Capitalism as It Is and as It Is Seen by the ‘Common Man’

The emergence of economics as a new branch of knowledge was one of the most portentous events in the history of mankind. In paving the way for private capitalistic enterprise it transformed within a few generations all human affairs more radically than the preceding ten thousand years had done. From the day of their birth to the day of their demise, the denizens of a capitalistic country are every minute benefited by the marvelous achievements of the capitalistic ways of thinking and acting.

The most amazing thing concerning the unprecedented change in earthly conditions brought about by capitalism is the fact that it was accomplished by a small number of authors and a hardly greater number of statesmen who had assimilated their teachings. Not only the sluggish masses but also most of the businessmen who, by their trading, made the laissez-faire principles effective failed to comprehend the essential features of their operation. Even in the heyday of liberalism, only a few people had a full grasp of the functioning of the market economy. Western civilization adopted capitalism upon the recommendation on the part of a small élite.

There were, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, many people who viewed their own unfamiliarity with the problems concerned as a serious shortcoming and were anxious to redress it. In the years between Waterloo and Sebastopol, no other books were more eagerly absorbed in Great Britain than treatises on economics. But the vogue soon subsided. The subject was unpalatable to the general reader.

Economics is so different from the natural sciences and technology on the one hand, and history and jurisprudence on the other hand, that it seems strange and repulsive to the beginner. Its heuristic singularity is viewed with suspicion by those whose research work is performed in laboratories or in archives and libraries. Its epistemological singularity appears nonsensical to the narrow-minded fanatics of positivism. People would like to find in an economics book knowledge that perfectly fits into their preconceived image of what economics ought to be, viz., a discipline shaped according to the logical structure of physics or of biology. They are bewildered and desist from seriously grappling with problems the analysis of which requires an unwonted mental exertion.

The result of this ignorance is that people ascribe all improvements in economic conditions to the progress of the natural sciences and technology. As they see it, there prevails in the course of human history a self-acting tendency toward progressing advancement of the experimental natural sciences and their application to the solution of technological problems. This tendency is irresistible, it is inherent in the destiny of mankind, and its operation takes effect whatever the political and economic organization of society may be. As they see it, the unprecedented technological improvements of the last two hundred years were not caused or furthered by the economic policies of the age. They were not an achievement of classical liberalism, free trade, laissez-faire, and capitalism. They will therefore go on under any other system of society’s economic organization.

The doctrines of Marx received approval simply because they adopted this popular interpretation of events and clothed it with a pseudophilosophical veil that made it gratifying both to Hegelian spiritualism and to crude materialism. In the scheme of Marx the “material productive forces” are a superhuman entity independent of the will and the actions of men. They go their own way that is prescribed by the inscrutable and inevitable laws of a higher power. They change mysteriously and force mankind to adjust its social organization to these changes; for the material productive forces shun one thing: to be enchained by mankind’s social organization. The essential content of history is the struggle of the material productive forces to be freed from the social bonds by which they are fettered.

Once upon a time, teaches Marx, the material productive forces were embodied in the shape of the hand mill, and then they arranged human affairs according to the pattern of feudalism. When, later, the unfathomable laws that determine the evolution of the material productive forces substituted the steam mill for the hand mill, feudalism had to give way to capitalism. Since then the material productive forces have developed further, and their present shape imperatively requires the substitution of socialism for capitalism. Those who try to check the socialist revolution are committed to a hopeless task. It is impossible to stem the tide of historical progress.

The ideas of the so-called leftist parties differ from one another in many ways. But they agree on one point. They all look upon progressing material improvement as upon a self-acting process. The American union member takes his standard of living for granted. Fate has determined that he should enjoy amenities which were denied even to the most prosperous people of earlier generations and are still denied to non-Americans. It does not occur to him that the “rugged individualism” of big business may have played some role in the emergence of what he calls the “American way of life.” In his eyes “management” represents the unfair claims of the “exploiters” who are intent upon depriving him of his birthright. There is, he thinks, in the course of historical evolution an irrepressible tendency toward a continuous increase in the “productivity” of his labor. It is obvious that the fruits of this betterment by rights belong exclusively to him. It is his merit that—in the age of capitalism—the quotient of the value of the products turned out by the processing industries divided by the number of hands employed tended toward an increase.

The truth is that the increase in what is called the productivity of labor is due to the employment of better tools and machines. A hundred workers in a modern factory produce per unit of time a multiple of what a hundred workers used to produce in the workshops of precapitalistic craftsmen. This improvement is not conditioned by higher skill, competence, or application on the part of the individual worker. (It is a fact that the proficiency needed by medieval artisans towered far above that of many categories of present-day factory hands.) It is due to the employment of more efficient tools and machines which, in turn, is the effect of the accumulation and investment of more capital.

The terms capitalism, capital, and capitalists were employed by Marx and are today employed by most people—also by the official propaganda agencies of the United States government—with an opprobrious connotation. Yet these words pertinently point toward the main factor whose operation produced all the marvelous achievements of the last two hundred years: the unprecedented improvement of the average standard of living for a continually increasing population. What distinguishes modern industrial conditions in the capitalistic countries from those of the precapitalistic ages as well as from those prevailing today in the so-called underdeveloped countries is the amount of the supply of capital. No technological improvement can be put to work if the capital required has not previously been accumulated by saving.

Saving, capital accumulation, is the agency that has transformed step-by-step the awkward search for food on the part of savage cave dwellers into the modern ways of industry. The pacemakers of this evolution were the ideas that created the institutional framework within which capital accumulation was rendered safe by the principle of private ownership of the means of production. Every step forward on the way toward prosperity is the effect of saving. The most ingenious technological inventions would be practically useless if the capital goods required for their utilization had not been accumulated by saving.

