What human motivation gets the most wonderful things done? It’s really a silly question, because the answer is so simple. It turns out that it’s human greed that gets the most wonderful things done. When I say greed, I am not talking about fraud, theft, dishonesty, lobbying for special privileges from government or other forms of despicable behavior. I’m talking about people trying to get as much as they can for themselves. Let’s look at it.

This winter, Texas ranchers may have to fight the cold of night, perhaps blizzards, to run down, feed and care for stray cattle. They make the personal sacrifice of caring for their animals to ensure that New Yorkers can enjoy beef. Last summer, Idaho potato farmers toiled in blazing sun, in dust and dirt, and maybe being bitten by insects to ensure that New Yorkers had potatoes to go with their beef.

Here’s my question: Do you think that Texas ranchers and Idaho potato farmers make these personal sacrifices because they love or care about the well-being of New Yorkers? The fact is whether they like New Yorkers or not, they make sure that New Yorkers are supplied with beef and potatoes every day of the week. Why? It’s because ranchers and farmers want more for themselves. In a free market system, in order for one to get more for himself, he must serve his fellow man. This is precisely what Adam Smith, the father of economics, meant when he said in his classic “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (1776), “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” By the way, how much beef and potatoes do you think New Yorkers would enjoy if it all depended upon the politically correct notions of human love and kindness? Personally, I’d grieve for New Yorkers. Some have suggested that instead of greed, I use “enlightened self-interest.” That’s OK, but I prefer greed.https://74c4e5c49c10ced562870b84fa49750d.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Free market capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to the rise of capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving one’s fellow man. Capitalists seek to discover what people want and then produce it as efficiently as possible. Free market capitalism is ruthless in its profit and loss discipline. This explains much of the hostility toward free market capitalism; some of it is held by businessmen. Smith recognized this hostility when he said, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” He was hinting at government-backed crony capitalism, which has come to characterize much of today’s businesses.

Free market capitalism has other enemies — mostly among the intellectual elite and political tyrants. These are people who believe that they have superior wisdom to the masses and that God has ordained them to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. Of course, they have what they consider to be good reasons for restricting liberty, but every tyrant who has ever lived has had what he considered good reason for restricting liberty. A tyrant’s agenda calls for the attenuation or the elimination of the market and what is implied by it — voluntary exchange. Tyrants do not trust that people acting voluntarily will do what the tyrant thinks they should do. They want to replace the market with economic planning and regulation.null

The Wall Street occupiers and their media and political allies are not against the principle of crony capitalism, bailouts and government special privileges and intervention. They share the same hostility to free market capitalism and peaceable voluntary exchange as tyrants. What they really want is congressional permission to share in the booty from looting their fellow man.

QWalter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at http://www.creators.com.

One hundred years ago today, on April 16, 1910, Henry Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation, put the finishing touches on the Flexner Report.1 No other document would have such a profound effect on American medicine, starting it on its path to destruction up to and beyond the recently passed (and laughably titled) Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA), a.k.a., “Obamacare.” Flexner can only be accurately understood in the context of what led up to it.

Free market medicine did not begin in the United States in 1776 with the Revolution. From 1830 to about 1850, licensing laws and regulations imposed during the colonial period and early America were generally repealed or ignored. This was brought about by the increasing acceptance of eclecticism (1813) and homeopathy (1825), against the mainstream medicine (allopathy) of the day that included bloodletting and high-dose injections of metal and metalloid compounds containing mercury or antimony.2

Eclectics emphasized plant remedies, bed rest, and steam baths, while homeopaths emphasized a different set of medicines in small doses (letting the body heal itself as much as possible), improved diet and hygiene, and stress reduction. The worst results these treatments produced were allergic reactions to no improvement. Hence it’s not surprising they began to be preferred over the ghastly bleeding and metal injections of allopathy, which killed large numbers of patients.

By 1860, there were more than 55,000 physicians practicing in the United States, one of the highest per capita numbers of doctors in the world (about 175 per 100,000).3 By 1870, approximately 62,000 physicians were in practice in the United States,4 roughly about 5,300 of which were homeopathic and about 2,700 eclectic.5 Schooling was plentiful and inexpensive, and entry to the most acclaimed schools was not exceedingly difficult. Most schools were privately owned. Licenses to practice were not required or enforced, and anyone could establish a practice.6

Like the mythical Hollywood portrayal of the American “Wild West” as a place in which the denizens of every town were killing each other in gunfights every minute of the day, the free market period in American medicine has also been distorted as one in which towns were mobbed by traveling quacks prescribing dangerous treatments that killed the townspeople in droves. Organized mainstream medicine concocted this myth, and as previously noted, it was they and not the homeopaths and eclectics who were killing large numbers of people via bloodletting and metal poisoning.7 This is why it took time and effort for any caregiver to win the widespread trust of a typical community in nineteenth-century America. The public en masse blindly lapping up snake oil dispensed from the dirty travel trunks of carnival-tent quacks is wild legend.

Even though they were only about 13 percent of physicians in practice,8 eclectics and homeopaths did damage to the incomes of the allopaths. The allopaths began organizing at the state level to use the coercive power of government to not only severely restrict (if not outright ban) eclectics and homeopaths, and the schools that trained them, but also restrict the number of allopaths in practice to dramatically increase their incomes and prestige.9

The American Medical Association (AMA) had already been formed in 1847 by Nathan Smith Davis. Davis had been working at the Medical Society of New York with issues of licensing and education. While the pretense was always more rigorous standards toward the supposed end of effective treatments, exclusion was the reality. Hence it was no surprise that in 1870, Davis worked successfully to prohibit female and black physicians from becoming members of the AMA.10

The AMA formed its Council on Medical Education in 1904 as a tool to artificially restrict education.11 However, the AMA’s conflict of interest was too obvious. This is where Abraham Flexner and the Carnegie Foundation entered the picture. Flexner’s older brother Simon was the director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and he recommended his brother Abraham for the Carnegie job. Abraham’s acceptance of the role was the perfect special-interest symbiosis. Carnegie’s desire was to advance secularism through higher education, thus it saw the AMA’s agenda as favorable toward that end. Rockefeller’s benefactors were allied with allopathic drug companies and hated for-profit schools that couldn’t be controlled by the big-business, state-influenced foundations. Last of all, the AMA got an objective-appearing front in Carnegie.12

Not only was Abraham Flexner not even an allopathic physician; he was not a widely known authority on education,13 never mind medical education, as he had never even seen the inside of a medical school before joining Carnegie. His report was already effectively written, since it was essentially the AMA’s unpublished 1906 report on US medical schools. Furthermore, Flexner was accompanied on his inspection by the AMA’s N.P. Colwell to insure the inspection would arrive at the preordained conclusions. Flexner then spent time at the AMA’s Chicago headquarters preparing what portion of the final product was his actual work.14

Regardless of these scandalous circumstances, state medical boards and legislatures used the report as a basis for closing medical schools. Around the time of Flexner, there was a high of 166 medical schools; by the 1940s there were just 77—a 54 percent reduction.15 Most small rural schools were closed, and only two African American schools were allowed to remain open.16 By 1963, despite advances in technology and a huge growth in demand, one effect of the report was to keep the number of doctors per 100,000 people in the United States—146—at the same level it was at in 1910.17 Of the approximately 375,000 physicians in practice in 1977, only about 6,300 or 1.7 percent were African American.18

While physician incomes and prestige dramatically increased, so did the caregiving workload. Wolinsky and Brune (1994) report that doctors were firmly in the lower middle class at the time of the AMA’s founding and made about $600 per year. This rose to about $1,000 around 1900. After Flexner, incomes began to skyrocket such that a 1928 AMA study found average annual incomes had reached a whopping (for the time) $6,354.19 Even during the Great Depression, physicians earned four times what average workers did.20 A 2009 survey put family practice doctors (on the low end of the physician income range) at a median of $197,655 and spine surgeons (at the high end) at a median of $641,728.21 These figures are mind-boggling to ordinary Americans, even in good economic times. In addition, the cyclical unemployment that throws workers out of jobs in almost all other industries with the arrival of recessions or depressions became nonexistent among physicians after Flexner.

