There have been protests against racism in the past, of course. But this year has been different. Never before have people on every continent, in countries and towns facing their own unique problems, turned out in such huge numbers to support the same cause. Never before have books like White Fragility, Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race and How To Be An Antiracist become international bestsellers. And never before has a protest movement had such establishment backing. In the UK, BLM has been publicly endorsed by the royal family, the football Premier League, and senior politicians. Multinational corporations have got in on the act, too. Ice-cream maker Ben and Jerry’s has pledged to do all it can to dismantle white supremacy, while elite universities have issued statements denouncing their own institutional racism.

The mainstreaming and elite-backing of anti-racism initiatives speaks to a new understanding of racism. Critical race theory (CRT) used to be a minority pursuit, an obscure academic interest. In 2020 it provided the rationale for protests, books, diversity workshops and school lessons. In June, Channel 4 screened The School That Tried to End Racism, a documentary series that followed the progress of children made to undergo an anti-racist re-education programme based upon principles of CRT. New phrases entered our vocabulary. Terms like systemic racism, unconscious bias, white privilege, cultural appropriation, reparations, microaggression and intersectionality migrated from academics and activists to newspapers, radio discussions, charity campaigns and school lessons. President Trump and Kemi Badenoch, the UK’s minister for equalities, made speeches explicitly naming CRT and calling out its perniciousness.

What is CRT ?

CRT begins with a challenge to the ‘scientific’ racism of the 19th and early 20th century. In the days of empire, colonial exploitation and slavery were justified by a belief that white people were physically, mentally and morally superior to the people they ruled over. This view extended to the working class at home, who were portrayed as genetically distinct from and inferior to the upper class. This biological understanding of race began to be called into question after the Second World War, although its legacy continued to play out in Apartheid-era South Africa, Jim Crow laws in the American South and discrimination in the UK.

Critical race theorists are not the first to point out that race is socially constructed; that is, it is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but created and made meaningful by people collectively, over time and place. Few today disagree with this point. But whereas a previous generation of anti-racists challenged the social significance attributed to biological differences to argue that there was one race, the human race, and emphasised universal traits that create a common humanity irrespective of skin colour, critical race theorists argue that, once constructed, race becomes an incontestable fact. As Robin Di Angelo explains in White Fragility: ‘While there is no biological race as we understand it, race as a social construct has profound significance and shapes every aspect of our lives.’ (1)

When race is seen in this way, racism is understood as systemic; that is, built into the very fabric of societies designed by white people, for the benefit of white people. Proponents of CRT argue that ideas of white superiority and black inferiority are intrinsic to our language, culture and interpretations of history. Every aspect of our daily lives, from education, policing, the health service and employment assumes a white norm, they argue, and this makes a mockery of equality before the law and the liberal notion of equality of opportunity. As Reni Eddo-Lodge explains in Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race: ‘If you’re white, your race will almost certainly positively impact your life’s trajectory in some way. And you probably won’t even notice it.’ In an inescapably circular argument, race is constructed and made meaningful through racism; it is people’s everyday experiences within a racist society that create the reality of race.

The Origins of Critical Race Theory

CRT is newly fashionable and highly influential, but it has a long and complex history. Its origins can be traced back to a divide within the US civil-rights movement. Free speech, democracy and legal equality were initially considered integral to the fight for civil rights, but by the end of the 1960s, with progress appearing to have stalled and both racism and poverty still major problems, groups within the movement began to question the efficacy of these principles. Many arrived at the conclusion that legal equality not only left social inequality intact but actually provided the context and justification for its continuation. As the authors of Words That Wound, a key CRT text published in 1993, point out:

‘It became apparent to many who were active in the civil-rights movement that dominant conceptions of race, racism, and equality were increasingly incapable of providing any meaningful quantum of racial justice.’

Having come up against the limits of formal, legal equality, the question facing the civil-rights movement at this point was how best to achieve social equality. As Helen Pluckrose and James A Lindsay point out in Cynical Theories, more materialist activists focused on housing, schooling, employment and income. For some, this led to championing black nationalism and segregation over universal human rights. At the same time, some began to find a home within academia where, to quote Words that wound:

‘individual law teachers and students committed to racial justice began to meet, to talk, to write, and to engage in political action in an effort to confront and oppose dominant societal and institutional forces that maintained the structures of racism while professing the goal of dismantling racial discrimination.’

These academic activists argued that ‘majoritarian self-interest’ was ‘a critical factor in the ebb and flow of civil-rights doctrine’; in other words, a white-majority society would be unlikely to cede its power voluntarily (1). A key text to come out of this period was by Derrick Bell, Harvard’s first African American professor. In Race, Racism and American Law, published in 1970, Bell argued that white people only concede rights when it is in their interests to do so. By 1987, his views had crystalised further and he was able to explain that, ‘progress in American race relations is largely a mirage obscuring the fact that whites continue, consciously or unconsciously, to do all in their power to ensure their dominion and maintain their control’.

Black scholars found common cause with professors engaged in critical legal studies who sought to formulate a radical left-wing critique of dominant liberal approaches to the law. Together, they drew from ‘liberalism, Marxism, the law-and-society movement, critical legal studies, feminism, poststructuralism/postmodernism, and neopragmatism’. A key aim was to examine ‘the relationships between naming and reality, knowledge and power’ (2). This marked a splintering from the materialists and a distinct turn towards subjectivity. It led to racism being understood not just as legal and economic inequalities, but as social, cultural and psychological practices. At this point, as Matsuda et al tell us, ‘Scholars of colour within the left began to ask their white colleagues to examine their own racism and to develop oppositional critiques not just to dominant conceptions of race and racism but to the treatment of race within the left as well’. Their conclusions presented racism, ‘not as isolated instances of conscious bigoted decision-making or prejudiced practice, but as larger, systemic, structural, and cultural, as deeply psychologically and socially ingrained’ (3).

In 1981, Kimberlé Crenshaw, then a student of Derrick Bell’s, led a protest against Harvard Law School when it refused to hire a black professor to teach Race, Racism and American Law following Bell’s departure. Crenshaw, along with others, invited leading academics and practitioners of colour to lecture on a course aimed at ‘developing a full account of the legal construction of race and racism’. Bringing people together in this joint intellectual project crystalised the ideas underpinning critical race theory. By the end of the 1980s, Crenshaw’s work led her to devise a framework she labelled ‘intersectionality’ to describe how multiple features of a person’s identity can combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Her 1991 essay, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Colour, has been especially influential.

Pluckrose and Lindsay point out that the concerns of materialists dominated the critical race movement from the 1970s to the 1980s. However, by the 1990s, a more identity-focused and postmodern understanding of CRT, driven primarily by radical black feminists such as Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins and Angela Harris, was becoming increasingly popular. Today, CRT is mainstream and terms like ‘structural racism’ now refer to structures of thought far more than any structural, material analysis of society. Activists have taken the subjective, identitarian and psychological understanding of racism developed within universities and transformed it into a list of commandments all must obey.

The rules of CRT

Critical race theorists may not see race as a biological fact, but they do view it as an ingrained outlook, endemic in culture and imprinted on the consciousness of every individual. As a consequence, racism will never be solved by challenging individual instances of prejudice; instead, the entire social hierarchy must be overturned. Achieving this goal necessitates rejecting false beliefs in objectivity, neutrality, equality and meritocracy. Personal, or ‘lived’, experience trumps all else. People can never hope to understand the world other than from the standpoint of their identity group. As DiAngelo makes clear: ‘I have a white frame of reference and a white worldview, and I move through the world with a white experience.’

Once the importance of lived experience is accepted, then it is only logical to reject ‘colour blindness’; people must, first and foremost, see themselves and others as racialised beings. Alongside this, white people must recognise their privilege and black people their oppression. Original privilege/oppression means it is not enough not to be racist, or even to remain silent — people must be actively anti-racist. Anti-racism starts with white people acknowledging their own racism and battling the fragility prompted by threats to their privilege. From here, we must probe deep into our psyches to root out unconscious bias before, with each word uttered, we set about constructing reality anew.