The entrepreneurs employ the capital goods made available by the savers for the most economical satisfaction of the most urgent among the not-yet-satisfied wants of the consumers. Together with the technologists, intent upon perfecting the methods of processing, they play, next to the savers themselves, an active part in the course of events that is called economic progress. The rest of mankind profits from the activities of these three classes of pioneers. But whatever their own doings may be, they are only beneficiaries of changes to the emergence of which they did not contribute anything.

The characteristic feature of the market economy is the fact that it allots the greater part of the improvements brought about by the endeavors of the three progressive classes—those saving, those investing the capital goods and those elaborating new methods for the employment of capital goods—to the nonprogressive majority of people. Capital accumulation exceeding the increase in population raises, on the one hand, the marginal productivity of labor and, on the other hand, cheapens the products. The market process provides the common man with the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of other peoples’ achievements. It forces the three progressive classes to serve the nonprogressive majority in the best possible way.

Everybody is free to join the ranks of the three progressive classes of a capitalist society. These classes are not closed castes. Membership in them is not a privilege conferred on the individual by a higher authority or inherited from one’s ancestors. These classes are not clubs, and the ins have no power to keep out any newcomer. What is needed to become a capitalist, an entrepreneur or a deviser of new technological methods is brains and will power. The heir of a wealthy man enjoys a certain advantage as he starts under more favorable conditions than others. But his task in the rivalry of the market is not easier, but sometimes even more wearisome and less remunerative than that of a newcomer. He has to reorganize his inheritance in order to adjust it to the changes in market conditions. Thus, for instance, the problems that the heir of a railroad “empire” had to face were, in the last decades, certainly more knotty than those encountered by the man who started from scratch in trucking or in air transportation.

The popular philosophy of the common man misrepresents all these facts in the most lamentable way. As John Doe sees it, all those new industries that are supplying him with amenities unknown to his father came into being by some mythical agency called progress. Capital accumulation, entrepreneurship and technological ingenuity did not contribute anything to the spontaneous generation of prosperity. If any man has to be credited with what John Doe considers as the rise in the productivity of labor, then it is the man on the assembly line. Unfortunately, in this sinful world there is exploitation of man by man. Business skims the cream and leaves, as the Communist Manifesto points out, to the creator of all good things, to the manual worker, not more than “he requires for his maintenance and for the propagation of his race.” Consequently, “the modern worker, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper. . . . He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.” The authors of this description of capitalistic industry are praised at universities as the greatest philosophers and benefactors of mankind and their teachings are accepted with reverential awe by the millions whose homes, besides other gadgets, are equipped with radio and television sets.

The worst exploitation, say professors, “labor” leaders and politicians, is effected by big business. They fail to realize that the characteristic mark of big business is mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses. Under capitalism the workers themselves, directly or indirectly, are the main consumers of all those things that the factories are turning out.

In the early days of capitalism there was still a considerable time lag between the emergence of an innovation and its becoming accessible to the masses. About sixty years ago Gabriel Tarde was right in pointing out that an industrial innovation is the fancy of a minority before it becomes the need of everybody; what was considered first as an extravagance turns later into a customary requisite of all and sundry. This statement was still correct with regard to the popularization of the automobile. But big-scale production by big business has shortened and almost eliminated this time lag. Modern innovations can only be produced profitably according to the methods of mass production and hence become accessible to the many at the very moment of their practical inauguration. There was, for instance, in the United States no sensible period in which the enjoyment of such innovations as television, nylon stockings or canned baby food was reserved to a minority of the well-to-do. Big business tends, in fact, toward a standardization of the peoples’ ways of consumption and enjoyment.

Nobody is needy in the market economy because of the fact that some people are rich. The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody. The process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples’ want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.

The Anti-capitalistic Front

From the very beginnings of the socialist movement and the endeavors to revive the interventionist policies of the precapitalistic ages, both socialism and interventionism were utterly discredited in the eyes of those conversant with economic theory. But the ideas of the revolutionaries and reformers found approval with the immense majority of ignorant people exclusively driven by the most powerful human passions of envy and hatred.

The social philosophy of the Enlightenment that paved the way for the realization of the liberal program—economic freedom, consummated in the market economy (capitalism), and its constitutional corollary, representative government—did not suggest the annihilation of the three old powers: the monarchy, the aristocracy and the churches. The European liberals aimed at the substitution of the parliamentary monarchy for royal absolutism, not at the establishment of republican government. They wanted to abolish the privileges of the aristocrats, but not to deprive them of their titles, their escutcheons and their estates. They were eager to grant to everybody freedom of conscience and to put an end to the persecution of dissenters and heretics, but they were anxious to give to all churches and denominations perfect freedom in the pursuit of their spiritual objectives. Thus the three great powers of the ancien régime were preserved. One might have expected that princes, aristocrats and clergymen who indefatigably professed their conservatism would be prepared to oppose the socialist attack upon the essentials of Western civilization. After all, the harbingers of socialism did not shrink from disclosing that under socialist totalitarianism no room would be left for what they called the remnants of tyranny, privilege and superstition.

