger to the lives or property of parties not willing to take the risk of such danger.
Separation of State and Church
Our opposition to government involvement in religion is based on the same foundation as our opposition to government involvement in education and science. Indeed, government-sponsored religion represents the most naked kind of use of force against the mind. Religion is based on faith. The use of force to impose it or its values is always the use of force in order to compel acceptance of what cannot be proved or denial of what can be proved.
The supporters of capitalism must take the lead in the battle against the current incursions of religion into politics and government. Nothing could be more vital to progress toward the establishment of a capitalist society. The old stereotypes of the advocates of socialism as enlightened liberals and the advocates of capitalism as religious conservatives need to be decisively broken. From now on, in accordance with the actual facts, the advocates of capitalism must be viewed as the representatives of enlightenment, and the socialists as the representatives of irrationalism and the Dark Ages.
In the 1930s and 1940s, to be sure, the seemingly enlightened Left was able to depict its opponents as virtual Ma and Pa Kettles, living on a farm somewhere, totally cut off from modern civilization, and projecting utter ignorance and contempt for science and technology. Exactly that image is what the New Left has chosen to wrap itself in, ever since it joined the ecology movement. We should be sure that the public eventually understands this fact and that it is with the New Left that those who place faith above reason belong.
Previous discussion in this book and in Ayn Rand’s The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution provide the essential basis for the transformation of the view of which side wears the mantle of Reason. They clearly show how the ecology movement, which is the last gasp of the Left, is thoroughly riddled with irrationalism and hostility to science and technology. Furthermore, the whole of this book and all of the writings of von Mises, of the other Austrian and classical economists, and of Ayn Rand, show beyond a shadow of a doubt that capitalism in no sense whatever depends on the acceptance of any form of faith or denial of reason. The case for capitalism is thoroughly rational.
In view of the fact that socialism has demonstrated its failure and that as a result its advocates have largely given up the banner of reason, means that the success of a rational, capitalist political program should be all the more rapid. By the admission of both sides, capitalism is the only system to which advocates of reason can turn.
Furthermore, the projection of a rational, capitalist political program, actually capable of solving major national and world problems, will stand as a major philosophic affirmation of the power of the human mind. Thus, it can be an important source of gaining recruits for all aspects of a rational philosophy. As previously shown in connection with the ecology movement, the cultural surge in blatant irrationality that has taken place in recent decades is due in no small measure to the demonstrated failure of socialism as a politico-economic system. Socialism is what most intellectuals have regarded as the system called for by logic and reason. As a result, its failure has served to shake their confidence in reason, and thus to open the floodgates to irrationalism. By the same token, a resurrection of respect for the potential of reason in the politico-economic realm will promote the case for reason everywhere.
* * *
The advocates of capitalism should take the lead in the defense of the freedoms of press and speech. At the same time that we seek to protect it for purveyors of “prurient” literature, we should seek to protect it for the writers of financial newsletters, whom the SEC wants to censor; for corporations, whom the Congress and the Federal Elections Commission want to censor by denying them the right to support political candidates of their choice; for unpopular speakers whom student thugs want to censor by denying them the ability to be heard by their audience; for ordinary citizens whom the Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to censor for speaking out against government-sponsored projects in their neighborhoods. We should demand the freedoms of speech and press for all advertisers, including cigarette advertisers.
We should place the establishment of full freedom of the press and of the more recent forms of communication, such as movies, radio, and television, in the forefront of our fight for a capitalist society. Long before the establishment of a fully capitalist society, we should seek the establishment of a fully free press and media as the pattern for all other industries later to follow. We should demand their exemption from all government regulation immediately–that is, we should demand that these industries, because of the intellectual nature of their products and services, be freed at once from the income tax, the antitrust laws, the labor laws, and every other form of government regulation and interference, so that they may advance their ideas totally without fear of punitive action of any kind being taken against them.
Copyright 1996 George Reisman. All rights reserved. The encyclopedic Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is a required reference for every Capitalist’s library. Reisman’s treatise is now available in two volumes: Volume I (focuses on microeconomic issues) and Volume II (focuses on macroeconomic issues).
In Fossil Future, Alex Epstein refutes literally hundreds of myths about fossil fuels. Here are 20 myths that 11,000,000 people heard on Joe Rogan’s podcast this year, refuted.
U.S. Rep. Cori Bush calls for $14 trillion to redistribute to people based on race, euphemistically calling it “reparations.” Please don’t say she’s not serious. Biden would sign it and the Senate would possibly pass it. The House would certainly pass it once back in DemCom hands, a real possibility by 2025 given continuing ballot fraud.
If this isn’t the basis for conventionofstates.com and/or secession, I don’t know what is.