However, not even Flexner could repeal the laws of economics: the physician workload in certain areas became backbreaking to impossible, such that some physicians no longer accept new patients. Some primary-care physicians today are booked solid for at least two months, and unless you have some sort of connection to get in before that or pay for concierge care, your alternative for urgent care is the same as everyone else’s on a weekend: the emergency room, where you’ll wait for hours, or a walk-in where you’ll see one or two MD names posted on the building, but wait for hours for a nurse practitioner.

Hospitals

Of course it wouldn’t make sense to restrict physician services without restricting hospitals. For-profits were the first to go, and where they were not outright prohibited, they faced a number of regulatory burdens that nonprofits escaped—such as income and property taxes. Nonprofits received generous government subsidies, tax-deductible contributions, and local planning agencies working in their favor to keep for-profit competitors from expanding. This state-sponsored discrimination against for-profit hospitals took its toll: at the time of Flexner, almost 60 percent of all US hospitals were for-profit institutions. By 1968, only 11 percent were for-profit institutions, with about an 8 percent share of hospital admissions.22

Eliminating most for-profit medical schools and hospitals made sense for the AMA and the rest of organized mainstream medicine, since they were controlled by owners or shareholders who had the incentive to control costs in order to maximize profits. Nonprofits were free to pursue the political goals that organized mainstream medicine favored, especially the goal of a much more lengthy and costly education, which served as another barrier of entry to the profession. (Especially amusing was a 2004 article by two Dartmouth physicians arguing for maintaining restricted entry because of high costs.)23

The Rise of Health “Insurance”

In the early 1900s, prepaid health plans were created for the timber and mining workers of Oregon and Washington to help offset the inherent risks of those industries. Within a free-market, for-profit insurance system, claims were closely monitored by adjusters. Fees, procedures, and exceptionally long hospital stays were monitored and subject to challenge. A physicians’ group in Oregon that resented this type of scrutiny created a plan where procedures were reimbursed and fees paid with few questions asked. Plans with similar structures began dominating the market in other locations because of government-provided advantages.

By 1939 these loose cost containment plans began to be marketed under the Blue Shield name. That same year, Blue Cross was endorsed by the American Hospital Association. Already in existence for ten years, Blue Cross had begun as a hospital insurance plan for Dallas school teachers that allowed them to pay for up to three weeks of hospital care with low monthly payments.

After this, organized mainstream medicine waged an intense war on non-Blue plans. Goodman (1980) contends that some physicians lost hospital privileges and even their licenses for accepting non-Blue plans.24 The Blues also gained government-supplied advantages not available to non-Blue plans. In many states, they paid no or low premium taxes and sometimes no real estate taxes. They also weren’t required to maintain minimum benefit/premium ratios and could have no or low required reserves. With government advantages, the Blues steadily came to dominate the industry. By 1950, Blue Cross held 49 percent of the hospital insurance market, while Blue Shield held 52 percent of the market for standard medical insurance.25 They merged in 1982 and today cover one of every three Americans.26

Blues-created “insurance” was anything but true insurance.

• Hospitals were paid on a cost-plus basis. Insurers paid not a sum of prices charged to patients for services but artificial “costs” that bore no necessary relationship to the prices of services performed.
• Insurance of routine procedures. This converted insurance to prepaid consumption that encouraged overuse of services.
• Insurance premiums based on “community rating.” The word “community” meant that every person in a specific geographic area regardless of age, habits, occupation, race, or sex was charged the same premium. For example, the average 60-year-old incurs four times the medical expense of the average 25-year-old, but under community rating both pay the same premium (i.e., young people are overcharged and the elderly undercharged).
• A “pay-as-you-go” system. Unlike genuine catastrophic hospital insurance that placed premiums in growing reserves to pay claims, the new Blues’ “insurance” collected premiums that only covered expected costs over the following year. If a large group of policyholders became ill over several years, the premiums of all policyholders had to be raised to cover the increase in costs.

These traits spell cost-explosion disaster, so naturally they were incorporated into the federal government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs when they were created in the mid-1960s to address the problem of healthcare being unaffordable for the poor and elderly—a problem the state and federal governments created!

This only leaves the mystery of how health insurance became attached to employment. The answer is found two decades before Medicare and Medicaid. Wage and price controls the federal government enacted during World War II prevented large employers from competing for labor based on wage rates, so they competed based on the quality of benefits. The most effective benefit for luring labor to large employers was generous health insurance policies.

The decision by the federal government to allow large-employer benefits to be obtained tax-free while effectively taxing plans purchased by small businesses and the self-employed created a system where medical insurance became not only perversely tied to the size of a worker’s employer but to employment itself. The price of health insurance for many self-employed workers and small businesses became unaffordable.

Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs)

Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) were prepaid practices that began mainly on the US west coast in the early 1900s. Western Clinic in Tacoma (1910) and Ross-Loos in Los Angeles (1929) were among the earliest. (Ross-Loos eventually became part of Insurance Company of North America [INA], which merged into CIGNA in 1982.) Kaiser Permanente began with a clientele of shipyard workers during World War II. After the war, it had hospitals and physicians, but no more worker clientele, so it started marketing to the wider public and by the 1970s had more than 3 million enrollees in five states.27

Still, HMOs had limited appeal. By 1970, Kaiser was the only major HMO in the United States, with most of its enrollees forced to join through their labor unions.28

Much more about HMOs will be covered in a forthcoming review in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. The purpose here is to emphasize that, despite some assertions to the contrary, HMOs are anything but free market firms. The Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 made federal grants and loans available to HMOs, removed certain state restrictions if HMOs became federally certified, and required employers with 25 or more employees who offered standard health insurance benefits to offer federally approved HMO plans.

“Obamacare,” or More Accurately, ConservativeRepublicanCare

When you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas…a lot of the ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, originated from the Heritage Foundation. (Barack Obama, NBC’s Today Show, March 30, 2010)

The latest chapter in US healthcare is one of the most surreal. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 was signed into law by Barack Obama on March 23, 2010. Among many provisions, the act includes expanded Medicaid eligibility, prohibiting denials of coverage for preexisting conditions, and a requirement to purchase federally approved health insurance or pay a fine.

While the content of the act is summarized in myriad places, much more interesting are its conservative Republican origins. The Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler, the intellectual behind urban enterprise zones, in Senate testimony in 2003 proposed a plan for universal healthcare coverage.29 Here’s one surprising portion of the testimony that sounds like it was uttered by a European socialist:

In a civilized and rich country like the United States, it is reasonable for society to accept an obligation to ensure that all residents have affordable access to at least basic health care—much as we accept the same obligation to assure a reasonable level of housing, education and nutrition.

Keep in mind that Butler is the conservative Heritage’s current vice president of domestic and economic policy. No wonder Butler seems to have found a new admirer in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Butler again:

The obligations on individuals do not have to be a “hard” mandate, in the sense that failure to obtain coverage would be illegal. It could be a “soft” mandate, meaning that failure to obtain coverage could result in the loss of tax benefits and other government entitlements. In addition, if federal tax benefits or other assistance accompanied the requirement, states and localities could receive the value of the assistance forgone by the person failing to obtain coverage, in order to compensate providers who deliver services to the uninsured family.

Now “Obamacare” is certainly more than just a mandate, but the mandate is certainly what has conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, both of whom have connections to, if not sponsorship from, the Heritage Foundation, screaming bloody murder the most. There’s no doubt that these ideas influenced Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan in Massachusetts.

Romney subjected himself to a recent interview by Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly that can only be described as a disaster.30 O’Reilly dwelled on the fact that outside tax dollars funded half of the plan, and Romney agreed, adding that the funding was approved by two conservative Republican Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretaries, Tommy Thompson and Mike Leavitt. In response to a question, Romney admitted that he didn’t know that emergency room costs in Massachusetts had increased 17 percent over the last two years. He repeatedly asserted that the plan solved a problem, but he couldn’t specify what it was since Massachusetts had the highest per capita costs both before the plan and after.