The problems with CRT

This view of race and racism, drawn from CRT but which is now mainstream, represents a significant break from the anti-racism of the past. Anti-racism has moved from focusing on the material conditions of people’s lives to the inner workings of their minds; from challenging legal inequality to calling-out cultural representations; from aiming to eradicate race to seeing everyone as racialised; from considering racism an aberration to viewing it as the norm. This shift in anti-racism throws up new problems.

Much of the thinking, and many of the leading proponents of CRT, come from the US. Yet often its ideas are imported wholesale into the UK and other countries without taking into account their specific historical and cultural context. For example, Britain had no equivalent of enforced segregation, but citizens arriving in the UK from former colonies did experience racial discrimination and prejudice. This is at best misunderstood and at worst ignored if we superimpose an American analytical framework on to British society.

Presenting racism as endemic and intractable ignores all progress that has been made and suggests attempts at further change will be futile. Instead, all campaigners can do is dig ever more deeply for examples to expose the racism they know to exist. A focus on microaggressions, subtle acts of racism that may be perpetrated unknowingly – for example, asking someone where they are from – may well surprise people who came up against legal discriminatory policies in employment and housing several decades ago. Yet, to DiAngelo, ‘racism’s adaptations over time are more sinister than concrete rules such as Jim Crow’.

Just at the point when ‘scientific’ racism was being thoroughly discredited, CRT breathed life back into racial thinking by insisting everyone has a racial identity, and this alone determines our perception and understanding of the world. Rejecting colour-blindness pushes us to view each other as racialised beings. The emphasis on group membership simultaneously erodes both differences between individuals and the possibility of finding common cause across identity groupings. At worst, this provides fresh justification for racial segregation. Eddo-Lodge does not see the increase in interracial families as a positive sign that people are becoming less prejudiced. Instead she argues that ‘white privilege is never more pronounced than in our intimate relationships, our close friendships and our families’, and urges parents of mixed-race children ‘to be humble, and to learn that they are racist even if they don’t think that they are’.

CRT’s obsession with racial categorisation and white privilege leaves little room to consider the impact of social class on people’s life chances. Indeed, in the rush to construct intersectional hierarchies that position people of colour as oppressed victims of entrenched white superiority, the experiences of wealthy, highly educated, well-connected black people are overlooked. And rather than promoting solidarity between working-class people of all skin colours, poor white people must be taught to recognise their privileges.

Some people certainly do benefit from CRT. The academics, experts and workplace trainers that comprise the burgeoning diversity industry make a good living and find an important sense of purpose in revealing our unconscious bias, hearing penance and holding out the promise of absolution. They are morally invested in the existence of racism and cannot afford for it to ever disappear.

Members of the wider graduate class of experts, bureaucrats and managers have imbibed the CRT script. They know that, to paraphrase the socialite and journalist Nancy Mitford, referring to ‘people of colour’ is ‘U’ (vocabulary that marks one out as upper class), while ‘coloured people’ is distinctly ‘non-U’. They know that three years ago, the acronym BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) fell out of fashion and was replaced by BAME (with Asian specified). And they know that BAME itself is now on its way out. Attitudes change and language evolves over time but policing vocabulary in the name of enforcing anti-racism is how today’s graduate class shores up its moral authority and social status. Their special insights into white privilege and the impact of microaggressions allow them to justify their position.

This elite anti-racist project is terrible for everyone else. Black and white people alike are reduced to their skin colour and set in opposition to one another. Black people must learn to see themselves as victims, white people as privileged oppressors. Back in the days of empire, upper-class British boys were trained up for a life in the colonies, they had a role to fulfil managing and civilising the natives. Over a century on, the natives are now at home rather than abroad, and white rather than black or brown, but the civilising mission remains the same. It is now white working-class men who are made to atone for their privilege in a neverending process of repentance. As DiAngelo puts it:

‘A positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy.’

We have a new elite that uses not racism but anti-racism to invent differences between people which it exploits for its own ends. These radicals do not want to end racism but for it to continue indefinitely. They must not be allowed to get away with this.

Joanna Williams is currently researching hate crime in her role as director of the Freedom, Democracy and Victimhood Project at the think tank, Civitas.

“Ambition” means the systematic pursuit of achievement and of constant improvement in respect to one’s goal. Like the word “selfishness,” and for the same reasons, the word “ambition” has been perverted to mean only the pursuit of dubious or evil goals, such as the pursuit of power; this left no concept to designate the pursuit of actual values. But “ambition” as such is a neutral concept: the evaluation of a given ambition as moral or immoral depends on the nature of the goal. A great scientist or a great artist is the most passionately ambitious of men. A demagogue seeking political power is ambitious. So is a social climber seeking “prestige.” So is a modest laborer who works conscientiously to acquire a home of his own. The common denominator is the drive to improve the conditions of one’s existence, however broadly or narrowly conceived. (“Improvement” is a moral term and depends on one’s standard of values. An ambition guided by an irrational standard does not, in fact, lead to improvement, but to self-destruction.)

Politically, the goal of today’s dominant trend is statism. Philosophically, the goal is the obliteration of reason; psychologically, it is the erosion of ambition.

The political goal presupposes the two others. The human characteristic required by statism is docility, which is the product of hopelessness and intellectual stagnation. Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.

Laziness leads to sloppiness, and sloppiness is how the most brazen heist in American history is being exposed.

Stealing the 2020 election was a mammoth undertaking, involving widespread lawlessness and illicit partnerships between private actors and public officials. They’ve been working to cover their tracks since Election Day, but they didn’t work fast enough. Now, the courts need to stop them from destroying any more evidence so that the people of Pennsylvania—and the rest of the country—can accurately assess the ramifications of their wrongdoing.

Explosive new litigation filed in federal district court on Nov. 21 details and documents a wide variety of illegal practices that were used to inflate the number of votes received by Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, including disparate treatment of voters based on where they live and outright manipulation of Pennsylvania’s voter registration system by partisan activists.

An unprecedented number of mail-in and absentee ballots were cast this year, and practically everyone expected that this would result in a higher-than-usual rate of ballots being rejected for various flaws, such as lacking a secrecy envelope or missing information. In Pennsylvania, tens or hundreds of thousands of ballots were likely to be rejected, based on historical patterns. Instead, a mere 0.03 percent of mail-in ballots were ultimately rejected—somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1,000 votes.

Considering that a significant majority of mail-in votes were cast for Biden, the Democrat candidate benefited handsomely from this discrepancy. But how did this anomaly happen?

It turns out that election officials in Democrat strongholds such as Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), Philadelphia County, and Philadelphia’s collar counties—particularly Delaware County—exceeded their authority in order to give voters preferential treatment that wasn’t afforded to voters in Republican-leaning areas of the state.

Specifically, election workers illegally “pre-canvassed” mail-in ballots to determine whether they were missing a secrecy envelope or failed to include necessary information. When ballots were found to be flawed, voters were given an opportunity to correct, or “cure,” their ballots to make sure they counted. In at least some cases, Democrat Party officials were even given lists of voters to contact about curing their ballots.

Election officials in Republican-leaning counties rightly interpreted this as a violation of Pennsylvania’s election code, but Democrat Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar issued guidance authorizing the illegal practices despite lacking the statutory authority to do so.

That’s not the only way Democrats broke the law to give their candidate an unfair advantage, though. Extensive on-the-ground investigations conducted over the past year and a half by attorneys and investigators with the Amistad Project of the nonpartisan Thomas More Society have uncovered another element of the plot that involved even more egregious behavior.

Boockvar also exceeded her authority by granting private, partisan organizations—including the notoriously pro-Democrat group “Rock the Vote”—access to the Commonwealth’s Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE).

“Rock the Vote’s web tool was connected to our system, making the process of registering voters through their online programs, and those of their partners, seamless for voters across Pennsylvania,” the lawsuit quotes Boockvar as saying.

That’s not supposed to happen. It’s one thing for outside groups to submit registration applications to the state on behalf of would-be voters, but election clerks are the only ones who are supposed to enter this sort of information directly into the records.

It’s easy to see why by inspecting post-election voter lists, which contain names such as “Mary April Smith,” followed by “Mary May Smith,” “Mary June Smith,” “Mary July Smith,” and so forth through the rest of the calendar. When the same voter lists were purchased just a week later, however, those suspicious names had mysteriously disappeared from the rolls.

