There is no sign of one in the traditional meaning of leftwing.
In former times, the left stood for the working class. Leftist literature was about class antagonisms. The left attacked the capitalists. Today the left is funded by them. The words–reform, justice, progressive–all meant different things in the 20th century than they mean today.
Today something called “left” looks with hatred at the working class—the white racist, misogynist “Trump deplorables.” The call is not to overthrow capitalist exploitation but to erase “whiteness,” by which is meant the power of white ethnicities in their own countries, along with their equal rights, monuments, history, and culture. A society has been forming for some years in which white people have become second class citizens. In the US they have lost the protection of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. It is legal to discriminate against them in behalf of “preferred minorities” in university admissions, employment, and promotions. White people have no protection against hate speech and hate crimes. Indeed, the law and the emerging new culture does not recognize any such thing as hate speech or a hate crime against a white person.
Today white people are denigrated by something called “left” with the same derision once used for capitalist exploiters. The difference is that today the exploiters are defined as the white working class.
As part of their agenda of cleansing society from white influence, the “left” has cooperated with the American Establishment in overthrowing a president regarded by the Establishment as a threat to Establishment agendas and by the “left” as a racist, misogynist, fascist. The left, formerly an impetus for reform is now a pillar of the Establishment and is funded by the Establishment.
Throughout the Western World white people are on the defensive to a much greater extent than capitalists ever were. The evil of hatred has come into its own, and deracinated white people stripped of confidence are unable to resist their positioning as objects to be hated.
Throughout the Western World those who try to stand up for the national racial ethnicities from which the name of the countries comes—whether English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Swedish—are demonized as “nativists” or “nationalists,” words that mean racist, Nazi or Fascist, and suppressed. No Western country has a ruling party that represents the white ethnicity that gives the country its name. In Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Sweden, and elsewhere the ruling party represents immigrant-invaders and maintains an open borders policy. In the US the Democrat party is committed to open borders. Illegals even vote in US presidential elections.
White people are a people abandoned by their own governments that their own votes put into power.
Nowhere in the Western World are the young and the immigrant-invaders being acculturated into Western civilization. Diversity, multiculturalism, and the special legal privileges of “preferred minorities” are gradually achieving the goal of erasing “whiteness.”
The decades old chant of brainwashed university students—“Western civ has to go”— is being achieved.
Dec. 18, 2020, marks the 142nd birthday of Joseph Stalin, the communist dictator who ruled the Soviet Union for almost three decades. For many people, Stalin is synonymous with mass murder and totalitarianism; his misdeeds are so voluminous and epic in scale that they are incomprehensible.
Historians continually debate just how many deaths Stalin was responsible for. Even a prominent former Soviet and Russian official estimates that Stalin’s victims, whether through famine, purge, or deportation, number around 20 million. Figures such as these are almost impossible for anyone to grasp in full.
The accounts of the Stalin era reveal a man as cruel and ruthless as the numbers suggest. During the Great Terror of the 1930s, Stalin routinely signed off on execution lists with hundreds or thousands of names. In one particularly bloodthirsty day during the Terror, he approved 3,167 executions.
Moments such as these were so commonplace in the Stalin era that the tyrant enjoyed a movie screening immediately afterward, his conscience apparently untroubled by the lives he was ruining.
Stalin’s regime targeted those suspected of being insufficiently dedicated to the communist cause, as well as their innocent family and friends. Millions of Armenians, Bulgarians, Chechens, Germans, Greeks, Jews, Muslims, Poles, and Turks were persecuted for being more loyal to their racial or religious affiliations than to the glorious truths of Karl Marx.
Stalin’s own words reveal his sadistic nature. He once remarked, “The greatest delight is to mark one’s enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly, and then go to sleep.”
Not even Stalin’s closest family and friends were safe — they were often the inevitable targets of his wrath. Stalin’s relatives by marriage, such as Alyosha Svanidze and Pavel Alliluyev, found themselves imprisoned because minor incidents aroused the dictator’s suspicions.
