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I still vividly recall sitting with a high school friend on the evening of July 20, 1969 and watching on television as astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of the moon, a few minutes before 8 p.m., west coast Pacific time, and saying his famous words, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” My glance went back and forth from watching Armstrong make his first steps on the moon’s surface and looking out the window at what was a full moon in the clear night sky over Hollywood, California where I lived, and thinking how surrealistic it all seemed.

In our new era of Covid-19 Big Government, there are those who want that famous event of a little over a half-century ago to serve as inspiration and a model for a post-coronavirus epoch of renewed and expanded political paternalism through government-business partnerships to solve the earth-bound problems of humanity. The questions I would ask are, was it really worth it and is this the appropriate role for government in a free society?

Building Up the State for Expanded Political Paternalism

Mariana Mazzucato is a professor of economics at University College, London, and the chair of the World Health Organization’s Council on the Economics of Health for All. She is one of the prominent advocates of government taking on “big missions” in society as the political “big brother” that organizes and directs those in the private sector who are to follow and obey the lead of governmental paternalists like herself. All, of course, to make a better world. (See my article, “The Downsides and Dangers of Mission-Making”.)

Professor Mazzucato argues, in her recent article, “Build Back the State” (April 15, 2021), that the Apollo mission to the moon demonstrates how government should do things that can get big things done, such as combating climate change and reducing income inequality through political leadership. She tells us, “The task for the Biden administration is to provide leadership for the missions that will shape the decades ahead, starting with the fight against climate change.”

She makes it very clear that it must be those in political power who should be in charge of the future economic direction of the United States:

“We need top-down direction to catalyze innovation and investment across the economy. And the Apollo era’s example of government’s leadership, bold public interest contracts, and public sector dynamism offer a valuable template.”

In addition, there is no turning back from this. Professor Mazzucato points out that while President John F. Kennedy may have said in 1962 that going to the moon was a “choice,” today in the 21^st century, the “same type of visionary leadership is not a choice, but a necessity.” By implication, denying or opposing such a more dominant role for government is to be on the “wrong side of history.” In other words, it’s either political paternalism on steroids or “curtains” for humankind.

The Political Mission-Makers Dictate to the Private Sector

Government must set the goals, determine the best way to get there, and then entice selected big business partners to go along with it through the offering of hundreds of millions, indeed, billions, of tax or borrowed dollars to do the investment and innovative work that the political leaders want them to take on. The private sector, therefore, is the “junior partner” who follows the directives and commands of those shoveling out the federal funds to the corporate coffers. To see that private self-interest never gets in the way of what and how the government wants things done, there should be imposed “fixed-price” contracts to prevent cost overruns, and at the same time to have strict regulations that assure the profits to be earned are what the political authorities consider reasonable and “fair.”

The purpose of the price, cost and profit restraints, Professor Mazzucato tells us, is to ensure that what drives their private business partners is “scientific curiosity” and the public welfare rather than “greed or speculation.” To guarantee that those devious private enterprisers don’t pull a fast one on Uncle Sam, the government bureaucracies have to be filled with technical experts with the knowledge to keep the profit-seekers on the straight and narrow path of only doing what government knows to be best:

“By strengthening the public sector’s capabilities and outlining a clear purpose for public-private alliances, the Biden administration could both deliver growth and help tackle some of the greatest challenges of our age, from inequality and weak health systems to global warming. These problems are much more complex and multi-dimensional than sending a man to the moon. But the imperative is the same: effective strategic governance of the space where public funding meets private industry.”

The Apollo Project was not “the People’s” Preference

It is interesting to note that President Kennedy told the head of NASA at that time, “I’m not that interested in space.” It was based on a political decision that the U.S. had to get there before the Soviet Union, that is, “because we hope to beat them, and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.” In fact, Kennedy was more concerned that the cost of going to the moon might “wreck our budget.”

Nor were the American people all that excited and interested in the U.S. getting to the moon first. According to Gallup opinion surveys, in 1965, four years before Armstrong’s walk on the moon, only 39 percent of the respondents supported the moon project to get there before the Soviets, “whatever it costs.” In fact, throughout the 1960s, opinion polls said that cutting the space program was near the top of the list of those government programs respondents thought not to be worth funding. Even after the successful landing on the moon in 1969, public opinion surveys reported that only 53 percent thought it had been worth the cost. And in the 1970s, those in favor of the space program decreased well into the 40s percentage range.

Americans Even Less Excited about Paying to Stop Climate Change

While Professor Mazzucato understands that going to the moon was a “choice,” government directed and commanded leadership on climate change, inequality, and health care is now a “necessity.” But in whose eyes? An Associated Press poll in 2019 found that 57 percent of Americans were willing to pay $1 a month more in taxes to “fight” global warming. But when they were asked whether they would be willing to pay an extra $10 a month to stop the climate from changing, only 28 percent said “yes,” while 68 percent said they were opposed.