Under the circumstances, that’s direct evidence of a systematic effort to conceal wrongdoing. All further alterations to the SURE system should be immediately halted to allow a thorough investigation of the records before any more evidence can be destroyed.

The thieves who attempted to hijack the 2020 presidential election were bound to slip up somewhere, and now they’re trying to clean up the glaring evidence of their wrongdoing before the full extent of their crimes can be exposed to the American public. We can’t allow that to happen, or we may never be able to trust the integrity of our elections again.

Newt Gingrich, a Republican, served as House speaker from 1995 to 1999 and ran as a presidential candidate in 2012.

[There is a] dangerous little catch phrase which advises you to keep an “open mind.” This is a very ambiguous term—as demonstrated by a man who once accused a famous politician of having “a wide open mind.” That term is an anti-concept: it is usually taken to mean an objective, unbiased approach to ideas, but it is used as a call for perpetual skepticism, for holding no firm convictions and granting plausibility to anything. A “closed mind” is usually taken to mean the attitude of a man impervious to ideas, arguments, facts and logic, who clings stubbornly to some mixture of unwarranted assumptions, fashionable catch phrases, tribal prejudices—and emotions. But this is not a “closed” mind, it is a passive one. It is a mind that has dispensed with (or never acquired) the practice of thinking or judging, and feels threatened by any request to consider anything.

What objectivity and the study of philosophy require is not an “open mind,” but an active mind—a mind able and eagerly willing to examine ideas, but to examine them critically. An active mind does not grant equal status to truth and falsehood; it does not remain floating forever in a stagnant vacuum of neutrality and uncertainty; by assuming the responsibility of judgment, it reaches firm convictions and holds to them. Since it is able to prove its convictions, an active mind achieves an unassailable certainty in confrontations with assailants—a certainty untainted by spots of blind faith, approximation, evasion and fear.

HENRY Hazlitt was one of American history’s most prolific public intellectuals. According to Lew Rockwell, he “was familiar with the work of every important thinker in nearly every field,” and “wrote in every important public forum of his day.” His published work as a journalist, literary critic, philosopher, and economist ran to roughly 10 million words before his death in 1993, including perhaps the most popular economics book ever written—Economics in One Lesson. In that vast output, perhaps Hazlitt’s most important contribution was his consistent defense of the central importance of liberty in American life, even though it lost him more than one job.

At a time where real commitment to liberty is very scarce, Americans need to remember his wisdom. Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality. Morality can only exist in a free society, it can exist to the extent freedom exists.

“Freedom to” is a guarantee that no one, including the government, will be allowed to interfere with one’s freedom. The future of human liberty … means the future of civilization. True adherents of liberty…[believe] in limited government, in the maximization of liberty for the individual and the minimization of the coercion to the lowest point compatible with law and order … we believe in free trade, free markets, free enterprise, private property.

The “private sector” of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector … the “public sector” is, in fact, the coercive sector. Capitalism, the system of private property and free markets, is not only a system of freedom and of natural justice—which tends … to distribute rewards in accordance with production—but it is a great cooperative and creative system that has produced … affluence that our ancestors did not dare dream of.

Government can’t give anything without depriving us of something else. Only if the modern state can be held within a strictly limited agenda … can it be prevented from regimenting, conquering, and ultimately devouring the society which gave it birth.

Liberty is so precious an end in itself that Lord Acton was moved to declare that it is “not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” Yet though liberty is beyond doubt an end in itself, it is also of the highest value … as a means to most of our other ends.

We can pursue not only our economic but our intellectual and spiritual goals only if we are free to do so. Moral rules which forbid mankind to hurt one another … include wrongful interference with each other’s freedom.

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. Many of today’s most eloquent in their arguments for liberty in fact preach philosophies that would destroy … economic liberty. Our intelligentsia….misprize economic liberty because … they lack the knowledge or understanding to recognize that when economic liberties are abridged or destroyed, all other liberties are abridged or destroyed with them.

Liberty is a whole, and to deny economic liberty is finally to destroy all liberty. I’ve been preaching liberty against coercion; I’ve been preaching this doctrine in every form without any excuse, and yet the world is more socialized than when I began.

The ideas which now pass for brilliant innovations and advances are in fact mere revivals of ancient errors, and a further proof of the dictum that those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it.

There is a passion built into a very large number of men to rule over others. In established democracies this takes the form of candidates for office determined to outbid their rivals in promising handouts or other favors to pressure groups in their districts at the expense of some unnamed minority.

The mounting burden of taxation not only undermines individual incentives to increased work and earnings, but in a score of ways discourages capital accumulation and distorts, unbalances, and shrinks production. Total real wealth and income is made smaller than it would otherwise be.

On net balance there is more poverty rather than less. The “conquest of poverty” is a product of the capitalist system which protected private property. [Forgotten are] the ones who are always called upon to stanch the politician’s bleeding heart by paying for his vicarious generosity.

The first requisite of a sound monetary system is that it put the least possible power over the quantity or quality of money in the hands of the politicians. The superior freedom of the capitalist system, its superior justice, and its superior productivity are not three superiorities, but one.

The justice follows from the freedom and the productivity follows from the freedom and the justice. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Henry Hazlitt recognized liberty as the only moral system and economic liberty, or capitalism, as the only means of organizing society that can benefit all. And he defended that position powerfully against many attacks.

As Ludwig von Mises described him, “in this age of great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which men can live as free men, you … are the economic conscience of our country.”

During his life, Hazlitt saw America taking the opposite course, with ever more resources forcibly taken from some for whatever and whomever the government decides. Now, much farther down that path, his understanding is even more important.

What is meant by “the supernatural”? Supposedly, a realm that transcends nature. What is nature? Nature is existence—the sum of that which is. It is usually called “nature” when we think of it as a system of interconnected, interacting entities governed by law. So “nature” really means the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance with their identities. What, then, is “super-nature”? Something beyond the universe, beyond entities, beyond identity. It would have to be: a form of existence beyond existence—a kind of entity beyond anything man knows about entities—a something which contradicts everything man knows about the identity of that which is. In short, a contradiction of every metaphysical essential.

They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it “another dimension,” which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it “the future,” which consists of denying the present. To exist is to possess identity. What identity are they able to give to their superior realm? They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say—and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge—God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

There is no way to prove a “super-existence” by inference from existence; supernaturalism can be accepted only on faith.

The premise of such a poll is that President Trump is on his way out, on January 20. If so, that means massive election fraud won. That means a soft-core dictatorship will be established by the Biden crime family. It will soon be followed by the real deal: a hard core dictatorship with Kamala Harris in charge of a command-and-control economy, including a packed Supreme Court, and an obliterated First and Second Amendment. Also, it implies that Democrats will succeed at stealing two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia in the upcoming runoffs, meaning they will now control the entire government … essentially forever. For an illustration of what that will look like, check out Kamala Harris’ own California: Even a decade ago, it was a vibrant two-party state. It will never be again. Republicans there have given up.

Remember: If this election fraud is successful, Democrats have not merely unseated President Trump. They have obliterated the Constitution and made all future elections absolutely meaningless.

I’m not trying to be negative. I’m simply stating obvious facts, using common sense-level logic. You cannot “try again” with President Trump or Donald Trump, Jr., in 2024. Not if there’s no more American republic.

Let’s be realistic. We’re already in a civil war. The Democrats and all their friends in big government, big media, and the corporate world will NOT tolerate a Trump reversal of this election. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t try. But if he succeeds, we’ve got a civil war. And if he doesn’t succeed — well, we’ve got either a civil war or a dictatorship. Or both. I see no way out. I see no third alternative. The closest I can envision to a third alternative is a peaceful divorce. All the “red” areas of the country peacefully separate themselves from the Communist, hard core blue areas. The kind of people who love their remaining liberty separate themselves from the kind of people who actually view Kamala Harris in charge of the armed forces a GOOD thing.