However, even with these privileged groups resentment and envy were more intense than cool reasoning. They virtually joined hands with the socialists disregarding the fact that socialism aimed also at the confiscation of their holdings and that there cannot be any religious freedom under a totalitarian system. The Hohenzollern in Germany inaugurated a policy that an American observer called monarchical socialism. [Cf. Elmer Roberts, Monarchical Socialism in Germany, New York, 1913.] The autocratic Romanoffs of Russia toyed with labor unionism as a weapon to fight the “bourgeois” endeavors to establish representative government. [Cf. Mania Gordon, Workers Before and After Lenin, New York, 1941, pp. 30 II.] In every European country the aristocrats were virtually cooperating with the enemies of capitalism. Everywhere eminent theologians tried to discredit the free enterprise system and thus, by implication, to support either socialism or radical interventionism. Some of the outstanding leaders of present-day Protestantism—Barth and Brunner in Switzerland, Niebuhr and Tillich in the United States, and the late Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple—openly condemn capitalism and even charge the alleged failures of capitalism with the responsibility for all the excesses of Russian Bolshevism.

One may wonder whether Sir William Harcourt was right when, more than sixty years ago, he proclaimed: We are all socialists now. But today governments, political parties, teachers and writers, militant antitheists as well as Christian theologians are almost unanimous in passionately rejecting the market economy and praising the alleged benefits of state omnipotence. The rising generation is brought up in an environment that is engrossed in socialist ideas.

The influence of the prosocialist ideology comes to light in the way in which public opinion, almost without any exception, explains the reasons that induce people to join the Socialist or Communist parties. In dealing with domestic politics, one assumes that, “naturally and necessarily,” those who are not rich favor the radical programs—planning, socialism, communism—while only the rich have reason to vote [28] for the preservation of the market economy. This assumption takes for granted the fundamental socialist idea that the economic interests of the masses are hurt by the operation of capitalism for the sole benefit of the “exploiters” and that socialism will improve the common man’s standard of living.

However, people do not ask for socialism because they know that socialism will improve their conditions, and they do not reject capitalism because they know that it is a system prejudicial to their interests. They are socialists because they believe that socialism will improve their conditions, and they hate capitalism because they believe that it harms them. They are socialists because they are blinded by envy and ignorance. They stubbornly refuse to study economics and spurn the economists’ devastating critique of the socialist plans because, in their eyes, economics, being an abstract theory, is simply nonsense. They pretend to trust only in experience. But they no less stubbornly refuse to take cognizance of the undeniable facts of experience, viz., that the common man’s standard of living is incomparably higher in capitalistic America than in the socialist paradise of the Soviets.

In dealing with conditions in the economically backward countries people display the same faulty reasoning. They think that these peoples must “naturally” sympathize with communism because they are poverty-stricken. Now it is obvious that the poor nations want to get rid of their penury. Aiming at an improvement of their unsatisfactory conditions, they ought therefore to adopt that system of society’s economic organization which best warrants the attainment of this end; they ought to decide in favor of capitalism. But, deluded by spurious anti-capitalistic ideas, they are favorably disposed to communism. It is paradoxical indeed that the leaders of these Oriental peoples, while casting longing glances at the prosperity of the Western nations, reject the methods that made the West prosperous and are enraptured by Russian communism that is instrumental in keeping the Russians and their satellites poor. It is still more paradoxical that Americans, enjoying the products of capitalistic big business, exalt the Soviet system and consider it quite “natural” that the poor nations of Asia and Africa should prefer communism to capitalism.

People may disagree on the question of whether everybody ought to study economics seriously. But one thing is certain. A man who publicly talks or writes about the opposition between capitalism and socialism without having fully familiarized himself with all that economics has to say about these issues is an irresponsible babbler.

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

Philosopher Herbert Spencer laid out the appropriate limits on what government does well enough to benefit citizens in “Representative Government—What is it Good For?” It merits close attention.

GOVERNMENT is frequently proposed as a panacea for seemingly every problem. But since government is just people with less relevant information and worse incentives than those acting for themselves, backed with coercive power, it is a false promise whose main result is the evisceration of liberty.

The government can only benefit everyone when tightly constrained to enforcing only equal, “natural” rights for all, reserving other choices to individuals.

Our political machine … Its parts are extremely numerous: multiplied, indeed, beyond all reason. They are not severally chosen as specially qualified for particular functions. No care is taken that they shall fit well together: on the contrary, our arrangements are such that they are certain not to fit … had the problem been to find an appliance for the slow and bungling transaction of business, it could scarcely have been better solved.

Besides devising measures to prevent the aggression of citizens on one another, and to secure each the quiet possession of his own…[governments] unhesitatingly take on themselves to provide for countless wants, to cure countless ills, to oversee countless affairs … confident that they know what knowledge is most required. What must be the knowledge and capacities of those who shall achieve it.

If there be any lack of insight respecting the mutual dependence of the many functions which, taken together, make up the national life, unforeseen disasters will ensue from not perceiving how an interference with one will affect the rest. See, then, the immense incongruity between the end and the means … the countless difficulties of the task; and … the almost total unpreparedness of those who undertake it.

Covid is a real virus. It is a threat to a small minority of the population—primarily people with poor immune systems and comorbidities.

There are inexpensive ways of boosting immune systems with supplements, such as zinc, vitimans C and D3, Beta Glucan, and NAC. But public health officials have not educated the public about the value of supplements in the Covid battle. The reason is that so-called public health officials are shills for Big Pharma’s profits, and Big Pharma regards good immune systems as a hindrence to profits.

There are also two effective, safe, and inexpensive cures for Covid. One is the combination of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), azithromycin, and zinc. The other is the combination of ivermectin, azithromycin, and zinc.

The use of these known cures has been blocked by public health officials, such as Tony Fauci of the National Institute of Health. Again, the reason is Big Pharma’s profits. The use of these effective cures negates the profit opportunity of a new vaccine.