Clearly, once told that a cost comes attached to the politically hailed benefit of an “unchanged” climate (whatever that would mean!), the public’s enthusiasm falls precipitously. Once the actual price tags of higher gasoline costs at the pump, increased bills for heating and air conditioning, the inconveniences of mandated restrictions on air flights with increased ticket prices, along with possible mileage limits on driving your car to “save the planet,” the numbers of voters supporting a drastic reduction in the standard and quality of life to combat the climate change bogeyman will most likely become far less than what it may be today.

The entire Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s had a cost of an estimated $25 billion at the time, or about $157 billion in today’s dollars. That paid for all the equipment and material, and around 400,000 people working to help put a total of 12 astronauts on the moon. The Biden administration infrastructure and anti-climate change programs carry a combined price tag of upwards of $4 trillion over the next eight to ten years, if everything proposed were to be implemented and funded. It will require higher taxes and increased prices and reduced living standards far more than that $1 a month that 57 percent of the public said they were willing to pay to “save” the planet.

Exciting Missions for Those Planning to Be the Planners

When Professor Mazzucato says that what the White House is taking on is more complex and intricate than just getting men to the moon, she is telling the truth. The federal government would be basically taking over more direct decision-making for various forms of manufacturing methods, residential and business construction standards, and huge additions to expenditures on health care and welfare redistribution. There would be funding to support unionization of more of the labor force, and subsidies and grants to those in the private sector willing to do the government’s bidding. Not to mention the funding for electric cars and accompanying recharging facilities, along with more funding for Amtrak and broadband internet. Indeed, a number of analysts have made it fairly clear that only a fraction of these trillions would be allocated for what has traditionally been considered road and bridge repair and rebuilding.

The grand national “mission-making” that Professor Mazzucato happily and insistently endorses and demands from the Biden administration reeks with the pungent odor of political power-lusting, special interest corruption, and dictatorial direction of virtually every person’s life. It also carries with it the end to all reasonable and rational economic decision-making throughout the American economy.

One can only read the words of someone like Mariana Mazzucato and sense the euphoric excitement of those who dream dreams of planning the future of the world. Clearly, she views herself among those qualified and destined to tell everyone else how they should and will live. Place her in charge, or at least among the special ones whispering into the ears of those in power who give the “expert” advice without which the world is doomed to live in misery and injustice. (See my article, “If I Ruled the World: A Dangerous Dream”.)

Special Interest Politicking Grows with More and Bigger “Missions”

A spider’s web of government interventions, regulations and controls and commands of the type that must accompany a top-down system of government planning of economic and social life, as implied by Professor Mazzucato’s vision, will inescapably bring with it an intensified institutional setting of special interest favor-seeking and political profit-making.

To the extent to which private enterprises’ revenues and economic survivability is dependent on government spending and regulating and planning, every affected business will have an increased incentive to develop “relationships” with the agencies and its personnel – the overseeing “experts” in the bureaucracies – and with the politicians and their staffers whose decisions and permissions and contract privileges will determine a company’s success or failure. Political connections, and not market competitiveness, becomes increasingly central to every businessman’s attention and intention. (See my article, “Out-of-Control Government: How, Why, and What to Do”.)

More Political Planning Means Less Personal Choice and Freedom

How can the tentacles of government intervention and planning extend so far into the economic activities of every corner of society and not bring with it a decrease in the degree of liberty and freedom of choice of the citizenry in their roles as consumers and producers? As the “senior partner” in these government-business “mission” relationships, the autonomy of individuals on the producer side of the economy necessarily is confined within the targets and goals, the “carrots” and the “sticks” of what those in political authority demand and determine as the direction of economic activity.

Control and command over production by necessity narrows and dictates what is offered to the consuming public and on what terms. The loss of economic liberty carries with it a narrowing of personal choice and self-determination as to how we live and the options offered to us and at what expense; they are taken out of our own hands in the free associations of an open and competitive marketplace and shifted into the political hands of those imposing the top-down directives over all of our lives. In an earlier period of time not too long ago this would have been labeled tyranny and totalitarianism. (See my article, “‘Great National Purposes’ Mean Less Freedom”.)

The Mutual Benefits in Free Market Exchange

Finally, Professor Mazzucato’s government “mission-making” weakens and finally destroys all economic rationality concerning what is to be produced in the society, as well as how and for whom. Since the time of Adam Smith, the virtue of the liberal free-market economy has been understood as leaving each and every individual at liberty to make his own decisions as a consumer and producer. This is made possible due to the institutions of private property, freedom of association and exchange, and unrestricted peaceful and honest competition among all the participants in the social system of division of labor.