Stalin’s longtime aide Alexander Poskrebyshev begged his boss to release his wife from prison (she had annoyed Stalin by asking him to free her brother). Characteristically, Stalin replied, “Don’t worry, we’ll find you another wife.”
Beyond the unnecessary human cost, one of the most troubling aspects of Stalin’s reign was how convinced his followers were that, despite all of this misery, they were creating a new, better world. Spurred on by the vision of a classless society with perfect equality, they were able to justify atrocities as necessary stumbling blocks on the road to utopia.
Stalin’s interpreter Valentin Berezhkov would later recall, “I believed in Stalin. … We felt we were creating the model for a better society that would be emulated by the rest of the world.” Even Soviet military official Dmitry Volkogonov, whose parents were purged, remembered: “I believed in Stalin. … Everybody thought that Stalin was the foundation of power and happiness and prosperity of the country.”
Historians continue to debate whether or not Stalin was a truly committed communist or simply using Marxist ideology to perpetuate his own power over the Soviet people. Stalin himself used communist terminology throughout his entire career to explain how the world worked. In 1946, he gave a major speech attacking capitalist nations for causing the two world wars. In his last public appearance, in 1952, Stalin continued on this theme, labeling the capitalist bourgeoisie the “arch-enemy” of freedom.
Stalin grew up in a broken home in Georgia mired in the depths of poverty. As a youth living in an authoritarian czarist empire, Stalin saw much in the way of injustice. While in seminary, he turned to communist revolution as the best solution to right the wrongs of his world. Whether or not he continued believing this for the rest of his life is anyone’s guess, but it’s clear that many of his followers were sincere Marxists. Unfortunately for their victims, the communist faithful stopped at nothing to attain the promised utopia.
As scholar Erik van Ree once observed, “The greatest crimes in history have been committed by the sincere — those who believe in their hearts that they are justified in committing their acts.” In doing so, these committed Marxists enabled one of the worst killers in human history.
On the 142nd anniversary of Stalin’s birth, let us remember the key lesson from his life: that those who promise to bring about heaven on earth through revolution and government control, no matter how sincere, often bring about a hell far worse than the one they are trying to escape.
“Morally and economically, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull. Morally, the chance to satisfy demands by force spreads the demands wider and wider, with less and less pretense at justification. Economically, the forced demands of one group create hardships for all others, thus producing an inextricable mixture of actual victims and plain parasites.” -Ayn Rand on the Welfare State
often see conservative commentators, both on TV and on social media, asking for Democrats to condemn the rioters or to at least state why they will not do that. While I am sure that those commentators are well-intentioned, they are obviously missing the point. Democrats have not condemned the riots and will not do so because, unlike conservatives and the independents that value the rule of law and private property, they do not cherish or even respect Western norms. In fact, they hate Western civilization. Therefore, I think it is fair to say that Democrats support the riots that are burning down America’s greatest cities.
Well, perhaps “greatest cities” is a bit too far. Chicago is full of corruption and crime, New York has been controlled by leftists for decades now, and the cities on the West Coast that have seen such high levels of Antifa violence are, well, cities on the West Coast. But, other than that, I think that everything I just said is absolutely true; Democrats support the riots and, as a result, will not condemn them.
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Examples of Ways That Democrats Support Anarchism and Rioters
We can see that Democrat support for anarchism and riots in many aspects of life.
Example 1: Their Messaging and Refusing to Condemn Anarchy and Violence
The first, and most obvious one, is their refusal to condemn the violence of the Antifa thugs and BLM Marxists. Whereas Republicans and Independents have stood against a complete breakdown of law and order, Democrats seem to have stood in support of that breakdown and have even egged it on.
Whenever and wherever there is a shooting of a black person, whether that person happens to be armed or not, Democrats step in to spread the seeds of chaos and attack the foundations of law and order, which is tantamount to attacking civil society. They use lies, deceit, and highly emotional speeches to urge people to commit acts of violence.
