Having examined the nature of fractional reserve and of central banking, and having seen how the questionable blessings of Central Banking were fastened upon America, it is time to see precisely how the Fed, as presently constituted, carries out its systemic inflation and its control of the American monetary system.

Pursuant to its essence as a post-Peel Act Central Bank, the Federal Reserve enjoys a monopoly of the issue of all bank notes. The US Treasury, which issued paper money as Greenbacks during the Civil War, continued to issue one-dollar “Silver Certificates” redeemable in silver bullion or coin at the Treasury until August 16, 1968. The Treasury has now abandoned any note issue, leaving all the country’s paper notes, or “cash,” to be emitted by the Federal Reserve. Not only that; since the US abandonment of the gold standard in 1933, Federal Reserve Notes have been legal tender for all monetary debts, public or private.

Federal Reserve Notes, the legal monopoly of cash or “standard,” money, now serve as the base of two inverted pyramids determining the supply of money in the country. More precisely, the assets of the Federal Reserve Banks consist largely of two central items. One is the gold originally confiscated from the public and later amassed by the Fed. Interestingly enough, while Fed liabilities are no longer redeemable in gold, the Fed safeguards its gold by depositing it in the Treasury, which issues “gold certificates” guaranteed to be backed by no less than 100 percent in gold bullion buried in Fort Knox and other Treasury depositories. It is surely fitting that the only honest warehousing left in the monetary system is between two different agencies of the federal government: the Fed makes sure that its receipts at the Treasury are backed 100 percent in the Treasury vaults, whereas the Fed does not accord any of its creditors that high privilege.

The other major asset possessed by the Fed is the total of US government securities it has purchased and amassed over the decades. On the liability side, there are also two major figures: demand deposits held by the commercial banks, which constitute the reserves of those banks; and Federal Reserve Notes, cash emitted by the Fed. The Fed is in the rare and enviable position of having its liabilities in the form of Federal Reserve Notes constitute the legal tender of the country. In short, its liabilities—Federal Reserve Notes—are standard money. Moreover, its other form of liability—demand deposits—are redeemable by deposit-holders (i.e., banks, who constitute the depositors, or “customers,” of the Fed) in these Notes, which, of course, the Fed can print at will. Unlike the days of the gold standard, it is impossible for the Federal Reserve to go bankrupt; it holds the legal monopoly of counterfeiting (of creating money out of thin air) in the entire country.

The American banking system now comprises two sets of inverted pyramids, the commercial banks pyramiding loans and deposits on top of the base of reserves, which are mainly their demand deposits at the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve itself determines its own liabilities very simply: by buying or selling assets, which in turn increases or decreases bank reserves by the same amount.

At the base of the Fed pyramid, and therefore of the bank system’s creation of “money” in the sense of deposits, is the Fed’s power to print legal tender money. But the Fed tries its best not to print cash but rather to “print” or create demand deposits, checking deposits, out of thin air, since its demand deposits constitute the reserves on top of which the commercial banks can pyramid a multiple creation of bank deposits, or “checkbook money.”

Let us see how this process typically works. Suppose that the “money multiplier”—the multiple that commercial banks can pyramid on top of reserves, is 10:1. That multiple is the inverse of the Fed’s legally imposed minimum reserve requirement on different types of banks, a minimum which now approximates 10 percent. Almost always, if banks can expand 10:1 on top of their reserves, they will do so, since that is how they make their money. The counterfeiter, after all, will strongly tend to counterfeit as much as he can legally get away with. Suppose that the Fed decides it wishes to expand the nation’s total money supply by $10 billion. If the money multiplier is 10, then the Fed will choose to purchase $1 billion of assets, generally US government securities, on the open market.

Figures 10 and 11 below demonstrate this process, which occurs in two steps. In the first step, the Fed directs its Open Market Agent in New York City to purchase $1 billion of US government bonds. To purchase those securities, the Fed writes out a check for $1 billion on itself, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It then transfers that check to a government bond dealer, say Goldman Sachs, in exchange for $1 billion of US government bonds. Goldman Sachs goes to its commercial bank—say Chase Manhattan—deposits the check on the Fed, and in exchange increases its demand deposits at the Chase by $1 billion.

fed1
Where did the Fed get the money to pay for the bonds? It created the money out of thin air, by simply writing out a check on itself. Neat trick if you can get away with it!

Chase Manhattan, delighted to get a check on the Fed, rushes down to the Fed’s New York branch and deposits it in its account, increasing its reserves by $1 billion. Figure 10 shows what has happened at the end of this Step One.

The nation’s total money supply at any one time is the total standard money (Federal Reserve Notes) plus deposits in the hands of the public. Note that the immediate result of the Fed’s purchase of a $1 billion government bond in the open market is to increase the nation’s total money supply by $1 billion.

But this is only the first, immediate step. Because we live under a system of fractional-reserve banking, other consequences quickly ensue. There are now $1 billion more in reserves in the banking system, and as a result, the banking system expands its money and credit, the expansion beginning with Chase and quickly spreading out to other banks in the financial system. In a brief period of time, about a couple of weeks, the entire banking system will have expanded credit and the money supply another $9 billion, up to an increased money stock of $10 billion. Hence, the leveraged, or “multiple,” effect of changes in bank reserves, and of the Fed’s purchases or sales of assets which determine those reserves. Figure 11, then, shows the consequences of the Fed purchase of $1 billion of government bonds after a few weeks.

Note that the Federal Reserve balance sheet after a few weeks is unchanged in the aggregate (even though the specific banks owning the bank deposits will change as individual banks expand credit, and reserves shift to other banks who then join in the common expansion.) The change in totals has taken place among the commercial banks, who have pyramided credits and deposits on top of their initial burst of reserves, to increase the nation’s total money supply by $10 billion.

fed2
It should be easy to see why the Fed pays for its assets with a check on itself rather than by printing Federal Reserve Notes. Only by using checks can it expand the money supply by ten-fold; it is the Fed’s demand deposits that serve as the base of the pyramiding by the commercial banks. The power to print money, on the other hand, is the essential base in which the Fed pledges to redeem its deposits. The Fed only issues paper money (Federal Reserve Notes) if the public demands cash for its bank accounts and the commercial banks then have to go to the Fed to draw down their deposits. The Fed wants people to use checks rather than cash as far as possible, so that it can generate bank credit inflation at a pace that it can control.

If the Fed purchases any asset, therefore, it will increase the nation’s money supply immediately by that amount; and, in a few weeks, by whatever multiple of that amount the banks are allowed to pyramid on top of their new reserves. If it sells any asset (again, generally US government bonds), the sale will have the symmetrically reverse effect. At first, the nation’s money supply will decrease by the precise amount of the sale of bonds; and in a few weeks, it will decline by a multiple, say ten times, of that amount.