So many have died by denying treatment while we wait for a vaccine that some experts worry will be more dangerous than Covid.

Keeping Covid alive as a threat serves other harmful purposes. As I wrote on November 13, the main threat from Covid is not the disease. When Covid subsides as a threat, the increased powers of government over citizens will remain.

In Europe and in parts of the US, it is clear that the people understand that the lockdowns and mask rules are a bigger threat to them than Covid. In Germany there have been mass protests, which are spreading elsewhere in Europe.

.Klaus Madersbacher says Germans have memories of where the use of arbitrary power leads. Unlike the American “anti-fascist” Antifa and BLM movements which conduct kristallnachts against white businesses, a real anti-fascist movement in Germany fights against the lockdown.

In Huntington Beach, California, there were protests early Sunday morning against the Democrat governor’s curfew.

Sheriffs in five California counties with a population of 17,250,000 people refuse to enforce the nutty governor’s curfew.

Even the police, who welcome any excuse to exercise power, are backing away from enforcing ineffective but intrusive Covid rules. Just as the California sheriffs are declining, the police chief in Leipzig, Germany, said that there is no point in using the police to fight a pandemic.

The only reason that the “pandemic” continues is that Western public health officials are financially tied in one way or another with Big Pharma, and public health officials are using their positions in the interest of these financial connections.

Paul Craig Roberts

Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called “the common good.”

Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group . . . and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force—and statism has always been the political corollary of collectivism.

Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory . . . both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state.

Modern collectivists . . . see society as a super-organism, as some supernatural entity apart from and superior to the sum of its individual members.

The political philosophy of collectivism is based on a view of man as a congenital incompetent, a helpless, mindless creature who must be fooled and ruled by a special elite with some unspecified claim to superior wisdom and a lust for power.

The advocates of collectivism are motivated not by a desire for men’s happiness, but by hatred for man . . . hatred of the good for being the good; . . . the focus of that hatred, the target of its passionate fury, is the man of ability.

George Washington’s original Thanksgiving proclamation called for a day to thank God for the blessings he gave America prior to the war, His providence and protection during the war and His blessing of a peaceful transition to a new form of government.   After playing Washington proclamation of 231 years ago, David Knight commented:

“When we hear politicians talk about responsibility today, you got to ask them, to whom are you responsible? Are you responsible to God? No. Our politicians have allowed and supported the idea that God is to be banned out of the public square, that was never the case. That was something that was invented.”

The idea of a “separation of church and state” was something that came out of a letter of assurance from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists.

Lies about Jefferson, spread during the political campaign, had people afraid that he was going to attack religion, even confiscate Bibles.

“So you had people burying Bibles in their backyards. And so the Danbury Baptist said, are you going to do anything like that? And he said, No, there’s a wall of separation for Jefferson, and that wall was a wall around government. But by the mid 20th century, they put that wall around churches.”

“Now we have politicians who are not just censoring [free exercise in schools], but now they are banning worship services. They’re banning, singing, even IF they allow worship services. We have underground churches that are meeting in America, not talking about as much as they do in the UK.”

“That’s where we are today. Do you think God is going to bless a country like that?”

Two years earlier, when the Constitutional Convention was struggling without success to come to an agreement on a form of government, Benjamin Franklin recalled that during the war they had met daily for prayer.  Why were they not asking for God’s guidance and blessing now, he asked?

David Knight commented,“if we don’t understand that liberty is a blessing from God, if we are going to heap scorn on God, if we are going to engage in religious persecution, this country has some very rough days ahead of it. And even those of us who are not a part of that will be suffering along with that.”

“That’s one of the reasons why God tells us to pray for peace, pray for wise leaders. Let me just ask you: have you seen any wise leaders lately at ANY level of American government? Is THAT not a testimony of God’s judgment? The fools and the clowns that are leading our country? Is that not a testimony of God’s judgment on us?”

As George Washington said in 1783, ‘it has yet to be decided whether the revolution must ultimately be considered to be a blessing, or a curse.’ A blessing or a curse? ‘A curse not to the present age alone. With our fate, will the destiny of unborn millions be involved.’”

“Those words have never had a deeper meaning than when we look at,

The rolling out of a massive program to inject people with untested, untried radical DNA modification vaccine
To incentivize it
To bribe people
To whip people into submission with unconstitutional house arrest
To purge us out of society like we were a leper colony if we don’t take their dangerous drugs. “

“Do you understand the technology that’s involved here? Do you understand the curse that Washington [DC] has become? Not only on Americans, but on the world? The center of this dark research, this bio warfare research. Did this come out of a bioweapons lab? Well, if it didn’t, there will be something coming out of that. Look at these people, Francis Collins, and Fauci at the NIH. They’re not only pushing DNA modification and transhumanism. Oh, yeah. They’re pushing transhumanism very hard. They’re pushing now the Human Connectome Project, all of Washington. You’ve got DARPA; you’ve got BARDA; you’ve got IARPA.  These people are all involved in trying to read and manipulate minds, our minds. They try to manipulate our biology, to track us, to poison us. This government has become a curse on mankind. May God shut it down.”

Alexis de Tocqueville said, “We should not comfort ourselves on the supposition that barbarians are still far from us. There are people who will allow the light to be snatched from their hands, and there are people who stifle it under their own feet.”

“Is that not a description of our generation? Have we not become two groups of people, one of them actively stamping out the light with their feet? And the other group, those of us who are professing Christians, allowing them to snatch it out of our hands.”

