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Keep raising the minimum wage and business owners will either go out of business, automate, or seek alternatives to employees priced beyond the actual value of their employment. If you don't understand the concepts, Kevin Williamson provides a good primer here, written with Bernie Sanders and his supporters in mind. Regardless, you can see the impact below:
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Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Thursday, May 28, 2015
The Immutable Economic Law Of Bark & Demand
Friday, April 17, 2015
Wolf Bytes - The Hillary Follies
Hillary
Hillary Clinton is trying to coast her way below the radar to a coronation. The last thing she wants is to answer questions about her record and qualifications. Her journey of a 1,000 miles (love the Maoist symbolism there) road trip to Iowa was about as phony as one could get. What makes it all the more sickening is that the mainstream press isn't all over this. They are playing along.
This from Megyn Kelly and Marc Thiessen - Is Hillary Clinton running a phony campaign?
KELLY: So the real people, like the whole listening tour so she can understand real ordinary people. Apparently she's really going to only understand people who work for Planned Parenthood and drove around Vice President Joe Biden and were Democratic campaign operatives.
THIESSEN: No, exactly. This was supposed to be -- they specifically decided to launch this campaign with a listening tour to listen to ordinary Americans. So she pulls in with the Scooby van into a Chipotle where there are actual real Americans there. And she puts on the big sunglasses to try to avoid being recognized. But then when she goes to a coffee shop where she is supposed to meet ordinary Americans, they're planted Democrat operatives. They're fake real Americans. I mean, she actually staged a coffee shop visit.
And from Stacy McCain: Her Fakeness, Hillary Clinton
The point isn’t so much that Democrats are being brought in by the campaign as “plants” at these events, but rather that the media are playing along and pretending that the events (and the people at the events) are “spontaneous.” That is to say, the media are just there to provide free campaign publicity for the Democrat.
Meanwhile, the National Enquirer is reporting that Hillary took a giant magnet to her hard drive to hide e-mails that would identify her partners in lesbian affairs. To be honest, given the National Enquirer's role as the sole media outlet to expose John Edwards, I don't discount that.
In other articles, Heather Willhelm writes that The Clinton Campaign Is Even Creepier Than You Think. Buzzfeed points out that Hillary Clinton's reference to the "immigrant experience" of her grandparents is a lie. Only one of her grandparents was an immigrant, and he came to this country as a child. In her first campaign speech in Iowa, she called for limiting freedom of speech. And then, this multi-millionaire, in order to show that she is one of the people, left Iowa and flew coach to NJ, "toting her own" luggage. As Bookworm Room points out, this is shades of Jimmy Carter, who used to try to show his bona fides as a regular American by toting an empty suitcase on board planes.
Hillary is a trainwreck. One blogger describes her as Nixon in a pantsuit, but I think she is a thousand times worse than Nixon ever thought of being.
Hillary Clinton has much to answer, about the e-mail scandal, about Benghazi, about her record as Secretary of State. She also should be weighing in on the critical issues of the day, in particular this Iran abomination and Obama's unconstitutional attempt to legislate in regards to millions of illegal aliens. Anyone know where she stands on any of that? This is a travesty.
The War On Religion
I've pointed out, countless times, that socialism seeks to deconstruct Western civilization and rebuild it in its place a utopian world. One element of that effort is to war on religion and religious institutions, including marriage. This from Daniel Greenfield, The Deconstruction Of Marriage:
The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution. . . .
The left's deconstruction of social institutions is not a quest for equality, but for destruction. As long as the institutions that preceded it exist, it will go on deconstructing them until there is nothing left but a blank canvas, an unthinking anarchy, on which it can impose its perfect and ideal conception of how everyone should live.
Government and the Economy
The left sees government central player in the economy, regulating it, picking winners and losers, with government spending as perhaps the single most important part of the economy. It inevitably creates an environment of high taxes and stifling regulation. Conservatives see the government's only function in an economy as establishing a framework based on laws that promote free market competition while protecting all of us from fraud and theft.