In any case, whatever tactics they use to start riots, it is obvious that Democrats support the riots because their support for the rioters is as vociferous and ubiquitous as it is uninformed and reality-defyingly stupid.
They step in to defend the people burning down Targets and other stores and describe them as “peaceful protesters.” When the media has a chance, it and its allies on the left fan the flames of Antifa’s riots. And every single time they have an opportunity to mourn the death of a career criminal, they do so. At no point while doing those things do Democrats ever condemn the riots or even express sympathy for the business-owners whose lives have been ruined by these vast orgies of destruction.
All of that is evidence that the Democrats support the riots and cases of domestic terrorism that are raging around America right now. They stand on the side of criminals, not the side of law-abiding Americans. Their messaging shows that.
Example 2 of How Democrats Support the Riots: Democrats Support Defunding the Police
The next example of why it is so obvious that Democrats support the riots is that they support defunding the police and leaving our communities at the mercy of rabid rioters that seek to do nothing more than to loot and destroy.
If anyone in the Democratic Party wanted to stop the riots, or at least slow them, they would be calling for increases in spending on the police right now. Like Republicans, they would want to defend the police and send them the necessary equipment to keep rioters in check.
However, Democrats support the riots so that is not what they want nor is it what they call for. Instead, Democrats support defunding the police. They want to turn Michigan into Somalia. Portland into the Wild West. New York into post-invasion Baghdad, the utter hell of which is well-documented in The Great War for Civilization. Those places were or are anarchic because there is no effective police force to defend the natural rights of citizens. If Democrats get their way and defund the police, America’s cities will resemble them.
So, that’s another great reason of why I know that Democrats support the riots. If they wanted to stop those horrific actions and prevent rioting, they would defend the police. But they are not. Instead, they are trying to remove the thin blue line between law-abiding Americans and the criminal elements of society.
Example 3: Democrats Want to Attack and Redistribute Private Property
Like other good socialists, Democrats hate the idea of private property. That is why they support unconstitutional wealth taxes. It is why they want to increase the regulatory state and make it harder for you to start a business and earn money. Their hatred of private property is what drives their agenda.
(Un)coincidentally, it also is what drives the BLM and Antifa rioters, almost all of whom are communists. They hate the idea that people who work hard and follow the simple path to success in America could possibly earn more than they do. So, to “correct” that “injustice” they burn down small businesses, loot luxury goods, and steal from and attack law-abiding citizens.
How does that show that Democrats support the riots? Because they have openly defended those actions! The always incompetent and idiotic AOC, for example, recently described BLM looters that were stealing plasma screen TVs as people simply taking “bread to feed their starving children.” Yes, she really said that. As usual, she was wrong. They were not taking bread. They were stealing goods.
And what if they were stealing bread? Would that be permissible? Is need the only payment necessary? No, of course not! In America, we value private property. As Ayn Rand says in Atlas Shrugged, there is no justification for taking private property simply because you “need” it. Civil society is dependent on respecting private property and the government punishing those that do not. Hence why governments that are just have always defended the property of their citizens.
But Democrats support the riots, not justice. Hence why they are attacking private property and encouraging the looters to engage in theft.
Conclusion
In my mind, there is no possible justification for rioting. Peacefully protesting is one thing, although even that is something I disagree with if it means that commerce is in any way restricted. But rioting and looting is evil. It is, in effect, placing your wants at the pinnacle of human existence and denying your fellow citizens their rights in the process.
So, Americans need to see that Democrats support the riots and are doing everything in their power to spark more riots and advance their ideology of anarchism. We need to understand that they are not just an opposition party with slightly different beliefs about what America should be like. In reality, they are a party of looters that wants to rob Peter to pay Paul. Professional looters in D.C. and amateur looters on the streets of every major city.