David Knight

The goal of Michael Sandel’s book, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, is to divorce personal competence and choices from morality, life success and happiness. He uses a combination of false claims, selected news reports, distortions and collectivism to buttress his assertions.

A major thrust is to claim that people do not earn what they achieve. Consider that successful people often come from wealthier families. True, but what he leaves out is that parents who are wealthy typically got their wealth partly due to their intellectual ability. Because IQ is heavily genetic, they tend to have higher IQ children who are more likely to get more education and to get into the better schools. (Admissions cheating is wrong but it is not the core issue).

He claims that SAT scores are basically set by training for the test; this is false. Training has only a modest effect on SAT scores. He denies that SAT is a measure of IQ; actually, it is if you know the psychology literature.

He is upset by the fact that social mobility is not greater, but mobility is heavily dependent on ability and effort. What about effort? He says that effort is determined by family environment, but there are no studies that prove that.

Then he says you are lucky to live in a free society where you can prosper; yes, but so what? Everyone one in our country has the same freedom to make choices.

Sandel’s bottom line: you did not earn anything. It is all determined or blind luck. Sandel’s goal is to induce unearned guilt in everyone who does well in life. To be consistent, of course, the author should not take credit for writing his book. The assault does not stop there.

He claims that people who do better (winners) scorn and humiliate those who do less well and make them feel inferior.  Who does this sort of thing? No one I have ever known. Most of us respect anyone who earns an honest living. The assault does not stop here.

Making money, Sandel asserts, is not connected to overall moral worth and should be. Here there is a huge equivocation. In fact, anyone who earns an honest living is worthy of admiration regardless of their income; it is moral to take responsibility for your own life. But this is not acceptable to Sandel, because the best people by his moral standard do not necessarily make the most money. But what is his moral standard? Contribution to the common good. But what is the common good? Here Sandel gets quite vague because the common good is a dubious concept. If it means: the right of each individual to pursue their own happiness thru voluntary trade and association with others (as I am sure the Founding Fathers intended it to mean) ok, but he does not define it that way and clearly does not mean that.

So, what is left? Sandel does not say, but it would have to be something like the greatest good for the greatest number. But this would simply mean mob rule; the greatest number could do, literally, whatever it pleased with or to the smallest number.

Or, Sandel could mean, as a variant on this, the state will decide how much each person should be paid. This would then be what?  The tyranny of the common good as defined by everyone but yourself.

To avoid such horrors, the Founding fathers rejected democracy (unlimited majority rule) and created a republic with a constitution to protect the rights of every individual to pursue their own, personal happiness.so long as they respect the legitimate rights of others. The choice here is clear: it is Sandel vs. America.

Edwin A. Locke, Capitalism Magazine

How might a Biden administration lead us to a totalitarian state?  What parallels may exist with previous pathways that lead to totalitarianism?  These seven quotes could provide some insights.

1. “The press is our chief ideological weapon.”

—Nikita Khrushchev

The lion’s share of the press seems to disparage Republicans or dismiss their arguments as baseless while praising Democrats.  These people bury Democrat misdeeds (Clinton emails, Hunter Biden, etc.) while advancing critical narratives against Republicans (Russian collusion, questionable impeachment, etc.) without diligence or evidence.  Why did the mainstream press seem to bury Republican legal challenges regarding the 2020 election, calling them false on day one, before evidence was produced and analyzed?  A press that regularly sides with only one point of view and takes no accountability begins to resemble Khrushchev’s ideological weapon.  A Biden presidency could cement a state-controlled media establishment that fulfills Khrushchev’s vision.

2. “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.“

–Benjamin Franklin

Additionally, there is a notion of censorship not only by the historical press, but within all other communications with the public that did not exist in the time of Khrushchev.  Why would Twitter and Facebook subdue reports of Hunter Biden’s relationships with Ukraine and China and emails with possible ties to his father Joe?  Meanwhile, the president was subject to an intense three-year investigation regarding collusion with Russia to win an election that resulted in no collusion being discovered.  What would an aggressive three-year investigation of Hunter Biden’s emails produce?  In a society with freeness of speech, we would know.  With the direction we are headed in now with social media and other censorship, we might not know.

Also concerning is the silencing of conservative voices across universities.  Janet Mock was banned from speaking at Brown University.  Ben Shapiro was banned from speaking at Cal. State at L.A.  There are others.  Upon a Biden presidency with sympathetic voices from Twitter, Facebook, other social media, universities, and others, we could find ourselves bearing out Ben Franklin’s observation and overthrow our own liberty by subduing the freeness of speech even beyond Khrushchev’s historical press.

3. “Indeed, you won the elections, but I won the count.”

—Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza

Is it possible for a presidential candidate in the United States to legitimately have the votes to win but then lose the election to the counting of those votes?  Elections happen around the world, and there are those in totalitarian states, as indicated by the Somoza quote above, that are controlled by manipulating the election counts.  In dispute at present with the 2020 presidential election is the flood of mail-in ballots that may have distorted the 2020 election results through the vote-counting process in Democrat-controlled cities.  How can we know if this is true?  It requires total re-verification and re-counting all mail-in ballots from Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Las Vegas before the existing counts and the election result could be believed.  Absent that, as implied by Somoza, Trump may have won the election, while Biden won the count.

4. “The implementation of a multi-party governing system offers people an avenue for giving constructive criticism to the government.  This prevents leaders from becoming dictatorial and repressive.”