As far as other conservative Republicans go, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has repeatedly stated that he sees “some good things” in Obamacare, especially the expanded use of Medicaid.

Voters naïve enough to think they will get a complete repeal from the Republican Party appear to be in for a major disappointment. “Obamacare,” with its continuance of socialized costs for private gains in American medicine, was the treatment that the conservative Republican doctor had in mind for some time. The problem is that the Democrats were the first to implement it.

–Dale Steinreich, Mises Institute

When hearing talk of the Democrats’ war on blacks, some may think of the 92 percent of black homicide victims murdered by other blacks mainly in Democrat-run cities. Others may ponder the 300,000 black babies killed yearly in the womb with the approval, sometimes tacit, sometimes more overt, of many white liberals. Yet there’s another front in this war, one more recently opened and far more insidious.

When President Trump early this month ordered an end to mandatory “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) training in the federal bureaucracy — which sometimes involved compelling white male employees to write letters of apology to “marginalized” people — he was, predictably, called a “racist.” But if ending this destructive program is “racism,” well, then whatever racism is, we need more of it.

The CRT “training’s” anti-white nature is obvious. As Heritage Foundation fellow Christopher Rufo wrote last month, reporting on the CRT indoctrination at Sandia National Laboratories, the trainers insisted “that white males must ‘work hard to understand’ their ‘white privilege,’ ‘male privilege,’ and ‘heterosexual privilege.’” 

Of course, such privilege exists like unicorns do. But insofar as blacks and other non-whites will believe it does and that they’re (perhaps fatally) disadvantaged, we should ask: How does making people more hopeless and bitter improve their prospects for success?

It gets far, far worse, however. The trainers also claimed that “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work” and “striving towards success” reflected “white male culture,” which they said leads to “lowered quality of life at work and home, reduced life expectancy, unproductive relationships, and high stress.” I guess slacker bums who can’t put food on the table (when they have a table) have no stress.

But this Loser 101 indoctrination isn’t limited to Sandia or even the bowels of federal buildings. It’s in schools as well, where teachers are being told that hard work, planning for the future and punctuality are “white norms.” Try telling that to Asian-descent Americans, who, apparently, are just like white people — only more so. 

(One race theory activist, Glenn Singleton, does tell them that, saying that Asian-descent Americans are a “majority” group because of their “white” habits. Honorary white people, I guess.)

Ironically, this is the very attitude black educators lamented, and combated, just a generation ago. Back then it was slacker, criminally inclined black youths (usually driven by jealously, mind you) accusing their higher achieving peers of “acting white.” This was universally recognized as destructive social pressure that militated against the embrace of success-breeding habits. Now the attitude has been lent the respectable veneer of educational theory and the endorsement of academic authorities.   

This does violence to an already struggling black underclass. It’s man’s nature to glom on to convenient excuses, and American blacks have long been fed a diet of low expectations for performance and high expectations for copping out. Now pseudo-intellectual social engineers are exacerbating the problem.

Consider race-theory-demeaned punctuality. The saying goes that “80 percent of success is just showing up”; I’ll add that 90 percent of success is showing up on time. Yet as black writer T.J. Holmes lamented in 2014, failure to do so characterizes the black community.

In “It’s Time to Quit Operating on CP [Colored People’s] Time,” Holmes writes that our “challenges with starting or arriving on time are often dismissed with humorous complacency.” “You know how we are,” is what he hears from other blacks. “But this week,” he wrote, “CPT totally stopped being funny to me.”

After relating instances in which he’d been bitten by CPT, he stated, “This hurts to admit, but I often pause when considering doing business with black people or black companies, based on my experiences.”  

Now, will activists call this black man a “racist”? They’ll more likely brand him an Uncle Tom. No amount of name-calling alters reality, however, which is this: We can institute all the affirmative action, quotas and set asides we want, but the last 50 years have proven that the wider society’s indulgence cannot compensate for a community’s fundamental virtue deficits. The pork barrel can keep people on a certain plantation, though.

Of course, as we’ll often hear regarding social ills, “It all starts at home.” It’s well known, too, that fatherlessness/family dissolution plagues the black community today, with 72 percent of black children born out of wedlock.

Now the Democrat Left aims to worsen this problem, too, with Black Lives Matter openly stating that one of its goals is to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.” In this structure’s place, BLM wants blacks to care for each other, as it writes, “collectively.”

A popular race-hustler notion, the aforementioned Glenn Singleton called “collectivism” a black norm while BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors admitted “We are trained Marxists” (collectivists) in a 2015 video. And in pushing socialism on blacks, they are in a way working toward equal outcomes — for the vast majority of the 100 million souls thus far murdered by Marxist governments have been white or Asian.

This quip gets at truth: The CRT’s largely unrecognized philosophical foundation (philoso-babble, really) would have to be the relativism sweeping our time. The idea is that, as Louis Farrakhan put it, “A White Man’s Heaven Is a Black Man’s Hell” (I believe Hitler expressed a similar sentiment, by the way); that whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, etc. all have different “needs.”

The truth, however, is precisely the opposite. As Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson has put it, the black community’s problem is “immorality.” Often called sin, this is a universal plaguing everyone and causes most human woes. Now, the remedy for immorality is, obviously, morality. To be specific, if morality came in a jar, on the ingredients label would be virtues.

These are “good moral habits,” examples being hope, honesty, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance, prudence, chastity, patience, kindness, humility and love. Another virtue is diligence, which relates to punctuality and industriousness. Yet another is forgiveness, which forestalls the bitterness and hatred that can cause a person to focus on tearing society down instead of building himself up.

The point, however, is that virtues aren’t “white” or black, Hispanic or Asian, male or female.

They are divine.

They’re also universals. All people need them to live happy, prosperous, moral lives — there are no exceptions.

Anyone counseling against virtue — as the race activists do — is the worst enemy a people could have. In fact, this is why Rev. Peterson called BLM “worse than the Ku Klux Klan”: It’s doubtful that even the most clever white supremacist would think to, or could, convince blacks that virtue is vice.

But Democrat-enabling, and enabled, organizations — teachers’ unions, BLM, academia, etc. — are doing just that. And why? Well, since poor, dependent people vote Democrat by wide margins, a cynic could think that the Democrats would want to make the poor and dependent class as large as possible.

What’s for sure is that virtuous people rarely support leftists. So if I were an amoral modern Democrat lusting after power, I’d peddle vice, too.

       Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab or Parler (preferably) or Twitter, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.

The unprecedented violence perpetrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter embodies two of the Left’s biggest tactics in its quest to fundamentally transform the United States.

One is to force a race war by radicalizing African-Americans to a violent degree. The other involves making mayhem more intimidating by spreading police and firefighters as thinly as possible, thereby limiting their ability to respond quickly.

Manning Johnson, an African-American, spoke about the first tactic from personal experience. Describing himself as a “dedicated ‘comrade’ ” and a “professional revolutionist,” Johnson belonged to the Communist Party USA for 10 years. He served as a union organizer, director of agitation propaganda, and a member of the party’s national committee. Johnson even ran as the party’s candidate for a Congressional seat in New York.

But when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany concluded their non-aggression pact in 1939 — nine days before Germany invaded Poland and began World War II — Johnson left the party. Following the war, Johnson testified about Communist activities to various legislative committees. In 1958, one year before his death, Johnson wrote about his experiences in Color, Communism and Common Sense.

Why did Johnson become a Communist at 21?

“Like other Negroes, I experienced and saw many injustices and inequities around me based upon color, not ability,” he wrote. “I was told that ‘the decadent capitalist system is responsible,’ that ‘mass pressure’ could force concessions but ‘that just prolongs the life of capitalism;’ that I must unite and work with all those who more or less agree that capitalism must go. 

“To me, the end of capitalism would mark the beginning of an interminable period of plenty, peace, prosperity and universal comradeship. All racial and class differences and conflicts would end forever after the liquidation of the capitalists, their government and their supporters. A world union of Soviet States under the hegemony of Russia would free and lead mankind on to Utopia. 