The first American Revolution was a war for independence against the tyrannical British monarchy. We now need a second war for independence — against a totalitarian, tyrannical cabal actually WORSE than the British monarchy ever dreamed of being. Nobody rational wants a war. Perhaps President Trump will, in the 30 days we have left, figure out a solution that avoids such a thing. But rational people who love their freedom cannot submit to an unaccountable, criminal, treasonous dictatorship, which — I promise you — we will get on our present course. Kamala Harris, even pretending to uphold the Bill of Rights? That’s a sick joke. Joe Biden is nothing more than a walking, coughing, brain-depleted corpse, but he’s more of a dictator than you may think. So rationally speaking, what are our choices? Waiting for the next election is no answer.
That ship has sailed.
The Republican Party, aside from a few authentic patriots, is morally no better than the Communist Democratic Party. The cowardly Republicans care NOTHING for our freedoms, including the newly appointed members of the Supreme Court, tragically. And even with a Donald Trump rerun candidacy in 2024, it wouldn’t matter. The fix is in: Permanently, after getting away with this fraud, Democrats now have the same lock on power as a dictatorship. Watch and see what happens in Georgia’s runoff elections. That horrible woman working for the Democrats in that state has all but said, gleefully, “Ha ha! The fix is in and you can’t do anything to stop it.” By all means, if you live in Georgia, go out and vote, I suppose. But I am not optimistic. So patriotic, freedom loving people will have to face their choices, at some point. It’s happening NOW, in your lifetime, not at some distant future point. Lovers of freedom — conservatives, libertarians, Objectivists, patriots, whatever you call yourself — must stop waiting for some unnamed savior. Nobody is coming to rescue us. We must save ourselves.
Many Americans, including this writer, contend that the 2020 presidential election is being stolen. About 70 percent of Republicans and even some Democrats believe that such a theft is happening. But despite considerable evidence, they cannot prove their case and put a number on the full extent of this alleged fraud.
Other Americans contend that the 2020 presidential election is not being stolen, and they, too, cannot prove their case. This second camp doesn’t deny that election fraud occurred but alleges that the margins are too great for fraud to have changed the outcome. Even respected conservatives have taken the position that Biden’s margins of victory are too great to overcome. But that seems to beg the question, because unless one can demonstrate the legitimacy of each and every ballot, one can’t really say what the margins are.
To prove what the legitimate vote count is, one would need to establish the eligibility of all the voters. Essentially, one would need to reregister all the voters. And that effort would be just the first of the several tasks that would be needed to demonstrate what the true vote count is.
If election fraud occurs cycle after cycle and is even tolerated, it can’t be said that America has a real democracy. Recently, this writer urged that the U.S. Supreme Court vacate the presidential elections in several problem states and order new elections to be conducted. This would be an unprecedented event, of course, but the glaring irregularities, anomalies, and illegalities are also without precedent. However, an editorial at National Review asserts that “the Supreme Court doesn’t have the authority to order new elections in those states.”
Since when has not having authority stopped the federal courts from doing anything? Until we get the “tyranny of the courts” under control, questions of authority should be tabled. I found the editorial unconvincing, but it did prove to be prescient about what Scotus would do — NR’s editorial ran at 6:30 AM on December 11, shortly before Scotus declined to hear Texas v. Pennsylvania.
This declination is a failure of the Court, which should have vacated the Pennsylvania presidential election just to send a message to the judiciary that they must stop overstepping their authority. It’s shameful that Scotus did not hear the Texas case. Their argument on “standing” is an evasion. That’s because the unconstitutional and illegal actions of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court unleashed rampant fraud, which nullified the votes of residents in other states. But Pennsylvania’s court also caused the disenfranchisement of GOP voters in their own commonwealth.
Regarding Pennsylvania, do watch Mark Levin’s opening monologue for his December 6 Fox News show: “The Supreme Court needs to intercede in 2020 election fraud investigations.” As Levin reports, not only did Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court overstep, so did its legislature, which is controlled by the GOP! Levin lays out these government illegalities in such an elegant linear manner that it’s a thing of beauty. And what he shows is that election fraud in Pennsylvania has been institutionalized. Mail-in voting is the new regime. We’ve shot the czar and his family and there’s no going back. So you’d best shut up and move along.