—Sharon Rondeau

For a democracy, even our republic, to succeed requires at least two “legitimate” political parties.  For a party to be “legitimate,” it needs to be recognized as being able to govern once elected.  Our nation’s two predominant parties have had mutual legitimacy — that is, up until Donald Trump and the Republicans won the 2016 election.  The Democrats never recognized the Republican victory’s legitimacy.  They formed a “resistance” and attempted to take down the president with a false Russian collusion narrative, a low-bar impeachment process, and on and on.  With a Biden presidency, could this resistance expand to writing off the Republican Party as an illegitimate organization that will need to be eliminated, placing us squarely in totalitarianism’s crosshairs?

5. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

—George Orwell

The founding of our country — “the past” — is under direct assault from the “woke” initiative.  Wokeness, being a Marxist concept, is trying to tell us that our nation’s founding is based on slavery — a false narrative.  Why false?  Slavery was an accepted, legal process at the time of our country’s founding, and many of our founders had slaves along with others across the world.  But slavery contradicts the founding principles these great men advanced.  The Declaration of Independence and Constitution held the principles of freedom and equality that contributed to the abolition of slavery, not slavery’s justification.  Should Biden gain the presidency, being Orwell’s “the present,” this woke notion and the “1619 Project” could be expanded to redefine “the past” and orient “the future” education narrative that might have our Declaration of Independence and Constitution labeled ill founded and discarded, along with our democratic republic, based on a false historical slavery narrative, moving us toward a totalitarian state.  

6. “As for civil liberties, anyone who is not vigilant may one day find himself living, if not in a police state, at least in a police city.”

—Gore Vidal

We have all seen the recent effort to delegitimize the country’s police as overreaching, racist entities — yet another false narrative.  Among the 800,000 armed policemen in this country, there have been incidents of criminal behavior that need to be addressed.  But to characterize Michael Brown’s shooting as a criminal act is another false narrative (look at the evidence).  Yet this incident was leveraged by Black Lives Matter to accelerate that movement’s Marxist agenda to take down and defund the police.  Then we have Marxist Antifa’s involvement.  With Biden, what could happen here?  Could defunded police be refunded and re-established and transition from an entity to “protect the people” to an entity that “protects the state,” moving to a “police state”?

7. “The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism.  But, under the name of ‘liberalism,’ they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”

—Norman Thomas

This is a quote that defines overall what may be happening.  We have lived through the decades of gradual transition of socialist sentiments and actions in our country, becoming more socialist every day through the transition.  We have seen universities, K–12 school systems, the media, large companies, philanthropic organizations, and other entities transition from idealistic to socialist, largely unnoticed — until now.  Would Biden’s administration be a massive socialist revolution into a totalitarian state?  No.  But given what has happened already, it could be the straw that breaks democracy’s back.

Our transformation to a totalitarian state must be resisted.  Buckle up and stand tall.  Do not fear Black Lives Matter, Antifa, social media, the press, your school’s curricula, your employer, or any of these forces.

We must heed the words of Andrew Jackson:

But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing.

As individuals, it is our price to pay to ensure our democratic republic’s survival and have its blessing secured.

It is on us.

Tom R. Keltner, American Thinker

We all know at least one person who likes to disagree, simply for the sake of disagreeing. That person is easy to identify: disputing minor facts such as the weather, carrying on an argument over something that doesn’t matter to anyone, or hanging on to a point for no apparent reason.

Different theories can be advanced to explain such a personality trait. One is boredom. The person who passionately disagrees over insignificant things may be trying to “work out” his pent up intellectual energy. Instead of pursuing something useful or creative, he takes the edge off his boredom by starting petty arguments with people who couldn’t care less.

But there could be more to it than just boredom. A person who does this kind of thing is looking for a short-cut to self-esteem. Most of us earn confidence by doing something well. Some, however, would rather not exert that effort or take the risks involved in achieving anything useful or productive. Instead, they prefer to get into a verbal tussle about the name of a song on the radio, what day and year something happened, or who won the Super Bowl in 1979. Like the singsong mocking of a little child, “I know something you don’t know,” the sad truth is that some adults never outgrow this immature stage.

Another word for contrary is “oppositional.” The mental health profession defines “oppositional defiant disorder” as an “ongoing pattern of disobedient, defiant and hostile behavior toward authority figures that goes beyond the normal boundaries of childhood behavior.” And, yes, I suspect that a lot of the problems with these contrary adults started in childhood. Perhaps they were exposed to arbitrary or contradictory rules and punishments. Some will take the high road; becoming better parents themselves, or maybe just distancing themselves from the erratic parents who drove them crazy. Yet others will grow into adults who want to “fight back” by doing battle over the name of the salesman who sold you your car or whether or not it’s going to rain. There are functional and dysfunctional ways to handle your negative childhood experiences, and the contrary person hasn’t yet found a healthy outlet.

Don’t confuse a chronically oppositional adult with an independent thinker. Sometimes, genuine independent thinkers are unfairly labeled as troublemakers just because they disagree with the group. The independent thinker has his own ideas and isn’t depending on you to say something so he can dispute it. The independent thinker (right or wrong doesn’t matter) has formulated a conclusion on his own. If it goes with the majority, fine. If it’s different or even unpopular, as when Galileo upset the narrow minds of the time by suggesting that the earth revolved around the sun, then equally fine. We all enjoy countless benefits thanks to independent thought exercised by a minority of individuals over the centuries.

An oppositional person thrives on conflict for its own sake. If Charlie wants to dispute me on my casual comment that it’s a nice day, and really wants to have an intense discussion about it, I’m in no way duty-bound to honor his desire. I don’t need to win a debate I don’t care to have. I’m free to walk away.