If ever there were irreconcilable differences, I would say we are seeing them now. With COVID fascism continuing indefinitely; with government shutting down millions of businesses and churches; with government indirectly (for now) censoring social media, and (very soon) confiscating weapons of self-defense, none of us can any longer escape politics. There’s no “agreeing to disagree” with differences of this magnitude. Like it or not, the war is on.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Excerpted from The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, by The Great Ludwig von Mises

The substitution of laissez-faire capitalism for the precapitalistic methods of economic management has multiplied population figures and raised in an unprecedented way the average standard of living. A nation is the more prosperous today the less it has tried to put obstacles in the way of the spirit of free enterprise and private initiative. The people of the United States are more prosperous than the inhabitants of all other countries because their government embarked later than the governments in other parts of the world upon the policy of obstructing business. Nonetheless many people, and especially intellectuals, passionately loathe capitalism. As they see it, this ghastly mode of society’s economic organization has brought about nothing but mischief and misery. Men were once happy and prosperous in the good old days preceding the “Industrial Revolution.” Now under capitalism, the immense majority are starving paupers ruthlessly exploited by rugged individualists. For these scoundrels, nothing counts but their moneyed interests. They do not produce good and really useful things, but only what will yield the highest profits. They poison bodies with alcoholic beverages and tobacco, and souls and minds with tabloids, lascivious books, and silly moving pictures. The “ideological superstructure” of capitalism is a literature of decay and degradation, the burlesque show, and the art of strip-tease, the Hollywood pictures, and the detective stories.

The bias and bigotry of public opinion manifests itself most clearly in the fact that it attaches the epithet “capitalistic” exclusively to things abominable, never to those of which everybody approves. How can any good come from capitalism! What is valuable has been produced in spite of capitalism, but the bad things are excrescences of capitalism.

It is the task of this essay to analyze this anti-capitalistic bias and to disclose its roots and its consequences.

The Sovereign Consumer

The characteristic feature of modern capitalism is the mass production of goods destined for consumption by the masses. The result is a tendency towards a continuous improvement in the average standard of living, a progressing enrichment of the many. Capitalism deproletarianizes the “common man” and elevates him to the rank of a “bourgeois.”

On the market of a capitalistic society, the common man is the sovereign consumer whose buying or abstention from buying ultimately determines what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Those shops and plants which cater exclusively or predominantly to the wealthier citizens’ demand for refined luxuries play merely a subordinate role in the economic setting of the market economy. They never attain the size of big business. Big business always serves—directly or indirectly—the masses.

It is this ascension of the multitude in which the radical social change brought about by the “Industrial Revolution” consists. Those underlings who in all the preceding ages of history had formed the herds of slaves and serfs, of paupers and beggars, became the buying public, for whose favor the businessmen canvass. They are the customers who are “always right,” the patrons who have the power to make poor suppliers rich and rich suppliers poor.

There are in the fabric of a market economy not sabotaged by the nostrums of governments and politicians no grandees and squires keeping the populace in submission, collecting tributes and imposts, and gaudily feasting while the villains must put up with the crumbs. The profit system makes those men prosper who have succeeded in filling the wants of the people in the best possible and cheapest way. Wealth can be acquired only by serving the consumers. The capitalists lose their funds as soon as they fail to invest them in those lines in which they satisfy best the demands of the public. In a daily repeated plebiscite in which every penny gives a right to vote the consumers determine who should own and run the plants, shops, and farms. The control of the material means of production is a social function, subject to the confirmation or revocation by the sovereign consumers.

This is what the modern concept of freedom means. Every adult is free to fashion his life according to his own plans. He is not forced to live according to the plan of a planning authority enforcing its unique plan by the police, i.e., the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion. What restricts the individual’s freedom is not other people’s violence or threat of violence, but the physiological structure of his body and the inescapable nature-given scarcity of the factors of production. It is obvious that man’s discretion to shape his fate can never trespass the limits drawn by what are called the laws of nature.

To establish these facts does not amount to a justification of the individual’s freedom from the point of view of any absolute standards or metaphysical notions. It does not express any judgment on the fashionable doctrines of the advocates of totalitarianism, whether “right” or “left.” It does not deal with their assertion that the masses are too stupid and ignorant to know what would serve best their “true” needs and interests and badly need a guardian, the government, lest they hurt themselves. Neither does it enter into a scrutiny of the statements that there are supermen available for the office of such guardianship.

The Urge for Economic Betterment

Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people. But, of course, these motorcars, television sets and refrigerators do not make a man happy. In the instant in which he acquires them, he may feel happier than he did before. But as soon as some of his wishes are satisfied, new wishes spring up. Such is human nature.

Few Americans are fully aware of the fact that their country enjoys the highest standard of living and that the way of life of the average American appears as fabulous and out of the reach to the immense majority of people inhabiting non-capitalistic countries. Most people belittle what they have and could possibly acquire, and crave those things which are inaccessible to them. It would be idle to lament this insatiable appetite for more and more goods. This lust is precisely the impulse which leads man on the way toward economic betterment. To content oneself with what one has already got or can easily get, and to abstain apathetically from any attempts to improve one’s own material conditions, is not a virtue. Such an attitude is rather animal behavior than conduct of reasonable human beings. Man’s most characteristic mark is that he never ceases in endeavors to advance his well-being by purposive activity.

However, these endeavors must be fitted for the purpose. They must be suitable to bring about the effects aimed at. What is wrong with most of our contemporaries is not that they are passionately longing for a richer supply of various goods, but that they choose inappropriate means for the attainment of this end. They are misled by spurious ideologies. They favor policies which are contrary to their own rightly understood vital interests. Too dull to see the inevitable long-run consequences of their conduct, they find delight in its passing short-run effects. They advocate measures which are bound to result finally in general impoverishment, in the disintegration of social cooperation under the principle of the division of labor and in a return to barbarism.

There is but one means available to improve the material conditions of mankind: to accelerate the growth of capital accumulated as against the growth in population. The greater the amount of capital invested per head of the worker, the more and the better goods can be produced and consumed. This is what capitalism, the much-abused profit system, has brought about and brings about daily anew. Yet, most present-day governments and political parties are eager to destroy this system.

Why do they all loathe capitalism? Why do they, while enjoying the well-being capitalism bestows upon them, cast longing glances upon the “good old days” of the past and the miserable conditions of the present-day Russian worker?

Status Society and Capitalism

Before answering this question it is necessary to put into better relief the distinctive feature of capitalism as against that of a status society.

It is quite customary to liken the entrepreneurs and capitalists of the market economy to the aristocrats of a status society. The basis of the comparison is the relative riches of both groups as against the relatively straitened conditions of the rest of their fellow men. However, in resorting to this metaphor, one fails to realize the fundamental difference between aristocratic riches and “bourgeois” or capitalistic riches.

The wealth of an aristocrat is not a market phenomenon; it does not originate from supplying the consumers and cannot be withdrawn or even affected by any action on the part of the public. It stems from conquest or from largess on the part of a conqueror. It may come to an end through revocation on the part of the donor or through violent eviction on the part of another conqueror, or it may be dissipated by extravagance. The feudal lord does not serve consumers and is immune to the displeasure of the populace.

The entrepreneurs and capitalists owe their wealth to the people who patronize their businesses. They lose it inevitably as soon as other men supplant them in serving the consumers better or cheaper.

It is not the task of this essay to describe the historical conditions which brought about the institutions of caste and status, of the subdivision of peoples into hereditary groups with different ranks, rights, claims, and legally sanctified privileges or disabilities. What alone is of importance for us is the fact that the preservation of these feudal institutions was incompatible with the system of capitalism. Their abolition and the establishment of the principle of equality under the law removed the barriers that prevented mankind from enjoying all those benefits which the system of private ownership of the means of production and private enterprise makes possible.

In a society based on rank, status, or caste, an individual’s station in life is fixed. He is born into a certain station, and his position in society is rigidly determined by the laws and customs which assign to each member of his rank definite privileges and duties or definite disabilities. Exceptionally good or bad luck may in some rare cases elevate an individual into a higher rank or debase him into a lower rank. But as a rule, the conditions of the individual members of a definite order or rank can improve or deteriorate only with a change in the conditions of the whole membership. The individual is primarily not a citizen of a nation; he is a member of an estate (Stand, état) and only as such indirectly integrated into the body of his nation. In coming into contact with a countryman belonging to another rank, he does not feel any community. He perceives only the gulf that separates him from the other man’s status. This diversity was reflected in linguistic as well as in sartorial usages. Under the ancien régime the European aristocrats spoke preferably French. The third estate used the vernacular, while the lower ranks of the urban population and the peasants clung to local dialects, jargons, and argots which often were incomprehensible to the educated. The various ranks dressed differently. No one could fail to recognize the rank of a stranger whom he happened to see somewhere.

