People usually define “crazy” as “losing your mind”. What does it mean to lose your mind? It means to lose your REASON. It means to start substituting your common sense observations, along with your higher level, objective, independent thinking with: (1) blatant delusions; (2) the opinions of others, even if those opinions make no sense; or (3) arbitrary, random feelings or imagination unhinged from reality.
Staying sane means holding to your independent and objective knowledge even when those around you defy all reason or recognition of even obvious facts. ESPECIALLY when those around you defy all reason or recognition of obvious facts. It’s called integrity: to your mind, and to reality itself. Having integrity to what you KNOW is true is for your own sake, most of all. The world will benefit, too; because when this is all over, the world is going to need at least a few good, rational people able and willing to pick up the pieces.
A reader posted on Facebook: “Have people lost all logic and reason? This war on critical thought has too many victims. When I hear people parrot the news…. covid conscious, believe the science, safe and effective, white privilege, etc., I cringe. This is indoctrination.”
My reply: No, most still have sanity. If they didn’t, civilization as we know it would be in total collapse. But they make the tragic error of believing their media. The media consists of mostly intellectual lightweights who are polished performers, and who stare into the camera earnestly and seem believable to the majority when they spout their collectivist drivel . THIS is a big part of what’s destroying us.
There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money,” is an insight the famed biographer James Boswell attributed to Samuel Johnson.
Clients of the late Bernie Madoff, however, might take issue.
Over four decades, Madoff, acclaimed as the greatest fraudster of them all, ran a Ponzi scheme that swindled 40,000 people, including his closest friends, out of $65 billion.
But if “getting money” is among the most innocent of callings, America has more than its fair share of the goodly people who excel at it.
According to Forbes’s 35th annual ranking of billionaires, last year witnessed a population explosion. Some 660 new billionaires were added to the number for a total of 2,755.
And more than one in every four billionaires is an American.
According to Forbes, the richest man in the world is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, with $177 billion.
Last year was the fourth in a row that Bezos led the list. His wealth exceeds the entire GDP of almost 150 nations.
Directly behind Bezos, at No. 2, is Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, whose wealth rose to $151 billion.
Numbers 4 and 5 were Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, with $124 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook with $97 billion.
“As a class billionaires added about $8 trillion to their total net worth from last year, totaling $13.1 trillion,” says the Washington Post.
“The United States had the most billionaires, at 724, extending a rapid rise in wealth that hasn’t happened since the Rockefellers and the Carnegies roughly a century ago. China, including Macau and Hong Kong, had the second highest number of billionaires: 698.”
This tripling of the wealth of the world’s billionaires and 30% increase in their number came during a year when America and the West endured the worst pandemic in a century and worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.
“While most of the world’s wealthiest people prospered during the pandemic, thanks in part to stock prices,” writes the Post, “millions of Americans grappled with job loss, food insecurity, debt, eviction and poverty.”
Query: Where was the outrage?
In previous times like these, where the rich got richer and the poor and working class rode the rails, we would have heard the excoriations of economic populists and echoes of TR’s “malefactors of great wealth” and FDR’s “forces of entrenched greed.”
But Forbes’ report of the population explosion among billionaires in 2020 passed seemingly without protest.
The dogs did not bark. Why not?
One reason: Whatever one may think of Bezos, Amazon, in 2020, was indispensable for delivering food and medicines to tens of millions of Americans who, given the “lockdowns,” depended on such deliveries for survival. You don’t castigate people providing your food and medicine.
Also, today’s billionaires’ boys club has come to understand how to make its astonishing wealth acceptable, by ingratiating themselves with their old ideological enemies.
Set up a tax-exempt foundation, fund it with billions of dollars, invite in liberals to sit on the board, and, at munificent salaries, to run it and distribute its income to liberal causes. The way to diminish leftist resentment at huge piles of private wealth is to give them a cut.
No wonder Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax went nowhere.
However, they did it, America’s most successful capitalists have learned the lesson some previous generations of capitalists did not — how to preserve their wealth, privilege and economic power and avoid such derisive terms as “capitalist pig.”
Yet, of greater interest, and import, is that the China of the new Great Helmsman, Xi Jinping, a one-party Communist dictatorship, coexists with hundreds of Chinese billionaires.