Thus, the major control instrument that the Fed exercises over the banks is “open market operations,” purchases or sale of assets, generally US government bonds. Another powerful control instrument is the changing of legal reserve minima. If the banks have to keep no less than 10 percent of their deposits in the form of reserves, and then the Fed suddenly lowers that ratio to 5 percent, the nation’s money supply, that is of bank deposits, will suddenly and very rapidly double. And vice versa if the minimum ratio were suddenly raised to 20 percent; the nation’s money supply will be quickly cut in half. Ever since the Fed, after having expanded bank reserves in the 1930s, panicked at the inflationary potential and doubled the minimum reserve requirements to 20 percent in 1938, sending the economy into a tailspin of credit liquidation, the Fed has been very cautious about the degree of its changes in bank reserve requirements. The Fed, ever since that period, has changed bank reserve requirements fairly often, but in very small steps, by fractions of one percent. It should come as no surprise that the trend of the Fed’s change has been downward: ever lowering bank reserve requirements, and thereby increasing the multiples of bank credit inflation. Thus, before 1980, the average minimum reserve requirement was about 14 percent, then it was lowered to 10 percent and less, and the Fed now has the power to lower it to zero if it so wishes.

Thus, the Fed has the well-nigh absolute power to determine the money supply if it so wishes.1 Over the years, the thrust of its operations has been consistently inflationary. For not only has the trend of its reserve requirements on the banks been getting ever lower, but the amount of its amassed US government bonds has consistently increased over the years, thereby imparting a continuing inflationary impetus to the economic system. Thus, the Federal Reserve, beginning with zero government bonds, had acquired about $400 million’s worth by 1921, and $2.4 billion by 1934. By the end of 1981 the Federal Reserve had amassed no less than $140 billion of US government securities; by the middle of 1992, the total had reached $280 billion. There is no clearer portrayal of the inflationary impetus that the Federal Reserve has consistently given, and continues to give, to our economy.

1.Traditionally, money and banking textbooks list three forms of Fed control over the reserves, and hence the credit, of the commercial banks: in addition to reserve requirements and open market operations, there is the Fed’s “discount” rate, the interest rate charged on its loans to the banks. Always of far more symbolic than substantive importance, this control instrument has become trivial, now that banks almost never borrow from the Fed. Instead, they borrow reserves from each other in the overnight “federal funds” market.

Author:
Murray N. Rothbard

Murray N. Rothbard made major contributions to economics, history, political philosophy, and legal theory. He combined Austrian economics with a fervent commitment to individual liberty.

This quote of Kamala Harris points to her totalitarian outlook. She’s claiming that we are all each other’s keepers–under the law, involuntarily. And based upon race. She’s paving the way for slavery reparations, which will do more damage to race relations in our country than anything since slavery itself. Also, she pulls out the idea that silence is akin to an act of force. Either you agree with her, or you’re basically a criminal. If demented Biden wins, she will soon be elevated to 47th President, undoubtedly America’s last; because true Americans will NOT put up with her. And, believe me: National mask mandates, defunded police and socialized medicine will be the least of our problems under the yoke of this toxic tyrant.

“Let’s speak the truth: People are protesting because Black people have been treated as less than human in America. Because our country has never fully addressed the systemic racism that has plagued our country since its earliest days. It is the duty of every American to fix. No longer can some wait on the sidelines, hoping for incremental change. In times like this, silence is complicity.”

Remember when integrity, competence & love of liberty were the requirement for a President? NOT race, gender, or ancestry?

Michael J. Hurd

Contrary to some attempts to portray Ludwig von Mises as a theorist who rejected radical solutions, we find in his works that Mises supported radical decentralization and widespread secession. Hans-Hermann Hoppe discusses Mises’s views below.

“A nation, therefore, has no right to say to a province: You belong to me, I want to take you. A province consists of its inhabitants. If anybody has a right to be heard in this case it is these inhabitants. Boundary disputes should be settled by plebiscite.” (Omnipotent Government, p. 90)

“No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want.” (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 34)

“Liberalism knows no conquests, no annexations; just as it is indifferent towards the state itself, so the problem of the size of the state is unimportant to it. It forces no one against his will into the structure of the state. Whoever wants to emigrate is not held back. When a part of the people of the state wants to drop out of the union, liberalism does not hinder it from doing so. Colonies that want to become independent need only do so. The nation as an organic entity can be neither increased nor reduced by changes in states; the world as a whole can neither win nor lose from them.” (Nation, State, and Economy, pp. 39–40)

“The size of a state’s territory therefore does not matter.” (Nation, State, and Economy, p. 82)

“The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars.” (Liberalism, p. 109)

“If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done.” (Liberalism, pp. 109–10)

“The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish to belong is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest.” (Liberalism, p. 119)

“It makes no difference where the frontiers of a country are drawn. Nobody has a special material interest in enlarging the territory of the state in which he lives; nobody suffers loss if a part of this area is separated from the state. It is also immaterial whether all parts of the state’s territory are in direct geographical connection, or whether they are separated by a piece of land belonging to another state. It is of no economic importance whether the country has a frontage on the ocean or not. In such a world the people of every village or district could decide by plebiscite to which state they wanted to belong.” (Omnipotent Government, p. 92)

From an interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe in the Austrian Economics Newsletter (AEN):

AEN: Was Mises better than the classical liberals on the question of the state?

HOPPE: Mises thought it was necessary to have an institution that suppresses those people who cannot behave appropriately in society, people who are a danger because they steal and murder. He calls this institution government.

But he has a unique idea of how government should work. To check its power, every group and every individual, if possible, must have the right to secede from the territory of the state. He called this the right of self-determination, not of nations as the League of Nations said, but of villages, districts, and groups of any size. In Liberalism and Nation, State, and Economy, he elevates secession to a central principle of classical liberalism. If it were possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, he says, it would have to be done. Thus the democratic state becomes, for Mises, a voluntary organization.

AEN: Yet you have been a strong critic of democracy.

HOPPE: Yes, as that term is usually understood. But under Mises’s unique definition of democracy, the term means self-rule or self-government in its most literal sense. All organizations in society, including government, should be the result of voluntary interactions.

In a sense you can say that Mises was a near anarchist. If he stopped short of affirming the right of individual secession, it was only because of what he regarded as technical grounds. In modern democracy, we exalt the method of majority rule as the means of electing the rulers of a compulsory monopoly of taxation.

Mises frequently made an analogy between voting and the marketplace. But he was quite aware that voting in the marketplace means voting with your own property. The weight of your vote is in accord with your value productivity. In the political arena, you do not vote with your property; you vote concerning the property of everyone, including your own. People do not have votes according to their value productivity.

AEN: Yet Mises attacks anarchism in no uncertain terms.