Allen West points out the failure of the most recent attempt in New York to draw investment into a state that is very much run according to the economic theories of the left.
As reported by Townhall.com, “Governor Andrew Cuomo was all too proud to unveil his Start-Up NY program in the Empire State. They called it a ‘game changer’. The ingenious program offered tax-free environments to tech and manufacturing companies for 10 years if they worked with state colleges and universities. It was supposed to boost entrepreneurism and create thousands of jobs throughout the state. Yet, one year later, the most New Yorkers have to show for it is emptier pockets.”
“The ubiquitous Start-Up NY promotional campaign has cost taxpayers $53 million since the program’s inception in late 2013, while it has led to $1.7 million in private investment so far, state records show. The state spent $47 million on the ads alone since the program started in December 2013, and the total cost included production expenses and other marketing efforts through last month, according to Empire State Development Corp. In July, the agency said $28 million had been spent on the ads.”
So what is the result from $53 million spent — $47 million on the ads alone with a program that has been operating for about a year and a half?
“The state has spent $697, 368 per job so far. These grisly numbers come in after the governor made several pledges across the state that jobs were going to start pouring in. Seventy-two in Albany, 123 in Western New York, he said. His promises have been mostly air thus far. Perhaps even more embarrassing for the governor, however, is the fact that New York has just come in dead last for economic competitiveness, as ranked by The American Legislative Exchange Council.”
As Mr. West points out, government's don't create jobs. They can only kill them with taxes and regulation.
France
And finally, Stacey McCain has a damning indictment of France:
. . . The French are a nation of degenerate swine. They are the nation that gave the world Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Monique Wittig. Do French men behave like animals on public transportation? Do they treat all women like whores? Sure. It’s part of French culture. You know, like wine, socialism, defeat, surrender, hating Jews and collaborating with Nazis. France: An entire nation that’s worse than Massachusetts.
I could not have said it better.
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Wolf Bytes - The Please Wear Underwear Edition
Blue Moon Over Cambodia: If you are First Lady of the United States, for the love of God, WEAR UNDERWEAR!!!
This is an atrocity: US Declassifies Document Revealing Israel's Nuclear Program
The solution, barring regime change, is simple: To Stop Iran's Bomb, Bomb Iran
Tell us something we didn't know: We're Losing The War Against Radical Islam
And the solution to that problem is: Islam Needs To Go Through A Reformation
From the Daily Beast, no less: Everything The White House Told You About Bowe Bergdahl Was Wrong
George Will: A new and mind-opening book on economics shows that it’s anything but “the dismal science.”
A rather damning indictment - "NYT's science articles take a pro-fearmongering, anti-technology viewpoint:" The New York Times Should Seriously Consider Not Writing About Science Anymore
Follow the money: ISIS's Backdoor Financing
Lanny Davis says that Hillary's E-Mail Scandal is meaningless because -- "LOOK, SQUIRREL!!!:" The Scandal Machine - Will We Ever Learn
Science Fiction comes closer to reality: Developing A "Cloaking Device" To Shield Against Shock Waves
The faith of our fathers: Franklin, Jefferson and what was deism?
From China: Wrath of Dancing Grandmothers
Fascinating: Two Sentence Horror Stories
& Finally, A True Treat: Itzhak Perlman Plays Klezmer
Friday, September 6, 2013
Left & Right Agree - Obama's Economic Policy Has Been "An Astonishing, Horrifying Failure"
Another month into the Obama presidency, another horrid economic report. This from Hot Air:
The August jobs report from BLS offers yet another installment on the four-year stagnation period after the Great Recession. The US economy added 169,000 jobs, just above the 150,000 needed to keep pace with population growth. The U-3 jobless rate edged downward to 7.3%, but that’s because the labor force participation rate hit another 35-year low. . . . [A]lmost twice as many people [312,000] left the work force as found new jobs.