Self-interest is harnessed to the general well-being of all those in society by requiring everyone to creatively and effectively find niches for themselves in the arenas of production and trade by which they may acquire the things they want and desire by offering in exchange some good or service willingly taken by others in the agreed-upon buying and selling.

Prices Inform and Coordinate All That People Do

People express what they want and the values they place on the things they desire by the prices they are willing to pay for them. Sellers articulate what they may be willing to produce and sell through the prices at which they offer their goods and services to others in the market. At the same time, competing producers bid for the labor services and resources and capital equipment they may use in their respective lines of production, and those offering their means of production in the pursuit of employment evaluate the alternative prices and wages offered by the rival producers and decide which ones seem most attractive to negotiate over and accept.

The end result is that the prices for finished goods and the prices for the factors of production offer entrepreneurs, private enterprisers, and businessmen the means of determining what to produce and how to produce; that is, prices provide the tools for the “economic calculation” of deciding which lines of production and with what combination of inputs might bring a profit versus a loss, and if there exists potential for profitability; in what ways of producing the chosen good maximizes the net possible gain.

Production is guided into those directions reflecting the most highly valued wants of consumers, and supply-side competition sees to it that the scarce resources of society, including labor, are allocated and applied in ways that tend to utilize them in the most economically efficient and effective ways. Free markets supply what people, in their role as consumers, actually want and are willing to pay for, and each earns an income based on what the market says their services are considered to be worth in their respective roles as producers.

The entire competitive market process and price system sees to it that supplies and demands are tending to match, that information is provided to everyone about what, how and where to be doing things in ever-changing economic circumstances, and that each participant has a fairly wide latitude to make their own decisions in their joint roles as consumer and producer.

Political Planning Making Decision-Making Irrational

Many, if not most or all of these free decisions are to be taken out of people’s hands and coercively transferred to the control of those in political power. The governmental “mission-makers” will now decide what shall be produced and in what ways and for which purposes. Goods produced and supplied will now reflect the ideas of how people like Mariana Mazzucato, in their roles as “experts” advising the government, think these things should be done.

By manipulating prices, setting profit margins, dictating what goods should be produced in what technological ways to meet what they think is good and needed by “society” and “the planet,” the entire economic system loses all reasonable footing for rational decision-making.

Let’s take Professor Mazzucato’s three areas of “mission” concern: the global environment, health care, and income inequality. How and by whom will it be decided that certain relative quantities of resources and labor will be devoted to infrastructure retrofitting versus wind-power turbine construction versus solar power manufacturing, and with what pieces of land for each of these two latter activities versus the uses of that land for residential housing, farming, wildlife preserves, retail shopping needs, or manufacturing sites of things that are considered useful and desirable to be produced by the “mission” planners?

How will these be weighed and considered versus allocations and uses of the scarce resources of the society for health care research, the servicing of patients, and the manufacturing of the medical devices and equipment and facilities connected with the provision of health care needs?

How will all these decisions be made versus a reallocation of income and wealth through tax transfers and in-kind services to those deemed “marginalized” and “unprivileged” and “underrepresented” in society? How will it be decided that not enough disposable income has been redistributed to “people of color” – and since “colors” come in a variety of shades, the determination of what and how much goes to each racial and ethnic “color” group? The same applies to those declaring their chosen gender and sexual orientation. How and who decides the proper “marginal” distribution of employments and relative incomes between “straight” people of color versus white people who are gay or handicapped and who come from differing family income and educational backgrounds?

Who Selects the “Experts” Like Mariana Mazzucato?

And who selects the “experts” like Professor Mazzucato, and on what bases and benchmarks, and how is it known that what they say are the necessary “mission” priorities are the ones to which all in society are to be made to conform? Oh, and by the way, Mariana Mazzucato’s Wikipedia page tells us that she is “Italian-American” and married, and, seemingly, “straight.” Her own home page tells us that she is “on a mission to save capitalism from itself” and that “this economist has a plan to fix capitalism. It is time we all listened.”

Straight? White? Italian-American? Clearly privileged and overrepresented. So what if she tells us how smart and important she is on her own home page? Where is the “person of color” or the gender-marginalized handicapped, gay or lesbian person who should be doing her jobs instead of her? Wait! Italian? Doesn’t that mean that some of her past family members may have been real fascists exploiting and oppressing Libyans and Ethiopians and Somalis in Africa during Mussolini’s time in power? Why has she not been culturally cancelled?

Decision-Making Is Taken Out of Real People’s Hands

All economic and social questions and problems are taken out of the peaceful, voluntary, and private arenas of market exchange and the nongovernmental institutions of civil society. Prices can no longer tell people what their fellow human beings actually want and how much they value it. Individuals cannot pursue ways of earning a living guided by what others might like to buy from them, and sort out how best to do it based on the agreed-up mutual terms of hiring and employing. “The people” are no longer allowed to freely speak to each other through prices, and associate with each other as they find best and most advantageous through the free bargaining and contracting that is otherwise central to an open and competitive free market. (See my article, “Price Controls Attack Freedom of Speech”.)