But what if Scotus had heard the Texas case and ordered that Pennsylvania conduct a new election? What would be the use of new elections if we conducted them in the same way and with the same data? We’d just get the same results. Therefore, new elections should require new safeguards with the aim of getting zero fraud. Does Scotus or the Dems have any ideas about how to achieve zero fraud?
Well, I’ve presented a few ideas which aim to do just that. In fact, these ideas assume that fraud will occur. These little changes say to the fraudsters, Come at me with everything you have, and I will repel you; send me a billion fraudulent ballots, and I’ll detect them. Also, my reforms would make it possible to “cure” ballots with mistakes.
When I see those huge rooms filled with people (supposedly) verifying the legitimacy of signatures, I just shake my head. We shouldn’t be wasting our time with signature verification. We should instead require the voter to use his SSN. That little addition to the ballot would obviate the throngs of verifiers, who may well be fraudsters themselves, and it would allow us to secure the vote.
I believe the election was stolen, but I can’t prove it. But no army of investigators can prove what the legitimate vote count was in the 2020 presidential election, and that is a scandal and a tragedy for our “democracy,” if that’s what you want to call it. But the incompetence, corruption, and failure is not just with government and the political class, it lies also with the People for tolerating such a squalid state of affairs election after election. And now we seem to have ended up with the Deep State’s chosen candidate, an easily manipulated figurehead, a doddering old flimflam artist who is the head of a family of influence peddlers and grifters.
Americans should be embarrassed by their elections. The political class is playing us for a bunch of fools. If Republicans can hold on to the U.S. Senate on Jan. 5 in Georgia, Mitch McConnell should insist on doing election reform before doing anything else. Congress should “take over” federal elections and impose a single standard on all the states for conducting elections for federal officials. The precedent for such a move is none other than the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The most poisonous situation for a democracy is the suspicion that an election has been stolen. None of the changes since the Bush-Gore mess in 2000 have been sufficient to remove doubt and give assurance to the voter that his participation was not in vain. Without GOP Senate wins in Georgia on the 5th, there’ll be little hope for institutionalizing real election integrity.
So, by all means, Georgia, have a happy New Year’s party, and then go out and vote for Perdue and Loeffler… America is depending on you.
Jon N. Hall of ULTRACON OPINION is a programmer from Kansas City.
The current situation over the Presidential Election of 2020 is the greatest test of our American system, which, if it doesn’t pass this test, our system of the Rule of Law, Checks and Balances, Freedom of Speech, and Democracy will be over.
As the book, THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF JAMES MADISON shows, our Founding was premised on the Christian appreciation of human weakness and sin, lust for power, corruption, and evil. Madison’s whole argument for Separation of Power and Pluralism in Federalist Paper #10 was that Freedom with Law and Justice could only be maintained if our Constitutional system checked “ambition against ambition,” pitting one branch of government against the other to prevent tyranny.
The widespread and systematic corruption of this Election will only be thoroughly exposed and corrected if that Madisonian pluralism works. At this point, the State elections, legislatures, courts, and governors have been compromised and the salutary check of a Free Press and debate weakened by media bias and censorship.
Only the United States Supreme Court can salvage our Republic now. As the Highest Authority, with Original Jurisdiction granted by the Constitution, only it can address this crisis in the American polity.
With the Court’s rules of evidence, adversarial system (hearing arguments from both sides) impartial judges and jury, only the United States Supreme Court can bring out a semblance of the truths of this complex Election controversy. All sides must see a fair, careful inquiry, and conclusion.
Otherwise, if the purportedly seamless web of fraud and corruption is allowed to stand, it will be institutionalized, and America will never have an honest election again. The Republic will be over. No one will ultimately benefit from the loss of popular sovereignty, freedom, rights, and dignity that this will entail.
As I have written before, this may just be the historical “Life Cycle of a Republic,” like the Athenian and Roman Republics before it, that declined into wealth, imperialism, corruption, chaos, and misery. But the Eastern Roman Empire (Constantinople) experienced numerous cleansing revivals of virtue that allowed it to survive for hundreds of years after the Fall of Rome. We pray God’s Grace and Mercy on the United States, that such a return to our Founding Principles will occur.
