Cancel culture in America is picking up speed, but Superman himself, actor Dean Cain, told “Fox and Friends” that it needs to end in Hollywood.

“This cancel culture within Hollywood, it is a cancer,” he said. “It’s McCarthyism and it’s threatening people [by saying] ‘look, I’m going to take away your ability to make a living, your livelihood if you don’t toe the party line.’ And it’s not going to end well, I promise you.”

Dean Cain: What a brave, rare, independent soul. Leftism is an irrational ideology overtaking society just like Hitler’s hatred enveloped Germany. These cancel culture people have no souls, not if souls consist of thinking and empathy. They are dreary nothings–and yet we allow these tortured, toxic abusers to control and intimidate us.

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

This was Samuel Johnson’s bitter rhetorical question about the American revolution, and the conflict it identifies has never been far from the surface of American political and intellectual life. Compared with the societies of 18th and 19th century Europe, the United States was unusually obsessed with the idea of liberty and unusually economically dependent on slave labor. Sometimes Americans like to tell ourselves that the revolutionary idea of liberty is what finally made abolition possible two generations later, but that sidesteps the paradox that the U.S. was one of the last countries to abolish slavery, and did so only after a decades-long expansion.

The great historical sociologist Orlando Patterson provided an important answer to Johnson’s question in his landmark study Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. Across the centuries, from ancient Greece to modern America, “people came to value freedom, to construct it as a powerful shared vision of life, as a result of their experience of, and response to, slavery or its recombinant form, serfdom, in their roles as masters, slaves, and nonslaves.” It is precisely in slave societies, confronted with the reality of slavery, that people most acutely perceive the importance of freedom, most clearly articulate defenses of it, and most passionately demand it. Sometimes it is slaves or ex-slaves who do so. But often it is masters. Understanding all too well how they rule over other human beings, they identify being ruled like that as the great social evil, and they fiercely refuse to be subjected to it. Slaveowners and their neighbors can see what unfreedom is like, and they resist it for themselves. This is only partly because they come to identify their freedom as their freedom to own and rule slaves, and are desperate to protect their status as masters. In a more general way, they become very sensitive to anyone proposing to treat them as they treat slaves.

The Freedom of the Masters and the Rhetoric of Liberty

These intellectual and cultural paradoxes in antebellum America survived abolition, and in mutated form survive to this day. The language of freedom in American political discourse has very often been appropriated for the defense of white supremacy. We have often heard the loudest yelps for liberty among those trying to protect the terror and apartheid states of the Jim Crow south, the quasi-serfdom of sharecropping, segregated schools, miscegenation laws, and the suppression of black votes. Particular types of freedom or particular strategies for limiting governmental power—freedom of association, religious liberty, federalism, bicameralism, and so on—all came to be identified at one point or another primarily as ways to prevent the federal government from breaking the power of white rule, just as before the war the protection of private property rights had so often been identified primarily with the protection of slaveowners’ supposed property in other human beings.

None of this means that liberty is not a worthwhile, and true, ideal.

Like Adam Smith, I believe that we often engage in real moral learning by negative example. We learn the value of mercy and kindness through witnessing or understanding cruelty. We learn about justice by being exposed to gross injustice. Patterson’s theory of how we learn about liberty doesn’t mean that we don’t thereby genuinely learn something important. But this history does mean that the public language of liberty in American politics is often not to be trusted. Not to put too fine a point on it, those who proclaim their commitment to freedom have all too often assessed threats to freedom as if those facing African-Americans don’t count —as if black liberty does not matter.

Treating Black Liberty Like it Doesn’t Matter Distorts the Picture of American Freedom

This exclusion of African-Americans from the calculus of American freedom extends far beyond the questions that most obviously connect to the legacy of Jim Crow, such as voting rights, and far beyond the borders of the old Confederacy.

The way we think about American freedom over time, or in comparison to the rest of the world, ought to be deeply structured by the rise of mass incarceration in the last three decades. It’s not—not in triumphalist narratives about revitalized market liberalism since the late 1970s or since 1989, not in comparative rankings and indices of freedom around the world, and certainly not in the unshakeable American public language that the United States is the freest nation on earth. At the level of gross political generalization, it’s common to encounter the idea that European and Canadian social democracies have chosen to make equality a priority, whereas the U.S. is committed to liberty. The distinctive policing and carceral practices of the American state, the ways that the U.S. is extraordinarily unfree, are nowhere to be seen in the comparison.

That is not to say that people who talk about freedom in American politics have nothing to say about the crises of mass incarceration and of violent, invasive, and militarized policing. American libertarians have always rejected the drug war that contributed so much to these crises. And libertarians have been happy enough to note the disproportionate impact of the drug war on African-Americans and Hispanics. But we have too often treated this as a rhetorical bonus on top of a pre-existing objection to the drug war.

Prisoners returning from forced labor, Louisiana State Penitentiary, 2011.
Prisoners returning from forced labor, Louisiana State Penitentiary, 2011.

What has been much too rare is an understanding of racism as a cause of the drug war and of mass incarceration. Nixon aide John Erhlichman was belatedly explicit about this. After the civil rights movement, the Nixon administration couldn’t openly admit that it aimed to subject African-Americans to greater policing and control or to mobilize white voters by fear of blacks. The crackdown on hard drugs provided the needed fig leaf. As has so often been true, racism was a cause of the expansion of American state power, a cause of unfreedom. The centuries-old appropriation of the language of liberty by the defenders of white supremacy obscures this, over and over again.

This brings me to two recent and awkwardly-connected controversies within, and about, American libertarianism.

Nancy MacLean Missed the Story on Libertarianism’s Race Problem

The more prominent is the debate about Nancy MacLean’s book on James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and a founder of public choice theory. In Democracy in Chains, MacLean alleges that Buchanan was significantly inspired by the Confederate nostalgia of the Southern Agrarian school, and that his creation of the original ideas and institutions of public choice theory was very much tied up with Virginian resistance to Brown v Board and the civil rights movement. She treats Buchanan as the architect of a decades-long conspiratorial strategy to advance a political agenda that was both anti-democratic and compatible with (indeed possibly supportive of) the maintenance of Jim Crow. I did not know Buchanan and am not much influenced by public choice theory, but those who did and those who are have dealt devastating blows to the credibility of this story. See these two essays co-authored by Crooked Timber’s Harry Farrell and my Niskanen colleague Steven Teles. See also this review essay by my Bleeding Hearts Libertarian co-blogger Steven Horwitz in The Cato Journal and this one by another co-blogger, Michael Munger, in The Independent Review. I will not try to add to these critiques, which I find entirely persuasive about Democracy in Chains’ details and core claims alike.

But part of what is so strange about Democracy in Chains is its choice of targets. The claims MacLean makes are untrue about Buchanan. But the history of the postwar libertarian movement is rich with moments of flirtation or outright entanglement with the defenders of white supremacy. This is most conspicuous today in the explicit sympathy for the Confederacy in some quarters, a problem I’ve written about before. There’d be no trouble writing a better book than MacLean’s about the dark history of libertarian politics that ran from Murray Rothbard’s support for Strom Thurmond’s presidential campaign to Lew Rockwell’s celebration to the beating of Rodney King to the racism that went out under Ron Paul’s name in his newsletters in the 1980s and 90s to the case of then-aide to Rand Paul Jack Hunter. The generalized distrust of institutions that can be part of anti-statism easily falls back on the fantasy of a unified pre-political national people, and that populist nationalism in America is almost definitionally white populist nationalism.

The particular fascination with Abraham Lincoln’s (genuine but far from unique) violations of civil liberties, the celebration of secession, the insistence on discussing the Civil Rights Act primarily in terms of freedom of association (as if white supremacy in the Jim Crow south were just a private taste that some people indulged), and an interest in freedom of speech that focuses disproportionately on the freedom to indulge in racially-charged “political incorrectness” could all figure in such a book. Rothbard was a decisive figure in the development of organized libertarianism, and the Pauls are hardly minor characters in libertarian and quasi-libertarian politics. I suspect they were less appealing to MacLean because Buchanan was close to Charles and David Koch for decades after Rothbard and his circle went to ideological war against them, and the Kochs were the exciting target for her to try to implicate.