***************
“This is a battle between human nature versus progressive politics. The survival urge is genetically driven, and progressives like Alvin Bragg prefer a docile, vulnerable, and easy-to-manage population. It’s no different from forcing you to mask up and take the vaccine. The Daniel Penny episode is a public training exercise in domestication and judging by the outpouring of support for the former Marine, lots of people are tired of being forced to submit when cornered.
Recall when Rosa Parks decided that she was sick and tired of being legally required to sit at the back of the bus. Many are now fed up with having to suffer abuse from the crazies and risk being arrested if they fight back. If governments refuse to protect us, we may have no choice but to send in the Marines. “
— from The American Thinker
****************
Censorship is always an implicit compliment. You don’t need to silence someone when you know they’re wrong.
****************
“NJ Gov. Murphy: We’ll Defy SCOTUS ‘to Save Lives’ if They Rule Against Abortion Pill,” says a headline.
So leftists are LAWLESS when it suits them. And as authoritarian as the Gestapo when they like the law or a particular decision.
I think millions of us should STOP OBEYING the Biden regime and any law we dislike. And any woke court decision we dislike. If these leftists want war, they will have it.
Imagine the impact if millions of us grew a spine and simply resisted these totalitarian freaks.
The system of public education could be abolished over the course of a generation, in a way that need not impose financial hardship on the parents of any child alive at the time of the abolition’s commencement. The method would be the enactment of state laws declaring that as of the end of the seventh school year following the enactment of the law, that state and its localities will no longer be responsible for the financing of the first-grade education of any student; that a year after that, they will no longer be responsible for the financing of the second-grade education of any student; and so on, through all the elementary, secondary, and college grades. This procedure would enable the parents of children alive at the time of the enactment of the phase-out legislation to go on using the public education system if they wished; it would give prospective new parents a year’s notice that they would be responsible for the cost of their children’s education.
The abolition of public education should be preceded by the recognition of the right of parents to educate their own children and by the abolition of educational licensing requirements. It would also be proper if the public schools were to be made to begin charging tuition fees to those who could afford them, which would be progressively increased, until they reflected the public school system’s costs. The fee system would permit steadily increasing competition and growth on the part of private schools, which would then be in a position easily and totally to displace the public schools.
One of the most immediate points to fight for in connection with the abolition of public education is the abolition of the federal Department of Education and all federal aid to education. These measures would create an immediate improvement in education by eliminating a major layer of bureaucracy and by forcing the elimination of unnecessary courses and unsound educational methods that are fostered, if not mandated, by the availability of federal funds. They would thus bring about a renewed concentration on the three R’s and other serious subjects.
In the struggle against public education, an important principle to stress is that the public education system is inherently unsuited to teach any subject about which there is controversy. This is because teaching such a subject necessarily entails forcing at least some taxpayers to violate their convictions, by providing funds for the dissemination of ideas which they consider to be false and possibly vicious. On the basis of this principle, the public schools should be barred from teaching not only religion, but also history, economics, civics, and biology. In the nature of things, only private schools, for whose services people have the choice of paying or not paying, can teach these subjects without violating the freedom of conscience. The fact that barring the public schools from teaching these subjects would leave them with very little to teach, and place them in a position in which they may as well not exist, simply confirms the fact that public education should be abolished.
Separation of Government and Science
The above principle concerning the government’s violation of the freedom of conscience in supporting the promulgation of controversial ideas also constitutes an argument for the abolition of practically all government support of the arts and sciences. There is great controversy concerning the artistic merit of various schools of literature, painting, and sculpture. There is significant and growing controversy even over the various theories of natural science, such as the controversy between the supporters of the “Big-Bang” theory of the origin of the universe and the supporters of the steady-state theory of the universe, which holds that the universe did not have an origin. For the government to finance any artistic or scientific activity means to compel taxpayers who hold the activity to be artistically or scientifically worthless, and perhaps immoral as well, to finance it nonetheless.
More fundamentally, our opposition to government involvement in art and science–and in education–is based on Ayn Rand’s principle that force and mind are opposites. Matters of truth and value can be determined only by the voluntary assent of the human mind. Yet government is essentially a policeman with a gun and club. It settles matters by means of force. This is directly contrary to the nature of knowledge. It has no place in the laboratory, the lecture hall, or the art gallery. The determination of what is true or false, or possessing or lacking in value, simply cannot properly be decided by government officials. Nor can it properly be decided by majorities in voting booths. Such a thing is further contrary to the nature of knowledge, which always begins as the discovery of just one mind, and which is as yet totally unknown to the entire rest of the human race. Governments and majorities must not be allowed to crush the isolated individual, who is the source of all new knowledge and improvement. Yet precisely this is the outcome of government support of science and art, which scoops up the limited funds available for the support of such activities and arbitrarily dictates how they are to be spent.
