The only thing standing between YOU and a government working camp is an Executive Order issued by a corrupt, decrepit old man. Once the principle is established, and widely accepted, that a ruling regime defines rights as we go, the rest is just a matter of time. #NotMyDictatorship
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Americans have been shocked by how teachers unions have blocked school re-openings in many states despite the disastrous learning lag during this pandemic. In Montgomery County, Maryland, unreliable “distance learning” produced a more than 500 percent increase in the number of black and Hispanic students failing classes. McKinsey consultants estimate that, if the shutdown continues to the end of this school year, “students of color could be six to 12 months behind [due to lost learning], compared with four to eight months for white students.” But teachers unions are claiming that, unlike the vast majority of other American workers, their members are entitled to risk-free environments.
Unions have vilified any politician or parent who has sought to re-open schools. The Chicago Teachers Union proclaimed: “The push to reopen schools is based in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” Joe Biden owes his election victory in part to the teachers unions, and last week, the White House rejected the recommendation to re-open schools from Biden’s appointee as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky. And on Friday, the CDC issued new guidance for school safety during the pandemic. As National Public Radio observed, “Rather than a political push to reopen schools, the update is a measured, data-driven effort to expand on old recommendations.” One of the clearest lessons of this pandemic is that politicians will always be able to find data to justify whatever restrictions or delays they favor. With or without the CDC recommendations, “honesty in shutdowns” remains as unlikely as #ZeroCovid. Reason magazine’s Matt Welch predicts that “CDC’s new ‘reopening’ guidance will keep schools closed in the Fall.” During the presidential campaign, Biden pledged to re-open schools within 100 days of taking office. But now Biden is betraying that promise. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said last week that the Biden goal of reopening the schools within 100 days will be satisfied if 50 percent of schools are open “at least one day a week.”
The behavior of teachers unions during this pandemic confirms the nickname that Forbes magazine gave the NEA in the 1990s: “The National Extortion Association.” This latest betrayal of American students is no surprise, considering the unions’ long history of sabotaging learning. Since the 1970s, the National Education Association has been the leading advocate of “no-fault” teaching: whatever happens, don’t blame the teacher. Unions have launched strikes to prevent “parental interference” in public education. The Chicago Tribuneconcluded in 1988 that the Chicago Teachers Association has “as much control over operations of the public schools as the Chicago Board of Education” and “more control than is available to principals, parents, taxpayers, and voters.” The Tribune noted that “even curriculum matters, such as the program for teaching children to read, are written into the [union] contract, requiring the board to bring any proposed changes to the bargaining table.”
Teachers unions have worked to destroy local control of education, subvert standards, prevent teacher accountability, and deny parents a significant voice in their children’s education. In the late 1970s, the NEA denounced back-to-basics as “irrelevant and reactionary.” An NEA publication asserted that such reforms were orchestrated by the “neo-conservative New Right, a mixture of taxpayer groups, fundamentalists, and a few unreconstructed racists.” The same publication denounced minimum competency testing for students because it supposedly “sacrificed children who are black and poor on the altar of accountability.” As Richard Mitchell noted in his 1981 classic, The Graves of Academe, the NEA has helped debase American public schools because its members “wanted to be not teachers but preachers, and prophets too, charging themselves with the cure of the soul of democracy and the raising up in the faith of true believers.” For decades, the NEA pushed to have “social studies” replace history, government, and other classes. The result: American students are appallingly ignorant of the Constitution, American history, and American culture.
The clout of the teachers unions has become far more perilous during the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools have perennially behaved as if they were entitled to waste kids’ time, and now teacher unions feel entitled to practically waste a year of children’s lives. When lockdowns were first being imposed in New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo proclaimed a standard that guided many policymakers: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” Teachers unions have rallied around a similar motto: “If one teacher dies, isn’t that too many?” But like most union-backed policies, this ignores the collateral damage on American children. AJournal of the American Medical Association analysis concluded that shutting down the schools would reduce the current crop of students’ collective years of life by more than five million, based on “lower income, reduced educational attainment, and worse health outcomes.”
Private schools have safely re-opened in many cities and states where government schools remain padlocked. As Wall Street Journal editorial writer Bill McGurn wrote recently, “Catholic schools prove you can keep classrooms open while keeping Covid-19 at bay, which gave teachers unions another reason to resent them. The good news is that Covid-19 has heightened awareness that too many kids are held in education limbo by public-school systems that cannot put their students first because they are hostage to the unions.” Tom Carroll, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Archdiocese of Boston, observed, “The science is clear that there is no substitute for in-person learning, especially for poor and minority children most at danger of falling behind.”