But there are ways to neglect black liberty that are subtler than the white nationalism of the Confederatistas. Think about the different ways that market liberals and libertarians talk about “welfare” from how they talk about other kinds of government redistribution. There’s no talk of the culture of dependence among farmers, although they receive far more government aid per capita than do the urban poor. Libertarians absolutely and clearly oppose corporate welfare, but they don’t do so in the paternalistic language that corporate welfare recipients are morally hurt by being on the dole. The white welfare state of the 1930s-60s that channeled government support for, e.g., housing, urban development, and higher education through segregated institutions has a way of disappearing from the historical memory; the degrees earned and homes bought get remembered as hard work contributing to the American dream. But too many libertarians and their market-oriented allies among postwar conservatives treated the more racially inclusive welfare state of the 1960s and 70s as different in kind. White recipients of housing subsidies hadn’t been imagined to become dependent, non-autonomous, or unfree. When the FHA was insisting that neighborhoods be segregated in order to be eligible for mortgage or building subsidies, it contributed a great deal to the racial wealth gap that persists to this day. No free-marketeers of the era felt the need to engage in brave, politically incorrect inquiries into the lower intelligence of new white homeowners that might explain their long-term dependence. But once the imagined typical welfare recipient was a black mother, welfare became a matter not just of economic or constitutional concern but of moral panic about parasites, fraud, and the long-term collapse of self-reliance.

The Language of Liberty and the Rise of the Alt-Right

Returning for a moment to the overt white nationalists allows us to also think about the other recent dispute about libertarian politics: the embarrassingly large number of people associated with the racist alt-right who once identified as libertarians, or (even worse) still do. Some of this is just the inevitable sociology of the fringe. Those who join smaller political movements tend to come to think that mainstream sources of information and ideology aren’t to be trusted. They tend to be unmoored from a society’s dominant values and intellectual positions. And so, as they change their mind about things (and most people do, from time to time), they’re disproportionately likely to end up attached to other fringe movements. That’s just a selection effect about what kind of people join fringe movements, and it doesn’t say anything about the content of either movement’s ideas.

But it seems pretty plausible to me that there’s something more to be said. The capture of the language of freedom by the defenders of white supremacy and the Confederacy is a major fact about American political language and its history, and there’s a small but vocal group of self-identified libertarians who participate in it and perpetuate it. The racialization of the discourse around redistribution, such that people who think of themselves as committed to small government in general have a special visceral reaction against what they call “welfare” that doesn’t extend to the far larger redistributive activities of the state, is a major fact about more recent American political language. And the conviction that freedom of speech is mostly threatened by “political correctness” in American life, that saying racist things is a brave stand against censorship, that calling what someone else says “racist” is pretty much like censoring them—these are important facts about American political discourse today. Organized libertarianism partakes of all of these. I have argued elsewhere that American libertarianism’s dependence on Lockean traditions brings with it the fantasy of a unified pre-political people that might reclaim its liberty from distrusted governing institutions. And in the American political tradition, that kind of holist populist nationalism has always been white nationalism.

Re-imagining Libertarian Politics as if Black Liberty Matters

Now, libertarian, individualist, and market-liberal ideas, concepts, slogans, and advocates aren’t alone in having a history that is entangled with white supremacy. Hardly any set of social ideas in American intellectual history lacks such an entanglement. This is as true of the technocratic progressivism associated with the racist Woodrow Wilson as it is of the populist democracy associated with the racist Andrew Jackson. If federalism is tainted by Jim Crow, so is centralization by the Fugitive Slave Act and the white welfare state of the 1930s onward, among other things. (We can, of course, say something similar about the state and federal governments’ histories of crimes against Indians.) A particularly silly move made by some of MacLean’s defenders recently has been the insistence that constitutional restraints on racist majorities don’t count as counter-majoritarian or limits on democracy, as if “democracy” could only refer to some ideal state of affairs innocent of a history of herrenvolk democracy. The early American republic, and especially the Jacksonian republic, was at once much more democratic than any European state of the same era and much more racist, and these were not unrelated. A hierarchical society with countless small social gradations can treat racial subordination as continuous with many other kinds of subordination. A levelled hierarchy among whites sharpens the distinction at the edges of that category; a social hill is replaced by a social plateau that ends in cliffs. The expanding rights and proud equal dignity of lower-class whites came to consist precisely in their equal claim to whiteness; this became a foundational fact of American democratic equality. There’s no good reason to sever “democracy” or “progressivism” from their complicated genealogies while tying “federalism” or “freedom of association” to theirs.

As a scholar, I’m interested in all these histories. As an advocate, I have to be especially interested in the history of classical and market liberalism. I don’t want the convincing intellectual victory over Democracy in Chains to fool us into thinking that there’s no problem. I don’t want the forceful, true, statement that libertarian principles are incompatible with white supremacy to fool us into overlooking a morally compromised history and sociological and psychological patterns about how those principles turn into general political discourse.

Reimagining libertarian politics in light of the truth that black liberty matters will take a lot of intellectual and moral work. And this task, reorienting a set of ideas and ideals in light of a morally compromised history, of understanding what lessons need to be learned from it, of separating the arguments for liberty from the yelps, is insiders’ work. No one else is going to do it for us.

—

Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and Director of the Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds at McGill University; author of Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom and scholarly articles including, most recently,”Contra Politanism”; a blogger at Bleeding Heart Libertarians; and a Niskanen Center Senior Fellow and Advisory Board Member.

“The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

–Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

At first I thought this was satire from The Onion or Babylon Bee. But,no, it’s the rantings of a lunatic professor of ethics, Parker Crutchfield, at Western Michigan.–A/D

COVID is a collective risk. It threatens everyone, and we all must cooperate to lower the chance that the coronavirus harms any one individual. Among other things, that means keeping safe social distances and wearing masks. But many people choose not to do these things, making spread of infection more likely.

When someone chooses not to follow public health guidelines around the coronavirus, they’re defecting from the public good. It’s the moral equivalent of the tragedy of the commons: If everyone shares the same pasture for their individual flocks, some people are going to graze their animals longer, or let them eat more than their fair share, ruining the commons in the process. Selfish and self-defeating behavior undermines the pursuit of something from which everyone can benefit.

Democratically enacted enforceable rules – mandating things like mask wearing and social distancing – might work, if defectors could be coerced into adhering to them. But not all states have opted to pass them or to enforce the rules that are in place.

My research in bioethics focuses on questions like how to induce those who are noncooperative to get on board with doing what’s best for the public good. To me, it seems the problem of coronavirus defectors could be solved by moral enhancement: like receiving a vaccine to beef up your immune system, people could take a substance to boost their cooperative, pro-social behavior. Could a psychoactive pill be the solution to the pandemic?

It’s a far-out proposal that’s bound to be controversial, but one I believe is worth at least considering, given the importance of social cooperation in the struggle to get COVID-19 under control.

Protesters outside California state capital building
People in California protested stay-at-home orders in May – prioritizing the personal over the collective. Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
Public goods games show scale of the problem
Evidence from experimental economics shows that defections are common to situations in which people face collective risks. Economists use public goods games to measure how people behave in various scenarios to lower collective risks such as from climate change or a pandemic and to prevent the loss of public and private goods.

The evidence from these experiments is no cause for optimism. Usually everyone loses because people won’t cooperate. This research suggests it’s not surprising people aren’t wearing masks or social distancing – lots of people defect from groups when facing a collective risk. By the same token, I’d expect that, as a group, we will fail at addressing the collective risk of COVID-19, because groups usually fail. For more than 150,000 Americans so far, this has meant losing everything there is to lose.

But don’t abandon all hope. In some of these experiments, the groups win and successfully prevent the losses associated with the collective risk. What makes winning more likely? Things like keeping a running tally of what others are contributing, observing others’ behaviors, communication and coordination before and during play, and democratic implementation of an enforceable rule requiring contributions.

For those of us in the United States, these conditions are out of reach when it comes to COVID-19. You can’t know what others are contributing to the fight against the coronavirus, especially if you socially distance yourself. It’s impossible to keep a running tally of what the other 328 million people in the U.S. are doing. And communication and coordination are not feasible outside of your own small group.