HOPPE: His targets here are left-utopians. He attacks their theory that man is good enough not to need an organized defense against the enemies of civilization. But this is not what the private-property anarchist believes. Of course murderers and thieves exist. There needs to be an institution that keeps these people at bay. Mises calls this institution government, while people who want no state at all point out that all essential defensive services can be better performed by firms in the market. We can call these firms government if we want to.

Authors:
Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian school of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises’s writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that he called praxeology.

Contact Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an Austrian school economist and libertarian/anarcho-capitalist philosopher. He is the founder and president of The Property and Freedom Society.

People preoccupied with race are RACISTS. Democrats and leftists are obsessed with race. It’s all they talk or think about. They accuse others of racism, people who don’t even think about race at all. These race-obsessed bullies are trying to quiet the noise of their own minds. They’re trying to quell the guilt caused by their own racism, or by their fear they might be racist. Their neurosis should not be OUR problem. And yet it is. Cities are paralyzed by anarchy and we’re watching them disappear, one by one: New York, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland. They promise to come for suburbs and small towns next.

Leftism is a cancer. It’s a malignancy that swallows up civilization, beauty and freedom. We have to stop these tyrants. Voting is essential. But we need more than that. We need resistance. If we have to storm the palace gates, like America’s founders did, then so be it. Passive resistance is powerful, too. Millions of people disobeying these idiots, with their pointless mask orders and denunciation of everything American. Sometimes there IS strength in numbers. We have to learn that. These fools are worse than what the American colonists faced with the British. There’s no rationality, no civility, no justice. It’s sheer destruction. If we let it all go, it would be the greatest crime in human history.

Michael J. Hurd

Deep Inside, Rioters Are Angry That They Never Learned Anything But Lies; Our institutions have stolen critical knowledge from young people and replaced it with the poison of identity politics and political correctness.

I suspect many members of today’s street mobs have a secret in common: At some deep level, they know they are awash in ignorance of core knowledge. Claiming to be “woke” is cover for the ignorance educrats have systematically instilled in them.

For decades, leftist academics have attacked the study of history and real humanities, and now an Illinois legislator has openly called to abolish the study of history. Recent episodes of Bible burning in the streets of Portland indicate the trashing of America’s cultural memory is well past the boiling point.

Our educational institutions have committed intellectual grand theft. They have withheld critical knowledge from students and replaced it with the poison of identity politics and political correctness. This makes it difficult for students to express independent thoughts, or even to think them. Where does that leave the victims who have been forcibly injected with this ignorance?

They can’t really articulate what has been stolen from them, but they seem to sense the loss deeply. How else can one explain their primal screams and street theater, in which they both accuse and confess “systemic racism?” After educrats and media hounded them for years with the talking point that Western culture is just tales of “dead white males,” how can they even be openly curious about it without the threat of being smeared?

It’s no wonder they can’t, since the rabbit hole into which they’ve been thrown is very deep. Imagine being trained to “think” only with your emotions. The consequence is unbridled passions and confusion, like that of someone who can’t read but pretends to. The resulting impulse undergirds the perverse toppling of a statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, or the burning and vandalizing of a beloved elk statue in Portland while “protesting” for justice. Could the angst behind such senseless acts amount to the deep frustration of knowing so little about so much?

The Anguish and Isolation of Ignorance
If you don’t understand what it feels like to be in the dark about core knowledge, consider the poignant excerpt below. It’s from a 2012 high school newspaper in which a student mourns her ignorance of basic Bible references. The letter illustrates how illiteracy of a huge part of our culture, whether biblical or secular, can cause painful feelings of alienation. While in English class, this student felt disconnected from the culture and from others because of her ignorance.

We were discussing biblical references in passages of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein,’ and how the story of Adam and Eve was reflected into the novel.
 I thought to myself, Adam and Eve — isn’t that the passage about someone eating an apple?
 I had no idea what the story was about, and no idea what the lesson or moral was. And this wasn’t the first time something like this had occurred.
 Genesis? What is that? Moses parting the Red Sea? How did that work? When people bring up these essential topics in religious history, I feel like I am the only one who doesn’t know the story.

My lack of religious knowledge, no matter what religion it may be, is also keeping me from being a well-versed person.

Forget for a minute that today’s public school classrooms are unlikely to allow such discussions. This student felt alone because of her lack of general cultural knowledge of the Western canon. Probably millions of millennials and Gen Zers feel the same way but cannot articulate what it’s like to be in that darkness.

I can personally relate to it. I spent a long time educating myself in the humanities after miseducation in my high school and college years left huge gaps in my own cultural knowledge. It’s a miserable feeling.

The ‘Crowning Achievement’ of Cultural Ignorance
Notre Dame Professor Patrick Deneen offered a deep and compelling reflection on this situation, writing in 2016 that “our students’ ignorance is not a failing of our educational system — it is its crowning achievement.” He described his students as “know nothings” while acknowledging they were good test-takers and nice people.

Their brains are largely empty. Ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? … Who was Saul of Tarsus? … Why does the Magna Carta matter? … What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? … What are the Federalist Papers? … At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance.

What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like ‘critical thinking,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘ways of knowing,’ ‘social justice,’ and ‘cultural competence.’

On the surface, students seem to make do with what little real knowledge they glean. But mostly they go through the politically correct motions demanded of them by some 90 percent of higher education personnel who are on board with the curriculum of cultural amnesia. When asked a simple question about a basic historical event or classic work, they “avert” their eyes. They panic.

How Did This Happen?
The process of imparting this systematic ignorance has been generations in the making. One of the many turning points in recent times was the gutting of Stanford University’s Western Civilization program. Ironically, Stanford’s program had been immensely popular among students. Those intent on destroying it used the most potent weapon they could: a smear and fear campaign, by which anyone who might promote the program would feel intimidated into silence from accusations of bigotry or white supremacy for supporting it.

When Jesse Jackson and a cohort of activists marched through the Stanford campus in 1987 chanting, “Hey hey! Ho ho! Western Civ has got to go!” that was pretty much all it took to create a domino effect in at least 50 other universities. It’s odd how easily people give up something they love just because of social pressure from a tiny minority.

The upshot is that our institutions — academia, media, government, medicine, and more — are now filled with a lot of know-nothings who pretend to know it all. Most don’t understand basic biblical allusions or standard terms from William Shakespeare embedded in the culture.

They’ve not a clue what it means to “cross the Rubicon.” Maybe they think “baroque” means something doesn’t work anymore, or that “Trinity” only means Neo’s girlfriend, or that Norway (unlocatable on a map) flies the Confederate flag. Perhaps saddest of all is the inability of the culturally ignorant to appreciate good comedy, especially satire.

The Sense That You’ve Been Cheated
Nevertheless, Deneen writes that these students deeply sense a great loss from having the study of their heritage and all of Western civilization stolen from them: “I discern their longing and anguish and I know that their innate human desire to know who they are, where they have come from, where they ought to go, and how they ought to live will always reassert itself.”