Obama, and indeed, the entire left, are simply economically incompetent. They shouldn't be allowed to run a lemonade stand. They see businesses as, at once, an enemy to be regulated and punished and as a cow to be milked for all they want.
The only thing keeping this economy afloat, even in this sad state, has been the Federal Reserve's "quantitative easing" - running the printing presses overtime, printing money to buy up government bonds in something akin to the world's biggest ponzi scheme. The danger of that is run away inflation, and indeed, the Fed has indicated that it intends to start unwinding this massive accumulation of debt at some point here in the near future as unemployment numbers fall.
The only part of the U.S. economy that is doing well is the stock market - and that is a bubble derived by Quantitative Easing (QE) that will burst the moment QE and the Fed's easy money policy stops. There is a reason today that Wall St. is celebrating the horrid economic numbers from the August BLS report - it means that QE will continue. This via Bizzy Blog:
Speaking today, at least one very famous economist says that we have suffered through five "years of tragic waste" under Obama:
[B]y any objective standard, U.S. economic policy since Lehman has been an astonishing, horrifying failure.
I couldn't agree more. That is indeed a damning indictment, but who is the economist that said this? Thomas Sowell? Art Laffer?
No. It is former Enron Advisor, Obama cheerleader and far left economist Paul Krugman writing in the NYT. As Krugman points out:
[T]he failure of policy these past five years has, in fact, been immense.
Some of that immensity can be measured in dollars and cents. Reasonable measures of the “output gap” over the past five years — the difference between the value of goods and services America could and should have produced and what it actually produced — run well over $2 trillion. That’s trillions of dollars of pure waste, which we will never get back.
Behind that financial waste lies an even more tragic waste of human potential. Before the financial crisis, 63 percent of adult Americans were employed; that number quickly plunged to less than 59 percent, and there it remains.
Do remember that Krugman blessed off on Obama's "stimulus" plan several years ago, both in design and size. Now he claims that the real problem is that the stimulus was three times too small. As Powerline describes it:
Of course, Krugman thinks the problem with Obama’s policies is that the stimulus was too small, the United States isn’t far enough in debt, and we don’t have a big enough public sector. More cowbell! The salient point, I think, is that we can say it is now unanimous: Left and Right agree that Obamanomics has been an utter failure. The only question at this point is whether to go even farther left–to, what, the policies of Fidel Castro or Kim Jong-un?–or return to the principles of limited government and a free market that produced our prosperity in the first place. Seems like an easy choice.
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Friday, July 26, 2013
Krauthammer & McArdle Conduct Detroit Postmortems
From Dr. Krauthammer:
If there’s an iron rule in economics, it is Stein’s Law (named after Herb, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers): “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
Detroit, for example, can no longer go on borrowing, spending, raising taxes, and dangerously cutting such essential services as street lighting and police protection. So it stops. It goes bust.
Cause of death? Corruption, both legal and illegal, plus a classic case of reactionary liberalism in which the governing Democrats — there’s been no Republican mayor in half a century — simply refused to adapt to the straitened economic circumstances that followed the post–World War II auto boom. . . .
. . . The legal corruption was the cozy symbiosis of Democratic politicians and powerful unions, especially the public-sector unions that gave money to elect the politicians who negotiated their contracts — with wildly unsustainable health and pension benefits. . . .
McArdle's post-mortem finds a tsunami of causes. She is certainly right about the number of contributing causes, though I think that, from the standpoint of simple math, Krauthammer has it right. That said, this from Ms. McArdle:
If you listen to the interwebs, the answer is “terrible, Democratic-run urban politics.” Or “union-busting anti-labor policies” in Southern states that transformed solid middle-class jobs in the Midwest into near-minimum-wage jobs in states such as Alabama and Tennessee. Or maybe “racism.” Or “the urban underclass.”