The main criticism leveled against the principle of equality under the law by the eulogists of the good old days is that it has abolished the privileges of rank and dignity. It has, they say, “atomized” society, dissolved its “organic” subdivisions into “amorphous” masses. The “much too many” are now supreme, and their mean materialism has superseded the noble standards of ages gone by. Money is king. Quite worthless people enjoy riches and abundance, while meritorious and worthy people go empty-handed.

This criticism tacitly implies that under the ancien régime the aristocrats were distinguished by their virtue and that they owed their rank and their revenues to their moral and cultural superiority. It is hardly necessary to debunk this fable. Without expressing any judgment of value, the historian cannot help emphasizing that the high aristocracy of the main European countries were the descendants of those soldiers, courtiers, and courtesans who, in the religious and constitutional struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had cleverly sided with the party that remained victorious in their respective countries.

While the conservative and the “progressive” foes of capitalism disagree with regard to the evaluation of the old standards, they fully agree in condemning the standards of capitalistic society. As they see it, not those who deserve well of their fellow men acquire wealth and prestige, but frivolous unworthy people. Both groups pretend to aim at the substitution of fairer methods of “distribution” for the manifestly unfair methods prevailing under laissez-faire capitalism.

Now, nobody ever contended that under unhampered capitalism those fare best who, from the point of view of eternal standards of value, ought to be preferred. What the capitalistic democracy of the market brings about is not rewarding people according to their “true” merits, inherent worth, and moral eminence. What makes a man more or less prosperous is not the evaluation of his contribution from any “absolute” principle of justice, but evaluation on the part of his fellow men who exclusively apply the yardstick of their own personal wants, desires and ends. It is precisely this that the democratic system of the market means. The consumers are supreme—i.e., sovereign. They want to be satisfied.

Millions of people like to drink Pinkapinka, a beverage prepared by the world-embracing Pinkapinka Company. Millions like detective stories, mystery pictures, tabloid newspapers, bullfights, boxing, whiskey, cigarettes, chewing gum. Millions vote for governments eager to arm and to wage war. Thus, the entrepreneurs who provide in the best and cheapest way all the things required for the satisfaction of these wants succeed in getting rich. What counts in the frame of the market economy is not academic judgments of value, but the valuations actually manifested by people in buying or not buying.

To the grumbler who complains about the unfairness of the market system only one piece of advice can be given: If you want to acquire wealth, then try to satisfy the public by offering them something that is cheaper or which they like better. Try to supersede Pinkapinka by mixing another beverage. Equality under the law gives you the power to challenge every millionaire. It is—in a market not sabotaged by government-imposed restrictions—exclusively your fault if you do not outstrip the chocolate king, the movie star and the boxing champion.

But if you prefer, to the riches you may perhaps acquire in engaging in the garment trade or in professional boxing, the satisfaction you may derive from writing poetry or philosophy, you are free to do so. Then, of course, you will not make as much money as those who serve the majority. For such is the law of the economic democracy of the market. Those who satisfy the wants of a smaller number of people only collect fewer votes—dollars—than those who satisfy the wants of more people. In moneymaking the movie star outstrips the philosopher; the manufacturers of Pinkapinka outstrip the composer of symphonies.

It is important to realize that the opportunity to compete for the prizes society has to dispense is a social institution. It cannot remove or alleviate the innate handicaps with which nature has discriminated against many people. It cannot change the fact that many are born sick or become disabled in later life. The biological equipment of a man rigidly restricts the field in which he can serve. The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is through an unbridgeable gulf separated from the class of those who cannot.

The Resentment of Frustrated Ambition

Now we can try to understand why people loathe capitalism.

In a society based on caste and status, the individual can ascribe adverse fate to conditions beyond his own control. He is a slave because the superhuman powers that determine all becoming had assigned him this rank. It is not his doing, and there is no reason for him to be ashamed of his humbleness. His wife cannot find fault with his station. If she were to tell him: “Why are you not a duke? If you were a duke, I would be a duchess,” he would reply: “If I had been born the son of a duke, I would not have married you, a slave girl, but the daughter of another duke; that you are not a duchess is exclusively your own fault; why were you not more clever in the choice of your parents?”

It is quite another thing under capitalism. Here everybody’s station in life depends on his own doing. Everybody whose ambitions have not been fully gratified knows very well that he has missed chances, that he has been tried and found wanting by his fellow man. If his wife upbraids him: “Why do you make only eighty dollars a week? If you were as smart as your former pal, Paul, you would be a foreman and I would enjoy a better life,” he becomes conscious of his own inferiority and feels humiliated.

The much talked about sternness of capitalism consists in the fact that it handles everybody according to his contribution to the well-being of his fellow men. The sway of the principle, to each according to his accomplishments, does not allow of any excuse for personal shortcomings. Everybody knows very well that there are people like himself who succeeded where he himself failed. Everybody knows that many of those whom he envies are self-made men who started from the same point from which he himself started. And, much worse, he knows that all other people know it too. He reads in the eyes of his wife and his children the silent reproach: “Why have you not been smarter?” He sees how people admire those who have been more successful than he and look with contempt or with pity on his failure.

What makes many feel unhappy under capitalism is the fact that capitalism grants to each the opportunity to attain the most desirable positions which, of course, can only be attained by a few. Whatever a man may have gained for himself, it is mostly a mere fraction of what his ambition has impelled him to win. There are always before his eyes people who have succeeded where he failed. There are fellows who have outstripped him and against whom he nurtures, in his subconsciousness, inferiority complexes. Such is the attitude of the tramp against the man with a regular job, the factory hand against the foreman, the executive against the vice-president, the vice-president against the company’s president, the man who is worth three hundred thousand dollars against the millionaire and so on. Everybody’s self-reliance and moral equilibrium are undermined by the spectacle of those who have given proof of greater abilities and capacities. Everybody is aware of his own defeat and insufficiency.

The long line of German authors who radically rejected the “Western” ideas of the Enlightenment and the social philosophy of rationalism, utilitarianism and laissez-faire as well as the policies advanced by these schools of thought was opened by Justus Möser. One of the novel principles which aroused Möser’s anger was the demand that the promotion of army officers and civil servants should depend on personal merit and ability and not on the incumbent’s ancestry and noble lineage, his age and length of service. Life in a society in which success would exclusively depend on personal merit would, says Möser, simply be unbearable. As human nature is, everybody is prone to overrate his own worth and deserts. If a man’s station in life is conditioned by factors other than his inherent excellence, those who remain at the bottom of the ladder can acquiesce in this outcome and, knowing their own worth, still preserve their dignity and self-respect. But it is different if merit alone decides. Then the unsuccessful feel themselves insulted and humiliated. Hate and enmity against all those who superseded them must result. [Moser. No Promotion According to Merit, first published in 1772. (Justus Moser’s Siimmtliche Werke, ed. B. R. Abeken, Berlin, 1842, Vol. II, pp. 187-191.)]

The price and market system of capitalism is such a society in which merit and achievements determine a man’s success or failure. Whatever one may think of Möser’s bias against the merit principle, one must admit that he was right in describing one of its psychological consequences. He had an insight into the feelings of those who had been tried and found wanting.

In order to console himself and to restore his self-assertion, such a man is in search of a scapegoat. He tries to persuade himself that he failed through no fault of his own. He is at least as brilliant, efficient and industrious as those who outshine him. Unfortunately, this nefarious social order of ours does not accord the prizes to the most meritorious men; it crowns the dishonest unscrupulous scoundrel, the swindler, the exploiter, the “rugged individualist.” What made himself fail was his honesty. He was too decent to resort to the base tricks to which his successful rivals owe their ascendancy. As conditions are under capitalism, a man is forced to choose between virtue and poverty on the one hand, and vice and riches on the other. He, himself, thank God, chose the former alternative and rejected the latter.