The desire for real cultural knowledge is innate because it’s tied into the need to connect with our common humanity as well as to “know thyself.” Identity politics frustrates and mocks those deeply human desires by assigning students into demographic boxes and locking them in. They must spend all their God-given time in those boxes thinking of themselves only as victims or oppressors. Victims must stay where they are. Oppressors must do the hard work of trying to be an “ally,” an exhausting and total waste of life.

Our instinct is to thrash about when locked up for long in any kind of box, but especially that kind. The raging of many of today’s wannabe wokesters likely has much in common with this deep sense of loss. They seem to be trying to make sense of the senseless, thirsting for the real knowledge that comes from open conversations and strong relationships. They don’t know how to go about getting it in a world that seems so hostile to curiosity and learning, to civilization and love.

I’m sure Deneen is right that the desire for real knowledge will reassert itself. The big question going forward is for those who can understand the pain of losing it. How can we begin to rectify this loss, if only for those who are not too far gone down the rabbit hole?

Stella Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow Stella on Twitter.

In order to discuss the “future of capitalism,” we must first decide what the meaning of the term “capitalism” really is. Unfortunately, the term “capitalism” was coined by its greatest and most famous enemy, Karl Marx. We really can’t rely upon him for correct and subtle usage. And, in fact, what Marx and later writers have done is to lump together two extremely different and even contradictory concepts and actions under the same portmanteau term. These two contradictory concepts are what I would call “free-market capitalism” on the one hand, and “state capitalism” on the other.

The difference between free-market capitalism and state capitalism is precisely the difference between, on the one hand, peaceful, voluntary exchange, and on the other, violent expropriation. An example of a free-market exchange is my purchase of a newspaper on the corner for a dime; here is a peaceful, voluntary exchange beneficial to both parties. I buy the newspaper because I value the newspaper more highly than the dime that I give up in exchange; and the newsdealer sells me the paper because, he, in turn, values the dime more highly than the newspaper. Both parties to the exchange benefit. And what we are both doing in the exchange is the swapping of titles of ownership: I relinquish the ownership of my dime in exchange for the paper, and the newsdealer performs the exact opposite change of title. This simple exchange of a dime for a newspaper is an example of a unit free-market act; it is the market at work.

In contrast to this peaceful act, there is the method of violent expropriation. Violent expropriation occurs when I go to the newsdealer and seize his newspapers or his money at the point of a gun. In this case, of course, there is no mutual benefit; I gain at the expense of the victimized newsdealer. Yet the difference between these two transactions—between voluntary mutual exchange, and the holdup at gunpoint—is precisely the difference between free-market capitalism and state capitalism. In both cases we obtain something—whether it be money or newspapers—but we obtain them in completely different ways, ways with completely different moral attributes and social consequences.

Here I can’t resist the temptation of pointing out that I have an entirely different interpretation of Jefferson and Hamilton from that of Professor Averitt. I don’t regard Jefferson as some sort of early Franz Boas–type, an early Left-Wing anthropologist. He wasn’t. My reading of Jefferson is completely different; on my reading, Jefferson was very precisely in favor of laissez-faire, or free-market, capitalism. And that was the real argument between them. It wasn’t really that Jefferson was against factories or industries per se; what he was against was coerced development, that is, taxing the farmers through tariffs and subsidies to build up industry artificially, which was essentially the Hamilton program.

Jefferson, incidentally, along with other statesmen of his time, was a very learned person. He read Adam Smith, he read Ricardo, he was very familiar with laissez-faire classical economics. And so his economic program, far from being the expression of bucolic agrarian nostalgia, was a very sophisticated application of classical economics to the American scene. We must not forget that laissez-faire classicists were also against tariffs, subsidies, and coerced economic development.

Furthermore, the term “equality,” as used by Jefferson and Jeffersonians, was employed in the same sense as Jefferson’s friend and colleague George Mason used when he framed the Virginia Declaration of Rights shortly before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence:

“that all men are by nature equally free and independent.” In other words, “equality” did not then mean what we often mean by equality now: equality of condition or uniformity. “Equality” meant that each person has the right to be equally free and independent, to enjoy the right to “equal liberty,” as Herbert Spencer would phrase it a century later. In other words, again what I am saying is that the Jeffersonian wing of the Founding Fathers was essentially free-market, laissez-faire capitalists.

To return to the market: the free market is really a vast network, a latticework, of these little, unit exchanges which I mentioned before: such as exchanging a dime for a newspaper. At each step of the way, there are two people, or two groups of people, and these two people or groups exchange two commodities, usually money and another commodity; at each step, each benefits by the exchange, otherwise they wouldn’t be making it in the first place. If it turns out that they were mistaken in thinking that the exchange would benefit them then they quickly stop, and they don’t make the exchange again.

Another common example of a free market is the universal practice of children swapping baseball cards—the sort of thing where you swap “two Hank Aaron[s]” for “one Willie Mays.” The “prices” of the various cards, and the exchanges that took place, were based on the relative importance that the kids attached to each baseball player. As one way of annoying liberals we might put the case this way: liberals are supposed to be in favor of any voluntary actions performed, as the famous cliché goes, by “two consenting adults.” Yet it is peculiar that while liberals are in favor of any sexual activity engaged in by two consenting adults, when these consenting adults engage in trade or exchange, the liberals step in to harass, cripple, restrict, or prohibit that trade. And yet both the consenting sexual activity and the trade are similar expressions of liberty in action. Both should be favored by any consistent libertarian. But the government, especially a liberal government, habitually steps in to regulate and restrict such trade.

It is very much as [though] I were about to exchange two Hank Aarons for one Willie Mays, and the government, or some other third party, should step in and say: “No, you can’t do that; that’s evil; it’s against the common good. We hereby outlaw this proposed exchange; any exchange of such baseball cards must be one for one, or three for two”—or whatever other terms the government, in its wisdom and greatness, arbitrarily wishes to impose. By what right do they do this? The libertarian claims by no right whatsoever.

In general, government intervention can be classified in two ways: either as prohibiting or partially prohibiting an exchange between two people—between two consenting adults, an exchange beneficial to both parties; or forcing someone to make an “exchange” with the government unilaterally, in which the person yields something up to the government under the threat of coercion. The first may include outright prohibition of an exchange, regulating the terms—the price—of the exchange, or preventing certain people from making the exchange. As an example of the last intervention, in order to be a photographer in most states, one must be a duly licensed photographer—proving that one is of “good moral character” and paying a certain amount of moolah to the state apparatus. This in order to have the right to take somebody’s picture! The second kind of intervention is a forced “exchange” between us and the government, an “exchange” that benefits only the government and not ourselves. Of course, taxation is the obvious and evident example of that. In contrast to voluntary exchange, taxation is a matter of leaping in and coercively seizing people’s property without their consent.