All of these answers are impossibly reductive. The city of Detroit has no one problem; it has a constellation of them. Here, in no particular order, are some of the most important factors. . . .
The factors she lists:
- The decline of shipping along the Detroit River.
- The claim that the South stole high paying union jobs by allowing for non-union near minimum wage pay is a falsehood. There is little wage disparity between Michigan UAW workers and non-union workers in Southern Right To Work states. The three killers have been expansive health and pension benefits for UAW retirees, deeply inefficient union work rules, and competition.
- Post-WWII UAW Pattern Bargaining tactics failed when competition came to the auto industry. This was at least as big a problem for the UAW and the auto industry as the availability of jobs in Southern right to work states.
- Middle Class flight: This was a real problem for Detroit caused by a huge increase in crime during the 50's and 60's. It picked up even more in the wake of the 1967 race riots - the most violent in the nation.
- White Flight and Reverse Racism: A large chunk of the white population fled after the race riots. Those that were left were subject to a series of deeply anti-white black dominated city governments.
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Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Applying Socialism To Economics Class
From Counting Cats, the story of an Econ 101 professor who, at the urging of his students, applied the socialist economic principle of equality of outcome to grading the class. The predictable result, everyone failed.
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Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Economics & Race, Tragedy & Travesty
A juxtaposition of three stories tells a lot about the state of our nation. Our economy is fragile. Our GDP declined in the 4th Quarter and our economy is facing yet more headwinds in the future. The sector hurt the worst by Obama are his most loyal constituents - blacks. And lastly, is California a cautionary tale for the rest of the U.S., or is it a blueprint for our future.
Our nation's economy actually contracted .1% during the fourth quarter of last year according to the preliminary report issued by the Commerce Dept. Hot Air does a good analysis of the numbers. This may well be anomalous, associated with a quarterly drop in government spending and the reduction in inventories, but it still shows just how fragile our economy is going into Obama's second term. Tthat despite four years of massively increased government spending and historically low interest rates. And on the horizon are tax increases already passed that will punish the job creators and hurt capital formation. There are all the taxes and expenses associated with Obamacare that will begin kicking in as 2014 approaches. And then of course there is the tsunami of new regulations expected in Obama's second term. A portion of that tsunami will be new EPA regulations further expanding Obama's war on energy sector, something Obama all but promised during his second inaugural speech. The best case scenario is four years of very sluggish growth and little if any job creation.
The second story, via Gateway Pundit, is NAACP President Ben Jealous who, while appearing on Meet The Press last Sunday, made the admission that blacks are doing "far worse" under Obama. This should come as a surprise to no one. Blacks are loyal to Obama and the left, but that loyalty is a one way street. Blacks identify with Obama as black. The true irony is that they don't realize that his skin color is, well, only skin deep. It is meaningless to his identity as a highly ideological leftist. And with that as his motivating force, blacks run a distant second to moneyed interests - i.e, public sector unions - and pathways to greater power - i.e., the green agenda.
Lastly, there is a wholly depressing column from V.D. Hanson at PJM, wherein he gives a eulogy for his state, California, a state sinking under decades of left wing political experimentation that are driving out the productive middle class in droves. In assessing the cause, he writes:
California has changed not due to race but due to culture, most prominently because the recent generation of immigrants from Latin America did not — as in the past, for the most part — come legally in manageable numbers and integrate under the host’s assimilationist paradigm. Instead, in the last three decades huge arrivals of illegal aliens from Mexico and Latin America saw Democrats as the party of multiculturalism, separatism, entitlements, open borders, non-enforcement of immigration laws, and eventually plentiful state employment.
Given the numbers, the multicultural paradigm of the salad bowl that focused on “diversity” rather than unity, and the massive new government assistance, how could the old American tonic of assimilation, intermarriage, and integration keep up with the new influxes? It could not.