By the way, this is a good technique for more contentious or debatable issues as well. Somebody might be trying to argue with you about a political or philosophical point you hold near and dear. In one sense, you want to be true to your values and ideals, and may feel obliged to fight back. Maybe you should, and you certainly can, but you never have to just because of somebody’s neurotic prodding.

Pick your battles wisely. Cherish your serenity by deciding for yourself what’s a battle and what’s not. Rise above the pettiness and see those quarrelsome people for whom they really are.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

At the present moment, we are witnessing a phenomenon that to many people appears bizarre and inexplicable: the phenomenon of wealthy capitalists supporting socialism/communism.

Capitalists, we have been taught, are supporters of capitalism, indeed, the only supporters of capitalism, because they are allegedly the only ones who gain from capitalism. Everyone else is assumed to be a victim of capitalism’s alleged exploitation of labor.

The actual significance of this phenomenon is that it constitutes a living refutation of the doctrine of “identity politics,” according to which people’s ideas and actions are determined by their group membership in terms of economic class, race, or gender.

The truth is that what people advocate is determined by their ideas and values, not their membership in this or that group. This includes the fact that the policies that actually serve an individual’s self-interest are a matter of economic science, not group membership.

The beliefs associated with the alleged interests of this or that group, such as labor and social legislation, confiscatory taxation of the rich, and government ownership, being in the interest of the wage earners, turn out to be nothing more than unchallenged, frozen ignorance.

They are a bundle of errors. In contrast, a wage earner who understands economics knows that his material well-being is served by capitalism and capitalists. For the capital of the capitalists is the source of the supply of the products that he buys and of the demand for the labor that he sells.

This, of course, means that the greater the number of capitalists and their average wealth, the higher are wages and the lower are prices.

Just as wage earners who understand economics, support capitalism, businessmen and capitalists who don’t understand economics but instead have accepted the nonsensical theories of Marx, stand with the enemies of capitalism.

This has been true from the very beginning, starting with Marx’s collaborator and personal benefactor Friedrich Engels, a wealthy cotton mill owner. Indeed, it goes back even earlier, to Robert Owen, a leading “utopian socialist” textile manufacturer early in the 19^th Century.

An interesting question for psychologists and psychotherapists is how anti-capitalist capitalists are able to live with themselves. They believe that what they are doing is robbing their workers and making them suffer, but they go on doing it.

Is it really sufficient for them to be able to say they are financing the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system, while on the basis of their beliefs, they think they are causing massive suffering every day, while they themselves enjoy all kinds of luxuries?

I’m tempted to coin a couple of names for this condition: “double inverted schizophrenia” and “capitalists’ socialism syndrome.” The schizophrenic element is a socialist belief-system in opposition to one’s every-day capitalistic behavior.

The “double inversion” part refers to the fact that the actual behavior entailed in being a capitalist is profoundly beneficial to wage earners, while the atonement for that behavior is what is destructive and evil.

Originally published at the blog of George Reisman. Copyright 2020 George Reisman. All rights reserved.

As we pointed out previously, the left’s psychological stance is inherently anti-western. This means that the left’s activities are motivated and actuated by its animus toward the values and ways underpinning what we call “Western Civilization.” Driven by its antipathy to it, the left’s ultimate objective is nothing less than the subversion of this socio-political system.

This fact is not always easy to discern, since most of the time evidence of anti-western animus is not readily obvious. Nor is it admitted to by most of those who harbor it. It is especially difficult to detect by observers who are not aware of its existence in the first place. To conceal their true motives, those on the left have consistently claimed that their deeds are inspired by love, compassion and other such noble motives. Many well-meaning people either believe such claims or at least give them the benefit of the doubt. They do not carefully analyze the left’s actions and thus fail to recognize their corrosive effect on their society and civilization at large. What makes it difficult for unsuspecting people to see the truth is their inability to imagine that the activities some of their fellow citizens could be fueled by hatred of their own culture and community. Then there are those who sense that something is not quite right, but they lack the intellectual framework to properly grasp or articulate what may be wrong with leftists and their works.

Only a relatively small sliver of the left is honest about their true feelings and goals. There are few who openly confess their aversion to the Western way of life and their desire to do away with societies that practice it. These honest elements, however, are usually seen only as an extremist minority residing on the far fringe of the spectrum. But this is not the case. The haters of the West do not constitute merely some small clique on the left. They are only more sincere than their ideological compadres who disingenuously conceal their aversion toward western ways under the false façade of love, compassion, tolerance and such. The truth behind their motives is actually the exact opposite of their claims.

Note: Not all those on the left are driven by active hatred of their Western heritage. There are some individuals who get involved with leftist causes because they have been deceived, or they are confused, or they want to appear to be good and caring people. In other words, they fall into the category Lenin used to call “useful idiots.”

In the spring of this year something very revealing happened. The hostile effervescence of the anti-western animus which had been building up in the left’s collective psyche for decades, mostly under the surface and largely unnoticed by most, suddenly erupted with great force. The trigger was the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis during his arrest on May 25. The incident broke the sluice gate lock, as it were, and the accumulated reservoir of pugnacious energy began rushing into the left’s entrails in one great stream.