As to the tactics to be used to remove the government from these areas, the most important is the continuous demonstration of the contrary nature of government force, on the one side, and knowledge and value freely assented to, on the other.
* * *
An important step in reducing and ultimately eliminating government interference in science would be to require that all alleged scientific studies financed in any way by any government agency or department prominently state that fact. This might be required in the form of an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act. The requirement should extend to all press releases and public announcements made by the government or any of its employees concerning the study. In this way, the study could be easily identified as coming from the government or associated with the government. The requirement would serve, in effect, as a warning label. In addition, all information relevant to the study’s being undertaken, including the initial application for a government grant, and all correspondence and internal government documents pertaining to the study, should be identified in an appendix to the study, and copies made readily available to any member of the public wishing to see them. The study should also be required to include an appendix providing an intelligible explanation of the methodology on which it was based. These requirements would make it possible to scrutinize and judge the scientific seriousness of such studies far more easily than is possible today, and thus to enable people much more readily to distinguish government propaganda from science.
An important first step in the eventual abolition of such agencies as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be a law severely limiting their powers to ban drugs and chemical substances. The law would nullify the power of the agency’s adverse ruling in any case in which similar agencies in, say, two or more modern foreign countries, such as Canada, Switzerland, and Great Britain, have found no reason to ban a substance. In other words, it would subject these agencies to a form of liberalizing “peer review.” In such cases, in order to ban a substance, the FDA and EPA would have to prove their case before a court of law. The principle that the FDA and EPA and their staffs are not endowed with any form of divine guidance could be progressively extended–to the point where any one private individual was free to act on his contrary opinion. (After all, why should the opinions of American citizens be viewed as inferior to those of foreign bureaucrats?)
Perhaps the best way ultimately to abolish the FDA and the EPA would be to demand their conversion to private agencies, having no powers of compulsion and supported exclusively by private funds. They would then operate as advisory agencies, in competition with other such private advisory agencies, free to pronounce whatever opinions they wished about any subject, but not free to have force used to back their opinions–except when they could go before a court of law, as any other private citizen, and prove the existence of a danger to the lives or property of parties not willing to take the risk of such danger.
Perhaps the best way ultimately to abolish the FDA and the EPA would be to demand their conversion to private agencies, having no powers of compulsion and supported exclusively by private funds. They would then operate as advisory agencies, in competition with other such private advisory agencies, free to pronounce whatever opinions they wished about any subject, but not free to have force used to back their opinions–except when they could go before a court of law, as any other private citizen, and prove the existence of a danger to the lives or property of parties not willing to take the risk of such danger.
Separation of State and Church
Our opposition to government involvement in religion is based on the same foundation as our opposition to government involvement in education and science. Indeed, government-sponsored religion represents the most naked kind of use of force against the mind. Religion is based on faith. The use of force to impose it or its values is always the use of force in order to compel acceptance of what cannot be proved or denial of what can be proved.
The supporters of capitalism must take the lead in the battle against the current incursions of religion into politics and government. Nothing could be more vital to progress toward the establishment of a capitalist society. The old stereotypes of the advocates of socialism as enlightened liberals and the advocates of capitalism as religious conservatives need to be decisively broken. From now on, in accordance with the actual facts, the advocates of capitalism must be viewed as the representatives of enlightenment, and the socialists as the representatives of irrationalism and the Dark Ages.
In the 1930s and 1940s, to be sure, the seemingly enlightened Left was able to depict its opponents as virtual Ma and Pa Kettles, living on a farm somewhere, totally cut off from modern civilization, and projecting utter ignorance and contempt for science and technology. Exactly that image is what the New Left has chosen to wrap itself in, ever since it joined the ecology movement. We should be sure that the public eventually understands this fact and that it is with the New Left that those who place faith above reason belong.
Previous discussion in this book and in Ayn Rand’s The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution provide the essential basis for the transformation of the view of which side wears the mantle of Reason. They clearly show how the ecology movement, which is the last gasp of the Left, is thoroughly riddled with irrationalism and hostility to science and technology. Furthermore, the whole of this book and all of the writings of von Mises, of the other Austrian and classical economists, and of Ayn Rand, show beyond a shadow of a doubt that capitalism in no sense whatever depends on the acceptance of any form of faith or denial of reason. The case for capitalism is thoroughly rational.
In view of the fact that socialism has demonstrated its failure and that as a result its advocates have largely given up the banner of reason, means that the success of a rational, capitalist political program should be all the more rapid. By the admission of both sides, capitalism is the only system to which advocates of reason can turn.