These three stories demonstrate the insanity that is America's politics today. Obama proved in his first four years that he wasn't qualified to run a lemonade stand, yet he gets reelected. Over 90% of blacks, the people who have as a group suffered the most under Obama, nonetheless pull the lever for him. The left wins the Hispanic vote by campaigning against the values and economics that made our country great. It is a devil's pact destined by simple math to end very badly. And yet, the left is the dominant force in politics today.
Just as V. D. Hanson sees the future as exceedingly bleak for his state, I see the future exceedingly bleak for our nation. I cannot see our economy recovering. And until Conservatives are able to break the left's stranglehold on black and Hispanic voters, there is simply no way we are going to win a large enough majority to change our nation's economic and cultural trajectory. Given objective reality, we should be able to do this on the basis of conservative principles, but I don't see anyone on the right making a serious attempt to do so. It is both tragedy and travesty.
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Friday, December 21, 2012
What Is Wrong With Republicans???
Who didn't watch with amusement yesterday as Republicans refused to vote for Boehner's bill to make permanent the Bush era tax cuts for all Americans earning less than $1 million per year. It would seem that the Keystone Cops are alive and well in the Republican wing of Congress. As Gerard van der Luen of American Digest is wont to say, "Republicans, they thirst for death."
Republicans have precisely zero leverage on tax rates. Come January 1, all of the Bush era tax cuts expire and all the tax rates will go up automatically - and quite unfairly, Republicans will get the blame. Moreover, the centerpiece of Obama's tax plan was to raise tax rates on "the rich." It is time to give the people what they voted for. If four years of gross economic incompetency wasn't enough to convince the electorate, well, let's let them have the next four years good and hard indeed. Obviously, more lessons are needed.
In this instance, Republicans prepared to die on the hill of stopping higher taxes is much like Picket's charge - a suicidal act that did nothing beyond sealing the doom of Lee's Army of the Potomac. One of the first rules of warfare - don't reinforce failure, reinforce success - or at least where you have the greatest likelihood of success.
Where House Republicans hold absolute power is on spending. Give Obama whatever tax increase he wants, but then shut down the government over the budget ceiling. Moreover, refuse to pass anything but a life support budget until all sides agree on - and pass into law - a grand bargain that in real terms, sans the usual accounting gimmicks, will decrease the debt by 25% over the next four years.
Debt is where the real issue lies. Sure, Obama's tax increases will hurt the economy - but they won't kill it. Our continued accumulation of debt will. Between Obama's world record profligate spending and Fed Chairmen Ben Bernanke, who is keeping our printing presses spinning at a record pace, they are placing our nation in mortal peril. Obama and Bernanke are setting the stage for runaway inflation and the devaluation of the dollar. That is where Republicans need to draw the line in the sand - this far, and no further.
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Thursday, October 25, 2012
Voting, Economic Literacy & The Sowell Solution
As regards a recent BBC world poll showing massive support for Obama across the pond, I wrote that my suspicion is that such people lack any understanding of basic economics - which happens to be how I view the vast majority of Democrats.
If nothing else, the past four years have been an utter repudiation of Keynsian economic theory embraced by the left. Moreover, few if any Democratic policies make sense on a much more micro-economic scale. For example, one of the worst economic threats to our nation comes from public sector unions. They are a plague on the public treasury and deeply distorting of our politics. And yet, the voters in Ohio, the majority of whom are getting the shaft from public sector unions, were recently convinced to vote in favor of the unions. How economically illiterate do you have to be to support public sector unions?
My suspicion that one has to be economically illiterate to vote Democrat was recently given some objective foundation. This from Legal Insurrection:
A new study commissioned by Independent Women’s Voice reveals that it may be not surface-level stats that can predict voter behavior, but who they are. Their study found that voters’ exposure to facts about the economy can dramatically influence their political preferences.