What would Marx, Lenin, Stalin or the Mao of the Revolution that triumphed in 1949, who put his country through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, say of Chinese oligarchs and plutocrats, each of whom possessed at least a billion dollars in wealth?
Politically, China remains under an ever-tightening Communist rule.
But today, there are inequalities of wealth between the working poor and middle class, and the well-to-do and rich, that would have been anathema to the revolutionaries who founded Communist China.
Is China running a capitalist economy to generate the wealth to consolidate Communist Party control of the nation and grow China’s economic, military and geostrategic power until China displaces America as the first power on earth? So it would appear.
One wonders: Has China found the formula for global ascendancy that eluded the Soviet Union of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev?
Use state capitalism and market incentives to build the economic wealth that can be translated into the growth to enable China to ascend to a level of power where it is indisputably the first nation on earth?
Are the Chinese billionaires the geese laying the golden eggs for the Chinese Communist party? Is Communist doctrine being updated to accommodate the most successful Communist country of them all?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
Author Jordan Peterson has said his life “has not been happy” in the years since he spoke out about a controversial Canadian bill that protected gender expression and identity.
My psychological advice to the courageous Jordan Peterson: Once you really get how small, petty and metaphysically insignificant evil and irrationality are, you can shut them out and they cannot hurt you, at least not emotionally.
Without a doubt there are moments when Joe Biden doesn’t know where his feet are. He frequently loses his mask and he often is confused but do not discount his mendacity for one second when he is lucid. He is and always has been a liar of epic proportions. Even more of his deceit can be seen here. He is not a nice man. He is not a good man. The smartest man he knows holds the Guinness World Record for smoking parmesan cheese.
It was widely predicted that the economy would add close to a million jobs last month but only 266,000 jobs were added. It was regarded as the biggest prediction fail since 1998 and one CNBC host thought it was a typo. Biden went out and blamed Donald Trump for the bad numbers while out of the other side of his mouth claimed that America was moving in the right direction.
Why is the employment report so dismal? Because Biden is providing a financial incentive to not work. Not working pays far better than working.
Under President Biden’s recently enacted $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, workers who lost their jobs to the pandemic shutdowns and scale-backs are now earning more in unemployment benefits than they did in wages. And that is stopping people from returning to work — just when employers are trying to reopen across the nation.
The unemployed are getting an extra $300 a week in federal benefits through Labor Day. That’s on top of state unemployment benefits averaging about $320 per week.
It all adds up to an average of $638 per week in combined federal and state unemployment payments. In 2019, that combined amount averaged out to $348 per week.
And that means
According to economists at Bank of America, the combined unemployment benefits mean that anyone earning less than $32,000 a year can potentially receive more income from unemployment aid than from their previous jobs.
Restaurants and small businesses are desperate to hire as the economy gains momentum but Biden is determined to smother them:
Owners and managers from New York, California, Washington, and Chicago told The Epoch Times hiring woes have become a nightmare amid a litany of other challenges like indoor occupancy rules. They say the federal unemployment bonuses handed out during the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic incentivized people to stay home instead of working.
It’s as though Biden wants kill the remaining businesses that scraped through the pandemic
Mark Fox, a Dublin native who lives in New York City, owns four restaurants in the Big Apple. While business is now finally starting to pick up, hiring troubles have slowed down the momentum.
“We have difficulty hiring hourly workers, bartenders, servers, bar-backs, busboys, runners, overnight cleaning staff,” Fox told The Epoch Times inside his flagship restaurant, The Ragtrader & Bo Peep Cocktail and Highball Store.
“We are probably 60 employees short,” he said. “I have one restaurant in Greenwich Village that I haven’t reopened yet because they don’t have the manpower.”
I have a long time friend who quit a job as chef because he could not find any help.
“Mr. President, do you believe enhanced unemployment benefits had any effect on diminishing a return to work in some categories?” a reporter asked Biden.
“No, nothing measurable,” Biden answered.
Talk about detached from reality. We cannot sustain as a nation by printing money and incentivizing people not to work. What’s wrong with him?
Perhaps it’s because he can’t find his measuring tape or his yardstick. Maybe it’s because he’s senile. Maybe it’s because he’s a liar. Maybe it’s because he’s a Chinese agent. Maybe it’s because he wants to grind the US economy to a halt.