To the extent that climate changes may be occurring that have negative effects on people in different ways in different parts of the world, the advantage and benefit of the free market system is that changing demands, shifting resource and supply possibilities, and changing terms-of-trade in the relative price structures for inputs and outputs constantly and flexibly incorporates the relevant information and of all the worldwide changing circumstances. Individuals and private enterprises in each and every corner of the global division of labor then have profit-motivated incentives and the personal liberty to utilize their own unique and specialized types of knowledge to competitively discover and bring about the appropriate modifications in what people do, where and in what ways, and with the most cost-efficient uses of resources, capital investments and labor skills to do so. (See my article, “F. A. Hayek and Why Government Can’t Manage Society”.)

We all are, instead, under Professor Mazzucato’s scheme of things, reduced to those manipulated pawns on the great chessboard of society about which Adam Smith once spoke, with the social engineers and political paternalists moving us about and positioning each of us as they think we should be arranged and related to each other, instead of each of us deciding ourselves where we want to be and doing what, in collaborative associations with others, as we peacefully see fit. (See my article, “Adam Smith on Moral Sentiments, Division of Labor, and the Invisible Hand”.)

Yes, Mariana Mazzucato and Joe Biden are on “missions” with “big plans.” But their political missions and their big economic central plans require all of us to give up our own individual and personal plans to be straightjacketed into their compulsory designs for us. We need to remember Adam Smith’s words in The Wealth of Nations, “The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people . . . would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had the folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”

ABOUT RICHARD M. EBELINGDr. Richard M. Ebeling is the recently appointed BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel. He was formerly professor of Economics at Northwood University, president of The Foundation for Economic Education (2003–2008), was the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College (1988–2003) in Hillsdale, Michigan, and served as vice president of academic affairs for The Future of Freedom Foundation (1989–2003).

It used to be called “State of the Union.” Now it’s a “congressional address”. Very Soviet-like.

His stupid address to the nation doesn’t matter. It’s all totalitarian Communism. There’s no news there. It’s all predictable. It will have to be undermined and fought outside the traditional channels like free elections and free speech BECAUSE WE NO LONGER HAVE THOSE. The healthy thing is to stop dignifying this rigged regime as a legitimate successor to real presidencies. That America is over. The republic has been dying a long time. Face the truth before the stormtroopers of the cabal propping up this demented miscreant literally or figuratively come knocking on your door. Facing the truth, that our republic is dead, does not automatically lead to a solution; but it’s an entirely necessary condition for finding one. Remember: the reality and rationality of individual rights and the Bill of Rights once honored by the American government, more or less, will long outlive these outlaws disguised as “leaders”.

“I don’t remember a time in my lifetime people more divided than they are right now.”
— Frank Luntz, long-time pollster

I agree. Why would anyone who cherishes his or her liberty want anything to do with people who don’t care if the Bill of Rights is obliterated — just so their guys are in charge? When I encounter people who support the Communists taking over our country, I am disgusted by them. I think, “YOU stole my freedom.” And that’s personal.

Division is better than submission.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The past, we’re so often told, is a dystopia — a cauldron of backwardness and bigotryApril 28, 2021 | 11:19 pm

Are citizens of liberal societies permitted to question liberalism? In theory, the answer is yes, given liberalism’s commitment to ‘free thought’ and ‘the marketplace of ideas’. Such tolerance is rarely in evidence in practice, however — a reality illustrated in hilarious fashion by a writer for a Washington magazine who recently decried ‘cancel culture’ even as he insisted that: ‘It’s absolutely necessary to de-platform public intellectuals who object to liberal democracy.’

To the liberal mind, to question liberalism risks opening portals to the past, a place populated by tyrannical kings, Catholic inquisitors, Spanish conquistadores, religious warriors, zealous apparatchiks, ‘collectivists’, fascists and sundry other ghastlies. Over the past few years, as voters registered discontent with the global liberal consensus, an entire cottage industry of books, essays and charities has sprung up to warn against revivifying the past.

The past, we’re so often told, is a dystopia — a cauldron of backwardness and bigotry. One that must be repressed at all costs.

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Liberals disagree over where exactly lies the line dividing the enlightened time and the dark time. ‘Classical’ liberals tend to mark 1789, whereas ‘progressive’ liberals — noting that much of reality since that watershed year has failed to conform to their own liberal ideal — are uncomfortable with anything not from the present or the future. Hence they now issue fatwas against even the avatars of liberalism’s own recent past (Cher, Dr Seuss, J.K. Rowling, etc).