Even if these factors were achievable, they still require the very cooperative behavior that’s in short supply. The scale of the pandemic is simply too great for any of this to be possible.

Promoting cooperation with moral enhancement
It seems that the U.S. is not currently equipped to cooperatively lower the risk confronting us. Many are instead pinning their hopes on the rapid development and distribution of an enhancement to the immune system – a vaccine.

But I believe society may be better off, both in the short term as well as the long, by boosting not the body’s ability to fight off disease but the brain’s ability to cooperate with others. What if researchers developed and delivered a moral enhancer rather than an immunity enhancer?

Moral enhancement is the use of substances to make you more moral. The psychoactive substances act on your ability to reason about what the right thing to do is, or your ability to be empathetic or altruistic or cooperative.

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For example, oxytocin, the chemical that, among other things, can induce labor or increase the bond between mother and child, may cause a person to be more empathetic and altruistic, more giving and generous. The same goes for psilocybin, the active component of “magic mushrooms.” These substances have been shown to lower aggressive behavior in those with antisocial personality disorder and to improve the ability of sociopaths to recognize emotion in others.

These substances interact directly with the psychological underpinnings of moral behavior; others that make you more rational could also help. Then, perhaps, the people who choose to go maskless or flout social distancing guidelines would better understand that everyone, including them, is better off when they contribute, and rationalize that the best thing to do is cooperate.

Hand injecting a shot into a bare upper arm
A moral booster rather than an immunological one? Jeffrey Hamilton/DigitalVision via Getty Images
Moral enhancement as an alternative to vaccines
There are of course pitfalls to moral enhancement.

One is that the science isn’t developed enough. For example, while oxytocin may cause some people to be more pro-social, it also appears to encourage ethnocentrism, and so is probably a bad candidate for a widely distributed moral enhancement. But this doesn’t mean that a morality pill is impossible. The solution to the underdeveloped science isn’t to quit on it, but to direct resources to related research in neuroscience, psychology or one of the behavioral sciences.

Another challenge is that the defectors who need moral enhancement are also the least likely to sign up for it. As some have argued, a solution would be to make moral enhancement compulsory or administer it secretly, perhaps via the water supply. These actions require weighing other values. Does the good of covertly dosing the public with a drug that would change people’s behavior outweigh individuals’ autonomy to choose whether to participate? Does the good associated with wearing a mask outweigh an individual’s autonomy to not wear one?

The scenario in which the government forces an immunity booster upon everyone is plausible. And the military has been forcing enhancements like vaccines or “uppers” upon soldiers for a long time. The scenario in which the government forces a morality booster upon everyone is far-fetched. But a strategy like this one could be a way out of this pandemic, a future outbreak or the suffering associated with climate change. That’s why we should be thinking of it now.

I hate to say “I told you so”, BUT…

Years ago, most state and local governments outlawed smoking in public places, such as restaurants. Like millions of people (including even some smokers), I much prefer public places without smoking. It’s hard to believe there was a time when you ate in a restaurant and had to inhale these fumes. But still: I opposed the non-smoking mandates. People thought I was crazy. “Do you LIKE to smell smoke when you’re in a public place?” Of course not. But it was up to the individual business owner to decide. Because of changes in cultural attitudes about smoking, probably many places would have outlawed smoking in their establishments. Others would cater to a smoking market, and leave it that way. The point is: It’s up to PEOPLE to decide, not governments. I finally gave up on arguing with people about it. I wanted to convince them that the principle of the thing mattered. All they cared about was, “If I don’t like smoking in public, then I’m glad it’s illegal.” Principle was beside the point. I tried to say, “But if you concede the principle on smoking, then the stage is set for future mandates you might NOT like.” No answer. Usually, just a shrug or a sneer.

Now, 20 years later, we have new mandates. Way, way beyond smoking. We have mask mandates. We have closed church mandates. We have no public gatherings over X number of people mandates. In California, police (I thought they were outlawed?) are raiding homes with parties the government considers too big. Federal and local officials talk openly of mandating mask-wearing IN YOUR HOUSE. Even during sex! National sports games — beloved by millions — have essentially been outlawed. Don’t even talk about schools and universities. They will not be normal or open again, not for a long time, if ever. These mandates are not limited and specific. They are open ended, indefinite. They have the feel of permanency. The unspoken and often spoken attitude of governors throughout the country is, “Do this because I say so.” People shout at strangers, “Wear your goddam mask.” There’s no sense of choice. There’s no sense of rational weighing. It’s all command. And control.

This is not freedom. This is not liberty. This is not rationality. And if you think it’s temporary, you’re crazy. The rationale for mandates is nonspecific. The rationale is, “Do as I say, and do as you’re told.” Millions comply. That’s how dictatorships work…not free countries.

I tried to warn people when we passed non-smoking mandates. Now the mandates are everywhere. And they’re just getting started. Mandates, like any malignancy, will grow. So long as we let them. I’m still waiting for mass disobedience, mass rebellion, mass outrage. The mental health of people cannot be good. They’re being forced to give up everything that made this country so wonderful and great. At the core of it all was freedom and liberty, the simple things in daily life. Most of those are gone. Instead of a Puritanical religious dictatorship, we got the exact same thing, only it’s a pseudo-medical, pseudo-scientific tyranny.

Our liberties are not gone for any delimited, rational or temporary reason. They’re gone because we’re told they’re gone. We operate 100 percent with the consent and permission of the rulers. If you’re OK with that, then I don’t want to know you.

Michael J. Hurd

Paul Rojas,
Tulsa, OK.

I’m going to come out and say it…the same thing thousands, probably millions of people in this country are feeling, at this point.

I don’t care about black people’s problems anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I care very much for the black people I known personally. I care about them as people, as much as whites, Asians, Latinos, and every other human being on earth.

But I no longer care about the special set of issues that many black people hold so near and dear, and that seem to define them as a group…though thankfully, not as individuals.

I’m simply worn out with them. Exhausted by their constant demands, their neediness, their helplessness, their hypocrisy, their never ending problems, their inability to take advantage of the myriad opportunities practically delivered to them, their ungratefulness, their refusal to take responsibility for their own lives or accept the consequences of their actions.

I’ve just thrown in the towel. I can’t keep caring about problems that I obviously can’t do anything about. Especially when they have brought at least some of it on themselves, or when they won’t make the lifestyle changes necessary to succeed or to overcome or avoid their problems.

There comes a point, where I just quit listening. When racist graffiti is discovered on a college campus, or on a black person’s house, my reaction is no longer outrage, disgust, and sympathy for a victim of a hate crime. It’s outrage and disgust alright, and it comes a few days later when it is almost always revealed to be yet another racial hoax perpetrated by black people. I really don’t want to hear them tearfully recounting that heartrending moment when they “discovered” some mean white KKK member had snuck into their laundry room, completely unseen and invisible to video cameras, to scribble “Trump ’16” and “Die niggers” on the wall. At this point, I’ll turn the channel.

I applaud those who are successful, and overcome challenges, and I wish them well. But just like my white colleagues, if they make poor decisions, spend their money foolishly, refuse the free education available to them, have children they can’t afford, get involved in drugs and criminality, I have little sympathy. And I’m not likely to make an effort to be friendly with them or get to know them. I’ll be polite, but I don’t particularly care to associate with them, white or black.

I no longer excuse or rationalize violence, criminality, laziness, indolence, careless babymaking, willful dependency or degeneracy among blacks, any more than I do with whites. If you’re a thief who doesn’t support his child, and spends his days drinking and whining about how his life sucks, your black skin doesn’t get you a pass from me. You’re just as much of a piece of garbage as your fellow white bum. Doesn’t equality feel good?

Perhaps it’s the hyper-sensitivity, the arrogant and unabashed racism toward other races, and the self-entitlement. Could be the willingness to drop everything to riot, loot, burn and destroy personal and public property, menace, threaten and physically attack innocent white people. Or the propensity towards cowardly mob attacks on vulnerable whites, especially the elderly, women, any white person they catch alone and defenseless.