This search for a scapegoat is an attitude of people living under the social order which treats everybody according to his contribution to the well-being of his fellow men and where thus everybody is the founder of his own fortune. In such a society each member whose ambitions have not been fully satisfied resents the fortune of all those who succeeded better. The fool releases these feelings in slander and defamation. The more sophisticated do not indulge in personal calumny. They sublimate their hatred into a philosophy, the philosophy of anti-capitalism, in order to render inaudible the inner voice that tells them that their failure is entirely their own fault. Their fanaticism in defending their critique of capitalism is precisely due to the fact that they are fighting their own awareness of its falsity.

The suffering from frustrated ambition is peculiar to people living in a society of equality under the law. It is not caused by equality under the law, but by the fact that in a society of equality under the law the inequality of men with regard to intellectual abilities, will power and application becomes visible. The gulf between what a man is and achieves and what he thinks of his own abilities and achievements is pitilessly revealed. Daydreams of a “fair” world which would treat him according to his “real worth” are the refuge of all those plagued by a lack of self-knowledge.

The Resentment of the Intellectuals

The common man as a rule does not have the opportunity of consorting with people who have succeeded better than he has. He moves in the circle of other common men. He never meets his boss socially. He never learns from personal experience how different an entrepreneur or an executive is with regard to all those abilities and faculties which are required for successfully serving the consumers. His envy and the resentment it engenders are not directed against a living being of flesh and blood, but against pale abstractions like “management,” “capital” and “Wall Street.” It is impossible to abominate such a faint shadow with the same bitterness of feeling that one may bear against a fellow-creature whom one encounters daily.

It is different with people whom special conditions of their occupation or their family affiliation bring into personal contact with the winners of the prizes which—as they believe—by rights should have been given to themselves. With them the feelings of frustrated ambition become especially poignant because they engender hatred of concrete living beings. They loathe capitalism because it has assigned to this other man the position they themselves would like to have.

Such is the case with those people who are commonly called the intellectuals. Take for instance the physicians. Daily routine and experience make every doctor cognizant of the fact that there exists a hierarchy in which all medical men are graded according to their merits and achievements. Those more eminent than he himself is, those whose methods and innovations he must learn and practice in order to be up to date were his classmates in the medical school, they served with him as interns, they attend with him the meetings of medical associations. He meets them at the bedside of patients as well as in social gatherings. Some of them are his personal friends or related to him, and they all behave toward him with the utmost civility and address him as their dear colleague. But they tower far above him in the appreciation of the public and often also in height of income. They have outstripped him and now belong to another class of men. When he compares himself with them, he feels humiliated. But he must watch himself carefully lest anybody notice his resentment and envy. Even the slightest indication of such feelings would be looked upon as very bad manners and would depreciate him in the eyes of everybody. He must swallow down his mortification and divert his wrath toward a vicarious target. He indicts society’s economic organization, the nefarious system of capitalism. But for this unfair regime his abilities and talents, his zeal, and his achievements would have brought him the rich reward they deserve.

It is the same with many lawyers and teachers, artists and actors, writers and journalists, architects and scientific research workers, engineers and chemists. They, too, feel frustrated because they are vexed by the ascendancy of their more successful colleagues, their former schoolfellows and cronies. Their resentment is deepened by precisely those codes of professional conduct and ethics that throw a veil of comradeship and colleagueship over the reality of competition.

To understand the intellectual’s abhorrence of capitalism one must realize that in his mind this system is incarnated in a definite number of compeers whose success he resents and whom he makes responsible for the frustration of his own far-flung ambitions. His passionate dislike of capitalism is a mere blind for his hatred of some successful “colleagues.”

The Anti-capitalistic Bias of American Intellectuals

The anti-capitalistic bias of the intellectuals is a phenomenon not limited to one or a few countries only. But it is more general and more bitter in the United States than it is in the European countries. To explain this rather surprising fact one must deal with what one calls “society” or, in French, also le monde.

In Europe “society” includes all those eminent in any sphere of activity. Statesmen and parliamentary leaders, the heads of the various departments of the civil service, publishers and editors of the main newspapers and magazines, prominent writers, scientists, artists, actors, musicians, engineers, lawyers, and physicians form together with outstanding businessmen and scions of aristocratic and patrician families what is considered the good society. They come into contact with one another at dinner and tea parties, charity balls, and bazaars, at first-nights, and varnishing-days; they frequent the same restaurants, hotels, and resorts. When they meet, they take their pleasure in conversation about intellectual matters, a mode of social intercourse first developed in Italy of the Renaissance, perfected in the Parisian salons, and later imitated by the “society” of all important cities of Western and Central Europe. New ideas and ideologies find their response in these social gatherings before they begin to influence broader circles. One cannot deal with the history of the fine arts and literature in the nineteenth century without analyzing the role “society” played in encouraging or discouraging their protagonists.

Access to European society is open to everybody who has distinguished himself in any field. It may be easier to people of noble ancestry and great wealth than to commoners with modest incomes. But neither riches nor titles can give to a member of this set the rank and prestige that is the reward of great personal distinction. The stars of the Parisian salons are not the millionaires, but the members of the Académie Française. The intellectuals prevail and the others feign at least a lively interest in intellectual concerns.

Society in this sense is foreign to the American scene. What is called “society” in the United States almost exclusively consists of the richest families. There is little social intercourse between the successful businessmen and the nation’s eminent authors, artists, and scientists. Those listed in the Social Register do not meet socially the molders of public opinion and the harbingers of the ideas that will determine the future of the nation. Most of the “socialites” are not interested in books and ideas. When they meet and do not play cards, they gossip about persons and talk more about sports than about cultural matters. But even those who are not averse to reading, consider writers, scientists and artists as people with whom they do not want to consort. An almost unsurmountable gulf separates “society” from the intellectuals.

It is possible to explain the emergence of this situation historically. But such an explanation does not alter the facts. Neither can it remove or alleviate the resentment with which the intellectuals react to the contempt in which they are held by the members of “society.” American authors or scientists are prone to consider the wealthy businessman as a barbarian, as a man exclusively intent upon making money. The professor despises the alumni who are more interested in the university’s football team than in its scholastic achievements. He feels insulted if he learns that the coach gets a higher salary than an eminent professor of philosophy. The men whose research has given rise to new methods of production hate the businessmen who are merely interested in the cash value of their research work. It is very significant that such a large number of American research physicists sympathize with socialism or communism. As they are ignorant of economics and realize that the university teachers of economics are also opposed to what they disparagingly call the profit system, no other attitude can be expected from them.

If a group of people secludes itself from the rest of the nation, especially also from its intellectual leaders, in the way American “socialites” do, they unavoidably become the target of rather hostile criticisms on the part of those whom they keep out of their own circles. The exclusivism practiced by the American rich has made them in a certain sense outcasts. They may take a vain pride in their own distinction. What they fail to see is that their self-chosen segregation isolates them and kindles animosities which make the intellectuals inclined to favor anti-capitalistic policies.

The Resentment of the White Collar Workers

Besides being harassed by the general hatred of capitalism common to most people, the white-collar worker labors under two special afflictions peculiar to his own category.

Sitting behind a desk and committing words and figures to paper, he is prone to overrate the significance of his work. Like the boss he writes and reads what other fellows have put on paper and talks directly or over the telephone with other people. Full of conceit, he imagines himself to belong to the enterprise’s managing elite and compares his own tasks with those of his boss. As a “worker by brain” he looks arrogantly down upon the manual worker whose hands are calloused and soiled. It makes him furious to notice that many of these manual laborers get higher pay and are more respected than he himself. What a shame, he thinks, that capitalism fondles the simple drudgery of the “uneducated” and does not appraise his “intellectual” work according to its “true” value.

In nursing such atavistic ideas about the significance of office work and manual work, the white-collar man shuts his eyes to a realistic evaluation of the situation. He does not see that his own clerical job consists in the performance of routine tasks which require but a simple training, while the “hands” whom he envies are the highly skilled mechanics and technicians who know how to handle the intricate machines and contrivances of modern industry. It is precisely this complete misconstruction of the real state of affairs that discloses the clerk’s lack of insight and power of reasoning.

On the other hand, the clerical worker, like professional people, is plagued by daily contact with men who have succeeded better than he. He sees some of his fellow employees who started from the same level with him make a career within the hierarchy of the office while he remains at the bottom. Only yesterday Paul was in the same rank with him. Today Paul has a more important and better paid assignment. And yet, he thinks, Paul is in every regard inferior to himself. Certainly, he concludes, Paul owes his advancement to those mean tricks and artifices that can further a man’s career only under this unfair system of capitalism which all books and newspapers, all scholars and politicians denounce as the root of all mischief and misery.