The current tendency to see the past as a foreign land of endless horrors brings with it periodic bursts of purges and violent iconoclasm — most recently, the statue-toppling of last year. In the realm of ideas, we see the inability of even Christian liberals to tolerate any serious consideration of non-liberal political, economic and cultural arrangements. We see the growing discord in the Anglican Church over once-standard ideas about marriage and gender.

Church and state have long been separated. The ideal is that a new liberal order ushers in a new, rational, tolerant and secular regime: cleaving apart day-to-day politics from religion and metaphysics. So instead of enshrining any one orthodoxy, a liberal neutral ground would be created, one that could be contested by rival accounts of the good life. The religious would be able to live happily beside the unbelievers, with all minorities protected. In this way, the advent of liberalism would — once and for all — put an end to the persecutions of the past.

But has that really come to pass? Given man’s inclination to worship, to build altars in the public square, our societies will always enshrine some orthodoxy or other (and, therefore, empower some clerisy or other). The only questions are: which orthodoxy? Which clerics? If the past couple of years have made anything clear, it is that there is to be no neutrality. The West must choose.

Do we enshrine the orthodoxy of the latest theories on race, sex and gender? Do we empower the woke clerisy, the army of blue-check Twitterati and HR managers who can destroy careers and lives in a matter of minutes over the smallest of ideological infractions, and whose judgments are subject to no reasoned appeal and no code of canon law? Do we live under their new blasphemy laws, ostensibly designed to prohibit ‘hate speech’?

Or do we choose the more forgiving, perhaps old-fashioned orthodoxy that sustained western culture for the better part of two millennia? The Judeo-Christian values and institutions that venerated natural reason, that by their discipline tamed the big and small would-be tyrants of Europe, reminding them that there exists a higher power than theirs? You don’t need to be religious to think that, on balance, this world view has put us in pretty good stead so far — and is worth keeping now.

It’s tempting to imagine that there is no choice — or to defer the choice for ever. This excuse for doing so is precisely that the present is the best of all possible worlds, while any attempt to preserve the past means clinging to unremitting horrors. For the liberal, to evoke a bedrock pre-modern concept such as the common good — much less the highest good — is to summon those various demons that good progressive liberal values were supposed to have vanquished.

Anyone, left or right, calling today’s progressive order into question — or daring to propose alternatives — is first asked to apologize for these horrors, stretching from antiquity to whenever enlightened time began (which may be as recently as a couple of years ago). This is a type of intellectual blackmail, and the best defense against it is to go on the offense: no, it’s the actually existing present that increasingly resembles a dystopia, and the onus is on the liberal to give account and apology. The non-liberal’s rejoinder can be summed up with three simple words: look around you.

Look around you: has liberalism delivered on its own terms, on its promise of neutrality between world views? How’s the liberty of the church faring amid lockdowns and renewed threats to force American nuns to pay for abortifacients? Why are churches told they can no longer run adoption services if they refuse to follow the liberal view on sexuality? Why was a Catholic priest expelled from a Glasgow university campus because he held a prayer meeting protest on the day of a Pride march? This is not a sign of neutrality, but one world view crushing another.

Look around you: if a 200-plus-year-old newspaper like the New York Post (where I work) can be censored ahead of an election for posting a true story about Hunter Biden, how safe are you from the censors and cancelers? Does it make any meaningful difference that in liberal societies, the repression is meted out by large, privately owned corporations, rather than a centralized state? Do a Silicon Valley dweeb’s Birkenstock sandals taste any better than a junta commandant’s boots?

Look around you: when was the last time you felt like you lived in a pluralistic, tolerant society? Does the Free World feel free? Four centuries or so since it was launched, has the liberal project delivered on its promise to make men and women free, by toppling all the old authorities? Or has the downfall of authority left us more vulnerable to more insidious and subtle forms of coercion, by woke demagogues, employers and advertisers?

Look around you: does our marketplace of ideas resemble anything like that promised by the bewigged liberals of the late-18th and 19th centuries? Does truth prevail over its cacophony of nonsense? Set aside the teaching of Genesis, whatever happened to the basic teachings of biology and genetics about the immutability of sex? (Don’t ask Richard Dawkins, just cancelled by the American Humanist Association for daring to question gender ideology.)

Look around you: do today’s eye-watering wealth and power inequalities suggest that liberalism has done away with social hierarchies? Or has it rather empowered an especially selfish class of owners and managers, their rapaciousness made all the more galling by their woke and ‘meritocratic’ pretensions?

It won’t do for the ‘classical’ liberal to insist that these phenomena are gross distortions of some aboriginal version of his ideology. After a while, he begins to sound like the Trotskyist circa 1936 who, as evidence mounted of show trials, camps and NKVD torture, insisted that none of these crimes could be laid at the feet of ‘original’ Marxism.