Furthermore, the projection of a rational, capitalist political program, actually capable of solving major national and world problems, will stand as a major philosophic affirmation of the power of the human mind. Thus, it can be an important source of gaining recruits for all aspects of a rational philosophy. As previously shown in connection with the ecology movement, the cultural surge in blatant irrationality that has taken place in recent decades is due in no small measure to the demonstrated failure of socialism as a politico-economic system. Socialism is what most intellectuals have regarded as the system called for by logic and reason. As a result, its failure has served to shake their confidence in reason, and thus to open the floodgates to irrationalism. By the same token, a resurrection of respect for the potential of reason in the politico-economic realm will promote the case for reason everywhere.
* * *
The advocates of capitalism should take the lead in the defense of the freedoms of press and speech. At the same time that we seek to protect it for purveyors of “prurient” literature, we should seek to protect it for the writers of financial newsletters, whom the SEC wants to censor; for corporations, whom the Congress and the Federal Elections Commission want to censor by denying them the right to support political candidates of their choice; for unpopular speakers whom student thugs want to censor by denying them the ability to be heard by their audience; for ordinary citizens whom the Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to censor for speaking out against government-sponsored projects in their neighborhoods. We should demand the freedoms of speech and press for all advertisers, including cigarette advertisers.
We should place the establishment of full freedom of the press and of the more recent forms of communication, such as movies, radio, and television, in the forefront of our fight for a capitalist society. Long before the establishment of a fully capitalist society, we should seek the establishment of a fully free press and media as the pattern for all other industries later to follow. We should demand their exemption from all government regulation immediately–that is, we should demand that these industries, because of the intellectual nature of their products and services, be freed at once from the income tax, the antitrust laws, the labor laws, and every other form of government regulation and interference, so that they may advance their ideas totally without fear of punitive action of any kind being taken against them.
Copyright 1996 George Reisman. All rights reserved. The encyclopedic Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is a required reference for every Capitalist’s library. Reisman’s treatise is now available in two volumes: Volume I (focuses on microeconomic issues) and Volume II (focuses on macroeconomic issues).
I hear the argument — from people who don’t like Biden or leftists — that Republicans are getting “too extreme.” If only that were true!
But on the subject of “extreme”…how are we supposed to deal with the extreme views and actions of the people in charge of our culture, of private corporations and of the government? The view and actions of the “woke”?
We don’t label the woke “extreme” when they say that you must do as the government says, that you must shut up when the government tells you to shut up, that you’re stupid if you don’t want the face of a drag queen on your beer can, that you’re selfish and bad if you want to keep your gas car or stove, and that you’re evil and immoral if you want redistribution of wealth to stop. We don’t label them “extreme” when they say if you oppose government schools teaching racism and Communism with tax money to your children, that you’re a domestic terrorist. We don’t say it’s “extreme” when the FBI and the local police of major cities are weaponized and politicized in the service of minimizing or ignoring real crimes (theft, rape, murder) and replaced with political crimes (criticizing the government). We don’t call it “extreme” when Donald Trump faces charges for things he didn’t do in order to keep him from running for President again, and when ballots are manufactured to ensure no Republican ever wins again.
If it’s bad to be “extreme” by supporting the extreme opposite of all that is dishonest, disingenuous, irrational, psychotic, illegal, totally immoral and outright evil — then what exactly would be good? Keeping all the irrationality and evil going, and just toning it down a bit? Who will benefit from such a tepid approach? Who will be harmed the most?
My question is not for leftists. Leftists are beyond reason. They have made up their minds on entirely an emotional basis. My question is for the dissenters.
America is dying, not so much because of the irrational tyrants on the left. They’re just doing what tyrants do — being tyrants. It’s the people on the dissenting side who are too afraid or too apologetic to stand up to these tyrants and give them absolutely everything they deserve who will ensure our downfall.
It’s not left or right. It’s good or bad. ALL of the left is bad. MOST of the right is. Rationality & freedom are rare, and precious.
Leftists do not care about others. They care about being SEEN as caring about others.
Their fixation on putting “transgenders” on beer cans and swimsuit Sports Illustrated covers does not show they care for others. It simply shows that they wish to be SEEN as progressive and innovative. Obviously, they don’t know how to actually BE progressive and innovative. If they did know how, they would not choose such bizarre, self-refuting methods for attempting to show that they are.
When an individual fixates on trying to prove what he isn’t through distorted, self-congratulatory and reality-busting hallucinatory outbursts, running around and screaming about the alleged superiority of less than 1 percent of the population who consider themselves both male and female — and neither — at the same time, you would dismiss such a person as out of his mind. When the entire infrastructure of a culture goes down this road, you have no choice but to wonder if the fall of civilization as we know it is precariously close.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 