The classical expression of the clerks’ conceit and their fanciful belief that their own subaltern jobs are a part of the entrepreneurial activities and congeneric with the work of their bosses is to be found in Lenin’s description of the “control of production and distribution” as provided by his most popular essay. Lenin himself and most of his fellow-conspirators never learned anything about the operation of the market economy and never wanted to. All they knew about capitalism was that Marx had described it as the worst of all evils. They were professional revolutionaries. The only sources of their earnings were the party funds which were fed by voluntary and more often involuntary—extorted—contributions and subscriptions and by violent “expropriations.” But, before 1917, as exiles in Western and Central Europe, some of the comrades occasionally held subaltern routine jobs in business firms. It was their experience—the experience of clerks who had to fill out forms and blanks, to copy letters, to enter figures into books and to file papers—which provided Lenin with all the information he had acquired about entrepreneurial activities.

Lenin correctly distinguishes between the work of the entrepreneurs on the one hand, and that of “the scientifically educated staff of engineers, agronomists and so on” on the other hand. These experts and technologists are mainly executors of orders. They obey under capitalism the capitalists, they will obey under socialism “the armed workers.” The function of the capitalists and entrepreneurs is different; it is, according to Lenin, “control of production and distribution, of labor and products.” Now the tasks of the entrepreneurs and capitalists are in fact the determination of the purposes for which the factors of production are to be employed in order to serve in the best possible way the wants of the consumers—i.e., to determine what should be produced, in what quantities and in what quality. However, this is not the meaning that Lenin attaches to the term “control.” As a Marxian he was unaware of the problems the conduct of production activities has to face under any imaginable system of social organization: the inevitable scarcity of the factors of production, the uncertainty of future conditions for which production has to provide, and the necessity of picking out from the bewildering multitude of technological methods suitable for the attainment of ends already chosen those which obstruct as little as possible the attainment of other ends—i.e., those with which the cost of production is lowest. No allusion to these matters can be found in the writings of Marx and Engels. All that Lenin learned about business from the tales of his comrades who occasionally sat in business offices was that it required a lot of scribbling, recording and ciphering. Thus, he declares that “accounting and control” are the chief things necessary for the organizing and correct functioning of society. But “accounting and control,” he goes on saying, have already been “simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.” [Cf. Lenin, State and Revolution (Little Lenin Library, No. 14, published by International Publishers, New York), pp. 83-84.]

Here we have the philosophy of the filing clerk in its full glory.

The Resentment of the “Cousins”

On the market not hampered by the interference of external forces, the process which tends to convey control of the factors of production into the hands of the most efficient people never stops. As soon as a man or a firm begins to slacken in endeavors to meet, in the best possible way, the most urgent of the not yet properly satisfied needs of the consumers, dissipation of the wealth accumulated by previous success in such endeavors sets in. Often this dispersion of the fortune starts already in the lifetime of the businessman when his buoyancy, energy and resourcefulness become weakened by the impact of old age, fatigue, and sickness, and his ability to adjust the conduct of his affairs to the unceasingly changing structure of the market fades away. More frequently it is the sluggishness of his heirs that fritters away the heritage. If the dull and stolid progeny do not sink back into insignificance and in spite of their incompetence remain moneyed people, they owe their prosperity to institutions and political measures which were dictated by anti-capitalistic tendencies. They withdraw from the market where there is no means of preserving acquired wealth other than acquiring it anew each day in tough competition with everybody, with the already existing firms as well as with newcomers “operating on a shoestring.” In buying government bonds they flee under the wings of the government which promises to safeguard them against the dangers of the market in which losses are the penalty of inefficiency. [In Europe there was, until a short time ago, still another opportunity offered to make a fortune safe against clumsiness and extravagance on the part of the owner. Wealth acquired in the market could be invested in big landed estates which tariffs and other legal provisions protected against competition of outsiders. Entails in Great Britain and similar settlements of succession as practiced on the Continent prevented the owner from disposing of his property to the prejudice of his heirs.]

However, there are families in which the eminent capacities required for entrepreneurial success are propagated through several generations. One or two of the sons or grandsons or even great-grandsons equal or excel their forebear. The ancestor’s wealth is not dissipated, but grows more and more.

These cases are, of course, not frequent. They attract attention not only on account of their rarity, but also on account of the fact that men who know how to enlarge an inherited business enjoy a double prestige, the esteem shown to their fathers and that shown to themselves. Such “patricians,” as they are sometimes called by people who ignore the difference between a status society and the capitalistic society, for the most part combine in their persons breeding, fineness of taste and gracious manners with the skill and industriousness of a hardworking businessman. And some of them belong to the country’s or even the world’s richest entrepreneurs.

It is the conditions of these few richest among these so-called patrician families which we must scrutinize in order to explain a phenomenon that plays an important role in modern anti-capitalistic propaganda and machinations.

Even in these lucky families, the qualities required for the successful conduct of big business are not inherited by all sons and grandsons. As a rule only one, or at best two, of each generation are endowed with them. Then it is essential for the survival of the family’s wealth and business that the conduct of affairs be entrusted to this one or to these two and that the other members be relegated to the position of mere recipients of a quota of the proceeds. The methods chosen for such arrangements vary from country to country, according to the special provisions of the national and local laws. Their effect, however, is always the same. They divide the family into two categories—those who direct the conduct of affairs and those who do not.

The second category consists as a rule of people closely related to those of the first category whom we propose to call the bosses. They are brothers, cousins, nephews of the bosses, more often their sisters, widowed sisters-in-law, female cousins, nieces and so on. We propose to call the members of this second category the cousins.

The cousins derive their revenues from the firm or corporation. But they are foreign to business life and know nothing about the problems an entrepreneur has to face. They have been brought up in fashionable boarding schools and colleges, whose atmosphere was filled by a haughty contempt for banausic moneymaking. Some of them pass their time in night clubs and other places of amusement, bet and gamble, feast and revel, and indulge in expensive debauchery. Others amateurishly busy themselves with painting, writing, or other arts. Thus, most of them are idle and useless people.

It is true that there have been and are exceptions, and that the achievements of these exceptional members of the group of cousins by far outweigh the scandals raised by the provoking behavior of the playboys and spendthrifts. Many of the most eminent authors, scholars and statesmen were such “gentlemen of no occupation.” Free from the necessity of earning a livelihood by a gainful occupation and independent of the favor of those addicted to bigotry, they became pioneers of new ideas. Others, themselves lacking the inspiration, became the Maecenas of artists who, without the financial aid and the applause received, would not have been in a position to accomplish their creative work. The role that moneyed men played in Great Britain’s intellectual and political evolution has been stressed by many historians. The milieu in which the authors and artists of nineteenth-century France lived and found encouragement was le monde, “society.”

However, we deal here neither with the sins of the playboys nor with the excellence of other groups of wealthy people. Our theme is the part which a special group of cousins took in the dissemination of doctrines aiming at the destruction of the market economy.

Many cousins believe that they have been wronged by the arrangements regulating their financial relation to the bosses and the family’s firm. Whether these arrangements were made by the will of their father or grandfather, or by an agreement which they themselves have signed, they think that they are receiving too little and the bosses too much. Unfamiliar with the nature of business and the market, they are—with Marx—convinced that capital automatically “begets profits.” They do not see any reason why those members of the family who are in charge of the conduct of affairs should earn more than they. Too dull to appraise correctly the meaning of balance sheets and profit and loss accounts, they suspect in every act of the bosses a sinister attempt to cheat them and to deprive them of their birthright. They quarrel with them continually.

It is not astonishing that the bosses lose their temper. They are proud of their success in overcoming all the obstacles which governments and labor unions place in the way of big business. They are fully aware of the fact that, but for their efficiency and zeal, the firm would either have long since gone astray or the family would have been forced to sell out. They believe that the cousins should do justice to their merits, and they find their complaints simply impudent and outrageous.