Democrats won the election, but they don’t seem very happy about it. And with reason: The election failed in its main purpose, which was to shut down the Deplorables.
The Deplorables, in Hillary Clinton’s infamous term, are working- and middle-class people who haven’t bought into the progressive agenda. They’re people who don’t see the rise of the tech oligarchy as a plus, who don’t think “woke” politics make sense, who have jobs that produce tangible outputs. They’re nearly half the country.
This election was supposed to demoralize them, crushing President Trump and his supporters in a double-digit landslide that would give the Democrats solid control of the White House and Congress — and, with a little judicious court-packing, of the judicial branch, too. The Deplorables would be made to realize that they aren’t in charge, that if they want to ride, they’ll have to (in Barack Obama’s famous words) ride in the back.
Only it didn’t work out that way. The big congressional victories turned into lost House seats for the Democrats. And the presidential election was hardly a crushing victory. For an election to really take, the losers have to admit that they’ve been beaten. And to admit that they’ve been beaten, they have to think they actually lost fair and square. Not many Trump supporters think that.
Leaving aside charges of voter fraud and vote-rigging, there is the undisputable fact that Big Media and Big Tech put not just a thumb, but both hands, on the scales to influence the result.
As much as possible, the media ignored the Hunter Biden scandal and Joe Biden’s role in it, first reported in this paper. When blue-check reporters did pay attention, they claimed, falsely and without evidence, that the reports were “Russian disinformation.”
Big Tech shut down the accounts of people who shared the story, and Twitter even blocked sharing the link via direct messages.
The machinations worked, but at a high price: According to a McLaughlin poll, enough Joe Biden voters say they would have changed their votes had they known of the Hunter Biden scandal that they would have produced solid Trump win. The impression of tech-media-corporate underhandedness will long endure.
So the Deplorables are still around, and they’re still angry. And as long as they’re still around, and still angry, the Democrats can’t actually get what they want.
Trump was elected, remember, because in 2016 the elites had already lost their mojo. In the mid-20th century, elites brought us antibiotics, jet planes and trips to the moon. In more recent years, they’ve brought us failed wars, a failed health-care reform with a lousy nonfunctioning Web site and economic policies that benefited the rich at the expense of the middle and working classes.
Getting rid of Trump won’t get rid of that problem, and, in fact, will only make it worse. His army will still be out there — motivated.
Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general who administered a crushing defeat to Napoleon, did so by realizing that as long as he kept his army intact, he didn’t have to win flashy victories. And he eventually ground Napoleon’s forces down to a nub. Likewise, so long as the Deplorables don’t give up in their opposition, they can’t really be defeated. By staying motivated, the Deplorables can become the Unconquerables.
Oh, the Democrats will use every vote-harvesting and media-censoring trick they can manage in response. But when half the population views a government as illegitimate and, in a fundamental sense, hostile, there’s a limit to how far the left can get.
Ironically, the one thing that might send the Unconquerables back to their daily routines is the one thing the Democrats won’t be able to manage: showing understanding, concern and respect to working-class America. Too many of today’s Democrats have anchored their self-esteem in feeling superior to other Americans — and to loudly and contemptuously proclaiming that superiority — for a conciliatory policy to work.
Indeed, I expect them to expand their efforts to mock and deplore those on the other side. In doing so, of course, they’ll just help keep the opposition together and focused.
It’s not smart, but it’s almost certainly what the Dems will do. And that will keep the army together for 2022 and 2024.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
“Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live–that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values–that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others–that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human–that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay–that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live–that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road–that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up–that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.”
“Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone’s work prove greater than their own – they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal – for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them – while you’d give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don’t know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors – hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom – the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don’t respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?” “I’ve felt it all my life,” she said.”
“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received — hatred. The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.”
Under real capitalism, there is no government policy at all regarding how people are to conduct themselves in a pandemic. With no barriers to innovation, production, and distribution, the pharmaceutical industry would be rocketing us into an almost disease-free future.