For the Conservatives, Capitalism is moral only to the extent that the capitalist lives to serve others. Self-interest can be smuggled silently in but not as a moral right or as a moral ideal. This means that “creeping socialism” always has the advantage and thus creeps unabated.
Over and over for decades, Conservatives have made the point that socialism does not “work,” that it does not create wealth but rather leads to poverty. This is true. Despite promising nirvana, “utopian” (socialist) communities and countries based on communism and socialism always failed economically.
Conservatives (including Wall Street Journal op-ed writers, right-wing think tanks, and pro-free enterprise economics departments) keep repeating the obvious and assert that people simply need better economic education to set them straight. Yet Conservatives keep losing every battle; the left repeatedly responds by ignoring their argument and rationalizing socialist failures.
The rationalizations run the gamut:
Previous socialist programs were not run correctly.
The moral ideal was right, but people are just too corrupt to practice it—there is a flaw in human nature.
The failure was caused by a plot by the U.S. (usually the CIA).
Socialism takes years to come to fruition and will triumph at some unspecified, future date….and so on.
What is striking is that no matter what the economic failures, true socialists rarely give it up. Why not. Because it has a moral base. Ayn Rand has made it clear that, “The power of morality is the strongest of all intellectual powers…men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right.” (quoted in Binswanger, 1986, p. 315).
Morality trumps economic facts if there is a conflict. This is true even if one’s accepted code of morality is objectively wrong. Millions have died fighting for Communism and Nazism (national socialism), including murdering millions of victims and keeping millions of others in hopeless poverty.
What is the problem with Conservatives (for more details, see Binswanger, 1986, pp. 95-100)? The Conservative argument is based on a contradiction: Capitalism is practical because most people want to live better, but morally it is defended by altruism, the premise that one must live only for the sake of others. Thus, Capitalism is only permissible so long as one lives, or claims to live, for “the public good.” For the Conservatives, Capitalism is moral only to the extent that the capitalist lives to serve others.Self-interest can be smuggled silently in but not as a moral right or as a moral ideal. This means that “creeping socialism” always has the advantage and thus creeps unabated. The hapless Conservative defense is routinely: “Hey, let us not overdo it. Let us have some capitalism. The welfare state will work better if capitalists have permission to function.” Socialists face no such internal contradiction; sacrifice for and of others is the morally right thing to do even when everyone stays poor, cf. Cuba and Venezuela. (See Locke, 2020, for a detailed discussion of Venezuela).
The socialist’s indifference to poverty reveals that there is a deeper moral (objectively anti-moral) layer than altruism which means sacrifice for the benefit of others. Since others do not actually benefit, the deeper standard is the destruction of economic freedom as an end in itself. This is pure nihilism, destruction for the sake of destruction: better to have everyone grovel in poverty than to let one person make a profit. Socialism is based on hatred for human life. In socialist societies, the worst people, power lusters, rise to the top, but they only rise because socialism gives them a moral sanction.
What then would change a socialist’s mind? Convincing them that socialism is anti-life and that Capitalism, which is based on individual rights, is morally good, i.e., that every individual has a right to their own life, which includes the right to trade freely with others, based on self-interest, and profit from it (i.e., without fraud or coercion). This would mean that capitalists would be admired, both practically and morally, rather than reluctantly tolerated as a necessary evil or totally forbidden. Economic education will only be embraced by people who think that Capitalism is not just practical but morally good. Moral education is needed as the proper base for economic education.
Some might ask about the puzzling situation of a Communist dictatorship, China, openly fostering Capitalism (though with numerous controls). This is a historically unprecedented event. So, what explains it? It is not based on respect for individual rights since communists deny them. It is based purely on power lust. For centuries China was backwards in relation to the west. Now they have decided to be imperialists, and they saw that the only way they could get the needed power was to create wealth which would give them the ability to intimidate or dominate other countries by using economic and military force together, e.g., massive exports, cyber-crime, building a large, military including a nuclear arsenal, trying to forcibly take over international waters in the South China Sea, threatening and harming fishing vessels from other countries, seizing islands they do not own to build military bases, stealing copyrighted and military technology from foreign countries, bullying countries which displease them (Australia), invasion (Hong Kong, Tibet), continual military threats (Taiwan), loaning money to poor countries, who will not be able to repay them, as a means of gaining power over them, cooperating with other dictatorships such as North Korea and Iran which are also building nuclear weapons to attack the U.S., etc.