School systems are finally responding to outraged parents, but with sham school re-openings. After Maryland’s Gov. Larry Hogan ordered all of the state’s school systems to start in-person classes by March 1, the Montgomery County school system pretended to comply. Similar to the response in school systems in the Virginia suburbs, Montgomery will hire “classroom monitors” to oversee students sitting in desks while teachers remain absent from the classroom. A Maryland parents’ organization bitterly complained: “Staring at a Chromebook while your teacher teaches on a screen is not in-person instruction, and it is frankly unacceptable. It is clear [the school system] does not want to embrace a true return to schools.” One Montgomery County mother of two students groused that the new system “sounds like glorified babysitting.”
President Biden endlessly appeals for “unity” while he sacrifices the interests of millions of children to his political supporters. CNN anchor Jake Tapper commented last week on Twitter, “I’ve yet to see any evidence the Biden administration disagrees with teachers unions. Even when THEIR OWN health officials are saying something different.” Biden’s tacit support of school shutdowns promises that in the coming years his administration will sacrifice children in other ways to placate teachers unions. America will see a new “achievement gap” between privately educated students and those whose brains were offered up on the altar of teacher union power.
One of the clearest lessons of the COVID pandemic is that public employee unions cannot be trusted with children’s minds. Parents and politicians should speedily move to maximize the number of students who can exploit vouchers to escape public schools and to repudiate laws and labor agreements that are helping blight a rising generation. If politicians continue kowtowing to unions, parents must make their wrath felt or forfeit their children’s future.
James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights, Attention Deficit Democracy, and Public Policy Hooligan. He is also a USA Today columnist. Follow him on Twitter @JimBovard
Rush Limbaugh was one of the greatest figures of the last half-century and he could personally take credit for millions of people becoming conservative. He was a legend, an icon and he will be missed. In honor of a great man, here are Rush’s 20 greatest quotes.
20) “The liberals, you see, do not want to confront conservative ideas; they just attack conservatives as a group, and particularly their motives. If you believe what they say about us, you would think that if someone like Bill Bennett, or Jack Kemp, or myself were driving through South Central Los Angeles and looking at the slums and poverty, we would go: Oh, man, this is great – they’ve got nothing, so that means we get more. It’s simply preposterous. We all want to live in a great country. And for the country to fulfill its potential, you need individuals to be the best they can be – not the government taking care of people.”
19) “For government to give, it must first take away.”
18) “The people that make this country work, the people who pay on their mortgages, the people getting up and going to work, striving in this recession to not participate in it, they’re not the enemy. They’re the people that hire you. They’re the people who are going to give you a job.”
17) “Now, what is the left’s worldview in general? What is it? If you had to attach not a philosophy but an attitude to a leftist worldview, it’s one of pessimism and darkness, sadness. They’re never happy, are they? They’re always angry about something. No matter what they get, they’re always angry.”
16) “I’m a huge supporter of women. What I’m not is a supporter of liberalism. Feminism is what I oppose. Feminism has led women astray. I love the women’s movement — especially when walking behind it.”
15) “Liberals always exempt themselves from the rules that they impose on others.”
14) “Bigot: A person who wins an argument with a liberal.”
13) “Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it.”
12) “Conservatism is an active intellectual pursuit; it requires constant vigilance. It has nothing to do with feelings. Liberalism is the most gutless choice you can make. You just see suffering and say, ‘Oh, I feel so horrible!’”
11) “I’m convinced that a lot of people simply don’t know what’s available out there and how it is possible to find a job and work your way up if you are willing to accept responsibility for your life. I know what it’s like to be on the bottom. I’ve been broke. I’ve been fired seven times from jobs. And I don’t even have a college degree. But I didn’t blame anyone else for my problems. I knew that if I didn’t try to solve them on my own or with the help of friends or family members, no one else was going to take care of me.”
10) “I’m not opposed to the protection of animals. But the best way to do that is to make sure some human being owns them.”
9) “Morality is defined by individual choice.”
8) “No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity.”
7) “End results that work that don’t involve government threatening liberals.”
6) “Let me tell you who we conservatives are: we love people. When we look out over the United States of America, when we are anywhere, when we see a group of people, such as this or anywhere, we see Americans. We see human beings. We don’t see groups. We don’t see victims.”
5) “In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus or work, what wins?”
4) “The world’s biggest problem is the unequal distribution of capitalism. If there were capitalism everywhere, you wouldn’t have food shortages.”
3) “Progress is not striving for economic justice or fairness, but economic growth.”
2) “You know why there’s a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one.”
1) “What about feeling sorry for those…who pay the taxes? Those are the people NO ONE ever feels sorry for. They are asked to give and give until they have no more to give. And when they say ‘Enough!’ they are called selfish.”
It is with profound sadness and eternal gratitude that I note the passing of Rush Limbaugh today. A truly great American in all senses of that designation, a brilliant radio artist and the de facto leader of true conservatism in the United States for 30 years, he was truly one of a kind.
Rush’s wife, Kathryn, opened his radio program today with a heartfelt statement to his 25 million+ listeners. I won’t deny shedding a tear or two as I listened to it and tried to take in the impact his loss will have. Talk radio as it has existed for the last generation existed because of Rush. His influence in the country is unrivaled in the history of the media; not just of radio, but of all media in this country’s history. No other single figure even comes close.