At some point, the liberal has to admit that the powdered-wig version of his ideology contained in it the seeds of its woke, repressive variety: that enshrining individual autonomy and choice as the highest goods of human life would eventually create the conditions for a kind of private tyranny, precisely what the common-good tradition of classical and Christian thought had always warned about and sought to restrain.

The past, in a realistic frame, is a mix of light and dark. Remove the rosy glasses of liberalism, however, and it is the present that looks more dark than 

How can America unite again to do great things if we are led by people who believe America suffers from a great sickness of the soul, an original sin that dates back to her birth as a nation?

Consider.

After his long night of prayer for “the right verdict” to be pronounced — Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts — Joe Biden stepped before the White House cameras to tell us what it all meant.

George Floyd’s death, said Biden, “was a murder in the full light of day, and it ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism… that is a stain on our nation’s soul — the knee on the neck of justice for Black Americans.”

Astonishing. Biden is saying that when Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes as the life drained out of him, the world, for once, was getting a good, close look at the diseased soul of America.

What Chauvin was doing to Floyd, said the president of the United States, is a reflection of the kind of justice America delivers to Black Americans.

This is no aberration, Biden was saying. This is the routine reality.

Biden was introduced by Kamala Harris, who said much the same:

“America has a long history of systemic racism. Black Americans and Black men in particular have been treated throughout the course of our history as less than human.”

At Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield delivered what The Wall Street Journal called, “a recitation of America’s sins (that) could have come from China’s Global Times.”

Said Thomas-Greenfield:

“I have… seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles. … Racism is the problem of the racist. And it is the problem of the society that produces the racist.”

What our diplomat to the world is saying is that our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights are interwoven with white supremacy and that America, to this day, continues to breed racists.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at a Congressional Black Caucus event after the verdict, turned her eyes heavenward in gratitude:

“Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice….For being there to call out to your mom — how heartbreaking was that … And because of you … your name will always be synonymous with justice.”

Implication: Floyd died to redeem America of her original sin of racism.

All in all, quite a commentary on our leaders.

For, again, our president and vice president are saying that this people and country still suffer from a sickness of the soul that dates back to its formative days.

The 1960s radicals who vilified our country as “Amerika” were rightly called “anti-American.” Today, the difference between what they said about America and what our highest elected leaders are saying is hard to discern.

Our enemies have picked up on this. In Anchorage, after Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Beijing out for repression in Hong Kong and “genocide” in Xinjiang, China’s foreign minister was right back in his face.

You Americans should look to your own sins and clean up your house before lecturing the world on political morality, he said. Today, that Chinese foreign minister could cite Biden and Harris as his chief witnesses that America is a nation sick in its soul.

We hear our leaders’ attacks on America. Where is their defense?

What other nation has provided the same measures of personal and political freedoms and material blessings for 40 million Black people as has the United States?

If people of color are treated “as less than human” in America, as Harris says, why are so many people of color seeking desperately to get across our Southern border to build their future here?

What is the real truth about race in America that goes unmentioned in the mainstream media’s endless hunt for encounters between Black men and white cops?

The main perpetrators of violent crimes against Black Americans — are other Black Americans. Black men, ages 16 to 40, are 3% of the U.S. population but commit roughly a third of America’s violent crimes.

Defund police, restrict police, remove police and you will get more of what the police prevent — crimes, especially violent crimes, in your community.

When Biden and Harris spoke of “systemic racism” afflicting our society, they were not describing their enlightened selves. And it was Hillary Clinton who identified the people the leftist elites have in mind:

“You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. … The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. … Some of those folks… are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

What Clinton, Biden and Harris are all saying is that, though the moral sickness of racism pervades our society, we are the vaccinated ones.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever

Patrick Buchanan, UNZ Review

ANTHONY HOPKINS:

“Let go the people who are not prepared to love you. This is the hardest thing you will have to do in your life and it will also be the most important thing. Stop having hard conversations with people who don’t want change.

Stop showing up for people who have no interest in your presence. I know your instinct is to do everything to earn the appreciation of those around you, but it’s a boost that steals your time, energy, mental and physical health.

When you begin to fight for a life with joy, interest and commitment, not everyone will be ready to follow you in this place. This doesn’t mean you need to change what you are, it means you should let go of the people who aren’t ready to accompany you.

If you are excluded, insulted, forgotten or ignored by the people you give your time to, you don’t do yourself a favor by continuing to offer your energy and your life. The truth is that you are not for everyone and not everyone is for you.

That’s what makes it so special when you meet people who reciprocate love. You will know how precious you are.

The more time you spend trying to make yourself loved by someone who is unable to, the more time you waste depriving yourself of the possibility of this connection to someone else.