70 years ago or more, white men did beat up or occasionally murder blacks they suspected of wrongdoing…just as they did to other whites who “needed killin’”. Vigilante “justice” was an injustice, nobody argues the point. It was wrong, and the civil rights era exposed these as shameful and reprehensible acts. Black and whites marched together and lobbied their political leaders to put a stop to racial injustice, to shame those guilty of racism, and to codify and enforce equal rights for all. A noble and righteous cause, one which was long overdue.

But here it is 50 years later, the president, attorney general, and a disproportionate percentage of the top government executives are black. The mayors, commissioners, police chiefs, and other local adminstrators in most, if not all, major cities are also black. Black Run America has not brought prosperity to its constituents, rather, its Democratic policies, programs and spending have driven once majestic and prosperous cities into bankruptcy, decay and abandonment.

I just can’t bring myself to feel for the people who scrawl vulgar graffiti on the sides of stately brownstones, or who break the subtly rippled glass that a craftsman, white or black, had carefully glazed in an ornate linteled window a hundred thirty years ago. There’s no part of me that yearns to reach out to people throwing garbage onto what had been a tidy, manicured patch of decorative greenery flanking a grand marble entrance with exquisitely carved doors. I just don’t have it in me, anymore. I do wonder what has become of the respectable, genteel families who were displaced by the social engineering policies of the New Deal, leaving their architectural legacy to the ravages of neglect and deliberate defacement.

I’ve left the “dialogue”, which turned out to be nothing more than a one-sided, accusatory tirade, berating me for unspecified harm I am to bear responsibility for, and denying me the right to respond with my own, civil point of view. There’s simply no point having “the conversation” any longer. You smugly assert that I have no right to my views because I can’t possibly know what it’s like to be black. Yet you claim in the same breath, to be the arbiter, the expert on my own race, and therefore I have no right to speak for myself. So, have your own “dialogue” with yourself. I’m out.

No matter what I do, no matter what I say, you say my whiteness makes me racist. So there is no longer any point in considering it. Fine, you say I’m “racist”. I don’t care anymore.

I’m sure there are those who will say in rebuttal that they are “tired of” being the victims of racism every walking minute of their lives. And to this, I say…”Ok, I am willing to accept that you are being victimized by the inherent racism absorbed by simply being in proximity to white people. But you must accept that my response will be to avoid you, and to decline to involve myself in your issues, lest my whiteness somehow damage you further.”

The iconic Lower Manhattan 9/11 memorial display that features twin beams of light to honor victims of the terror attacks will not shine this year over coronavirus concerns,” reports the New York Post.

“The annual ‘Tribute in Light’ display requires a large crew to pull off … posing health risks this year that ‘were far too great.’” [Breitbart 8/14/20]

Somehow, riots and looting falsely labeled as peaceful protests ARE perfectly healthy. But a crew setting up a light display is NOT.
If you think any of this is about health, you are crazy. And if you don’t care, you deserve to lose all of your freedom.

Kim Jong Un rolls up to village devastated by floods in luxury SUV
Kim Jong Un cracks down on defectors with new pledge for North Koreans
Jung Gwang-il was a 36-year-old married father of two when a truck delivered him late one night to hell on earth.

“When we got there, I saw people who didn’t even look human, they looked like beasts,” he recalled. “It was extraordinarily frightening.”

It was April 2000. Jung had been a privileged seafood trader at a North Korean state-run company that did business with China. He was accused of espionage by a co-worker, arrested, and taken to one of the six terrifying political prison camps established by Kim Jong Un’s dictator grandfather in the late 1940s.

The “beasts” were inmates who “couldn’t walk properly because they’d been tortured and starved.”

Many of the men arriving with Jung at the mountain prison, Camp 15, also known as Yodok, wouldn’t survive the 16 daily hours of hard labor, usually dangerous logging, with little food and only light clothing in freezing temperatures. But conditions are even more horrific at remote and fearsome Camp 16, believed to be the worst in North Korea’s vast penal system, and a place no one has ever been known to escape.

Now, between defectors like Jung and the testimony of female detainees in a new UN report, the effort to expose North Korea’s murderous penal system might finally be working. Britain announced July 11 they were slapping sanctions on the country for its prison camps. North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un predictably went ballistic, calling it a “flagrant political plot to jump on the bandwagon of the United States’ inimical policy” — and inadvertently shined a light on camps he and his family have always denied existed.

An estimated 120,000 “enemies of the state” are warehoused in Soviet-style political prison gulags, but even “regular” prison camps are extraordinarily brutal. According to the July UN report, about 100 North Korean women who escaped to China and were forcibly repatriated suffered “appalling violations.”

“I did not sleep and worked because I did not want to be beaten. It was excruciating to a level that I even attempted to commit suicide,” said one of the women interviewed by UN probers.

The detainees reported forced nudity, invasive body searches, and sometimes torture and rape. Several women told UN officials that prison guards tried to cause pregnant prisoners to abort by beating them or making them do hard labor. There was also infanticide.

“Guards beat the infants to death or bury them alive after they are born,” wrote Roberta Cohen, the former chair of Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), in an earlier report.

In Camp 15, an already emaciated Jung was barely able to walk after nine months of daily punishment that included waterboarding, being electrocuted while bound to a barber chair and so-called “pigeon torture” — tied to the wall for hours in such a way that he could not sit down nor stand up.

Enlarge ImageKim Jong Un and Kim Jong Il
Kim Jong Un and Kim Jong IlAP Photo/Korean Central News Agency via Korea News Service
In an interview with The Post via Zoom from Seoul, South Korea, Jung said he managed to survive Camp 15 because the trainer-inmates warned him his family would be imprisoned if he died in the camp.

Unlike Camp 16, Jung’s prison was a so-called “revolutionizing zone.” Inmates faced nightly brainwashing sessions that often lasted until midnight. But these prisoners were sometimes let go, as Jung was after three years. He swam across the Tumen River into China 12 days after his release, and eventually made it to South Korea. He wife and two kids had escaped the country previously and joined him in Seoul.

Despite harrowing reports from the UN and human-rights groups and even the death of American college student Otto Warmbier in 2017 while detained in North Korea, most outsiders know little about the concentration camps.

North Korea has long adhered to the “three generation rule” when imprisoning dissidents, meaning their entire families often have to go with them. But no one has ever escaped to report what happens in Camp 16, thought to be a “total control zone.” Captives are reportedly worked until they drop dead, possibly at the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site about a mile away.

“It’s like the Matrix,” Sean King, an Asian specialist with Park Strategies, told the Post. “You’re grown and harvested for the regime.”

Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of HNRK, said, “The level of cruelty in the North Korean prison camps is truly unsurpassed in modern history. I’ve interviewed hundreds of witnesses over the years. When it comes to a gulag system, they have out-Sovieted the Soviets.”

Thomas Buergenthal, an Auschwitz survivor and judge who served on the International Court of Justice, said in 2017 that North Korean’s political prisons are as bad, if not worse, than the Nazi death camps.

Jung, now 57, leads No Chain for North Korea, a group he founded that smuggles Hollywood movies, South Korean TV and other information about the outside world into the Hermit Kingdom. According to a recent video seen by the US-backed Radio Free Asia, Kim is so enraged at North Koreans secretly watching smuggled South Korean soap operas and K-pop music videos that he’s had dozens arrested, shackled, their heads shaved, and sent to the camps for interrogation.

Having grown up worshiping Kim Jong Un’s father, the second Supreme Leader of North Korea, Jung’s only wish now is to awaken what he says are the brainwashed masses of his former country.

He despises Kim Jong Un — but his real resentment is reserved for world leaders who appease him for their own political ends.

“I blame what’s happening in North Korea on large part on the politicians and leaders who enable Kim Jong Un,” Jung said. “South Korea nowadays is a vassal state of the north and they take their orders from the north. Kim is not a normal leader who deserves to meet Trump. Kim is a killer. He is not worthy of going to summits with.

Here is what strikes me as a profound political paradox. The US government is larger, more consolidated, more powerful, and more intrusive than it has ever been in its history —indeed our sweet land of liberty is now host to the most powerful Leviathan state that has ever existed.