“Being an idealist, I was sold this ‘bill of goods’ by a Negro graduate of the Lenin Institute in Moscow.”

That graduate probably was Harry Haywood, who joined the Communist Party in 1925 and studied in Moscow soon afterwards. Johnson credited Haywood with playing a major role in convincing Stalin to incorporate blacks into the American Communist leadership during the Communist International’s 1928 meeting in Moscow.

“Stirring up race and class conflict is the basis of all discussion of the Communist Party’s work,” Johnson wrote. “The evil genius, Stalin, and the other megalomaniac leaders in Moscow ordered the use of all racial, economic and social differences, no matter how small or insignificant, to start local fires of discontent, conflict and revolt.

“Black rebellion was what Moscow wanted. Bloody racial conflict would split America. During the confusion, demoralization and panic would set in.” 

Johnson’s own training reflected that strategy. Once he joined the party, Johnson received “two years of practical training in organizing street demonstrations, inciting mob violence, how to fight the police and how to politically ‘throw a brick and hide,'” he wrote. Johnson then attended a school where he studied “red political warfare,” he wrote, in which he “learned to use secret codes, ‘mail drops,’ organize clandestine meetings, ‘shake police shadows'” and grasped “the nature of communist sabotage and espionage.”

Compare Johnson’s descriptions with BLM’s activities, beyond the obvious similarities of arson, looting, assault, harassment — even murder.

“We actually have an ideological frame,” co-founder Patrisse Cullors told a left-wing podcast. “Myself and Alicia in particular, we’re trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on ideological theories.”

Cullors studied under Eric Mann, a left-wing organizer who worked with the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground in the 1960s. “Alicia” is fellow co-founder Alicia Garza, who also created the Black Futures Lab, a BLM subsidiary that organizes African-Americans and develops policies. The Black Futures Lab, states its website, “is a fiscally sponsored project of the Chinese Progressive Association.”

The CPA dedicates itself to promoting the interests of China’s government and Communist Party in the United States, which include Marxist revolution.

As an organization led by “trained Marxists,” BLM also opposes capitalism, the nuclear family and religion, especially Christianity. BLM agitators burned Bibles in Portland, Ore. and chanted “(Fornicate) your Jesus!” at a black street preacher in Charlotte, N.C.

Regarding the family, BLM stated its position before deleting it from its website:

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”

That position not only restates Karl Marx’s demand to end the nuclear family. It alludes to the alternatives Leon Trotsky advocated.

“Abolition of the family!” Marx wrote. “On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie.”

Trotsky proposed “a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, crèches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc.” that would bind “all generations in solidarity and mutual aid,” he wrote.

Even the quest to defund the police embraces Marxist ideology. These words Mann wrote in 1999 express attitudes that are all-too-familiar to today’s Americans:

The Black Panthers in particular argued that the prisons and police were colonial instruments, and thus bourgeois concepts of ‘crime’ or ‘innocence and guilt’ could not be used to justify the military occupation of an oppressed community. The demands to free all political prisoners including all black men and women were based on the assumption that the greatest danger to the black community was not black-on-black crime, but police-on-black crime. Armed self-defense groups, community patrols to monitor police behavior and the demands for the most stringent police review boards were efforts to structurally reduce police brutality by placing the police under black civilian authority.

The protesters in this video epitomize Mann’s thinking. Their leader asks, “Who do we protect?” They respond, “Black criminals.”

Garza succinctly summarized BLM’s objectives and ideology at a left-wing conference in 2015:

“It’s not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it’s under capitalism, and it’s not possible to abolish capitalism without a struggle against national oppression and gender oppression.”

BLM and Antifa would have found a kindred spirit in Robert Williams, a black activist in the mid-20th century. In the final third of his career, Williams embraced radical Marxism and history’s worst political mass murderer, Mao Zedong. Williams’ newspaper, The Crusader, advocated “an urban guerrilla war of self-defense” to foment revolution, he wrote in 1964.

Such a war, Williams wrote, would involve violent sabotage on a large-scale. Guerillas would derail trains and fire Molotov cocktails, acid bombs, hand grenades, machine guns, bazookas and rocket launchers from rooftops to kill law enforcement and make streets impassable. Kitchen matches placed in air-conditioning ducts would cause explosions that destroy buildings.

But perhaps Williams’ favorite technique was arson.

“The most aggressive and irrepressible arm of the overall organization would be the fire teams,” he wrote in 1965. “The mission of these thousands of active fire teams would be setting strategic fires. They could render America’s cities and countryside impotent. The fire teams roving in automobiles would find unguarded rural objectives even more accessible. A few teams could start miles and miles of fires from one city to the other.”

Such arson would have two goals. One would be to overwhelm first responders and the military.

“State forces would be forced to spread their ranks and would not be able to sustain massive troop concentrations in a single community,” Williams wrote. “The heat and smoke generated from the fires would render some of the highways impassable to repressive troop reinforcements. The rural countryside covers vast areas and would require exhaustive man power, equipment and security forces.”

The second goal would be to create mass terror.

“The psychological impact would be tremendous,” Williams wrote. “By day the billowing smoke would be seen for miles. By night the entire sky would reflect reddish flames that would elicit panic and a feeling of impending doom.”

Given Antifa’s popularity in Oregon’s largest city, some members might be implementing Williams’ plan. Despite denials from law enforcement in Portland, numerous Oregonians recorded videos of arsonists caught in the act. One man arrested for arson in Washington even attended anti-police rallies.

Perhaps more incriminating is Antifa’s message to its members: “Be water. Spread fire.” A sheriff’s deputy from Oregon’s Clackamas County even connected Antifa to the state’s wildfires. Those comments got him placed on leave.

Johnson’s epitaph as a “professional revolutionist” resounds with even greater force today:

I saw Communism in all its naked cruelty, ruthlessness and utter contempt of Christian attributes and passions. And, too, I saw the low value placed upon human life, the total lack of respect for the dignity of man, the betrayal of trust, the terror of the Secret Police and the bloody hand of the assassin…

Robert Hippolito, Front Page Magazine

When the Great Depression began, about 18 million elderly, disabled, and single mothers with children already lived at a bare subsistence level in the United States. State and local governments together with private charities helped these people. By 1933, another 13 million Americans had been thrown out of work. Suddenly, state and local governments and charities could no longer provide even minimum assistance for all those in need. Food riots broke out. Desertions by husbands and fathers increased. Homeless families in cities lived in public parks and shanty towns. Desperate times began to put into question the old American notion that if a man worked hard enough, he could always take care of himself and his family.

The effect of the Depression on poor children was particularly severe. Grace Abbott, head of the federal Children’s Bureau, reported that in the spring of 1933, 20 percent of the nation’s school children showed evidence of poor nutrition, housing, and medical care. School budgets were cut and in some cases schools were shut down for lack of money to pay teachers. An estimated 200,000 boys left home to wander the streets and beg because of the poor economic condition of their families.

Most elderly Americans did not have personal savings or retirement pensions to support them in normal times, let alone during a national economic crisis. Those few able to set aside money for retirement often found that their savings and investments had been wiped out by the financial crash in 1929. Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois made this observation in 1936:

The impact of all these forces increasingly convinced the majority of the American people that individuals could not by themselves provide adequately for their old age, and that some form of greater security should be provided by society.

Even skilled workers, business owners, successful farmers, and professionals of all kinds found themselves in severe economic difficulty as one out of four in the labor force lost their jobs. Words like “bewildered,” “shocked,” and “humiliated,” were often used at the time to describe increasing numbers of Americans as the Depression deepened.

Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt focused mainly on creating jobs for the masses of unemployed workers, he also backed the idea of federal aid for poor children and other dependent persons. By 1935, a national welfare system had been established for the first time in American history.

Welfare Before the Depression

A federal welfare system was a radical break from the past. Americans had always prided themselves on having a strong sense of individualism and self-reliance. Many believed that those who couldn’t take care of themselves were to blame for their own misfortunes. During the 19th century, local and state governments as well as charities established institutions such as poorhouses and orphanages for destitute individuals and families. Conditions in these institutions were often deliberately harsh so that only the truly desperate would apply.