There are billions of people on this planet and many of them will meet with you at your level of interest and commitment.

The more you stay involved with people who use you as a pillow, a background option or a therapist for emotional healing, the longer you stay away from the community you want.

Maybe if you stop showing up, you won’t be wanted. Maybe if you stop trying, the relationship will end. Maybe if you stop texting your phone will stay dark for weeks. That doesn’t mean you ruined the relationship, it means the only thing holding it back was the energy that only you gave to keep it. This is not love, it’s attachment. It’s wanting to give a chance to those who don’t deserve it. You deserve so much, there are people who should not be in your life.

The most valuable thing you have in your life is your time and energy, and both are limited. When you give your time and energy, it will define your existence.

When you realize this, you begin to understand why you are so anxious when you spend time with people, in activities, places or situations that don’t suit you and shouldn’t be around you, your energy is stolen.

You will begin to realize that the most important thing you can do for yourself and for everyone around you is to protect your energy more fiercely than anything else. Make your life a safe haven, in which only ′′compatible′′ people are allowed.

You are not responsible for saving anyone. You are not responsible for convincing them to improve. It’s not your work to exist for people and give your life to them! If you feel bad, if you feel compelled, you will be the root of all your problems, fearing that they will not return the favours you have granted. It’s your only obligation to realize that you are the love of your destiny and accept the love you deserve.

Decide that you deserve true friendship, commitment, true and complete love with healthy and prosperous people. Then wait and see how much everything begins to change. Don’t waste time with people who are not worth it. Change will give you the love, the esteem, happiness and the protection you deserve.”

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Wisdom

Everything today is political. That’s one of the ugliest and hardest things about today. Culturally, we’re already a Communist society; because that’s what it’s like in a Communist society. The God is government and the religion is the state. Try escaping politics today. Try not wearing a mask in most parts of the country. Try not being “woke”. Try even being quiet, or non-political. People are scared to death to even hit “like” on a non-woke post. Why is nobody scared of conservatives, Republicans, Trump-lovers or libertarians? And yet everyone is scared to death of leftists. Because, as I said, it’s like we’re already a Communist society.

People who want to make everything political are after power. In some cases, it’s literal, physical power. More often, it’s psychological. The woke twenty-five-year-old still living in his childhood bedroom at his parents’ house will not attain power, neither in business nor government. His power is limited to the Internet, perhaps social media. But power is the motive. When you turn things that aren’t political, or need not be political, into political issues, your obvious goal is to intimidate people. When you intimidate or cause people to be in annoying if not life-threatening dilemmas, you attain a sense of power you would not otherwise achieve through productive means — and believe you are incapable of achieving. In this sense, the power mongers destroying our culture and freedom are life’s biggest losers. Whatever talent and capabilities they may possess, they squander those virtues and potentialities on politics. Because politics is where the power is. They don’t believe they are capable of being architects, engineers, artists, medical professionals, small business people or anything else productive. So they impose their irrationality and neuroses on the rest of us — finding most of us, at least up to now, more than willing to grudgingly comply.

I recently read an excellent book. It’s called “The Madness of Crowds” by Douglas Murray. Published in 2019, it’s perfectly timed for the unraveling of the Western World we are witnessing in 2020 and 2021. The author doesn’t explicitly name the precise cause of today’s demise: the death of reason. But throughout the book he asks reasonable questions and exposes error after error, and absurd contradiction after absurd contradiction, regarding the insanity of our times, both on and off social media. Unlike a lot of thinkers, he correctly points out that reason is not the goal of today’s “woke” tyrants. It never was. Marxists celebrate the inherent contradiction of the “dialactic”, going back to the time of Marx. They love contradictions in the same way they love destruction. They’re not trying to create a beautiful or utopian society. They sneer at Martin Luther King’s vision of “color blindness.” Racism finally died out in America. THIS is what drove them mad. They have to bring divisiveness and hatred back. It’s how they make a living and, far worse: it’s how they thrive.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Scores of millions of Americans sense that something terrible has been happening in our country recently.  Democracy has been steadily slipping away for years, but never faster than in the catastrophic year of 2020.   Meanwhile, the process continues at an ever-increasing rate under the administration of the cognitively declining man in the White House.  Incompetent tyrants at the federal, state, and local level rule the American people.  Who knew that anonymous local health officials could violate our property rights by shutting down small businesses and that governors could restrict our rights to freedom of association and of worship?  Who knew that social media corporations could censor our First Amendment rights to freedom of speech? 

Leading American corporations publicly embrace the radical agenda of the far left while holding in contempt much of the population whom they seem to regard as “white supremacists.”   It would be hard to find a major American corporation with an international presence that does not think of itself in global rather than national terms.  This should not be surprising.  Globalism is the antithesis of nationalism — or should I say, patriotism.