China recently acknowledged that their use of Capitalism was only a strategic move until full socialism could be established. China, right now, is the single biggest threat to world peace and freedom. The old-line Marxists said capitalists would buy or make the rope that will be used to hang them. China wants to make their own rope and hang us with it. It remains to be seen how all this will turn out. Our weapons are: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, our military might, Capitalism, and our commitment to freedom as a moral ideal–if we can keep them.
Nobody ever asks: If it’s so unsafe to go out in public that you must wear a cloth or paper face diaper, then how is it a good idea to go out in public at all? The issue isn’t that most people really believe masks are effective; I suspect that a majority do not. The issue is that the great majority will continue to wear masks, possibly into 2022 and beyond, so long as they are told to do so. If people place obedience and social conformity above reason and independence on THIS issue, then what else are they prepared to give up?
We should not only allow global capitalism; we should welcome it and foster it in every way possible. It is time to rephrase Karl Marx: Workers of the world unite for global capitalism; you have nothing to lose but your poverty.
A version of this article was first published in 2003. CM is republishing it because its message still remains relevant today.
May Day will once again be celebrated by left-wing and environmentalist protestors united by a single emotion: a virulent hatred of capitalism, especially global capitalism. Why the hatred?
The advantage of a global economy based on free trade and capitalism is so obvious and so enormous that it is difficult to conceive of anyone opposing it. The benefit is based on the law of comparative advantage: every country becomes more prosperous the more it invests in producing and exporting what it does best (in terms of quality, cost, uniqueness, etc.), and importing goods and services that other countries can produce more efficiently. For example, let us say that Nigerian companies can produce T-shirts for $1 a piece whereas U.S. companies can only produce them for $5 a piece. Under free trade, Americans will buy their T-shirts from Nigeria. This division of labor benefits people in both countries. Nigerians will have more money to buy food, clothing and housing. Americans will spend less on T-shirts and have more money to buy cell phones and SUVs, and the investment capital formerly spent on T-shirts will be put to more productive uses, say in the area of technology or drug research. Multiply this by millions of products and hundreds of countries and over time the benefits run into the trillions of dollars.
How, then, do we reconcile the incredible benefits of global capitalism with the anti-globalization movement? The protestors make three claims repeatedly. First, they argue that multinational corporations are becoming too powerful and threaten the sovereignty of smaller nations. This is absurd on the face of it. Governments have the power of physical coercion (the gun); corporations do not; they have only the dollar–they function through voluntary trade.
Second, anti-globalists claim that multinational companies exploit workers in poor countries by paying lower wages than they would pay in their home countries. Well, what is the alternative? It is: no wages! The comparative advantage of poorer countries is precisely that their wages are low, thus reducing the costs of production. If multinational corporations had to pay the same wages as in their home countries, they would not bother to invest in poorer countries at all and millions of people would lose their livelihoods.
Third, it is claimed that multinational corporations destroy the environments of smaller, poorer countries. Note that if 19th-century America had been subjected to the environmental legislation that now pervades most Western countries, we ourselves would still be a third-world country. Most of the industries that made the United States a world economic power–the steel, automobile, chemicals and electrical industries–would never have been able to develop. By what right do we deprive poor, destitute people in other countries from trying to create prosperity in the same way that we did, which is the only way possible?
All of these objections to global capitalism are just rationalizations. The giveaway, and the clue to the real motive of today’s left and their hangers-on, is that all their protests are against–they are anti-capitalism, anti-free trade, anti-using the environment for man’s benefit–but they are not for anything. In the first third of the 20th century, most leftists were idealists–they stood for and fought for an imagined, industrialized utopia–Communism (or Socialism). The left’s vision was man as a selfless slave of the state, and the state as the omniscient manager of the economy. However, instead of prosperity, happiness and freedom, Communism and Socialism produced nothing but poverty, misery and terror (witness Soviet Russia, North Korea and Cuba, among others). Their system had to fail, because it was based on a lie. You cannot create freedom and happiness by destroying individual rights; and you cannot create prosperity by negating the mind and evading the laws of economics.
Furious over the fact that their envisioned utopia has collapsed in ruins, the leftists now seek only destruction. They want to annihilate the system that has produced the very prosperity, happiness and freedom that their system could not produce. That system is capitalism, the system of true social justice where people are free to produce and keep what they earn.