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With his passing, there is no obvious replacement, no conservative pundit capable of taking up the torch and keeping the fires of conservatism burning. With no true national voice to guide the way, the loss of this great American will be every bit as impactful as the loss of Donald Trump and his presidency.
God Bless Rush Limbaugh for all he has done for us, God Bless his family and God Bless America.
That, sadly, is all.
David Blackmon
Donald Trump’s second impeachment acquittal isn’t really something to cheer. If you study dictatorships, the whole fiasco was simply a twenty-first century version of the guillotine. Conviction never mattered, because with impeachment “conviction” means removing a President from office. THE FASCISTS ALREADY REMOVED HIM FROM OFFICE. And they knew it. Defeating Trump wasn’t enough. They must crush ALL dissension.
The whole symbolic circus was a way for our occupiers to put dissidents on notice: “We are going to do whatever the hell we want to you, and you can’t stop it.” Stop the denial, patriots. We are in serious trouble here, as the continued inability of the former President to communicate with his tens of millions of supporters shows. This isn’t politics anymore. This is literal tyranny. Face the fact the bad guys are currently WINNING. Everything. Stop fantasizing that Trump will be enough to save us. He can’t even speak, not even in an “underground” because the bad guys control everything from Internet connectivity to the financial system. At some point, the millions who oppose this leftist occupation will simply have to quit working, quit cooperating and quit complying with everything. Nobody is coming to rescue us: We must rescue ourselves.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Can the Republicans show some steel and fend off Democrat tyranny?
Like last year’s Congress, the new 116th failed ignominiously to get Donald Trump convicted of their impeachment charge. Some federal court investigations into Trump’s businesses are still ongoing, but it’s likely, though not certain, that Trump will become less and less useful for distracting voters from the Democrats’ sharp turn to the left both on domestic and foreign policy.
If the Dems fail to hold on to power as they did in 2016, history will have a lot of suspects to investigate in order to explain their inability to attract voters without the bogey of Donald Trump and a fortuitous pandemic. But if they succeed, then we will have turned a dangerous corner on the road to dismantling the Constitution’s structure of ordered liberty and unalienable rights.
Start with Biden himself. We can pass over his obvious cognitive impairments and endless gaffes. He overcame those campaign-ending deficits because the party, with a compliant media, marketed him as an old-school centrist who could neutralize the toxic socialist Bernie Sanders. Upon election he indulged the dull clichés “working together,” “healing the wounds,” and “no blue America, no red America.” But the House negated that rhetoric with an even more preposterous article of impeachment that charged the president with “insurrection,” based mainly on creatively editing the footage of his speech at the Ellipse, and taking literally a “fight” metaphor that Trump’s lawyers used video clips to show numerous Democrats repeatedly using over the past four years.
So much for “healing.” But worse has been Biden’s flurry of executive orders that make down- payments on the Green New Deal disaster dear to the party’s socialist wing. On foreign policy, he has stacked his administration with old retreads from the “rules-based” global order that has failed serially since World War II, and which blew the opportunity presented when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. This means returning to the creaking global diplomacy institutions that favor summits, conferences, photo-ops and empty threats. Hence Biden is undoing the necessary corrections made by Trump in order to make it clear to our rivals and allies alike that the U.S. is putting our own national security and interest ahead of the mythic “new world order.”
The UN’s Human Rights Council, for example, from which Trump pulled the U.S. in 2018, is the epitome of this failure. Its corruption and anti-Semitism are notorious, as is its habit of seating the worst offenders like current members China, Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba. Biden’s Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, on announcing our return, gave a great example of the fossilized, feckless idealism of the old “new world order”: “To address the council’s deficiencies and ensure it lives up to its mandate, the United States must be at the table using the full weight of our diplomatic leadership.”
But the current Council was created in 2006 to replace and correct the “deficiencies” of the old Human Rights Commission, including its corruption and anti-Semitism. But numerous attempts to correct the “deficiencies” of the Commission by creating the Human Rights Council failed miserably, which is why Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out. And now, 15 years later, Biden is going back to the old “new world order” playbook based on endless diplomatic babble substituting for meaningful action, and on the magical powers of the U.S.’s mere presence.
More dangerous is Biden letting Iran know that he’s ready to restore the disastrous nuclear deal Trump walked away from. Biden has sent propitiatory signals by taking Iran client Yemen off the state terrorist list, and restoring payments to the uber-corrupt Palestinian Authority, which for years has abused U.S. and UN money to fund terrorist groups and pay blood-money to jihadis who murder Israeli citizens. Biden has also cut off arms sales to Saudi Arabia, a long-time ally of the U.S. that has been moving closer to Israel in order to thwart Iran’s aggression. With Biden undercutting Trump’s achievements like the Abraham Accords, the opportunity for a multination alliance in the Middle East has been lost.