Sensing blood and supercharged with the overflow of destructive spirit, the left sprang into action. Having perceived that our troubled, crisis-ridden civilization was weak, the left threw away the gloves and went for the jugular. Baring its teeth and moving in for the kill, it dropped its mask of goodness to reveal its ugly face. Suddenly it became all too obvious that the left is neither compassionate, nor loving, nor tolerant nor inclusive. Now everyone with the eyes to see could recognize that, rather than being loving and compassionate, the left is actually violent, destructive, hateful, oppressive, angry, censorious and intolerant. In addition, the latest election also exposed them as shameless fraudsters and cheats. What also became very clear was that these qualities do not only define the fringes but run all the way through the left’s core and center. They were on ample display all across the field – from the vandals on the streets, through suave media figures like Anderson Cooper to powerful politicians like Kamala Harris and all in between. In the process we witnessed billionaire owners of social media platforms overseeing brazen forms of censorship while sophisticated intellectuals kept churning out blatant lies about the nature of this deleterious movement.

Weakened societies are almost invariably brought down by violence. Thus it was that violence became the focus and the centerpiece of the left’s efforts the moment it erupted with such force in late May. The left correctly perceived that in order to achieve its objective of societal subversion, the violence had to be intensified and prolonged for as long as possible. Consequently, all the elements of the left’s juggernaut began working synergistically in unison toward this goal. To begin with, it was imperative that regular citizens not become fully aware of the extent of the violence and the damage it was causing. The idea was to keep concerned Americans from rising up and demanding the end of it by putting pressure on politicians and law enforcement. It was for this purpose that the mainstream media kept describing the riots as “the mostly peaceful protests” and carefully avoided broadcasting footage of devastation and mayhem. Even as America was being torn apart by the most violent internal upheaval in its history – which the insurance industry declared “a catastrophe” across multiple states – many people had no real idea of what was happening, thanks to the successful concealment efforts of the mainstream media outlets.

The media was deftly seconded by leftist intellectuals who provided both justification and cover. Among the many examples we could list, we just mention the world-renowned academic Noam Chomsky who managed to utter the following words with a completely straight face:

“The Black Lives Matter protests which is a huge, incredible development: the biggest social movement in American history. A huge number of people involved spontaneously, solidarity black and white together, constructive goals, develop good programs, really great things happening… At the fringes they are people who are breaking windows, intimidating somebody at the restaurant… Things like this shouldn’t be happening, but that’s not what’s going on. What’s going on is a massive, non-violent, constructive social movement.”

That was a blatant lie by Professor Chomsky. No other movement in the history of this country has wrought more damage than the 2020 riots. The only domestic event that has caused more destruction in America was the Civil War.

For their part, leftist politicians on all levels did their best to lend their support and give encouragement to the vandals and subversives who were laying waste to American cities and terrorizing communities up and down the country. This they did in two main ways. First, they tied the hands of law enforcement so that law and order would not be restored. In a truly surreal twist of reality, they managed to make the police the object of reprobation while the looters and arsonists the police were trying to restrain were cast as righteous warriors in the cause of social justice. In some places they went so far as to accommodate the rioters’ demand of defunding the police. Secondly, the politicians would signal to rioters to continue their work and, at times, they would even urge them to step it up further. A notable instance of this was the democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris who in an online interview with Stephen Colbert encouraged and stimulated the rioters with these words:

“They’re not gonna stop.  And that’s – they’re not – this is a movement, I’m telling you.  They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop… They’re not gonna stop before election day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after election day.”

To see where leftists really stand contemplate this fact: as of today, no major figure on the left has either condemned the violence or called for prosecution of those responsible for the injuries, damage and deaths that have occurred as a result of it.

To further their cause, the woke operatives in Big Tech did their part by imposing severe censorship on those who tried to document and expose what was actually taking place. By the summer of 2020 cancel culture reached unprecedented proportions. Conservative posts and their authors were being purged from platforms of public discourse in a systemic manner. Those of social media accounts were blocked or cancelled for simply stating the truth. Many of those who objected to the left’s methods were harassed, threatened, assaulted, fired from their jobs and had their reputations ruined.

The true nature and goal of the “protest” movement should become clear once we recognize the glaring falsity of its purported cause. Spearheaded by BLM, the riots were cast as a righteous uprising against systemic racism that allegedly runs rampant the United States. The problem with this claim is that it is simply not true. The exact opposite is, in fact, the case. Rather than being a racist country, the United States has made its black people the most advantaged and privileged minority in history. Blacks in America enjoy a whole array of privileges and benefits that are unavailable to the rest of population. Reverse discrimination is a common practice in education, government employment and other areas of life. In the last twelve years America has elected a black president twice and if the initial result of the 2020 presidential election stands, America will have a black vice-president next year. Given the advanced age of Joe Biden – who would be 82 years old at end of his first term – it is quite likely that Kamala Harris will be called upon to ascend to the presidency at some point during his term in office. If this likely scenario does indeed take place, America will have had two black presidents in three out of the last four presidential cycles. Moreover, Harris would also have the honor of being the first female president in the history of the United States. Could anything like this ever happen in a racist country? The truth is that both Barrack Obama and Kamala Harris ascended to the very pinnacle of the American power structure because they are black. Given their modest accomplishments prior to their spectacular rise to the top, they would not get anywhere close to the Oval Office if they were white. The black color of their skin was not an obstacle. Quite to the contrary, it was their advantage and a ticket to success. So much about America being a racist society.

To any sane person it must be amply obvious that the protest/riot movement that shook America to its core in 2020 was launched and conducted on a fraudulent basis and under false pretenses. Rather than intended to right a non-existent injustice, the purported cause of racism was only a cover for an entirely different agenda and goal. The agenda was the destabilization of American society and the goal its overthrow.

We will continue this discussion in the next installment and show how the left exported this agenda to other western nations in an effort to effect wider civilizational subversion.

The Best of Vasko Kohlmayer