The fact that free trade is now becoming truly global is one of the most important achievements in the history of mankind. If, in the end, it wins out over statism, global capitalism will bring about the greatest degree of prosperity and the greatest period of peaceful cooperation in world history.
We should scornfully ignore the nihilist protestors–they have nothing positive to offer. We should not only allow global capitalism; we should welcome it and foster it in every way possible. It is time to rephrase Karl Marx: Workers of the world unite for global capitalism; you have nothing to lose but your poverty.
Copyright 2003 Ayn Rand Institute. All rights reserved. That the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) has granted permission to Capitalism Magazine to republish this article, does not mean ARI necessarily endorses or agrees with the other content on this website.
ABOUT EDWIN A LOCKEEdwin A. Locke is Dean’s Professor of Leadership and Motivation Emeritus at the R.H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the American Psychological Association, the Society for Industrial & Organizational Behavior, and the Academy of Management. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (Society for I/O Psychology), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Management (OB Division), the J. M. Cattell Award (APS) and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Academy of Management. He, with Gary Latham, has spent over 50 years developing Goal Setting Theory, ranked No. 1 in importance among 73 management theories. He has published over 320 chapters, articles, reviews and notes, and has authored or edited 13 books including (w. Kenner) The Selfish Path to Romance, (w. Latham) New Directions in Goal Setting and Task Performance, and The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators. He is internationally known for his research on motivation, job satisfaction, leadership, and other topics. His website is: EdwinLocke.com
James Madison warned in the Federalist Papers in 1788 that “it will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.” Madison referred to the peril of excessive legislation; he may have never imagined that Congress would routinely enact thousand-page blockbusters without reading the text. But that is now standard procedure in Washington.
On the night of the day before Thanksgiving 1991, the House of Representatives approved a 1400-page highway bill — even though almost no member of the House had seen the bill and only one copy was available in the House chamber. Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.) observed at the time that congressional “bills are five times longer on the average than they were just as recently as 1970, with a far greater tendency to micromanage every area of government.” Conservatives were outraged, and a Republican Leadership Task Force proclaimed in 1993, “A bill that cannot survive a three-day scrutiny of its provisions is a bill that should not be enacted.”
When Bill Clinton railroaded a 972-page crime bill into law in 1994, Republicans saw the legislation only a few hours before the vote. That was irrelevant because Clinton proclaimed that it was “the will of God” that Congress speedily pass the bill. Clinton’s bill created dozens of new criminal offenses and opened a $10 billion subsidy spigot for local and state prison building that sent America’s incarceration rate skyrocketing in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Willful ignorance
Republicans captured control of Congress in the 1994 elections. But that did not deter House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Clinton from jamming a 4000-page, 40-pound agreement down Congress’s throat in 1998. No one had a chance to read the bill before voting. Legendary “King of Pork” Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) declared, “Only God knows what’s in this monstrosity.”
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration strong-armed the 342-page USA PATRIOT Act through Congress. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) complained that “the bill wasn’t printed before the vote.” Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, declared, “We are now debating at this hour of night, with only two copies of the bill that we are being asked to vote on available to Members on this side of the aisle.” Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the longest-serving member of the House, said the process was “denigrating basic constitutional rights, and I find it to have been done in a sneaky, dishonest fashion.” Regardless of the legislative travesty, Bush and Barack Obama routinely invoked Congress’s passage of the PATRIOT Act to justify their anti-terrorism policies.
During the George W. Bush era, legislative ignorance became a point of patriotic pride. Shortly before the 2006 congressional elections, Congress rushed to rubber-stamp a Bush administration barbaric interrogation wish-list part of the Military Commissions Act. The Boston Globe reported that “because of the Bush administration’s restrictive policy on sharing classified information with Congress, very few of the people engaged in the debate will know what they’re talking about.” Fewer than 50 members of Congress knew what actual interrogation methods were being debated, according to the Globe. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump’s first attorney general, boasted, “I don’t know what the CIA has been doing, nor should I know.” Retroactively legalizing torture, as the bill did, was a non-issue on Capitol Hill. Legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick declared, “We’ve reached a defining moment in our democracy when our elected officials are celebrating their own blind ignorance as a means of keeping the rest of us blindly ignorant as well.”