Never before has a government in human history owned more weapons of mass destruction, looted as much wealth from a country, or assumed unto itself the power to regulate the minutiae of daily life as much as this one. By comparison to the overgrown behemoth in Washington, with its printing press to crank out money for the world and its annual $2.2 trillion dollars in largesse to toss at adoring crowds, even communist states were powerless paupers.

At the same time — and here is the paradox — the United States is overall the wealthiest society in the history of the world. The World Bank lists Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Norway as competitive in this regard, but the statistics don’t take into account the challenges to mass wealth that exist in the US relative to small, homogenous states such as its closest competitors. In the United States, more people from more classes and geographic regions have access to more goods and services at prices they can afford, and possess the disposable income and access to credit to put them to use, than any other time in history. Truly we live in the age of extreme abundance.

What is the relationship between the rise of big government and the rise of American prosperity? It seems that people on the right and left are quick to confuse correlation with causation. They believe that the US is wealthy because the government is big and expansive. This error is probably the most common of all errors in political economy. It is just assumed that buildings are safe because of building codes, that stock markets are not dens of thieves because of the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), that the elderly don’t starve and die because of Social Security, and so on, all the way to concluding that we should credit big government for American wealth.

Cause and Effect Commission
Now, this is where economic logic comes into play. You have to understand something about the way cause and effect operates in human affairs to understand that big government does not bring about prosperity. Government is not productive. It has no wealth of its own. All it acquires it must take from the private sector. You might believe that it is necessary and you might believe it does great good, but we must grant that it does not have the ability to produce wealth in the way the market does.

Lasting prosperity can only come about through human effort in the framework of a market economy that allows people to cooperate to their mutual advantage, innovate and invest in an environment of freedom, retain earnings as private property, and save generation to generation without fear of having estates looted through taxation and inflation. This is the source of wealth. This is the means by which a rising population is fed, clothed, and housed. This is the method by which even the poorest country can become rich.

Now, does this system as described characterize the United States? Yes and no. This is, after all, the country that recently jailed Martha Stewart, the world’s most successful woman entrepreneur, for the crime of having not disclosed to the inquisitors every last detail about the circumstances surrounding her choice to sell a stock before its bottom dropped out.

Some of our most successful magazines celebrate entrepreneurship, but recently enacted laws, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, empowered the federal government to oversee the books of every publicly listed company and even manage their methods and operations in every detail. Some have compared this act to FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act.

This is a country with cradle-to-grave security promises that just recently added a benefit of low-price prescriptions for seniors that is going to cost hundreds of billions over time. This is a country that, when faced with a problem of airport security, created a whole new federal bureaucracy to gum up the workings of every airport in the country.

These are incredibly bad policies, enterprise killers in every way. Why, then, does enterprise continue to thrive? The answer is complex. In many ways we continue to live off the borrowed capital of previous generations. Some economic sectors benefit too greatly from an artificial injection of created credit, making prosperity seem more real than it is in sectors such as housing and perhaps stocks. There is a bitter irony at work here too in that the larger the economy is, the more there is to tax, and so government grows as an aftereffect of economic growth.

People Resist Control
But here I would like to concentrate on what I think is an explanation that is too often overlooked. It requires that we understand something about the extraordinary capacity of the human mind to overcome obstacles put in its path. In all the history of states and the history of reflection on social organization and economics, this component is the most underestimated because it is the least predictable and the most difficult to comprehend. Human beings are creative and determined, and, if they have a love of liberty, and cooperate through exchange, they can overcome seemingly impassable obstacles.

It is because of this power of human ingenuity and determination to improve the world around us, despite the state, that a vast gulf has come to separate the accumulated power of the nation-state from its effective power in the management and guidance of society and the world economy.

Now, there is a sense in which the state is nowhere as effective as it claims. Economic law limits what the state can do. The state cannot raise wages for everyone. It cannot dampen prices that want to rise without causing shortages, or increase prices that want to fall without causing surpluses. It cannot predict the course of markets or human events. It can control surprisingly few forces that work in the world.

In all its central planning, government is forever declaring the major combat operations are over, whether in foreign or domestic policy, only to discover that its real struggles and battles last and last. A good example is in the area of foreign trade. If a good or service is more efficiently produced abroad, the logic of the market will reassign production patterns until they conform. An attempt to protect domestic industry can do nothing to change this reality. Instead, protection only increases prices for consumers, subsidizes inefficient firms, and brings about ever-increasing amounts of wasted time, work, and resources.

I only mention these few examples of the limits of the state as a prelude to my general claim. It’s my view that the gulf between accumulated power and effective power is going to grow ever wider in the coming years, to the point where the nation-state itself will grow effectively weaker, more anachronistic, and finally irrelevant to the course of social development.

In these minutes, I would like to explain more in depth what I mean, and provide an account of how the relationship of society to the state has been dramatically changed over the last fifty years and will continue to do so in the years ahead. This change has fundamentally altered our view toward public life and our expectations concerning what institutions we depend upon for our security and well being. We have come to depend on the state less and less in our daily lives, even as the state has accumulated ever more power. Indeed, unless we work directly for the state, and sometimes even if we do, our activities and affairs owe ever more to the private sector.

In saying this, I am to some extent agreeing with what has become a common complaint made by neoconservative writers and left-liberal pundits. They have said for years that the civic culture is no longer coherent and cohesive. They complain that the nation-state has lost its hold on the public imagination. They whine and wail about how we have all retreated into our suburbs and internet connections and no longer rally around grand national projects that inspire us with a vision of all that government can do.

Or to put it another way, they worry that the government has run out of good excuses for spending money, taxing us, regulating us, drafting our kids, and getting us embroiled in wars. For the neoconservative crowd, 9/11 really was a godsend, just as the Oklahoma bombing was a godsend to the left-liberals of the 1990s. They were equally adept at exploiting these horrible tragedies to the great advantage of the state, and to browbeat the rest of the population into going along with the political priorities of the regime in power. But in retrospect, it is clear that these events only represented a brief parenthesis in the long-run decline of the nation-state in our social consciousness.

The Mythology of the Nation-State
Before proceeding further, it is useful to back up just a bit to remember that the nation-state as we know is a modern invention, and not an essential feature of society. In many ways, it is, as Bastiat said, nothing but an artifice that permits some to live at others’ expense. He was of course speaking of the modern state, particularly that of nineteenth-century France, and all that he wrote applies in our time as well.

But states were not always structured as we know them today. From the fall of the Roman Empire to the late Middle Ages, societies in Europe were governed not by bureaucrats, elected councils, regulations, or any kind of permanent structural apparatus of coercion and compulsion, but by competing cells of authority that were woven together not by ideology, but by separate function. The merchant class managed its affairs, the church had its purview and courts, the international traders developed their code, feudal lords were masters of their domain, free cities managed themselves, the family was largely autonomous, and the state, such as it was, consisted of extended families and lines of rulers who dared not transgress their traditional authority.

Every institution was supremely jealous of its power and authority. The emergence of liberty from feudalism occurred not because any institution brought it about but because they all stayed within their realms, cooperating where necessary but also competing for the loyalty of the public. All the institutions we associate with civilization—universities, stock markets, charities, global trade, scientific establishments, vocational schools, courts of law—were born or recaptured from the ruins of the ancient world in these supposed dark ages without nation-states.

Voltaire once wrote of how kings would conduct their wars, raising their own money and employing their own soldiers, always acquiring or losing territory and usually up to no good. But for the most part, though they dominate the history books, their activities had little or no impact on the people. It was during this time, historian Ralph Raico reminds us, that the process of accumulating capital began and the division of labor began to expand — two features that are essential to rising population and prosperity.

The nation-state as we know it — defined by a fixed governing class that enjoys the legal monopoly on the right to use aggressive force against person and property and holds a status that is higher in authority than any other institution — was a development of the breakup of Christendom and the wars of the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. As competitive sources of authority weakened, the state as an entity separate from its ruler came to be strengthened and consolidated, sometimes in opposition to competing authority centers and sometimes in cooperation with them.