Local governments (usually counties) also provided relief in the form of food, fuel, and sometimes cash to poor residents. Those capable were required to work for the town or county, often at hard labor such as chopping wood and maintaining roads. But most on general relief were poor dependent persons not capable of working: widows, children, the elderly, and the disabled. 

Local officials decided who went to the poorhouse or orphanage and who would receive relief at home. Cash relief to the poor depended on local property taxes, which were limited. Also, not only did a general prejudice exist against the poor on relief, but local officials commonly discriminated against individuals applying for aid because of their race, nationality, or religion. Single mothers often found themselves in an impossible situation. If they applied for relief, they were frequently branded as morally unfit by the community. If they worked, they were criticized for neglecting their children.

In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt called a White House conference on how to best deal with the problem of poor single mothers and their children. The conference declared that preserving the family in the home was preferable to placing the poor in institutions, which were widely criticized as costly failures.

Starting with Illinois in 1911, the “mother’s pension” movement sought to provide state aid for poor fatherless children who would remain in their own homes cared for by their mothers. In effect, poor single mothers would be excused from working outside the home. Welfare reformers argued that the state pensions would also prevent juvenile delinquency since mothers would be able to supervise their children full-time.

By 1933, mother’s pension programs were operating in all but two states. They varied greatly from state to state and even from county to county within a state. In 1934, the average state grant per child was $11 a month. Administered in most cases by state juvenile courts, mother’s pensions mainly benefitted families headed by white widows. These programs excluded large numbers of divorced, deserted, and minority mothers and their children.

Few private and government retirement pensions existed in the United States before the Great Depression. The prevailing view was that individuals should save for their old age or be supported by their children. About 30 states provided some welfare aid to poor elderly persons without any source of income. Local officials generally decided who deserved old-age assistance in their community.

A National Welfare System

The emphasis during the first two years of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was to provide work relief for the millions of unemployed Americans. Federal money flowed to the states to pay for public works projects, which employed the jobless. Some federal aid also directly assisted needy victims of the Depression. The states, however, remained mainly responsible for taking care of the so-called “unemployables” (widows, poor children, the elderly poor, and the disabled). But states and private charities, too, were unable to keep up the support of these people at a time when tax collections and personal giving were declining steeply.

In his State of the Union Address before Congress on January 4, 1935, President Roosevelt declared, “the time has come for action by the national government” to provide “security against the major hazards and vicissitudes [uncertainties] of life.” He went on to propose the creation of federal unemployment and old-age insurance programs. He also called for guaranteed benefits for poor single mothers and their children along with other dependent persons.

By permanently expanding federal responsibility for the security of all Americans, Roosevelt believed that the necessity for government make-work employment and other forms of Depression relief would disappear. In his address before Congress, Roosevelt argued that the continuation of government relief programs was a bad thing for the country:

The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. . . . 

A few months later, on August 18, 1935, Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. It set up a federal retirement program for persons over 65, which was financed by a payroll tax paid jointly by employers and their workers. FDR believed that federal old-age pensions together with employer-paid unemployment insurance (also a part of the Social Security Act) would provide the economic security people needed during both good and bad times.

In addition to old-age pensions and unemployment insurance, the Social Security Act established a national welfare system. The federal government guaranteed one-third of the total amount spent by states for assistance to needy and dependent children under age 16 (but not their mothers). Additional federal welfare aid was provided to destitute old people, the needy blind, and crippled children. Although financed partly by federal tax money, the states could still set their own eligibility requirements and benefit levels. This part of the law was pushed by Southern states so they could control the coverage made available to their African-American population.

This is how welfare began as a federal government responsibility. Roosevelt and the members of Congress who wrote the welfare provisions into the Social Security Act thought that the need for federal aid to dependent children and poor old people would gradually wither away as employment improved and those over 65 began to collect Social Security pensions. But many Americans, such as farm laborers and domestic servants, were never included in the Social Security old-age retirement program. Also, since 1935, increasing divorce and father desertion rates have dramatically multiplied the number of poor single mothers with dependent children.

Since the Great Depression, the national welfare system expanded both in coverage and federal regulations. From its inception, the system drew critics. Some complained that the system did not do enough to get people to work. Others simply believed the federal government should not administer a welfare system. As the system grew, so did criticism of it, especially in the 1980s and ’90s.

In 1992, candidate Bill Clinton, a Democrat, ran for president promising to “end welfare as we know it.” In 1996, a Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed a reform law that returned most control of welfare back to the states, thus ending 61 years of federal responsibility.

For Discussion and Writing

1. How did needy Americans get help before 1900?

2. Why did most states adopt “mother’s pension” programs after 1910? In what ways were these pensions sometimes administered unfairly?

3. Did President Franklin D. Roosevelt view the Social Security Act’s welfare provisions helping needy children and other dependent persons as permanent or temporary? Explain FDR’s reasoning on this matter.

For Further Reading

Burg, David F. The Great Depression, An Eyewitness History. New York: Facts on File, 1996.

Handler, Joel F. The Moral Construction of Poverty. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1991.
 
 
 

ACTIVITY

Who Should Be Responsible for Welfare?

The debate still continues over who should be responsible for the welfare of destitute old people, disabled persons, and poor single mothers and their children.

1. Divide into small groups to discuss the four different positions on the responsibility for welfare that are listed below.

2. Each group should decide which position is the best and report its conclusions and reasons to the rest of the class.

3. The class should then vote on the four choices.

4. Finally, each student should write an editorial explaining why his or her choice is the most preferable.

Positions

A. Welfare should be a national government responsibility so that needy single mothers of dependent children, elderly, and disabled persons in every part of the country can get support when they meet certain qualifications.

B. Welfare should be a state government responsibility so that each of the 50 states will be free to design its own qualifications and levels of support.

C. Welfare should be the responsibility of charities, churches, and other non-profit groups.

D. There should be no welfare. Individuals should take care of themselves with the help of their families, friends, and neighbors.

Market exchange is not based on the requirement that both parties appraise the goods about to be exchanged at equal value. Instead, market exchange is based on both parties benefiting from a two-way, unequal valuation of the goods to be exchanged.

An example from my youth: During my high school years in the early 1980s, I had purchased a double-live album of the rock group Rush for $15. Teenagers can be a fickle lot and I was no different. My musical tastes changed during my junior year and I morphed from a Rush fan into someone who felt that Fly By Night was simply noise — vulgar noise at that. Not only did I no longer listen to the album, I wanted to get rid of it since I felt that the album reduced the quality of my record collection.

Along comes a fellow student who was fast becoming an ardent Rush fan. We agreed to an exchange: I would trade my album for his $5. Fair enough. Right after the exchange, as I held the $5 and he held the album, the new Rush fan said something along the lines of, “I just ripped you off. I would have paid $10 for that album.” I replied, “No, I just ripped you off since I was about to toss the album into the garbage anyway.”

You see, we both had different valuations for the $5 and the album, which is why we traded. But carefully note the dialogue that occurred between us. To the outside observer, one of us may appear to have been “ripped off” due to a lack of knowledge of the other’s true valuation and, hence, tricked in the exchange by an unfair negotiation. Depending on the observer’s point of reference, he may have locked onto either my claim of profit or my fellow trader’s claim of profit.

Or, and this is where things go wrong, one of us may have actually decided to act on the other’s statement. I could have been offended by the knowledge of the Rush fan’s true valuation of the album, or maybe I was influenced, pushed, or prodded by the observer who believed I got shafted in the exchanged. So, instead of accepting the exchange as agreed, I may have sought a third-party ruling on the fairness of the trade. What sounded good ex ante — before the trade — sounded like unfair negotiations ex post — after the trade. I should have received the $10 since it was a $15 album — I was truly “ripped off.” Wasn’t I?