Before we start taking for granted the statist perspective on the vaccine and its delivery, let’s look at how a free, rights-respecting government and society would be behaving right now.
Prices of anything in short supply (where I am it’s Bounty paper towels) rise until supply meets demand. The supermarket shelves remain full. The businesses producing and selling these items reap windfall profits, which draws capital to ramp up production, so that in a few weeks prices fall back to where they were.
The same is true of medical services: in a free society doctors are not licensed; consequently, their supply can be expanded; hospitals are not regulated, so they can handle surges in demand as they wish. No fire marshals, building inspectors, environmental impact assessors can interfere with any temporary build-out a hospital decides to make. In fact, no one would dream of even asking to be informed of any decision a hospital makes regarding how to use its own property on its own land.
Tests and vaccines are developed by pharmaceutical companies, in their labs, and get whatever private voluntary certification they choose to get (probably none—why do Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson need any stamp of outside approval?).
As they develop these new tests and vaccines, they distribute early versions of them to their own network of forward-looking individuals, including doctors, medical staff, and researchers, willing to take a little extra risk to get innovative products sooner.
The new tests and vaccines are sold for “all the market can bear.” That means: high prices to early-adopters; then, as safety and efficacy become established by tracking the experience of the early-adopters, the items are sold at progressively lower prices to wider and wider segments of the general population.
Since a free society’s government never compels anyone to get a doctor’s prescription, there are no such things as pharmacies in the traditional sense. Rather, CVS, Walmart, Walgreens have a pharmaceutical area, perhaps staffed by specially knowledgeable people (who don’t require a government license) to advise you. If you don’t need this kind of service, and just want pills to swallow, you can just grab a bottle off the shelf and go to the cash register. Or you can go on Amazon or other sites and buy them just the way you do books, T-shirts, and canned peas.
The “delivery system” for the new vaccines and tests is the same profit-making firms that already deliver everything in a capitalist society. Think: UPS, Amazon, FedEx—but even better, because they are not regulated.
To get products, new or old, we don’t need four-star generals to be in charge of “logistics.” Even today, under semi-capitalism, the task is handled by purchasing managers, inventory managers, buyers, and vendors—and no shortage ever develops, except where government holds prices below market.
Under pure capitalism, there is no such question as: “Who is going to get the vaccine first?” If it were asked, the answer would be the same as for “Who is going to get the new C8 model Corvette first?” Whoever shows up with the money. If there’s a rush, the price goes up to where demand matches supply. Then supply is expanded to reap the resulting high-profit rate.
And there is no such question as: “What if a segment of the population is afraid to take the vaccine?” People are thinking, not of collective outcomes, but of individual ones. It would never occur to them to worry about people who don’t take the vaccine, because they know that by choosing to get vaccinated, they themselves will be protected.
Under real capitalism, there is no government policy at all regarding how people are to conduct themselves in a pandemic. Not only are there no lockdowns, no curfews, no group quarantines (on the basis of group statistics), but also no thought of government having any role to play. “Public health” is no more connected in people’s minds to government than is “public entertainment.” Health is understood to be a personal matter—just as entertainment is.
Even where there are “social problems,” free citizens of a free society regard it as widespread individual problems, not as problems justifying government coercion.
Take the rising divorce rate, which is widely regarded as a “social problem.” Even today, no one thinks divorce is something to be combatted by government directives. The prospect of government getting involved in marital problems would fill us with horror. For the citizens of a laissez-faire society, the idea of government dictating people’s behavior in a pandemic would be equally as horrifying.
In practice, the laissez-faire utopia I’m envisioning would be tremendously healthier than the regulatory state we live under in America today. Without the dead hand of the FDA, medical experimentation and data-collection from ordinary citizens (via their smartphones, perhaps) would produce vastly more data for AI to use in discovering what works and what doesn’t. With no barriers to innovation, production, and distribution, the pharmaceutical industry would be rocketing us into an almost disease-free future.