The emergence of the modern state immediately gave rise to a countervailing force: the great liberal movement all over Europe and, shortly thereafter, in the United States. This liberal movement emphasized a single theme in its writings. It is as follows: society contains within itself the capacity for managing itself in all its affairs, especially its economic affairs, and states, to the extent that they do more than merely punish criminals, are a source of despotism and tyranny.

It was this conviction that was accepted as commonplace during the founding period of the United States, and not just by statesmen but also by merchants, farmers, ministers, and intellectuals. The conviction that society requires no central management, and should therefore be left alone by the governing class, had a name: it meant to love liberty.

The structure and founding ideology of the United States was intended to protect that idea of liberty, under the belief that if people are free to pursue their dreams, cooperating with each other and also competing with each other, freely associating to their mutual betterment, and governing their own affairs rather than permitting themselves to be governed from on high, the result will be human flourishing as never before known in history.

The Age of Leviathan
Now, it should be obvious that this model was rejected in the twentieth century, the century of government control. It began with a horrible war that brought the communists to power in Russia and the managerial class to power in the United States. Thomas DiLorenzo has discussed how we came to be saddled with an income tax, a central bank, and direct democracy all in one year. The interwar years provided an ever-so-brief respite before the world became uglier with two models of central control having presented themselves as the only viable systems: fascism and communism. We flatter ourselves if we think the New Deal represented a third choice, for it borrowed from the other two and added only the ingredient of democratic expediency.

World War II cemented into place the planned society in which all attention was directed toward the public sector as liberator and savior of mankind. The words economic development, technology, and security were bound up with one institution only: the nation-state. It was the nation-state that fought and won the war, launched the bomb, reconstructed economies, rescued the aged, educated the youth, stabilized the economy, and planned the exploration of space. The nation state was the new god: supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-competent.

The Mises Institute recently published an unpublished essay by Murray Rothbard written in the late 1950s on the subject of technology and the state. In it he departed from the whole of conventional wisdom at the time by arguing that the government was not the appropriate institution to trust with our technological future. Research and development is best done by the private sector, he said. All major innovations in world history have come about this way, he wrote, and it is from within the private sector that we should expect the next revolution. From government we can only expect technology that reinforces political priorities, but no real innovations that are both useful for the mass of the consuming public and economically viable.

These days, the paper is not shocking to read at all. Not so in those times. The paper was not published, because there was no one around to publish it. It was an argument that all his colleagues would have rejected outright. In those days, it didn’t even seem to have superficial plausibility. Even those who commissioned the piece found themselves squeamish about its contents. When you think about the public consensus that existed for the state in those days, it does indeed strike us as a different world.

In 1955, the federal government was relatively small but exercised enormous effective power. The federal budget was $68 billion, which is about one-thirty-sixth as large as that of today’s government. In fact, the whole federal government was smaller than a single department of the government today: the Department of Education, which, ironically, is the one that the Republicans keep saying that they will abolish.

But the size of the state by today’s standards masked its effective hold on the public mind. The G.I. bill, it was believed, would educate all soldiers, while the federal government would reconstruct the Europe the Nazis destroyed, even while it protected us from the demonized Soviets who had been our allies in the war the day before yesterday.

The Cold War purported to pit US capitalism against USSR communism, but the truth was that there was very little enthusiasm for market economics in the United States. It was not taught in the classrooms. Mises himself could not find a paid position as professor of economics. Keynesian thinking — which imagined the government to be an effective manager of the macroeconomy — was seen at the only real alternative to socialism.

The technological advances of the period mostly involved television and commercial flight, advances widely attributed to government wartime spending. Our information came from three approved networks and a handful of wire services. Publishing books was too expensive so self-publishing was out of the question. Intellectual and economic life was dominated by a kind of forced conformity and the culture seized by an unrelenting fear of nuclear holocaust.

The planned economy that had become fashionable in the 1930s continued its hold on public policy in the 1950s, and successfully kept many innovations at bay. The cell phone is a good example of this. Probably many people in this room carry one. As with most new technology that enters into mass distribution, we all wonder how we got along without them before. The development and expansion of this industry — which was born in 1994 — has been entirely a result of private sector initiative. We own our phones, manage our accounts, deploy the phones for email, web surfing, and even for taking and sending pictures.

The prices and plans are entirely market based, and accessible to a vast amount of the buying public. The industry is incredibly competitive. In every mall in America, cell phone dealers have their booths. When I was a kid we dreamed of personal communication devices that we read about in James Bond books. We imagined that they would be in our cars. But even Ian Fleming couldn’t have imagined their portability or the advance of wireless communications. Nor could we have imagined that they would be a mass product, available not just to spies or the rich but to everyone.

It is highly significant that this industry is rooted so deeply in the private sector. It was not too long ago that economists and political scientists believed that communication technology must always fall within the purview of the state. This belief was the basis of the creation of the old Bell system. I can recall as a young adult that the phone strapped to the wall was the only real-time contact we had with the outside world. It was owned by the one phone company, and maintained by the government. Our right to communicate was sustained and controlled by the state. No more.

So too with the mails. There was only one way to deliver a letter or package when I was a young adult, and very few imagined that it could be done any other way. A few exceptions in the law were made and now look what we enjoy: vast choice in package delivery, with the private sector offering far more choices than the public sector ever dreamed of offering. Here again the federal government had finally permitted an exception to the rule against using any provider but the federal government. Thus a slight bit of light into darkness has brightened the whole world.

Not enough can be said about the way the web has completely reshaped the world. While the internet was frozen and nearly useless after the government put it in place for purposes of military and bureaucratic communication, the private sector transformed this creaking and poorly constructed structure into the institution that would change the whole world.

A Privatized World
So it is in sector after sector. We have in these examples the story of the modern world, shaped by private enterprise, driven forward by the power of entrepreneurship, improving in a hundred million ways by employing private property toward the common good. It is done largely outside the government’s purview. Sometimes it seems as if government works as little more than an absentee mafia lord, showing up to collect a check and then retreating again to his private estate. You don’t want to make him angry but neither do you let the prospect of his sudden appearance deter your activities.

Most of our daily lives are conducted as if we are all striving to live in absence of government — precisely as the critics say. We live increasingly in private communities and use technologies that are provided for us by private enterprise. We depend on the matrix of exchange and enterprise to give us security in our homes and in our financial affairs. We manage our finances with no sense of anticipation that government will care for us in the future. Our churches and schools and workplaces and families have become the units that draw our social attention. Government and the old-fashioned civic religion just can’t find a place for themselves in this scenario. But rather than a bad thing, this strikes me as a wonderful thing, a return to the world of Tocqueville rather than the regimented national life of the postwar period.

To celebrate this is not really a matter of ideology. If the market had not been working spectacularly well despite attempts by government to hobble it and channel its energies, we would certainly find ourselves much poorer today than we were fifty years ago. And yet here we are, a country with a population that has fully doubled in size in that period and a GDP that has increased by a multiple of twenty-eight. This much we can say: by historical standards, this is a miracle, and the market, not the government, is responsible.

In the meantime, the market has outrun the state to such an extent that the whole planning apparatus of the postwar period, always based on a kind of pseudo-science, has become preposterously untenable.

This is especially true given the size and expanse of the global economy. In 1953, the dollar value of world merchandise trade between all countries totaled $84 billion, not a small sum but about one-fourth the size of the total US GDP in the same year. Today, the dollar value of world merchandise trade is $7.3 trillion, or nearly two-thirds the size of the total US GDP. This increasing integration of the world economy, which was given a huge boost by the collapse of Soviet satellites and the opening of China, has shattered the dreams of anyone who hoped national economic planning had a future.

If I can present the following metaphor of how I imagine the relationship of the productive matrix of human voluntarism to exist alongside the Leviathan state. Imagine a vigorous game of football with fast and effective players, cooperating with their teams and competing with the other team. These, we might say, constitute the activities of the market economy: consumers, producers, savers, investors, innovators, workers, and all institutions associated with the voluntary sector of society such as houses of worship, educational institutions, charitable endeavors, families, and artistic and literary associations of every sort. They are the players in this game.