I probably could have found the sympathetic ear of a government official who felt the tug of omniscience; someone believing in his own capacity to understand true value, someone believing that the state needs to protect those acting in non-coerced exchanges. My fellow trader would have been forced to hand over an additional $5 so that an arbitrated fair exchange occurred. But, why is that any more fair than the exchange we initially agree upon? Well, in fact, it isn’t.

The actions of the sympathetic do not increase fairness, nor do they increase value. Their actions actually decrease wealth as such intrusions in the market leave participants without a guarantee of the final result of a non-coerced exchange. The rule of contract and common law is replaced by the rule of civil law and bureaucracy. As a result, people become less likely to exchange as the rules of the game change with the political winds.

The point: When an elected official or government bureaucrat interferes with a valid, non-coerced exchange, they may appear to be helping one individual when they are actually harming a foundation of modern society; free exchange of goods and services. They tend not to believe that their action can result in harm because power is almost always cloaked by the veil of omniscience.

During this political campaign season, letter writers to local newspapers have been congratulating a local congressman for his willingness to intervene on each writer’s own behalf. What these letter writers forget is that the power to intervene is simply the power to use the hammer of government in order to force individuals and firms to act other than they would have normally chosen; to act outside of already signed contractual agreements. The hammer of government does not create fairness, as the hammer is anathema to the principals of Liberty that founded our country.

I’m not talking about contract or criminal laws being broken, I’m referring to a congressman using government to lean on individuals and companies that have broken no law. Simply because someone was unsatisfied with the result of a contract that they signed under no duress, they chose to get the local power broker to have the contract amended — if the “offending” individuals and firms know what’s best for them, they agree to the amendments. The position to exert such pressure must be quite an aphrodisiac for power seekers.

The ability to influence, to put the pressure on someone, cuts both ways. This time it benefits you, the next time it hurts you. When a congressman implicitly uses the power of government to change contracts and events, he has moved from the realm of the citizen-statesman to that of the political don who controls Third World politics. He’s the Soviet apparatchik trading his ability to threaten for a bottle of vodka, or a front-page story and supportive letter to the editor. Why depend on contracts and the court system when your congressman can get the job done.

Neither I nor the new Rush fan should have sought the intrusive power of government after our exchange. We agreed to the price and we both profited. Sure one of us could have negotiated a better price but our lack of a Trumpian sense for the art of the deal does not warrant government interference. We both profited from our unequal valuations of cash and music. Had we sought compensation due to a perceived excess profit obtained by our fellow trader, the end result would have been that he and I would not have continued engaging in mutual exchanges of goods or services. And, that would have been a loss to both of us, and society in general.Author:

Jim Fedako

Jim Fedako, a business analyst and homeschooling father of seven, lives in the wilds of suburban Columbus. Send him mail.

California is a mess; no secret there.  But the degree of decline that befalls it, and the quickness with which that decline is moving, seems to be largely ignored, particularly by Californians themselves.  The nation’s most populous state, and arguably its most naturally beautiful, is falling apart virtually everywhere we look.  Yet state and local governments not only insist on moving forward with leftist policies, but continually double down by moving even farther left, and the state’s voters return them to office with ever-increasing electoral margins.  California’s current approach to virtually all aspects of society — the economy, environment, legal system and culture — is unsustainable, and the time for reckoning is rapidly approaching.

The current crisis in California that is getting the most national attention is the plague of wildfires throughout much of the northern part of the state.  Such fires have ravaged the area for millennia, long before the presence of any European settlers, but that has not stopped California leftists and their media from pointing fingers at climate change and President Trump.  Avoiding responsibility for a crisis by blaming anyone and anything with even a remote chance of culpability is the California way — which leads to a failure to develop real solutions.  None of California’s leaders, least of all Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, have accepted any responsibility for the government’s role in the fires.  Evidence clearly shows that the decision by the state to revive “fire suppression” efforts, a practice that essentially delays the inevitable and results in even larger wildfires (and was mostly discontinued in the 1960s), has been a major contributor to the magnitude of this year’s fires.  But has the government of California even paused to reconsider the strategy?  Sadly, no.

Wildfires, unfortunately, are among the least of California’s woes.  Homelessness in the state has become a major problem, and one that is having a significant impact on the quality of life for taxpayers.  According to a San Francisco Chronicle article published last December, “[w]hile the latest counts compiled by the federal government show that America’s homeless population is growing again after more than a decade of declines, the entire national increase and more can be attributed to California alone.”  In other words, homelessness continues to be on the decline in the U.S. if we exclude California.  So how does California plan on addressing the problem?  A bill passed by the state’s Legislature earlier this month will empower Governor Newsom to appoint a “Homelessness Czar.”  Government actions, including regulations which aggressively target landlords and programs that provide handouts enticing the homeless to settle in the state, have perpetuated the homeless situation, but more taxpayer dollars and government interference is always the solution for California.  Got a problem?  Throw money at it, and let the government make it worse.

With increasing homelessness, a soft approach to criminal prosecution, and the ongoing embracing of illegal immigration, violent crimes are increasing after having seen a reduction the past few years.  According to The Trace, “homicides are sharply up this year” in California as a whole, and cities such as Oakland, with a 26% increase, have seen a significant increase in the number of murders.  With the jump in violent crimes, what steps has California’s government taken to reduce certain crimes?  They recently passed the controversial bill S.B. 145, which will ultimately end up reducing accountability and sentences for adults who sexually assault children as young as 14.  What a brilliant idea.  Apparently, California’s leadership believes that the pedophile community had been treated unfairly.  

In spite of an abundance of bad news items hitting California on a regular basis, the most ominous challenge is undoubtedly the fiscal time bomb that looms, and whose ticking grows louder by the day.  Already one of the highest taxed states in the U.S., California had a reported government debt of over $1.5 trillion as of 2017 — long before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and an amount that has surely increased dramatically since.  Undeterred, on September 2, state lawmakers sent a budget to Governor Newsom calling for $600 million in spending increases and a reduction in state revenue with the extension of earned income tax credits for immigrants and illegal aliens.  Balance sheet be damned, California must cater to illegal aliens.https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=www.americanthinker.com&width=692

Increasing spending and decreasing revenue is a lousy recipe for getting one’s fiscal house in order — particularly one that is already a disaster.  The state government appears to be counting on an eventual federal bailout from its financial predicament, but that help is not going to happen, nor should it.

California industries have recognized the signals and are taking action.  High-profile companies and leaders have announced their plans to leave the state or have openly proclaimed their considerations for the idea.  Media outlet The Daily Wire, with co-owner Ben Shapiro, recently announced its plan to move to Nashville; podcast giant Joe Rogan is taking his ball and moving to Texas; and Elon Musk is moving Tesla’s headquarters out-of-state, and possibly manufacturing operations as well.   Other businesses will surely follow, as the hostility toward industry through taxes and oppressive regulations continues unimpeded.  State lawmakers are not intimidated by the idea of losing millions of dollars in revenue and have recently taken the bold step of adding a layer of government regulations to existing and would-be businesses.  Another bill recently passed by the state legislature will “mandate ethnic, racial or LGBT diversity on corporate boards” — more government intervention in the private sector in the name of virtue and another assault on the philosophy of meritocracy.

California has some of the most appealing weather in the world, but pleasant weather goes only so far.  Residents enjoy the state’s natural wonders such as the lovely Napa Valley, Yosemite National Park, and the glorious pacific coast highway, but they have been choosing to leave anyway at an increasing rate in a phenomenon that is being called “The California Exodus.”  The state population decreased by almost 200,000 in 2018, and over 28,000 left the San Francisco Bay area alone in a single quarter last year.  Inevitably, the question that Californians have to consider is this: while it may be bad now, is there a chance it is going to get better?

California, the bluest of blue states, has rising crime and homelessness.  California has fearsome wildfires and rolling electrical blackouts due to government mismanagement of its forests and energy systems.  California has an ever-increasing budget deficit with no end in sight.  Yet California’s tone-deaf politicians continue to enjoy immense support from their oblivious electorate.  Many residents cherish the song lyric that laments, “Going to California with an aching in my heart.”  Unfortunately, the time has come for many to recognize reality, and to leave California with a similar aching.  California is decaying before our eyes, and it is not going to get better.