And of course, like all Democrats Biden has pledged to “strengthen” our alliances, by which the New World Order clerks mean the EU. No matter that the Eurocrats are cozying up to China by negotiating a Comprehensive Agreement on Investment. Such an agreement, of course, will end up a tool for leveraging concessions from European corporations, undercutting this country’s efforts under Trump to hold China accountable for its long history of gaming every agreement it’s signed, and for its murderous secrecy over the coronavirus. Likewise with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Europe, which will make European countries dependent on a regime that has made clear its intent to weaken NATO and American influence, and that serially ignores EU verbal dudgeon over human rights abuses like China’s ongoing genocide of the Uighur minority,..
No wonder Xi, Khamenei, and Vlad danced a jig when Biden’s tainted victory was announced.
Here at home, Biden has taken the first steps in restoring the regulatory and tax disincentives, that kept the economy in the doldrums during his tenure on Barack Obama’s team. Biden’s proposed “Modernizing Regulatory Review Plan” will reform nothing, but just create what Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute calls a “a new architecture for never-ending regulations.” Higher corporate and personal taxes are being proposed, another disincentive to investment and growth. The $1.9 trillion coronavirus “relief” includes a farrago of pork for pet causes, and $350 billion in unrestricted money for blue states that have run their economies into near bankruptcy by catering to the demands of their public employee unions. Marketed as a “stimulus,” this bill includes progressive “woke” causes like promoting Advancing Racial Equities against “entrenched disparities,” which Hoover Fellow Shelby Steele calls “a term that has no meaning but it gives . . . blacks power and prestige.”
In reality this budget-busting “stimulus” and “relief” bill is more likely to reprise the failure of Obama’s near-trillion dollar “stimulus” in 2009.
And don’t forget other bad economic ideas, like the $15 federal minimum wage, which will kill entry-level, low-skill jobs; and the plan to forgive much of the $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, a proposal that will favor doctors and lawyers who can easily afford to pay off their debt. All these proposals point to an economy much like Barack Obama’s––sluggish and slow-growing, just at a time when businesses are opening, people are starting to go back to work, and the economy, despite the lingering lock-downs, is showing signs of renewal. Throw in a spending binge on “renewal energy” and other Green New Deal lunacy, and you can expect energy prices to climb to California levels, creating another drag on an economy ready to expand if the government just gets out of the way, as it did during the Trump administration.
Finally, Biden in just a month has unleashed the politically correct “woke” legions to impose their unscientific, preposterous, and illiberal policies. He has opened up girls’ sports and locker-rooms to “trans-girls,” biological males with numerous physical advantages over biological girls. He has restored training in “critical race theory” for government workers, making sure this racialist propaganda becomes increasingly normalized. He’s also removed some of Trump’s policies for keeping our border safe. He’s stopped construction of the wall, and halted deportations. So of course, mobs of Latin American migrants are gathering for an invasion of el Norte.
If Biden sticks to this early left-leaning program, most Americans are not going to be happy come November 2022. We could see the same dynamic at work that helped the Republicans flip the house in 2010. Moreover, despite the media’s pronouncement of Republican doom, there are numerous factors in the Republicans’ favor. Trump may be diminished for now, but Trumpism, the populist concern for working class interests and its neglect at the hands of progressive globalist elites, brought Trump 74 million votes. Moreover, Trump made gains among blacks and Latinos, many of whom don’t care for the politically correct identity politics group-think that scorns their faiths and traditional mores.
Nor are the Trump constituency and others happy about the hypocritical “cancel culture” that increasingly looks and sounds like a high-tech version of the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution, or the show-trials of Lenin and Stalin. Most Americans like their First Amendment freedoms of worship and speech, and resent the “woke” thugs wantonly trashing people’s reputations and careers. They bristle at talk of “deprogramming” American just for holding beliefs contrary to the “woke” commissars’. This tyranny has worsened over the last four years, and shows no sign of abating. A couple more years, and it might ignite a backlash expressed at the polls.
The last election showed some promising signs. In the House, Republicans flipped a net of twelve seats, leaving the Dems with a nine-seat margin. Republicans lost control of the Senate, but that chamber is evenly split. This means winning one or both houses in 2022 is very possible. Particularly given the charisma-gap of Joe Biden. He is a factotum, not a leader. He doesn’t inspire or galvanize people, even his own voters, for whom his only appeal is that he is not Donald Trump. That’s not a viable foundation for the continuing loyalty enjoyed by Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.
Finally, the arrogance of the “woke” cadres and Democrat pols will likely cause them to overreach, as happened with Obama in 2008 when he muscled the Rube-Goldberg Obamacare legislation into law, and went on a “stimulus” spending, tax, and regulatory binge when the economy was just emerging from a recession. All he achieved was the birth of the Tea Party movement, which was instrumental in winning the House for Republicans in 2010.