The family feud between the bosses and the cousins concerns only the members of the clan. But it attains general importance when the cousins, in order to annoy the bosses, join the anti-capitalistic camp and provide the funds for all kinds of “progressive” ventures. The cousins are enthusiastic in supporting strikes, even strikes in the factories from which their own revenues originate. [“Limousines with liveried chauffeurs delivered earnest ladies to the picket lines, sometimes in strikes against businesses which helped to pay for the limousines.” Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade, New York, 1941, p. 186. (Italics mine.)] It is a well-known fact that most of the “progressive” magazines and many “progressive” newspapers entirely depend on the subsidies lavishly granted by them. These cousins endow progressive universities and colleges and institutes for “social research” and sponsor all sorts of communist party activities. As “parlor socialists” and “penthouse Bolsheviks,” they play an important role in the “proletarian army” fighting against the “dismal system of capitalism.”

The Communism of Broadway and Hollywood

The many to whom capitalism gave a comfortable income and leisure are yearning for entertainment. Crowds throng to the theatres. There is money in show business. Popular actors and playwrights enjoy a six-figure income. They live in palatial houses with butlers and swimming pools. They certainly are not “prisoners of starvation.” Yet Hollywood and Broadway, the world-famous centers of the entertainment industry, are hotbeds of communism. Authors and performers are to be found among the most bigoted supporters of Sovietism.

Various attempts have been made to explain this phenomenon. There is in most of these interpretations a grain of truth. However, they all fail to take account of the main motive that drives champions of the stage and the screen into the ranks of revolutionaries.

Under capitalism, material success depends on the appreciation of a man’s achievements on the part of the sovereign consumers. In this regard there is no difference between the services rendered by a manufacturer and those rendered by a producer, an actor or a playwright. Yet the awareness of this dependence makes those in the show business much more uneasy than those supplying the customers with tangible amenities. The manufacturers of tangible goods know that their products are purchased because of certain physical properties. They may reasonably expect that the public will continue to ask for these commodities as long as nothing better or cheaper is offered to them, for it is unlikely that the needs which these goods satisfy will change in the near future. The state of the market for these goods can, to some extent, be anticipated by intelligent entrepreneurs. They can, with a degree of confidence, look into the future.

It is another thing with entertainment. People long for amusement because they are bored. And nothing makes them so weary as amusements with which they are already familiar. The essence of the entertainment industry is variety. The patrons applaud most what is new and therefore unexpected and surprising. They are capricious and unaccountable. They disdain what they cherished yesterday. A tycoon of the stage or the screen must always fear the waywardness of the public. He awakes rich and famous one morning and may be forgotten the next day. He knows very well that he depends entirely on the whims and fancies of a crowd hankering after merriment. He is always agitated by anxiety. Like the master-builder in Ibsen’s play, he fears the unknown newcomers, the vigorous youths who will supplant him in the favor of the public.

It is obvious that there is no relief from what makes these stage people uneasy. Thus they catch at a straw. Communism, some of them think, will bring their deliverance. Is it not a system that makes all people happy? Do not very eminent men declare that all the evils of mankind are caused by capitalism and will be wiped out by communism? Are not they themselves hardworking people, comrades of all other working men?

It may be fairly assumed that none of the Hollywood and Broadway communists has ever studied the writings of any socialist author and still less any serious analysis of the market economy. But it is this very fact that, to these glamour girls, dancers and singers, to these authors and producers of comedies, moving pictures and songs, gives the strange illusion that their particular grievances will disappear as soon as the “expropriators” will be expropriated.

There are people who blame capitalism for the stupidity and crudeness of many products of the entertainment industry. There is no need to argue this point. But it is noteworthy to remember that no other American milieu was more enthusiastic in the endorsement of communism than that of people cooperating in the production of these silly plays and films. When a future historian searches for those little significant facts which Taine appreciated highly as source material, he should not neglect to mention the role which the world’s most famous strip-tease artist played in the American radical movement. [Cf. Eugene Lyons, 1.c., p. 293.]

Excerpted from Ludwig Von Mises The Anti-Capitalist Mentality. First published in 1956.

What is the true test of a person’s commitment to free speech? The true test does not come when he permits people to say those things he deems acceptable. The true test comes when he permits people to say those things that he deems offensive.

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

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

We might ask what is the true test of a person’s commitment to free speech? The true test does not come when he permits people to say those things he deems acceptable. The true test comes when he permits people to say those things that he deems offensive. The identical principle applies to freedom of association; its true test comes when someone permits others to voluntarily associate in ways that he deems offensive.

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

The 845-word document says in part:

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

The recognition of the intellectual elite attacking free speech is not new. In a 1991 speech, Yale University President Benno Schmidt warned:

“The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our society today exist on our campuses. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce correct opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.”

Tyrants everywhere, from the Nazis to the communists, started out supporting free speech rights. Why? Because speech is important for the realization of leftist goals of command and control. People must be propagandized, proselytized and convinced. Once leftists have gained power, as they have in most of our colleges and universities, free speech becomes a liability. It challenges their ideas and agenda and must be suppressed.

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

Walter WilliamsWalter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. In 1980, he joined the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and is currently the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics. He is also the author of Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? and Up from the Projects: An Autobiography. Williams participates in many debates and conferences, is a frequent public speaker and often gives testimony before both houses of Congress. This editorial was made available through Creator’s Syndicate.

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Many great politicians and leaders of history have remarked upon what socialism leads to and what its true nature is.

Winston Churchill, for example, noted that socialism “is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” He also said that “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

Similarly, Milton Friedman remarked that “A society that puts equality before freedom gets neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

And, of course, Ronald Reagan taught that “America’s prosperity was not a gift from the government or anyone else. Free enterprise, not government, is the source from which our blessings flow.”

Finally, Rand Paul’s book, “The Case Against Socialism,” fully tells the story of socialism and why it is an evil system that leads only to horrific, negative outcomes.

Together, all of those leaders and sources point to the same conclusion- socialism leads to starvation, suffering, and misery.

Rand Paul shows the historical evidence of what socialism leads to in his book; here’s a hint, none of it was good. Churchill’s quotations on socialism show that socialism is a system that both always fails and leads only to the sharing of misery.

Friedman’s point is that when socialist nations try to limit freedom to promote equality, they end up getting neither; as a result, what socialism leads to is both an unfree populace and one where the leading, Politburo class is far better off than every other member of society.

Relatedly, Reagan’s point that free enterprise is the source of all economic good, not the government, shows why socialism never works; it relies on the government, not the market, to produce goods. That doesn’t work. Ever.

All of those sources and quotations attack different aspects of socialism. But, when presented together, they get to the root of why what socialism leads to is suffering, starvation, and misery. The “why” is that socialism is both morally and theoretically bankrupt; because of that, socialism leads to only bad things.

Socialism is a morally bankrupt ideology because it is all about handing control to the leaders and limiting freedom, as Friedman hints at. Individual liberty is a natural right; it was given by God to all humanity. Systems like socialism that restrain that liberty in unjust ways are morally bankrupt. As a result of its moral bankruptcy, socialism leads to misery and suffering; humans cannot naturally live in such totalitarian, control-centric, oppressive systems. We need freedom. When it is limited, we suffer and are miserable.

Additionally, socialism is an economically bankrupt ideology. As Churchill and Reagan pointed out in their quotes on socialism, it is an economically disastrous idea because it ignores the basic factors that lead to prosperity. The result of that economic bankruptcy is that socialism always fails and that socialism leads to starvation and misery. Subjects of socialist nations never have enough to eat and are miserable because of their dim economic prospects.

And none of that is just theory. “Real socialism” has been tried. It destroyed Venezuela, turning a once-prosperous nation into a nation full of starving, miserable, impoverished people. If you want to read more examples of what socialism leads to, just read “Socialism Sucks.” It will tell you everything you need to know about the reality of life under socialism.

The facts about what socialism leads to cannot be ignored. A new generation of Democrats is rising to power and they have no attachment to traditional American values. They don’t want to help you live free. they don’t want prosperity. In fact, they don’t even want to make life better for anyone. They just want control, which is something that Margaret Thatcher illuminated in her quotation about socialism.

To get that control, they are pushing for so-called “democratic socialism.” Want to know what “democratic socialism” is? Here’s a hint: it’s the exact same thing as any other form of socialism. What it will lead to is suffering, misery, and starvation. We cannot let it happen here. We need to fight back against the growing socialist threat.

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