P.F. Whalen is a conservative blogger at TheBlueStateConservative.com.  His work has appeared in multiple publications, including American Thinker, the Western Journal, and Human Events. Follow him on Twitter at @pf_whalen.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that multiculturalism has “utterly failed,” adding that it was an illusion to think Germans and foreign workers could “live happily side by side.” The failure of multiculturalism is also seen in Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and other European countries. Immigrants coming from Africa and the Middle East refuse to assimilate and instead seek to import the failed cultures they fled.

Leftist diversity advocates and multiculturalists are right to argue that people of all races, religions and cultures should be equal in the eyes of the law. But their argument borders on idiocy when they argue that one set of cultural values cannot be judged superior to another and that to do so is Eurocentrism.

That’s unbridled nonsense. Ask a diversity/multiculturalism advocate: Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value? Slavery is practiced in northern Sudan. In most of the Middle East, there are numerous limits placed on women, such as prohibitions on driving, employment and education. Under Islamic law, in some countries, female adulterers face death by stoning, and thieves are punished by having their hand severed. In some African and Middle Eastern countries, homosexuality is a crime, in some cases punishable by death. Are all these cultural values morally equivalent to those of the West?https://16112885f7b1d808143b3781f9bacd73.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

The vital achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights, which saw its birth with the Magna Carta in 1215. The idea emerged that individuals have certain inalienable rights. Individuals do not exist to serve government; governments exist to protect their rights. But it was not until the 19th century that ideas of liberty received broad recognition. In the West, it was mostly through the works of British philosophers, such as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

Personal liberty implies toleration of differences among people, whether those differences are racial, sexual, ideological or political. Liberty also implies a willingness to permit others who disagree with you to go their separate ways. This is not the vision of the new immigrants. In some parts of Britain, Christians are threatened with violence for merely handing out Bibles. Trying to convert Muslims to Christianity is seen as a hate crime. Women are accosted by Muslim men for “improper” dress. Many women are sexually assaulted. In many European countries, “no-go zones” — where civil authorities will not enter — in which Shariah is practiced have been established. According to the Express, “London, Paris, Stockholm and Berlin are among the major European cities that feature on a bombshell list of 900 lawless zones with large immigrant populations” (http://tinyurl.com/hubbxuw).https://16112885f7b1d808143b3781f9bacd73.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Both in Europe and in the U.S., multiculturalism is a leftist elitist vision with its roots in academia. The intellectual elite, courts and government agencies push an agenda that is anything but a defense of individual rights, freedom from conformity and a live-and-let-live philosophy. Instead, multiculturalism/diversity is an agenda for all kinds of conformity — conformity in ideas, actions and speech. It calls for re-education programs where diversity managers indoctrinate students, faculty members, employees, managers and executives on what’s politically correct thinking. Part of that lesson is nonjudgmentalism, where one is taught that one lifestyle is just as worthy as another and all cultures and their values are morally equivalent.

Western values are superior to all others. But one need not be a Westerner to hold Western values. A person can be Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, African or Arab and hold Western values. By the way, it is no accident that Western values of reason and individual rights have produced unprecedented health, life expectancy, wealth and comfort for the ordinary person. There’s an indisputable positive relationship between liberty and standards of living. There is also indisputable evidence that we in the West are unwilling to defend ourselves from barbarians. Just look at our response to the recent Orlando massacre, in which we’ve focused our energies on guns rather than on terrorists.https://16112885f7b1d808143b3781f9bacd73.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at http://www.creators.com.

Ayn Rand said that “the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.”  Why did she say “moral”?  Because the original system of the United States was capitalism, “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.”  One of those individual rights is the right to pursue one’s own happiness.  But many people think acting in one’s self-interest conflicts with acting morally.

Evonomics.com, a progressive website biased against capitalism, has a discussion in an article about the role of morality in a capitalist economy.  Peter Turchin states, “The main question is whether economic agents, most importantly businessmen (including both corporation officers and business owners), should be motivated solely by self-interest, or should they also be motivated by personal ethics.” 

There is no dichotomy between being motivated by personal ethics or a rational self-interest.  It is always in one’s best self-interest to be ethical.  It may seem to some as though being deceptive in order to get something is in one’s self-interest, but one always has to consider the long-range consequences of one’s actions.  If someone cheats at a game in order to win, he knows that he didn’t really win.  If someone lies in order to gain sales for his product, he knows that he doesn’t deserve the sales.  Gaining, or trying to gain, what is not deserved is self-destructive.  It harms one’s self-worth because deep down one knows the truth — that one is not worthy of the win. This does not bode well for inner self-confidence and happiness.  How is being unethical in one’s best self-interest?

What about the people who do not act in their rational self-interest and are unethical?  It is the system of capitalism that corrects corruption due to actions of a free market that offers other choices. Once it is discovered that a businessman is dishonest, he loses business because the customers go elsewhere. Anyone who harms the individual rights of others through the use of force or fraud can be taken to a court of law for restitution or some form of justice.  But with socialism, the government controls all economic activity, so citizens are stuck with the corruption.  Actually, corruption grows and becomes the standard within socialism, as well as in a mixed economy, because decisions are taken out of the marketplace and reside solely within the political realm.

It may seem as if it is in one’s self-interest to buy off politicians in order to get laws passed that give one an edge over one’s competition, but this is not moral, nor is it rational.  People who do this are not really businessmen, they are swindlers.  Swindlers know that they cheated and that they have attained what they don’t deserve.  They have essentially committed a form of theft against their competitors and customers, and they have the constant stress that someone else could do the same thing to them.  Another negative result is that swindlers become dependent on politicians to keep the game going — they become dependent on politicians to grant them additional favors so they can stay in business.  A solution for this problem is to get rid of the mixed economy.  In a truly laissez-faire capitalistic society, a full separation between economics and state would predominantly prevent swindlers from using money to seek power by manipulating politics.

But aren’t businessmen greedy and isn’t greed immoral? Money is a medium of exchange, provides security, and there is nothing wrong with a desire to honestly earn more of it.  Who is it that determines if someone has excessive greed? Why is the person who works honestly for his money and wants more considered greedy, but the politician who demands money from him not considered greedy?

Whether greed is good or bad depends on the context.  If someone is greedy for something negative like drinking alcohol to excess, the result will most likely be negative.  He could become an alcoholic or abusive.  If someone is greedy for something positive such as the spouse of his dreams, the result will most likely be positive.  He could have a happy marriage.  Any successful entrepreneur is consumed with greed, but his greed is for his work.  He is primarily motivated by doing a good job; the money is secondary. 

Morality and a rational self-interest are not incompatible.  In order to survive, human beings need the freedom to work and keep the fruits of their labor.  True capitalism (i.e. without government interference such as bailouts, regulations, favors, and backroom deals) provides the freedom for businessmen to produce, but they have to do it honestly, otherwise they will not be successful.  If successful, the capitalist earns material wealth.  Production leads to prosperity and everyone benefits from prosperity — a hallmark of capitalism.

Charlotte Cushman is a Montessori educator and authored Montessori: Why It Matters for Your Child’s Success and Happiness, Effective Discipline the Montessori Way, and Your Life Belongs to You.  She has been involved in the study of Ayn Rand’s philosophy since 1970.

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Since 2015, George Soros has been executing a plan to reshape the country through local district attorney elections by pumping unprecedented amounts of money into races that typically only see candidates spend in the low five figures.

Here’s why he has an interest in these local races. Soros is exploiting the reality that all politics are local in some way. To transform America, you have to transform the way towns and cities operate.

A recent exchange on Fox News involving former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Fox News host Harris Faulkner, Democrat commentator Marie Harf, and Fox commentator Melissa A. Francis made the hair on my arms stand up because I realized how many people were either unaware of what Soros is doing or have been silenced by the idea that it’s somehow antisemitic to criticize Soros’s political activity.