However, right on the fifty-yard line sits a huge and overgrown elephant, enormously strong but also swelled up, slow, and completely unsuited to being a player in this game. Everyone knows that this monstrous animal is there, and they wish it were not. But rather than attempt to slay it and drag it away, the game proceeds apace, with runners, kickers, and throwers zipping around it. The elephant is powerful and authoritative, more so than ever, but it can hardly move. It can bat its trunk at players that prove especially annoying but it cannot finally stop the game from taking place. And the longer these players confront this strange obstacle, the better they become at working around it, and growing stronger and faster despite it.

I’ll block that metaphor before it becomes too implausible, but let me just say this about the future of this elephant state: like a dying, large, and once dangerous animal, the state will continue to be an annoyance and even deadly under certain conditions, but it will not be an effective player in our daily lives. The reason is this. The state cannot deal with change, and ours is a time of constant and relentless change. It does not navigate the world with attention to outcomes, and ours is a world in which all human endeavors are expected to achieve. Its bureaucratic structures are fine for dealing with repetitive tasks, but it cannot face new challenges. It can consume resources, but it is incapable of producing them. It is uninventive, unresponsive, unintelligent, uninformed, and unmotivated to succeed.

Ludwig von Mises provided the first full account for why this is so. The government exists outside the matrix of exchange. There are no market prices for the goods and services it endeavors to produce. The revenue it receives is not a reward for social services but rather money extracted from the public by force. It is not spent with an eye to return on investment. As a result there is no means for the government to calculate its own profits and losses. Its inability to calculate with attention to economic rationality is the downfall of governments everywhere. Its decision-making is ultimately economically arbitrary and politically motivated.

This feature of government can doom whole societies, as it did in the Soviet Union where the government presumed ownership over the whole capital stock. Because government control was complete, and there were few legal channels of escape, society and economy withered and died over time. Eventually the situation became so absurd that even the elite in the Soviet Union did not live as well as the middle class in most other well-developed countries. As much as power can be its own reward for some, this situation was clearly unsustainable.

But government control doesn’t always take that path. It always impoverishes relative to what might otherwise have been the case. But when its control is not comprehensive—or to extend that football metaphor, when the elephant doesn’t entire cover the field but still leaves room for the game to take place—the miracle that is the marketplace can still do remarkable things. Sometimes it only takes the government lessening control over one area of life to inspire stunning achievements. The government keeps trying to pave the world but private enterprise keeps growing through the cracks.

Socialist Islands
If you want a picture of the contrast between what Murray Rothbard called power and market — or the state and the private sector — consider what you see at most major airports in this country. You have two structures working side by side: the public sector as represented by the Transportation Safety Administration and the semi-private sector as represented by the airlines.

So you arrive with your luggage, and the TSA is the first to swing into action. And there you have it: the very picture of the bureaucrat: alternatively inattentive and belligerent, completely disregarding of customer well-being, so slow that they seem to exist out of time itself. They laugh amongst themselves as if they experience a real class identity and pay no mind to others. They treat mere citizens as subordinates, and are quick to accuse us mere mortals of wrongdoing.

Most of all, they don’t do their job well. They will apply a strict chemical test to a tube of Crest but will let a black ball with fuse in it go right through, unnoticed. They will give a thorough search to a young mother, and think nothing of ripping a baby out of her arms, only because she came up randomly on the list of those to get a thorough check.

Private enterprise could never work this way. If you applied a profit and loss test to such state services, bankruptcy would be a foregone conclusion. Once we get past the TSA, we are greeted with smiles and warmth hitherto unknown in the history of airline travel. They seem very much aware that the travelers have likely gone through hell in dealing with the TSA. Even these unionized employees do all they can to serve others. Somehow we arrive at our destinations in one piece and not suffering total humiliation, but this is not due to the TSA. It is due to the forces of private enterprise that still exist in the airlines.

We can think of this airport scene as a kind of microcosm of the whole economy. It is burdened, vexed, harassed, hampered, and hobbled by the state. But through the miracle of human creativity and determined effort, private enterprise has created a grand and glorious world that has surpassed the most far-flung dreams of the old utopians, a world where food once inaccessible to kings is available to the poorest of the poor, where no one need be without clothing or shelter, where even those we call poor would have been seen as enormously blessed only decades ago.

All of this leaves the question of what our political priorities should be. If it were up to me, I would push a button and reduce government to the size it was after the American Revolution, under the Articles of Confederation, and then look forward to debating whether we should get rid of the rest.

But because that is not likely to happen soon, my own sense is that if present trends continue, the years ahead will bear more in common with the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century than the country and world as we knew it between the years of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War.

Unlike the planned and regimented economy of the postwar period, the Gilded Age was a time when technological advance and demographic shifts made the society essentially ungovernable, even given the vast power of the state. Not that this is any reason for the lovers of liberty to let down their guard: the War on Spain and the Great War that followed the post–civil war peace shattered civilization. The same can happen again to the great civilization being created and renewed in our own time. After all, the elephant can still do a lot of damage.

We can do our part to encourage the good developments and forestall the bad. What should our priorities be? Two politicians I saw on C-SPAN recently gave a speech to instruct us on the first question we should ask when we go to vote.

The first one said that we should think mainly about the children, that we should elect politicians who put their interest first. As an extension of that principle, we should ask the state to further the interests of our families and communities, this person said. Now, if all this means anything, it strikes me as highly dangerous. The state does not own the children and we don’t really want to live in a society in which the state is permitted to do with our children, family, or communities what it wishes.

Moreover, there is no such thing as the collective interests of children, families, and communities, and to pretend that there is potentially despotic. In any case, it solves no political issue, since right and left both have different plans for what they believe is best for our children. These days, their plans reach into every area of their lives, from what program they should be using to learn to read to the conditions under which they are permitted to take their first job. I can’t but think of Hannah Arendt’s warning that politicians who invoke the children are potential totalitarians.

The second politician said that we should think mainly about our security when we go to vote. The Constitution, he said, empowers the federal government to collect taxes to provide for the common defense, so that is what we should do. He proceeded to justify the whole of the American military empire that has generated so much hatred and opposition around the world and interfered so seriously with our trading relationships. He was the classic case of a person who completely ignores the founders’ warnings against war, standing armies, and militarism.

Neither Welfare nor Warfare
Now, these politicians disagree profoundly on what the political priorities should be and what we should be asking of the state. The first says we should ask for welfare. The second says we should ask for warfare. They agree to disagree, and spend our money on both. Why? Because, well, because it’s no skin off their noses. Such is the nature of public government as Hans Hoppe describes it: there is no real ownership, so of course there is a squandering of resources and ever-higher costs.

Rockwell on Everything
The only real restraint against all forms of government is public opinion. A public that says no to the state is the best defense against despotism, and the best cultural and political context in which liberty grows and thrives. Our times have taught that the world economy does not need the state. As the old liberals said, society contains within itself the capacity for self-management. Our experience in our families and communities has taught that the state does very little for our benefit. Our experience in our workplaces has taught us that the state makes productivity more difficult and gives us very little to nothing in return.

I’m often asked what an average person can to do further liberty. I say that the first and most important step is intellectual. We all need to begin to say no to the state on an intellectual level. When you are asked what you would like the government to do for you, we need to be prepared to reply: nothing. We should not ask it to save our children, nor provide security, nor give us anything at all.

We can still be good citizens. We can be good parents, teachers, workers, entrepreneurs, church members, students, and contributors to society in a million different ways. This is far more important to the future of liberty than how we vote. We must regain our confidence in our capacity for self-governance. I believe this is happening already. The empire is shrinking despite its every attempt to expand. Even if the public sector cannot and will not prepare for a future of liberty, we can. Let us look for and work toward the triumph of liberty unencumbered by Leviathan.

This speech was delivered to a business audience in East Lansing, Michigan, in Spring 2005 to a group founded by the late entrepreneur Don Foote.

Author:
Contact Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and editor of LewRockwell.com.

We are standing on the precipice of the biggest education revolution in generations.

As schools refuse at union behest to reopen full-time instruction in the fall, parents are flooding into alternative options like homeschooling and pandemic “pods.” For the first time in modern political memory, there is likely to be an exodus from public schools.