If the Republicans can show some steel, stop their whining about Donald Trump, and fight like hell against the progressive attack on our Constitutional order, they can reprise the neutering of Obama for the last six years of his administration.
If they can’t, then the Dems’ overreach will relentlessly move closer to the purpose of all hubris––tyranny.
Bruce Thornton
The books in this Reading List have been given an unqualified Five-Star rating by the Artful Dilettante. They are masterpieces of their specific disciplines with brilliant insights into the human condition. As such, they are all but ignored in the halls of modern academia and the unwashed masses.
BANKING AND ECONOMICS
The Rise and Fall of Society Frank Chodorov
The Creature from Jekyll Island G. Edward Griffin
Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics Henry Hazlitt
Human Action: A Treatise on Economics Ludwig von Mises
Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis Ludwig von Mises
The Theory of Money and Credit Ludwig von Mises
The Anti-Capitalism Mentality Ludwig von Mises
Planned Chaos Ludwig von Mises
Liberty and Property Ludwig von Mises
Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War Ludwig von Mises
Marxism Unmasked: From Delusion to Destruction Ludwig von Mises
Man, Economy, and State Murray Rothbard
Power and Market Murray Rothbard
What Has Government Done to Our Money Murray Rothbard
America’s Great Depression Murray Rothbard
The Case Against the Fed Murray Rothbard
Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy Murray Rothbard
The Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies Murray Rothbard
Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action Robert P. Murray
Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis Michael D. Tanner
Architects of Ruin Peter Schweizer
Capitalism and Freedom (40th Anniversary Edition) Milton Firedman
End the Fed Ron Paul
Meltdown Thomas E. Woods
In Defense of Global Capitalism Johan Norberg
Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy Thomas Sowell
Marxism: Philosophy and Economics Thomas Sowell
Discovery, Capitalism, and Distributive Justice Israel M. Kirzner
Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics George Reisman
Popular Economics: What the Rollings Stones, Downton Abbey, and LeBron James Can Teach You About Economics John Tamny
EDUCATION
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, 10th Anniversary Edition John Taylor Gatto
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A School Teacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling John Taylor Gatto
The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher’s Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern Schooling John Taylor Gatto
A Primer on Libertarian Education Joel Spring
Inside American Education Thomas Sowell
Education: Assumptions and History Thomas Sowell
Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality Charles Murray
The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead Charles Murray
ENVIRONMENT
Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to COntrol Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them Steven Milloy
Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Activists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed Christopher C. Horner
ESTABLISHMENT/RULING CLASS/DEEP-STATE POLITICS
JFK and the World Oligarchy Robert Schramm Burnside
Shadow World: Resurgent Russia, The Global New Left, and Radical Islam Robert Chandler
Shadow Government, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World Tom Engelhardt
The Creature from Jekyll Island G. Edward Griffin
Crony Capitalism in America Hunter Lewis
Tragedy and Hope 101: The Illusion of Justice, Freedom, and Democracy Joseph Plummer
The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy Peter Dale Scott
Tragedy and Hope Carroll Quigley
None Dare Call It Conspiracy Gary Allen
Anglo-American Establishment Carroll Quigley
Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century F. William Engdahl
A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and New World Order F. William Engdahl
Superclass–The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making David Rothkopf
Power Elite C. Wright Mills
Bilderberg Group Daniel Estulid
Big Oil and Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf Dean Henderson
JFK – The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy L. Fletcher Prouty
Iron Triangle – Carlyle Group Dan Brody
Trilateralism – the Trilateral Commission and World Management Holly Sklar
Powers That Be G. William Domhoff
Who Rules America Now? G. William Domhoff
LIBERTARIAN THOUGHT AND ETHICS
Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life Edward Stringham
Death by Government R. J. Rummel
The Road to Serfdom Friedrich Hayek
The Constitution of Liberty Friedrich Hayek
The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism Friedrich Hayek
Our Enemy, the State Albert Jay Nock
The State Franz Oppenheimer
Makers and Takers Edmund Contoski
A Spontaneous Order: The Capitalist Case for a Stateless Society Chase Rachels
Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government Robert Higgs
The Psychology of Self-Esteem Nathaniel Branden
Honoring the Self Nathaniel Branden
The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem Nathaniel Branden
The Vision of Ayn Rand Nathaniel Branden
The Moral Revolution in Atlas Shrugged Nathaniel Branden
Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand
Fountainhead Ayn Rand
The Virtue of Selfishness Ayn Rand
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal Ayn Rand
American Contempt for Liberty Walter Williams
The Rise and Fall of Society Frank Chodorov
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority Lysander Spooner
Anatomy of the State Murray Rothbard
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature Murray Rothbard
For a New Liberty Murray Rothbard
The Abolition of Man C. S. Lewis
The Morality of Capitalism: What Your Professors Won’t Tell You Tom G. Palmer
Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice Tom G. Palmer
Common Sense Thomas Paine
Rights of Man Thomas Paine
Against the State Llewellyn Rockwell
Liberty vs. the Tyranny of Socialism: Controversial Essays Walter Williams