Criticizing People’s Political Actions Isn’t Racist

Before we dive into what Soros has done, we need to put the antisemitism argument to bed. Criticizing how an enormously wealthy individual uses his money to change a nation is not in any way related to criticism of that person’s ethnicity or religious beliefs. It’s simply an exercise of civic engagement, which is essential for any self-governing people.

The left’s assumption that questioning someone’s political spending is equivalent to questioning his dignity as a person is itself a deeply bigoted assumption, designed solely to silence dissent and shut down debate.

In the segment I referred to earlier, Gingrich brought up the indisputable fact that Soros has been spending what can only be described as unprecedented amounts of money on local races in recent years, with a goal of flipping DA races to far-left “progressive” candidates who will implement soft-on-crime policies that inevitably result in skyrocketing crime rates and violent criminals walking free.

In response, Harf and Francis objected: “George Soros doesn’t need to be a part of this conversation.” Harf went so far as to deny that Soros is buying these races, and Faulkner did not step in to correct her. The segment ends in awkward silence as a disappointed Gingrich remarks that it’s apparently “verboten” to speak about Soros on Fox News.

Buying Prosecutors Who Are Soft on Crime

Since 2015, Soros has pumped tens of millions of dollars into local races in Texas, Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington, Florida, and New York, as well as swing states such as Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Arizona. In 2016, Soros spent $2,000,000 on a single sheriff race in Maricopa County, Arizona, helping the leftist candidate, Paul Penzone, win.

In Philadelphia, Soros spent an insane $1,700,000 to elect Larry Krasner DA. Soros has also given millions of dollars in grants to candidates in other states. These enormous contributions have had a correspondingly enormous impact.

Although his efforts haven’t been universally successful, the vast majority of Soros-backed candidates have won with Soros donations pushing them across the finish line. Here are just a few examples:

• $2,000,000 to fund Kim Foxx in her Cook County (Chicago, Ill.) re-election bid.
• $1,400,000 to fund Aramis Ayala’s campaign to become state’s attorney of Orlando, Fla.
• $1,150,000 to fund Jake Lilly’s run to become DA of Jefferson and Gilpin County (Denver) in Colorado.
• $958,000 to fund Joe Gonzales’s run to become DA of Bexar County (San Antonio, Texas).
• $650,000 to fund Jose Garza in his Travis County (Austin, Texas) re-election bid.
• $750,000 to fund Joe Kimok in his Broward County, Fla. state’s attorney race.
• $583,000 to fund Kim Ogg’s run to become Harris County (Houston, Texas) DA.
• $583,000 to fund Parisa Dehghani-Tafti in her race to be Arlington County (Va.) commonwealth’s attorney.
• $500,000 to fund Jody Owen’s run to become Hinds County, Miss. (Jackson) DA.
• $406,000 to fund James E. Stewart’s run to become Caddo Parish, La. (Shreveport) DA.
• $392,000 to fund Steve T. Descano’s bid to become Fairfax County (Va.) commonwealth’s attorney.
• $275,000 to fund Diana Becton’s bid to remain as Contra Costa County, Calif. DA.
• $147,000 to fund Darius Pattillo in his run to become Harris County, Ga. DA.
• $116,000 to fund Kim Gardner’s re-election bid as St. Louis circuit attorney.
• $107,000 to fund Raul Torrez bid to become Benalillo County (Albuquerque, N.M.) DA.
• $89,000 to fund Scott Colom’s bid to become DA of Lowndes County, Miss.

That’s just a partial list, but it surely corroborates Gingrich’s point that Soros “paid for” the outcomes of those elections, notwithstanding Harf’s unsubstantiated denial. In 2018 The Los Angeles Times reported that Soros spent $2,700,000 on California DA races alone, and another $16 million on 17 DA races in other states.

Look How Crazy These DAs Are

San Francisco’s new DA, Chesa Boudin, is a perfect example of the ideological temperament of the candidates Soros has been backing. Boudin is a former translator for the late Venezuelan socialist dictator Hugo Chavez.

He’s also the son of two Weather Underground domestic terrorists who were convicted of murder for their roles in a Brink’s armored car robbery that resulted in the killings of three people. Due to the incarceration of his parents, Boudin was raised by former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers.

Huge contributions from the deep-pocketed Soros have made it nearly impossible for anyone to compete against his chosen candidates because DA elections rarely involve campaign war chests in excess of a few tens of thousands of dollars. Soros’s millions allow his candidates to bombard voters with propaganda, including commercials that smear Republicans as racists for fighting crime.

What Soros’s DAs Have Done In Office

Now let’s talk about what happens after Election Day, when the Soros-backed candidates start wielding their newfound power. Many of the following names will likely be familiar.

Foxx is well known as the DA who let actor Jussie Smollett escape prosecution after he hoaxed the nation by pretending he was beaten up by two men who allegedly shouted “This is MAGA country” in deep-blue Chicago, Illinois. A special prosecutor assigned to examine Foxx’s conduct in the case said there was “substantial abuses of discretion and operational failures” and determined she was guilty of “making false and/or misleading statements to the public.”

A recent report from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, moreover, found a 13 percent decline in guilty pleas or verdicts in felony cases and a 39 percent increase in dropped or lost cases after Foxx took office.

If you’ve had the misfortune of hearing Kim Gardner’s name, it’s probably because she’s trying to throw Mark and Patricia McCloskey in jail for defending their home by exercising their right to bear arms when they were threatened by rioters. Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, along with Baltimore DA Maryln Mosby, threatened in an op-ed to have federal officers arrested if these prosecutors feel they overstep their authority in his district.

Boudin is one of the DAs on this list who refuses to prosecute what he calls “quality-of-life crimes” such as camping in the streets, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, and more. He also recently questioned whether spending money on law enforcement is “the most effective” use of tax dollars. He has also said that policing and incarceration “are tremendously expensive and are failed responses to what we are trying to deal with.”

Diane Becton of Contra Costa County, Calif. filed hate crime charges against David Nelson and Nichole Anderson for painting over a Black Lives Matter mural. Suffolk County, Mass. DA Rachael Rollins, along with Krasner and Boudin, is part of the also-Soros-backed “Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commissions” that team up with far-left activist Shaun King’s “Grassroots Law Project” to advocate for defunding the police. Yes, that’s the same Shaun King who recently called for people to destroy statues and stained glass windows that depict Jesus as white.

Before going on his spending spree in DA races, Soros also made a $50 million donation to the American Civil Liberties Union’s “Campaign to End Mass Incarceration” through his Open Society Foundation in 2014. Much of this money trickled down to local progressive groups who back these types of radical candidates as well.

Without Law and Order, You Don’t Have a Country

After watching the Fox News exchange involving Gingrich, Francis, Harf, and Faulkner, I wondered how anyone who works in the news business could be so uninformed about what Soros has been up to. The left-wing billionaire’s plan clearly operates on the understanding that all politics are local and takes advantage of small-ball local DA races to remake the American justice system — and, by extension, remake all of America into the far-left world of his dreams.

That leap from remaking our justice system to remaking America may seem like a long jump to some, but law and order is the core of America’s existence. Without law and order, you don’t have a country.

If you want to know what the next step is for Soros, it’s a continued expansion of funding for DA races, but also so much more. His recent pledge of $1 billion to endow a network of universities across the nation is part and parcel with his broader effort to promote his far-left ideology among impressionable young people.

Soros calls this initiative “the most important project of my life.” That should deeply concern ordinary Americans everywhere, and perhaps even inspire a backlash of small-dollar donations to fight Soros’s pernicious influence.

I believe that maintaining our freedoms and preserving the Constitution are two pillars of keeping America great, along with upholding the rule of law and properly educating our youth. Soros has a plan to systematically tear down those pillars, and we’re not supposed to talk about it. But we must, and we will.

Robby Starbuck is a Cuban-American producer and director. Robby was nominated for Best Rock Video and Best Indie Video at the Much Music Video Awards (MMVAs), won the YouTube Play award, won the Kerrang! Video of the Year award and Best Video With A Message at the MTV VMAs. His work has been viewed over 5 Billion times worldwide.