After the Democrats captured control of Congress in the 2006 elections, several members, including Sen. Barack Obama, endorsed requiring that any legislative proposal be available and online for at least 72 hours before Congress voted on it. But that provision was not included in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, which Politico hailed as “sweeping ethics reform legislation.” Nine years later, Politico derided that same law as “the lobbying reform that enriched Congress,” noting that it “created an entire class of professional influencers who operate in the shadows, out of the public eye and unaccountable.”
The Obama administration’s 2700-page Affordable Care Act was another unread Pandora’s box. The bill was almost 400,000 words long; within four years, the Obama administration would issue more than 10 million words of regulations to enforce it. This time Conyers scoffed at members of Congress who “get up and say, ‘Read the bill.’ What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?” Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) later explained, “I don’t expect to actually read the legislative language, because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I’ve ever read in my life.” But not nearly as confusing as the blizzard of new mandates that private companies were forced to obey.
The law sparked widespread outrage, spurring many congressmen to cancel all public meetings with their constituents that summer. At a Montana forum in August 2010, a retired nurse asked Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who boasted that he wrote much of the Affordable Care Act, whether he read the health-care bill before it was passed. Baucus replied, “I don’t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health-care bill. You know why? It’s statutory language. We hire experts.”
In the 2010 congressional elections, Republicans campaigned on a “Pledge to America” to “ensure that bills are debated and discussed in the public square by publishing the text online for at least three days before coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives.” Republicans captured control of the House but that didn’t stop Republican congressional leaders a few months later from cutting a deal with Obama and rushing a 459-page budget deal through Congress, leaving members time neither to read nor to digest it before approving it.
Doorstops
Three years later, in December 2014, Congress enacted a 1200-page, $560 billion National Defense Authorization Act that was available to members only 36 hours prior to their vote. When asked whether members of Congress had read the bill, Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) replied, “Of course not. Are you kidding?” Moran explained that he felt no obligation to read the text because “I trust the leadership.” Later that month, members of Congress heaved all their unfinished work into a 15-pound lump of paper which no one had time to comprehend before approving. The 1603-page blockbuster was a continuing resolution omnibus bill that was nicknamed “Cromnibus.” House Speaker John Boehner scoffed at concerns about the process: “Understand, all these provisions in the bill have been worked out in a bicameral, bipartisan fashion or else they wouldn’t be in the bill.” And never before in American history have problems resulted from the closed-door deals on Capitol Hill.
As I wrote for USA Today in 2014 (“Government by Cromnibus — Blind, Deaf, and Dumb”), “Ignorance of the law is an excuse only for the congressmen who voted for the law.” There have been plenty of “scale-buster” pieces of legislation enacted without having been read since then, usually accompanied by sporadic media whining about the process. Most politicians’ love of power will always exceed their intellectual curiosity.
“You can lead a man to Congress but you can’t make him think,” quipped Milton Berle in 1956. Or read. According to a 1977 survey of House members by the House Administration Committee, the average congressman spends only 11 minutes a day reading at work. That survey result was so embarrassing that it has not been repeated since then. Congress has its own legislative research agencies as well as instant access to more than 4000 reports regularly produced by other federal agencies. But former ten-term congressman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) admitted that “a lot of the reports that have been mandated from these federal agencies are so overwhelming that I didn’t generally look at them.” Rather than reading the reports, one longtime congressional staffer told the Washington Post in 2014 that “we used them as doorstops.”
Legislative ignorance is treacherous in part because there is no Hippocratic Oath — “first, do no harm” — on Capitol Hill. Because politicians won an election, they often act entitled to dictate rules on anything and everything under the sun. The hefty omnibus bill that Congress passed late last year contains a blizzard of laws, penalties, and handouts that will take months to decipher. The media will be exposing horror stories from the bill long after congressional leaders finish their victory lap.
Congress would not be passing massive unread bills without a blind faith that government compulsion is inherently superior to what individual persons can do for themselves in daily life. Politicians assume their clueless decrees are better than decisions citizens make for themselves after gathering the best information they can find. Political action per se is presumptively redemptive for humanity — as exemplified by one congressman’s appeal to vote for the 2014 omnibus bill without reading it: “Hold your nose and make this a better world.”
But Congress in its routine operations is more slapdash than the vast majority of Americans in their daily lives. How many citizens routinely sign thousand-page contracts without reading them? Would anyone hire a lawyer who admitted he failed to examine settlement agreements he approved? Such an admission would spur a lawsuit for malpractice. But congressmen have legal immunity for anything they do on the floor of the House and Senate.