New Libertarian Manifesto Samuel Edward Conkin
Libertarianism: A Primer David Boaz
Free to Choose Milton Friedman
Liberty Defined Ron Paul
What it Means to Be a Libertarian Charles Murray
The Mainspring of Human Progress Henry Grady Weaver and Rose Wilder Lane
The Economics and Ethics of Private Property Hans-Hermann Hoppe
The God of the Machine Isabel Paterson
The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority Rose Wilder Lane
Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto Matt Kibbe
The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law Randy E. Barnett
Henry David Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Henry David Thoreau
What it Means to be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation Charles Murray
The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic, and Philosophic Case for Laissez Faire Andrew Bernstein
Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Status Quo Jeffrey A. Tucker and Steven Ng
Informed Common Sense Albert Jay Nock
Radical For Capitalism: An Introduction into the Political Thought of Ayn Rand William R. Thomas
Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics George Reisman
HISTORY
America’s Forgotten History:
Part I, Foundations
Part II, Rupture
Part III, A Progressive Empire Mark David Ledbetter
Conceived in Liberty Murray Rothbard
American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World David Stannard
Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government Robert Higgs
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
Amity Schlaes
Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement Brian Doherty
Conquests and Cultures: An International History Thomas Sowell
The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams Lester J. Cappon (Editor)
Thomas Jefferson: Writings, Autobiography, Notes on the State of Virginia, Private and Public Papers, Letters, Addresses Thomas Jefferson
The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate (1764-1772) Gordon S. Wood (Editor)
The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence
John H. Rhodehamel (Editor)
The Debate on the Constitution Bernard Bailyn and others
Thomas Paine: Collected Writings Thomas Paine
Washington: Writings George Washington
Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings Benjamin Franklin
John Adams: Writings from the New Nation (1784-1826) John Adams
Human Accomplishment Charles Murray
Conquests and Cultures: An International History Thomas Sowell
The Great Challenge: The Myth of Laissez Faire in the Early Republic Frank Bourgin
Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Civilization Larry Siedentop
POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT
The Federalist Papers Hamilton, Madison, Jay
The Antifederalist Papers and Constitutional Convention Debates Ralph Ketchum (Editor)
Plunder: How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation Steven Greenhut
Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind Mallory Factor
Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government Thomas DiLorenzo
American Contempt for Liberty Walter Williams
Architects of Ruin Peter Schweizer
The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch
Meltdown Thomas E. Woods
The Vision of the Anointed Thomas Sowell
Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville
The Spirit of the Laws Baron Charles de Montesquieu
Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Virginian and Kentucky Resolutions and Their Legacy William Watkins
New Views of the Constitution John Taylor of Caroline
Thomas Jefferson: Writings, Autobiography, Notes on the State of Virginia, Private and Public Papers, Letters, Addresses Thomas Jefferson
The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate (1764-1772) Gordon S. Wood (Editor)
The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence
John H. Rhodehamel (Editor)
The Debate on the Constitution Bernard Bailyn and others
Thomas Paine: Collected Writings Thomas Paine
Washington: Writings George Washington
Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography, Poor Richard, and Later Writings Benjamin Franklin
John Adams: Writings from the New Nation (1784-1826) John Adams
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles Thomas Sowell
Wealth, Poverty, and Politics: An International Perspective Thomas Sowell
SOCIETY AND CULTURE
The Antidote: Healing America from the Poison of Hate, Blame, and Victimization
Jesse Lee Peterson and Dennis Prager
Intellectuals and Race Thomas Sowell
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass Theodore Dalrymple
Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination Walter E. Williams
Race and Culture: A World View Thomas Sowell
The Dependency Agenda Kevin D. Williamson
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life Charles Murray
The Vision of the Anointed Thomas Sowell
Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Status Quo Jeffrey A. Tucker and Steven Ng
From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Serbvices, 1890-1967 David T. Beito
The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society David T. Beito
Bit by Bit: How P2P is Freeing the World Jeffrey Tucker
Negrophilia Erik Rush
You have to hand it to Democrats and leftists: They play the long game. And, even though they’re wrong about so much, they ultimately won it.
Back in the 1980s, they had lost politically. Reagan and the Republicans in Congress ushered in a new era of relative capitalism and a resurgence in the Bill of Rights. Even in the 1990s, Democrat Bill Clinton was forced to partially phase out welfare and reduce capital gains taxes. Imagine even a Republican pulling that off today.
But, starting in the wilderness of the 1980s, leftists intensified their hold on college campuses. Eventually their influence spread from campus to the society. “Political correctness” became a THING in the 1990s. Most laughed it off and dismissed it as the idiocy of a few moronic Marxist, totalitarian college professors. Then we got Obama. Then we got Trump — but it was in the Trump years that it became clear the left had totally overtaken everything. Not just academia and the “Deep State” of government that Trump himself could not defeat, but the entire corporate world.