It is true that many people seem to believe that taxation is not imposed without our consent. They believe, as the great economist Joseph Schumpeter once said, that taxes are something like club dues, where each person voluntarily pays his share of the expenses of the club. But if you really think that, try not paying your taxes sometime and see what happens. No “club” that I know of has the power to come and seize your assets or jail you if you don’t pay its dues. In my view, then, taxes are exploitation—taxes are a “zero-sum” game. If there’s anything in the world that’s a zero-sum game, it’s taxation. The government seizes money from one set of people, gives it to another set of people, and in the meanwhile of course lops off a large chunk for its own “handling expenses.” Taxation, then, is purely and pristinely robbery. Period.

As a matter of fact, I challenge any of you to sit down and work out a definition of taxation that would not also be applicable to robbery. As the great libertarian writer H. L. Mencken once pointed out, among the public, even if they are not dedicated libertarians, robbing the government is never considered on the same moral plane as robbing another person. Robbing another person is generally deplored; but if the government is robbed all that happens, as Mencken put it, “is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.”

The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, who wrote a magnificent little book called The State, put the case brilliantly. In essence, he said, there are only two ways for men to acquire wealth. The first method is by producing a good or a service and voluntarily exchanging that good for the product of somebody else. This is the method of exchange, the method of the free market; it’s creative and expands production; it is not a zero-sum game because production expands and both parties to the exchange benefit. Oppenheimer called this method the “economic means” for the acquisition of wealth. The second method is seizing another person’s property without his consent, i.e., by robbery, exploitation, looting. When you seize someone’s property without his consent, then you are benefiting at his expense, at the expense of the producer; here is truly a zero-sum “game”—not much of a “game,” by the way, from the point of view of the victim. Instead of expanding production, this method of robbery clearly hobbles and restricts production. So in addition to being immoral while peaceful exchange is moral, the method of robbery hobbles production because it is parasitic upon the effort of the producers. With brilliant astuteness, Oppenheimer called this method of obtaining wealth “the political means.” And then he went on to define the state, or government, as “the organization of the political means,” i.e., the regularization, legitimation, and permanent establishment of the political means for the acquisition of wealth.

In other words, the state is organized theft, organized robbery, organized exploitation. And this essential nature of the state is highlighted by the fact that the state ever rests upon the crucial instrument of taxation.

I must here again comment on Professor Averitt’s statement about “greed.” It’s true: greed has had a very bad press. I frankly don’t see anything wrong with greed. I think that the people who are always attacking greed would be more consistent with their position if they refused their next salary increase. I don’t see even the most Left-Wing scholar in this country scornfully burning his salary check. In other words, “greed” simply means that you are trying to relieve the nature-given scarcity that man was born with. Greed will continue until the Garden of Eden arrives, when everything is superabundant, and we don’t have to worry about economics at all. We haven’t of course reached that point yet; we haven’t reached the point where everybody is burning his salary increases, or salary checks in general. So the question then becomes: what kind of greed are we going to have, “productive greed,” where people produce and voluntarily exchange their products with others? Or exploitative greed, organized robbery and predation, where you achieve your wealth at the expense of others? These are the two real alternatives.

Returning to the state and taxation, I would point out incidentally that Saint Augustine, who is not famous for being a libertarian, did however set forth an excellent libertarian parable. He wrote that Alexander the Great had seized some pirate, and asked the pirate what he meant by seizing possession of the sea. And the pirate boldly replied: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a little ship, I am called a robber, while you, because you do it with a great fleet are called an emperor Here Augustine highlights the fact that the state is simply robbery writ large, on an enormous scale, but robbery legitimated by intellectual opinion.

Take, for another example, the Mafia, which also suffers from a bad press. What the Mafia does on a local scale, the state does on an enormous scale, but the state of course has a much better press.

In contrast to the age-old institution of statism, of the political means, free-market capitalism arrived as a great revolutionary movement in the history of man. For it came into a world previously marked by despotism, by tyranny, by totalitarian control. Emerging first in the Italian city-states, free market capitalism arrived full scale with the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe, a revolution that brought about a remarkable release of creative energy and productive ability, an enormous increase of production. You can call that “greed” if you wish; you can attack as “greed” the desire of someone on a poverty level who wishes to better his lot.

This reminds me of an interesting point on “greed” that cuts across the usual “Left-Right” continuum. I remember when Russell Kirk first launched the contemporary conservative movement in this country, in the mid-1950s. One of the leading young conservatives of that era addressed a rally, and opined that the whole trouble with the world, and the reason for the growth of the Left, is that everyone is “greedy,” the masses of Asia are “greedy,” and so on. Here was a person who owned half of Montana, attacking the mass of the world population, who were trying to rise above the subsistence level, to better their lot a bit. And yet they were “greedy.”

At any rate, free-market capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, saw an enormous outpouring of productive energies, an outpouring that constituted a revolution against the mercantilist system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact the mercantilist system is essentially what we’ve got right now. There is very little difference between state monopoly capitalism, or corporate state capitalism, whatever you want to call it, in the United States and Western Europe today, and the mercantilist system of the pre–Industrial Revolution era. There are only two differences; one is that their major activity was commerce and ours is industry. But the essential modus operandi of the two systems is exactly the same: monopoly privilege, a complete meshing in what is now called the “partnership of government and industry,” a pervasive system of militarism and war contracts, a drive toward war and imperialism; the whole shebang characterized the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The really key difference is that they didn’t have a gigantic P.R. apparatus; they didn’t have a fleet of intellectuals trumpeting to all and sundry the wonders of the system: how it promotes the common good and the general welfare, how this is Liberalism In Action. They said, “We’re out to shaft the public and we’re doing it!” They were very honest in those days. It’s really refreshing, by the way, to go back and read the material before 1914 and bask in the honesty of the period.

One of the concepts important in this connection is that of Albert Jay Nock, a great libertarian thinker and follower of Franz Oppenheimer. Nock coined two concepts: what he called “social power” on the one hand, and “state power” on the other. Social power is essentially what I have been talking about: the productive energies released by the free market, by voluntary exchanges, people interacting voluntarily and peacefully. “State power” is parasitism, exploitation, and the state apparatus in general—organized taxes, regulation, etc. And Nock saw history as essentially a race between social power and state power. In the Industrial Revolution period, for example, from various circumstances state power was minimal, and this allowed social power to take a tremendous burst upward. And what has happened in the twentieth century is essentially that state power has caught up; they’ve moved in on society and started crippling it once again.

What, then, is my view of the “future of capitalism”—our topic for today? My view of the future is highly optimistic. I really think that free-market capitalism, even though it is supposed to be a reactionary, Neanderthal institution, is the wave of the future. For one thing, it was the wave of the future a hundred and two hundred years ago, and what we have now is only a reactionary reversion to the previous system. The present system is not really “progressive” at all.