There is no prudent reason to expect fundamental change on Capitol Hill. Congress has always been fairly irresponsible, but the damage is vastly greater now. Instead of being a meddlesome distant uncle who ruins a family reunion once a year, Congress is a daily taskmaster with the authority to intervene in almost every aspect of Americans’ lives. Since we cannot expect members of Congress to behave more wisely or responsibly in the future, how much power should they possess over other Americans? Fantasizing about reforms that could create wiser legislators simply paves the way to bigger boondoggles down the road.
James Bovard is a policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a USA Today columnist and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, Playboy, American Spectator, Investors Business Daily, and many other publications. He is the author of Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty (2017, published by FFF); Public Policy Hooligan (2012); Attention Deficit Democracy (2006); The Bush Betrayal (2004); Terrorism and Tyranny (2003); Feeling Your Pain (2000); Freedom in Chains (1999); Shakedown (1995); Lost Rights (1994); The Fair Trade Fraud (1991); and The Farm Fiasco (1989). He was the 1995 co-recipient of the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the recipient of the 1996 Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. His book Lost Rights received the Mencken Award as Book of the Year from the Free Press Association. His Terrorism and Tyranny won Laissez Faire Book’s Lysander Spooner award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. Read his blog. Send him email.
The Who legend Roger Daltrey says the ‘woke’ generation is creating a miserable world that serves to stifle the kind of creative freedom he enjoyed in the 60s.
The iconic frontman made the comments during a recent appearance on Zane Lowe’s Apple Music 1 podcast.
“I don’t know, we might get somewhere because it’s becoming so absurd now with AI, all the tricks it can do, and the woke generation,” said Daltrey.
“It’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean, anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing, you just know that it’s a route to nowhere,” he added.
The singer noted how he was lucky to have lived through an era where freedom of speech was encouraged, not silenced.
“Especially when you’ve lived through the periods of a life that we’ve had the privilege to. I mean, we’ve had the golden era. There’s no doubt about that,” he said.
Daltrey also slammed the negative impact that social media has had on the world, saying it has undermined truth.
“It’s just getting harder to disseminate the truth. It’s almost like, now we should turn the whole thing off. Go back to newsprint, go back to word of mouth and start to read books again,” he said.
While Daltrey’s comments may not be mind-blowing, any celebrity speaking out against the mob that has cannibalized culture is something to be applauded.
Once again, this only tends to happen with older celebrities who have already passed their peak of fame and entered icon status. They are beyond cancellation.
For any up and coming celebrity, or even one who is at the top of their game, to question ‘generation woke’ is career suicide.
Which makes it all the more ludicrous to continue to see identitarians, notably the LGBT movement, continue to claim they are ‘fighting oppression’ when their mantras are echoed by every cultural institution, media outlet and corporate entity in the west, while anyone who utters a whimper of dissent is swiftly cancelled.
The 1619 Project was developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times that supposedly focuses on the cause(s) and consequences of slavery, etc, but does this “project” miss the target intentionally or otherwise?
Before anything like this “project” (opposed by President Donald Trump and numerous other politicians, educators, etc, across the United States) should have even been attempted, much less potentially taught within classrooms in high school or beyond, were the times before the 1600’s explored or even much less considered? Those origins could be covered in a “1400’s Project” that deals with how the slave trade began in the 1400’s with African tribes who collaborated with Europeans in the slave trade. A further examination of the slave trade could be brought about by delving into the rampant slavery conducted by Muslim areas of the Middle East even before the 1400’s and the degree to which they enslaved both blacks and whites. And did any nations in the Middle East before the 700’s-1000’s AD engage in a slave trade, even during BC times?
Pertaining to the slave trade and the 1600’s, has an in-depth and comprehensive analysis been conducted and published looking beyond merely which nations were involved and perusing which specific companies were involved in any way or capacity (primarily, secondarily or even tangentially), who owned the slave ships, where were the slave houses in Europe or across the ocean located, on what days was the selling of slaves conducted, and on and on?
Pertaining to CRT and/or any of its proponents, how could they, if they were to say so, possibly declare that enslaving others is indicative of only one race and ignore it being a problem potentially found within all humans of the past?