In 2020, it became crystal clear that it didn’t really matter who was President. If you control the culture, you control the people, even if your views are (1) wrong and (2) part of an elite minority. They want a pandemic? We get a pandemic. They want lockdowns? We get lockdowns — permanent ones, at that. They want Biden as President, an absurdity given his devoid-of-energy campaign? We get Biden as President. What’s that — you question the legality of the election? It’s off to Facebook and Twitter prison with you. And, once the Biden regime is installed, REAL prison. (Yes, that’s coming. For Trump and his family, unless they have really good lawyers; and for many others.)
The lesson here? Culture matters. And the long game matters. It’s ironic. Democrats espouse an ideology — socialism — that destroys independence, individual rights, reason, common sense, long-range thinking and personal responsibility. Yet they practiced these virtues to turn our culture and government into what it has become: a horrific hybrid of fascism, Communism and rancid leftism that most people don’t want. But we’re getting it, like it or not.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Some of the harshest critics of government corruption are thoroughly corrupt – and everyone in the upper reaches of government is complicit due to their silence.
I spent over 40 years in government service. I don’t consider myself an expert on the subject but after 40 years you cannot avoid acquiring a more than basic knowledge of a subject. One of the lessons I learned is that knowledge is power. There are people in government who keep their ears to the ground in order to gain as much knowledge as possible. I was not one of them, but I could not avoid learning who was sleeping with whom and other supposedly private matters. An example of this lesson: a coworker of mine walked into a chief’s office while he was on the couch with a woman who was not his wife. I should not have to clarify that they were in a horizontal position. This coworker was shortly promoted to supervisor and transferred to what I suspect was an ideal location. Ambitious people pay attention.
The higher reaches of powerful organizations are composed of ambitious people who are not necessarily competent in the areas they are responsible for, but they are aware of the situations that will advance their careers. The current situation with the Lincoln Project illustrates this point. The Lincoln Project claims to be “holding accountable those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would put others before Americans.” That’s a pretty noble endeavor. One of the founders of this group, John Weaver, resigned after charges of sexual harassment which included a 14-year-old boy.
Imagine a situation where a thoroughly reprehensible individual is an essential member of a team. The team is working to prevent a disaster that will possibly result in death of millions. Without this individual the team will fail. However, this individual is a monster, a pedophile, and a possible murderer. What do you do? Some people will ignore his behavior. Others will denounce him and accept the damage this will cause. It should also be noted that the prospects of whistleblowers are not very good. By exposing this individual, you are alienating a large number of powerful people who may share his vices. The Lincoln Project issued a severe condemnation of Weaver, denouncing his “deplorable and predatory behavior.” But this was only after a New York Times report detailed his history. Perhaps his coworkers were unaware of his activities. I find that unlikely though. So, their self-righteous condemnations of President Trump ring hollow
It is almost impossible for prominent people to conceal their behavior. The late Senator John McCain’s wife Cindy claimed, “Epstein was hiding in plain sight. We all knew about him. We all knew what he was doing, but we had no one that was — no legal aspect that would go after him. They were afraid of him. For whatever reason, they were afraid of him.” The important part of this statement is: “We all knew about him.” Jeffrey Epstein was prostituting young girls and Cindy McCain knew about it. She did not report it. What was she afraid of? Vladimir Bukovsky pointed out one of the problems with exposing people: “The movers and shakers of today have little interest in digging for the truth. Who knows what one may come up with? You may start out with the communists and end up with yourself.”
It is not surprising that men behave badly. Every profession has members exposed as predators. Entertainment has Harvey Weinstein. The news media has Matt Lauer. The government has the Congressional Office of Compliance (COC) which supposedly disbursed the ridiculously low sum of $17 million over a twenty-year period to cover sex-related incidents. Senator Ted Kennedy’s activities included public sex in 1985 and 1987 at La Brasserie restaurant. Kennedy reportedly had a high-ranking aide who served as “a pimp… whose real position was to procure women for Kennedy.” The late NPR reporter Cokie Roberts claimed, “(Rep. John) Conyers’ predatory behavior was an open secret among the press corps.” She stated, “Don’t get in the elevator with him, you know, and the whole every female in the press corps knew that.” She also stated, “You know they are so used to it. I mean, the culture of Capitol Hill for so many decades was men being bad.”
Predatory behavior should be exposed, and the perpetrators should be punished. However, this has to be done with discretion. Some charges are fabricated or exaggerated. There are often attempts to discredit the victims. Paula Jones was described by Newsweek’s Evan Thomas as “some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks.” Leslie Stahl reported on CBS that John Tower danced naked on a grand piano with his mistress, a Russian ballerina. Reporters had to go back 30 years in order to find questionable evidence that Judge Roy Moore was a pedophile. You might have noticed that the individuals with bogus or questionable charges are conservatives. That may be the case, but all members of the elite are complicit. When Utah Senator Orrin Hatch — a conservative Republican — was asked if he thought Sen. Kennedy had a drinking problem, he responded, “I wouldn’t comment on that.” Hatch knew all about Kennedy’s behavior but would not even comment on his drinking.