CEOs of major corporations act like oligarchs who can do as they please as long as they have government on their side.  So, they donate hundreds of millions of dollars either directly or indirectly to the party of government and tilt the electoral process toward their friends in high places. What’s more, many of those big corporations have gone woke in an effort to please their Democrat allies.   In the aftermath of the recent intervention by much of corporate America into the controversy about Georgia’s election law, many conservatives are awakening to the magnitude of this problem.  Scores of millions of Americans feel helpless in the face of this overwhelming threat posed to our liberty.

What most Americans don’t know — because we don’t teach history very well anymore — is that we faced a very similar dilemma before and that Americans charted a path to overcome the corporate oligarchy of another era.  Our ancestors even gave us many of the tools we need to bend our modern oligarchs to the popular will.   Ironically, given the behavior and ideas of their contemporary namesakes, they were known as “progressives.”

The corporate oligarchs of the past had names like Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie.  Along with scores of lesser tycoons, they ran “trusts” which used their monopolistic power to crush competitors and undermine the free market system of business enterprise.  Money bought them enormous influence in the courts, statehouses, and even in Congress.  Through their enterprise they created much of modern America, but they did it in such a manner as to rouse enormous hostility. Though it did not always seem so at the time, they did a great deal of good and gradually raised standards of living throughout much of the nation, and ultimately the world.  The problem was that their unrestricted power and influence threatened to destroy both the free enterprise system and democracy itself.

response, agrarian “populists,” and urban “progressives,” the reformers of their time, organized, agitated, and enlisted the assistance of friendly members of the press in a crusade to use the power of government to subject private power to the public will.  Over the course of many years, they successfully established two major tools to deal with the threat of monopoly created by big business.  One was the use of the government power to regulate business activities.  The other was the employment of government force to break up enterprises that became so big and powerful as to threaten the ability of the people to govern themselves.  The latter was anti-trust action.  During the course of the twentieth century, anti-trust action was used intermittently in a handful of high-profile court cases while ongoing regulation of big business on a day-to-day basis by government agencies became routine.  It is time to revive the use of anti-trust action to deal with the oligarchs of our time. 

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has recently introduced a bill into Congress called the “Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act.”  In promoting his legislation Hawley rightly said that “a small group of woke mega-corporations control… the information Americans can receive, and the speech Americans can engage in.”  Although Americans of the early twentieth century had never heard of a “woke mega-corporation,” and monopolistic control of the flow of information in a free society was inconceivable, otherwise the language in that sentence could have been lifted almost verbatim from the political debates of one hundred-twenty years ago. 

Two of the progressive reform leaders and presidents of the era were Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, one a Republican and the other a Democrat.  Roosevelt earned a reputation as a “trust-buster,” because his administration conducted a number of high-profile anti-trust suits against the likes of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, and the financial magnate J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Company, but his preferred course of action was to deal with “malefactors of great wealth” through regulation rather than by breaking them up.  This eventually led, during the 1912 presidential campaign, to an ongoing debate between TR and Wilson, who feared that federal regulation of the type TR advocated, would eventually lead to partnership between the government and big business.  This in turn Wilson thought would create such a powerful combination that the common man would have little chance to compete and succeed.   Accordingly, he championed the more aggressive use of anti-trust action to break up powerful monopolies and re-establish free market conditions.  In Wilson’s vision, the fragments that remained after the trusts were broken up would be compelled to compete against one another, thereby creating greater opportunity for entrepreneurs to challenge their dominance.

Ironically, while in office Wilson came around to TR’s position and used regulatory action more aggressively than TR ever did.  Indeed, during the First World War he went so far as to use the power of the federal government to temporarily seize and run a wide variety of war industries.  Although the government takeover was abandoned after the war, the idea of government-business partnership inspired the establishment of the second Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration (NRA) during the Depression.  In a final irony, it looks as though Wilson’s fears of business-government partnership have been realized in our time.  But even he never imagined that a woke tyranny of the self–loathing would take root in American corporations and hijack the federal government. 

Early twentieth-century progressives provided citizens with yet additional tools to fight despotism.  Reformers in some states, California prominent among them, made provision in their state constitutions for the initiative and referendum and the recall of incompetent or tyrannical officials.  This makes it possible for citizens to override the state legislatures when they are unresponsive to the public will.  It also makes it possible to recall recalcitrant public officials such as Governor Gavin Newsom.  The initiative process could be used to restrict the powers of local health officials to order destructive and unconstitutional lockdowns.

Unfortunately, there is little chance that Hawley’s legislation will be passed before a new conservative administration takes over in Washington and a friendly majority is in control of Congress.  Nevertheless, American citizens can make use of some of these tools established by progressive reformers over a hundred years ago to make it more difficult for tyrants to trample on their liberties.

Richard Speed, American Thinker