Second, it was discovered by Ludwig von Mises back in 1920 that socialism—the other polar alternative to our present neomercantilism—cannot run an industrial system. An agricultural system can be run indefinitely by almost anyone, as long as you leave the peasants alive. You can have almost any kind of tyrannical system over the peasants. But in an industrial system you need much more than that: you need a market, you need profit-and-loss tests, you can’t run the system haphazardly. And Mises proved that a socialist system cannot calculate economically, because it doesn’t have a price system for capital goods, and therefore socialism will not be able to run an industrial system. All the textbooks say that Mises was quickly refuted by Oskar Lange and others, but he really wasn’t refuted. I haven’t got time to go into the theoretical argument. But in practice what has happened is that, in response to industrialization, there has been a tremendous shift in the last fifteen years in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe away from socialism and towards a free market.

For a believer in freedom and the free market, this shift is one of the most exciting developments of the past two decades. Now there are only two interpretations of this development: either you have to say, as the Chinese do, that the Yugoslavs, the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Hungarians have all sold out to capitalism—they’ve gone in secret to the American Embassy and received their pay. Or you have to say that something deeper is happening, that what is essentially happening is that they tried socialism and it didn’t work, especially as the economies began to industrialize. They found in practice, pragmatically, without reading Mises (though there’s evidence that they’ve read Mises by this time) and Hayek and others, that socialism can’t calculate, they came to that conclusion themselves.

Lenin, indeed, came to that conclusion very early, when “War Communism” was scrapped in 1921. “War Communism” was an attempt, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, to leap into full communism, into an economy without money and without prices, in which everyone was supposed to—and in practice was forced to—present his goods to the common heap, and withdraw from that heap to satisfy his needs. The system of War Communism proved to be a total disaster–not because of the Civil War (that rationalization only came much later), but because of the communist system itself.1

Lenin soon realized what was happening, and quickly instituted the New Economic Policy, which was essentially a return to a quasi-free-market system. And now the Eastern European countries, especially Yugoslavia, have been moving very rapidly since the 1950s away from socialism and central planning and toward a free-market system.

In Yugoslavia, for example, agriculture, still the main industry, is almost completely private; a flourishing private sector exists in trade and small manufacturing; and the “public sector” has been turned over in fact as well as in law by the state to the ownership of the workers in the various plants—essentially functioning as producers’ cooperatives. Furthermore, there is substantially a free market between these producers’ co-ops, with a flourishing price system, stern profit-and-loss tests (when a firm loses enough money, it goes bankrupt). Moreover, the most recent Yugoslav economic reform, which began in 1967 and is still underway, saw a tremendous drop in the rate of taxation of their co-ops—a drop from the previous approximately 70 percent income tax rate to about 20 percent. This means that the central Yugoslav government no longer exercises complete control over investment: investment, too, has been decentralized and destatized. As a matter of fact, if one reads the Communist economists in Yugoslavia—especially in the relatively industrialized areas of Croatia and Slovenia—they sound very much like Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan. “Why should we productive Croats or Slovenes,” they ask, “be taxed in order to subsidize those lazy slobs down in Montenegro?” And: “why should we build uneconomic (‘political’) factories? Everyone should stand on their own feet,” etc. The next step in Yugoslavia is that the banks—which, incidentally, are largely competitive private co-ops owned by their business clients—are agitating for a stock market in a Communist country, which would have been considered incredible ten or twenty years ago. And what they are proposing to call this system—literally—is “socialist people’s capitalism.”

On this point, a few years ago I was teaching a course in Comparative Economic Systems. Naturally, I spent the term praising the free market, and attacking socialism and central planning. Finally, I invited an exchange professor from Hungary—an eminent Communist economist—to give a guest lecture, and the kids felt: “Ah, at least we’re going to get the other side of the picture.” And what did the Hungarian economist do? He spent the entire lecture praising the free market and attacking central planning. He said almost exactly what I had been saying up till then.

In Eastern Europe, then, I think that the prospects for the free market are excellent—I think we’re getting free-market capitalism and that its triumph there is almost inevitable. In the United States, the prospects are a little more cloudy, but here too we see the “New Left” picking up a lot of the positions that we “extreme Right-Wingers” used to have. Much of the position that used to be called “extreme Right-Wing” twenty years ago is now considered quite leftish.

As a result, I, with the same position I had then, have been shifted bodily from extreme right to left without any effort on my part at all. Decentralization; community control; attack on Leviathan government, on bureaucracy, on government interference with each person’s life; attack on the state-ridden educational system; criticism of unionism, which is tied up with the state; opposition to militarism, war, imperialism, and conscription; all these things that the Left is now beginning to see, [are] precisely what we “extreme Right-Wingers” have been saying all along. And, as far as “decentralization” goes, there is nothing that is so decentralized as the free market, and perhaps this too will come to the attention of the public.

And so, I’m very optimistic about the future of free-market capitalism. I’m not optimistic about the future of state capitalism—or rather, I am optimistic, because I think it will eventually come to an end. State capitalism inevitably creates all sorts of problems which become insoluble; as Mises again has pointed out, one intervention into the system to try to solve problems only creates other problems, which then demand further interventions, etc., and so the whole process keeps snowballing until you have a completely collectivist, totalitarian system. It’s very much like the escalation in Vietnam, by the way; the principle, as we all know by this time, is that government intervention in Vietnam creates problems which demand further escalation, etc. The same thing happens in domestic intervention, the farm program being a splendid example of this process.

Both in Vietnam and in domestic government intervention, each escalating step only creates more problems which confront the public with the choice: either press on further with more interventions, or repeal them—in Vietnam, withdraw from the country. Now in Yugoslavia and the rest of Eastern Europe, they have taken the opposite path: of progressive deëscalation, of continuing repeal of one intervention after another, and on toward the free market. In the United States we have so far taken the path of accelerating interventions, of ever greater hobbling of the free market. But it is beginning to become evident that the mixed system is breaking down, that it doesn’t work. It’s beginning to be seen, for example, that the Welfare State does not tax the rich and give to the poor; it taxes the poorer to give to the richer, and the poor in essence pay for the Welfare State. It is beginning to be seen that foreign intervention is essentially a method of subsidizing favored American corporations instead of helping out the poor in the undeveloped countries. And it is now becoming evident that the Keynesian policies only succeeded in bringing us to the present impasse of inflation-cum-recession, and that our Olympian economists have no way of getting out of the present mess at all, except to cross their fingers and their econometric models and pray. And, of course, we can look forward to another balance-of-payments crisis in a couple of years, another episode of inflationary crisis in a couple of years, another episode of gold-outflow hysteria.