John Dietrich is a freelance writer and the author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy (Algora Publishing). He has a Master of Arts Degree in International Relations from St. Mary’s University. He is retired from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. He is featured on the BBC’s program “Things We Forgot to Remember:” Morgenthau Plan and Post-War Germany.
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Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/how_your_government_emreallyem_works.html#ixzz6mf8mpQef
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Yes, conservatives, Karl Marx, the Manifesto, The German Ideology, Capital, The Eighteenth Brumaire . . . the lot of it. Close your Hayek and Friedman, forget the Invisible Hand for a while, Reaganism is history, Edmund Burke won’t help you, the Revolution is here and you’re in it.
Start reading, now, not Marx on private property or money, commodity fetishism, or the labor theory of value. Read him for one thing: class relations, for you are a class whether you like it or not.
When the populists among you started to talk about politicians as a “class” that crossed party lines, composed of Democrats and Republicans both, you made one important mistake. Not that legislators and high officials weren’t a distinct group with their own interests—that was clearly correct. Rather, you didn’t follow out the implication that the political class’s class behavior put conservatives into a class, too. The elite has marked you as a collective problem, and they’re busy dealing with you.
It’s not a culture war, not anymore. There is no common civic ground on which liberals and conservatives meet and hash things out. In the 1990s we had genuine debates in the public arena, Stanley Fish versus Dinesh D’Souza over political correctness, Lynne Cheney versus revisionist historians over the meaning of America, Clinton Democrats versus congressional Republicans over gays in the military.
The debates are over now. The Woke brigades won’t battle your ideas. They follow the motto of that brilliant manager of men, Joseph Stalin, who reasoned quite soundly: “No man, no problem.”
The marketplace of ideas offends them—you offend them. Now, they have the power of termination. While conservatives wrote bestsellers such as The Closing of the American Mind and trounced leftist spokesmen on the cable news shows, thousands of progressives and identity politicians were claiming space in university administrations, human resources in corporate America, school boards and city councils, editorial offices, and Silicon Valley, law schools and museums and libraries, not to mention the many activist organizations that have our most distinguished liberal institutions cowed.
From those posts, usually out of the public eye, they exert their power against you. It’s economic, not cultural. When Tucker Carlson defended Trump’s Wall, his antagonists didn’t collect evidence against his words. No, they threatened his advertisers with boycotts. When Jordan Peterson refused an Ontario law mandating pronoun usage, his critics didn’t mount arguments against him. They demanded the University of Toronto fire him. Money, jobs, resources, access—that’s the target now. Academia requires that all job candidates compose a “diversity statement,” essentially a loyalty oath that imposes leftist ideology onto the hiring process. An honest conservative doesn’t survive, and that’s the point.
This was the long march through the institutions, and it’s done. An open contest of ideas needn’t happen, not when leftists control the pipelines. Why risk it when they already have the power? They are so much better at personnel than you are. They don’t have to justify what they do if everyone in the room agrees with them. No conservatives, no problem. If they deprive you of jobs, they annul your ideas. If they reject your manuscripts and cancel your TV shows and keep you out of the teaching ranks, the rising generation and mass of citizens barely know you exist.
From then on, liberal ideology looks like reality. A class-based power play assumes the guise of natural truth. As Marx put it, one class’s values “increasingly take on the form of universality” (German Ideology). This is a sign of success—he calls it a “trick”—because it obscures the material conditions that exalted those values, including the suppression of the interests of other classes. As long as people accepted the oppression they suffered as “the way things are,” not a class set-up, they couldn’t resist it, at least not effectively. What they needed was class consciousness.
Conservatives don’t like to think of themselves as a class. They reject Marx’s definition of history as class struggle. Life isn’t 100 percent economic and human beings have souls that transcend politics. OK—but the Woke don’t care. They treat you as a class, and it works. They target your livelihood, so you better start thinking about a better response than “That’s not right.”
Popular conservative thinkers warn very astutely of the dangers of class warfare and everything-is-political thinking. When it comes to advising a subordinate class how to climb out of a pit, though, they’re pretty much worthless. Marxism, on the other hand, taught scattered and powerless laborers how to become a labor movement. You, too, can learn the lessons of organization while skipping the poisonous doctrines of Communism.
Mark Bauerlein is a senior editor at First Things and professor of English at Emory University, where he has taught since earning his Ph.D. in English at UCLA in 1989. For two years (2003-2005) he served as director of the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy, The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief, and The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. His essays have appeared in PMLA, Partisan Review, Wilson Quarterly, Commentary, and New Criterion, and his commentaries and reviews in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, The Guardian, Chronicle of Higher Education, and other national periodicals
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 