It will not just be the worst-served in poorer neighborhoods, to whom most school choice programs are geared, that leave. It will also be middle-class and wealthier families. This presents the biggest opportunity for domestic victory the Right has had in 70 years—if the Republican Party does not squander it.

William F. Buckley, Jr. may have started the conservative lament about the direction of higher education and academia in 1951, but the Right has only recently woken up to the political dangers of the elementary and secondary system. Perhaps this is because, in many ways, the common school system first implemented in the 19th century has, in the past, been an Americanizing, patriotic, and assimilatory institution.

But as it has done to so many institutions in American life, the Left’s long march has turned public school’s purpose upside down and inside out. Far from inculcating Reagan’s “informed patriotism,” today’s public schools now teach young citizens an outsized vision of America’s faults and a twisted, false view of her remarkable strengths.

While textbook information is proprietary, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History has long been a staple of high school classrooms, now bolstered by the 4,500 (at minimum) schools that have adopted the 1619 Project curriculum—a curriculum even the Project’s author now acknowledges is not factual history, but anti-American polemic.

There’s an inverse relationship between civic knowledge and the now-fashionable opinions that America is a racist and sexist country. Among people under 45, only one in five can pass the extremely basic U.S. citizenship exam given to naturalized immigrants. But half of that generation are convinced that America is a racist country and 40% disagree that we should be proud of our history.

There can be little doubt that the effect of public schooling today is far from its original purpose of forming citizens capable of living in a self-governing republic. But for decades, despite a robust private school sector, two million homeschoolers, and dozens of limited school choice programs, public school has remained the default option for 90% of American students. That may be about to change.

The Catastrophe of Remote Learning

The pandemic, with a self-defeating assist from teachers’ unions, is transforming our education landscape beyond all recognition. Parenting Facebook groups and other online forums are currently being overrun by families desperate to get a handle on what learning at home in a “pod” might entail. Overnight, gathering together a handful to a dozen students into a “co-quarantined” teaching or tutoring group has become the hottest new trend in education.

Homeschooling and micro-school parents are finding themselves inundated with questions from friends who had never considered those options before. So many are notifying states of their intentions to withdraw from public schools that government servers, unused to the strain, are crashing. Agencies previously dedicated to the placement of au pairs and nannies are capitalizing on the madness and have switched to matching tutors and teachers with families.

Until enrollment counts in the fall are taken, we won’t know for sure the extent of the exodus. But it will almost certainly dwarf normal figures. In Montgomery County, Maryland, for example, local parents have heard that instead of an expected enrollment of 2500, as few as 300 students had signed up for their local public school as of early August.

Why is this happening? After struggling through the spring, parents know what districts refuse to acknowledge: distance learning has been an utter disaster. A majority of districts never actually implemented live online instruction, and instead saddled parents with a frustrating combination of homework and multiplying digital platforms.

And that was in the better schools; in already-struggling places like Chicago, almost half of the city’s teachers did not even bother to log in to the district’s learning platforms at least three times a week. While families limped across the finish line in the initial months of the pandemic, the prospect of beginning another year this way seems to many not just inadvisable, but impossible.

The push to reopen schools does not stem from downplaying or disbelief about the effects of the virus: to the contrary, polls consistently show high levels of anxiety about the safety of students and teachers. If parents felt that schools were negotiating with them in good faith and preparing to deliver a better form of hybrid instruction in the fall, we might not have seen the mad scramble to exit the system.

But instead of working with parents, teachers’ unions and districts have chosen this moment to fully reveal how low students and families are on their list of priorities with hysterical hyperbole and outrageous non-health-related demands.

The Unions Overplay Their Hand

First, of course, there’s the request for more money from Washington. Unions want $245 billion—more than three times the normal annual federal expenditure—to reopen, despite the fact that funds from the first bailout in the CARES Act mostly have yet to be put to good use. Americans, who consistently and vastly underestimate how much the country spends on education and who have largely bought the Left’s lie that schools are underfunded, might have swallowed that one.

But in cities across the country, unions overplayed their hand. In Los Angeles they demanded that a moratorium be placed on charter schools and that the police departments be defunded before schools could open. In state legislatures across the country, unions lobbied to restrict families from switching to already-operating virtual charter schools accustomed to providing online instruction. A coalition of ten teachers’ unions across the country and the Democratic Socialists of America put together a list of political demands for reopening that included banning private school choice, testing, and police in schools.

In places where local authorities initially determined it was safe to open schools, union objections have forced last-minute reversals. In Washington, D.C., unions lined up body bags outside school system offices to show their displeasure with a potential part-time reopening; Washington, D.C. public schools will now be virtual only through fall.

Furthermore, unions have been in a desperate bid to foreclose other possibilities for parents. As early as March, they were frantically lobbying state legislatures in a bid to control what they seem to view as their captive market share of families, regardless of the quality of services offered. In Oregon, in response to lobbying from unions, the state stopped 1,600 students from transferring to a single virtual charter school network alone. Similar arrangements were passed in Pennsylvania.

And it’s not just their public competition they want to put on ice. In aforementioned Montgomery County, the municipality initially tried to force private schools to close in fall alongside public schools, a move that resulted in a huge outcry and an appeal to the governor that was eventually honored.

Union and district representatives have been relentlessly encouraging parents to avoid homeschooling or learning pods for the sake of “equity,” ignoring that shoddy distance learning also widens education gaps. Even more blatantly self-serving is their demand that parents lie to the state and enroll their children for the funds even if they plan to provide alternate learning environments.

The message from unions and district schools to struggling parents during this difficult time cannot be described as anything but tone-deaf. Many—perhaps millions—of families are getting a hard wake-up call that the current public school system places the needs of their children last while advancing nakedly partisan self-interest. “We don’t owe you an education for your child,” schools are indirectly telling parents. “But you owe us your tax dollars.”

Seize the Day

Unions clearly think parents will tolerate being dictated to, hemmed in, and left bereft of any options other than the shoddy distance learning they experienced back in spring; I do not.

Conservatives should step directly into this opening. If parents are being asked to shoulder the duties of actually educating their children, the tax dollars allocated for that purpose should flow directly to them to use for learning pods, private school, homeschooling equipment and curricula, tutors, or any other educational purpose they see fit.

This policy solution is not novel. Education savings accounts, which allow exactly the type of flexible use of state education funds that families so desperately need in the coming months, are already in operation in five states and receive extremely high satisfaction ratings from those who utilize them. As chronicled by Bill Mattox of the James Madison Institute, they’ve even been used in Florida to fund micro-schools—that is, podding—for years.

Providing families with a portion of the state funds that currently flow directly to districts, whether they’re serving families or not, would allow parents of all income levels to hire teachers for small-group, in-person learning, alleviating both fears about risk from the virus and some of the equity concerns now raised by unions and the New York Times.

Frankly, it’s rare that circumstances and policy solutions fit so seamlessly together.

Unfortunately, outside of a few presidential tweets about school reopening, the Republican Party’s response has been muted. Senator Rand Paul put his fellow caucus members on blast for considering a $100 billion bailout for public schools, even as they refuse to reopen, and he recently introduced legislation proposing to reroute federal education funds (about ten percent of education funding overall) to families. Donald Trump and his surrogates continue to help the cause of school choice from the bully pulpit, and some states like South Carolina, Oklahoma and New Hampshire have redirected aid funds directly to families.

While welcome, these limited and temporary programs are weak sauce considering that the Right has been on its cultural heels for decades, grasping at new ways to make arguments in favor of the American system and way of life to a generation that increasingly, thanks to the public school system and academia, knows little about it other than that it’s evil.

The Republican Party and the Right face a vitally important choice in the next several weeks: back parents with funds to support alternative arrangements like pods and seize the offensive against one of the Left’s most crucial cultural assets, or patch through some temporary Band-Aids in the hopes that we can all go “back to normal” after the immediate threat has passed. If they choose the latter, the normal we return to—while blessedly happier in certain ways than life in the age of COVID-19—will nevertheless be a return to more decades of culture war losses that the country cannot afford.