Thus, we have a lot of crises looming in America, some on their way, others imminent or already here. All of these crises are the products of intervention, and none of them can really be solved by more intervention. Again, I believe that we will eventually reverse our present course—perhaps taking Yugoslavia as our paradigm. Incidentally, Professor Averitt mentioned the Great Depression. The Great Depression has always been considered as the product of free-market capitalism of the 1920s. It was the result of very heavy government intervention in the 1920s, an intervention, by the way, that is very similar to the current intervention. In the 1920s, we had the newly imposed Federal Reserve System, which all the Establishment economists of the day assured us would eliminate all future depressions; the Federal Reserve System would henceforth manipulate prices and the money supply and iron out business cycles forever. Nineteen twenty-nine and the Great Depression were the results of that manipulation guided by the wise hands of Establishment economics—they were not the results of anything like free-market capitalism.

In short, the advent of industrialism and the Industrial Revolution has irreversibly changed the prognosis for freedom and statism. In the pre-industrial era, statism and despotism could peg along indefinitely, content to keep the peasantry at subsistence levels and to live off their surplus. But industrialism has broken the old tables; for it has become evident that socialism cannot run an industrial system, and it is gradually becoming evident that neomercantilism, interventionism, in the long run cannot run an industrial system either. Free-market capitalism, the victory of social power and the economic means, is not only the only moral and by far the most productive system; it has become the only viable system for mankind in the industrial era. Its eventual triumph is therefore virtually inevitable.

Murray N. Rothbard

Interesting little development in my neck of the woods, and also the town where Joe Biden owns a beach house. The mayor of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, was decisively defeated yesterday in his reelection bid for mayor. For months, the mayor has throttled, harassed and threatened small town businesses over COVID, even as the death numbers for the mostly nonfatal virus have gone down, down, down. He has ruined the boardwalk and shopping district for the summer (their prime earnings season), and has already driven some restaurants into bankruptcy.

At one low point last spring, the mayor threatened to build a wall blocking the view of the ocean from the boardwalk (Joe Biden’s oceanfront view would remain intact, of course). Earlier in the summer, he forced sunbathers on the beach to wear face diapers (excuse me, face masks) and after the ensuing outcry he defensively replied that at least “you don’t have to wear them in the water.” He was forced to back down on this one, but ordered the police to harass vacation goers who refused to wear face diapers.

It’s the kind of disgusting tyranny and thuggery disguised as compassion and concern that has dominated blue states and cities in particular throughout what was once our land of liberty. Rehoboth Beach is a pretty Democratic area, but they still threw the arrogant prick out. It’s a gleam of hope for November. If people are this angry in Joe Biden’s summer beach home, hopefully they’re mad as hell everywhere. While I know next to nothing about the mayor’s successor, kudos to Rehoboth Beach voters for putting out the trash.

Michael J. Hurd

Liberals are suddenly realizing that “cancel culture” can snap back – and it hurts. The liberal idea was to “cancel” people who raise “offensive” or “objectionable” topics, summarily ending unwanted discussions by intimidating people into abandoning free speech rights. It was always anti-American. Now, it turns out the left’s beast, is eating them too.

Upending the First Amendment by spurning people with different views is a dead end – legally, politically, and socially. Interestingly, conservatives generally offer to debate while liberals stifle dialogue. Now, they are being stifled.

Last week, some noted liberals wrote an “open letter” decrying how unthinking, zealous leftists were shutting them down. Former New York Times editor Bari Weiss and Harper’s columnist Thomas Williams were joined by Harry Potter’s J.K. Rowling, activist Noam Chomsky, and feminist Gloria Steinem, in this conservative turn. They rediscovered the First Amendment.

Suddenly, having been shunted off stage, out of newsrooms, and denied the right to opine, they took to Bill Maher’s show to say “open debate without fear of repercussions might be a good idea,” since the absence of free expression might lead to violence. Behold – an epiphany.

While the left swarms America’s streets, these liberals penned a letter. Said Weiss, their letter was a “warning cry from inside the institutions,” signaling the need to reverse course. Free speech apparently does matter, after all. Why? Because blocking it is “social murder” these enlightened liberals professed on Maher’s show – a curious venue for lefty confessions.

Weiss explained. “What is going on now with this culture of illiberalism is different from criticism.” Criticism is good, but “cancel culture is not criticism, it is about punishment … making a person radioactive… taking away their job.” She decried her former employer.

For background, a New York Times “editorial page editor” resigned in June, after “more than 1,000 staffers” signed a letter condemning him for allowing a column by conservative US Senator Tom Cotton on restoring law and order, if necessary with the military. In July, Weiss resigned, citing an internal “civil war,” pitting “social justice warriors” against “free speech.”

Could it be that “cancel culture” is biting the hand that fed it? On Maher’s show, Weiss perfectly described socialism. She noted “cancel culture” amounts to “punishing the person for being insufficiently pure,” pushing a “secondary boycott of people who would deign to speak to that person or appear on a platform with that person.” Suddenly, this is highly offensive.

She noted this kind of “politics” does not “get us” very far. She warned about where extremism goes. “If conversation with people that we disagree with becomes impossible, what is the way we solve conflict? … It’s violence.” She may have something there.

Weiss, the enlightened liberal, continued. She said politics has evolved into a “religious identity,” suggesting liberals who fail to push to “defund the police” are considered “heretics.” One hears an awakening in her voice to socialism’s hallmark, intimidation.

As if just washing over her, she explained: “That is an enormous problem … because it is … the collapse of moderates.” There is another idea. Could “cancel culture,” intimidating those not sufficiently “pure” to defend leftist violence, be a problem in America?

The effect, she said, is “collapse of the center and the retribalization of this country …,” now inside newsrooms. One could argue that she is a little late, but seeing the light is good. She observed that America is “exceptional… with all of its flaws.” Wisdom, indeed.

Unable to defend “patriotism,” she edged up to it. Returning to high school history – apparently missed by her peers – she said: “There is something bigger than lineage or kin or the political tribe we belong to…” Yes – and we call that America. She added, we are in “a very scary moment.” Right again, no thanks to her former employer. Could media bear responsibility?

These enlightened liberals – pilloried by former friends – now argue, “it is up to us to defend the ideas that made this country unique, and a departure from history.” “Cancel culture” – blotting out what we do not like – “stifles open discussion.” Extraordinary discovery, is it not?

Her epiphany was almost too much. One liberal decried where extremes lead. “We are in danger of reinvesting in the idea that race is real and that it cannot be escaped,” and “defines us.” Making those alive pay for past sins is “not a world that I want to create,” said a panelist.

Finally, the panel host chimed in. He offered a timeless nugget: “Being able to speak freely is the lifeblood not only of democracy, of really just our way of life.” Remarkable, liberals are now teaching liberals high school history – and why the First Amendment counts.

To be clear, there is nothing new about free speech being good, socialist intimidation bad. That is not news. The news is recognition by liberals – as they turn on one another – that free speech matters, and that canceling socialist “cancel culture” might be a good idea.

Does this represent a bend in the road for liberal thinking? Could we be returning to the idea that free speech protects societies which protect it? Maybe. Predictably, liberals who signed that letter are facing intense criticism from the left. The only thing worse than not being a pure socialist, of course, is calling out those who are.

What we are hearing, for the first time, is some liberals discovering “cancel culture” is a bad choice. Empowering socialist intimidation is dangerous. Suppression is catchy. Wisdom often comes to individuals and societies slowly, but this is a start. Small steps toward enlightenment are worth noticing – and this was one. Now, our nation must awaken to the profound risks of socialism in Congress, and stand firmly against it.

Robert B. Charles

In an article on children, philosopher Stephen Hicks makes an interesting case against homework for school-aged kids. “Everyone says that they want children to grow up able to live independent lives and pursue their chosen careers passionately. But that aspiration does not fit with a traditional practice of education that teaches children to follow instructions – above all – without asking “why”.

What kind of education will prepare students for order-following and self-stultifying jobs? Simple: One which requires rigidly defined school projects assigned by “authorities”. When kids do the schoolwork primarily because they have been told to do so, homework then becomes nothing more than an additional imposition. Kids learn that life is about doing tasks, whether they like it or not, and following orders. No wonder independent and critical thinking is slowly disappearing from many young people.

In the latter system, most children will learn to accept and go along, hopefully grudgingly, and to that extent let subside their potential for a life fully lived. Only a few will fight to preserve their potential for self-actualization by rebelling — often obnoxiously because of their youth — against their teachers, parents, and other perceived representatives of the system.” [http://www.thesavvystreet.com/the-case-against-homework/]

Interesting. We seem to have created a generation of children whose aspirations and expectations are immensely high, but whose initiative and follow-through are incredibly low. More young people are living at home with their parents than at any time since the 1930s. Yes, some of this is economic, but it goes deeper than that.

As a therapist, I hear stories every day from people about their kids. When I started training as a family therapist in the late ‘80s, I never heard of kids living at home with their parents; lacking direction and purpose – unless there was some kind of medical illness or, even more frequently, a drug or alcohol addiction.

Today, it’s different. I routinely hear stories of people whose kids (or whose friends’ or relatives’ children) are home well into their 20s and even their 30s. They’re not ill, and they don’t abuse drugs or alcohol. Many of them completed college. They’re not particularly irresponsible, but they do seem frightened and insecure while—oddly enough —entitled to a level of comfort that nobody can attain as easily as they seem to assume.

Even when grown kids are moved out and working, it’s typical for me to hear complaints from the older generation that we didn’t hear in the past. “My son [or daughter] has such grand expectations. He can’t understand why he’s not making a million dollars so quickly.” It seems that young expectations have of have never been higher, while initiative has never been weaker.

So here’s a theory: Schools for recent and current generations do it the old way, but with a new twist. The old way was to create passivity and ultimately resentment, with a command-and-control school system (see the Hicks quote above). But more recently, added to that uninspiring approach has been an emphasis on badly defined “self-esteem”. The prevailing definition of self-esteem has been (and still is) to make someone “feel good” about themselves. But when you use a subjective standard to define self-esteem, you convey unrealistic – and unattainable – ideas like, “You can be anything you want to be,” or “You’re entitled to be happy.” But today’s “good little citizen” education doesn’t provide the tools to actually do that.

The silver lining is that many young people challenge this Pollyanna phoniness when they reach young adulthood. But sadly, many come to believe it. They expect huge levels of wealth and achievement, but they lack the follow-through required to make it happen. They want ends without means; results without effort. To some extent all people (of any generation) are subject to this problem, but in the present generation this appears to have reached epidemic proportions.

Hicks brilliantly sums it up when he says: “So we should listen carefully and read between the lines, so to speak, when our children start saying self-assertive things like; ‘You’re not the boss of me!’ And we should reply, ‘Damned straight, kid. You are the boss of your own life, and our job as adults is to help you become better at it.’” Exactly.

Michael J. Hurd

Something is deeply wrong in our society. The political situation is horrible, obviously. But it’s deeper than that. For example, there’s the psychological state of most American adults. Something has to be off. Nearly all of us have been trained by media, government and government-run schools to think and feel like children. To feel helpless. To feel dependent. To feel, think and say things like, “Well, I’ve just about had it with these masks and lockdowns. I can’t wait until it’s over. I don’t know anyone with this COVID. I’m sure somebody has it, but it can’t be that horrible. There aren’t mass deaths. When will they let us go back to normal?”

“When will they LET us?” THAT’S not the mentality of a free adult. That’s the mentality of a child. Or of a person who is treated like a child by his government. But in the end, we’re our own victimizers. In America, which was once a free country, it wouldn’t be possible to turn adults into children without their consent. Free adults think this way: “The virus overreaction is all B.S. It’s about the election, and it’s about control. Of course there’s a virus. But most aren’t dying from it. It does not justify anything that’s going on. And what the hell is it with these riots? You can rape, loot, pillage and burn without consequences now, in many of our cities? This is insane. We should storm the palace gates of these governors and mayors — literally, if necessary — until they do their job or get the hell out. Much of our country is being run by thugs. Or people who support and enable thugs, which is the very same thing!”

Do some people think and feel like free adults? Of course. I do. Most of the people reading this post do. But many, many others do not. Because the palace gates have not been stormed. Nor has there been any discernable noncompliance or rebellion. Everywhere you go, people put up with it. Many resent it; but they’ll never rebel. They’ll never fail to comply. Others — the sick ones — don’t mind it; they actually like being pushed around. But that’s their problem. It should not be everyone else’s too.

Let’s be real. The Democrats and the leftists are — as of this moment — winning. I’m not saying they will win, in the end. But the longer we put up with THEIR manufactured crises, THEIR dictatorship and tyranny and THEIR open endorsement of thugs, the sooner the end of freedom will come. I hope like anything we haven’t lost our freedom for good. But it sure FEELS like we have, given all the things we can no longer do that we used to be able to do in this free country. Remember schools? Theaters? Restaurants? Ball games? Church? Large parties? Even if you didn’t participate in all these things, wasn’t it nice to have the option to do so … not with government consent, but as your BIRTHRIGHT?

Here’s a quote from Daren Jonescu that sums up the Democratic leftist desire to turn us into children:

“Among the various ways that modern leftism benefits from its systematic promotion of infantilism is that perpetual children lack the basic courage that is essential to the maintenance of liberty. A courageous adult will not trade his freedom, let alone that of others, for a ‘social safety net.’ Thus, leftists are deeply invested in cowardice.”

Yes, leftists NEED and WANT us to be cowards. To be weak. To be compliant, selfless and non-assertive.

If we’re to overthrow our oppressors, we must want to overthrow them. And to do that, most of us first have to grow up.

I sure hope there’s a silent majority out there. But if the silent majority doesn’t speak up with a ferocious roar — and soon — we will find ourselves silenced forever.

Michael J. Hurd