The research, which was conducted in Colorado, first tested voters’ awareness of several basic economic facts. Then, after an education campaign exposed them to information about the economy over a 10-day period, they tested again. The results are fascinating. First, voters who identified facts presented to them as true were more likely to support Romney; those who identified the facts as false were more likely to support Obama. While it could be that many of these voters view economic questions as solely the area of one political party already, it is clear that awareness of these facts correlates with support for one candidate.
Further, the information campaign conducted by IWV appears both to have been able to successfully educate voters on economic facts, but also to change preferences for candidates following the path established in their research. . . .
So not only is my theory tentatively vindicated, but there is also a cure - economic literacy. So if you happen to run into a working person who is also an Obama supporter - do them and our nation a favor. Buy them Thomas Sowell's economic masterwork - Basic Economics. It explains the panorama of economics with multiple examples and in simple terms even your average economically illiterate lefty can understand. It explains and repudiates virtually every left wing economic policy plaguing our nation today.
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Monday, October 15, 2012
George Will: Dodd Frank, Capitalism, & Banks Too Big To Fail
Capitalism — which is, as Milton Friedman tirelessly insisted, a profit and loss system — is subverted by [banks deemed "Too Big To Fail"], which socializes losses while leaving profits private. And which enhances the profits of those whose losses it socializes. TBTF is a double moral disaster: It creates moral hazard by encouraging risky behavior, and it delegitimizes capitalism by validating public cynicism about its risk-reward ratios.
George Will, Too Big To Maintain?, Washington Post, 12 Oct. 2012
Amen. Do read George Will's exceptional column, discussing what Romney referred to in the last debate, that the Dodd-Frank law "constitutes “the biggest kiss that’s been given to — to New York banks I’ve ever seen.”
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Thursday, March 15, 2012
So Did The Housing Crisis Cause Our Economic Meltdown & Our Continuing Malaise
Until we get this right - and by that I mean identify the causes of our economic meltdown - we will never fully right our economy, nor protect it from the harm done by the left's social engineering.
I've been beating my chest on this one since October 2008. The left's social engineering - put into law by the left through the Community Reinvestment Act and forced down the throats of lenders by community organizers - led to the massive housing bubble based on a complete degradation of lending standards. The bond rating agencies - which have yet to be criminally investigated - were utterly and criminally complicit with Fannie and Freddie in giving AAA ratings to equities based on subprime loans. These toxic loans created by Fannie spread throughout the world's financial markets. Wall St. created Credit Default Swaps were insurance policies against default. They were not the demon the left has made them out to be. They failed not because of lack of regulation, but because mark to market accounting rules meant that when the bubble burst, the equities based on subprime loans could not be sold and thus had to be accorded a wholly unrealistic value of zero dollars on the bank books. All of this is what caused the economic meltdown.
It should be noted that in Dodd-Frank, the exact same social engineering that led to the economic meltdown in the first place is not only retained, but strengthened. It virtually insures that we will again face the same economic issues that led to the melt-down in the first place.
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Tuesday, February 21, 2012
A Turning Point In History - Feb. 21, 1848: Marx Publishes The Communist Manifesto
Reposted From Feb. 21, 2011: Steeped in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and born in the crucible of the French Revolution, socialism was meant to wholly rework society. Socialist philosophers, most notably Karl Marx, rejected class and religion as the bases for societal structure and advocated remaking society under the watchful eye of a central government that would redistribute the nation's wealth and mandate social equality. At the center of the socialist revolution was the Marxian belief that all events could and should be analyzed in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed, the victim classes and the victimizing class - a simplistic and distorting theme that makes up such a large part of our political discourse today. It creates, in its myopic view, a world of demons and perpetual victims. As Marx wrote in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Inherent in that proposition is a rejection of Western values, history and norms and, in its stead, an embrace of militant secularism, moral relativism and, [in modern form], multiculturalism. II. The Process: . . . [T]he workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots. The Marxist conception of socialism is that of a specific historical phase that will displace capitalism and precede communism. The major characteristics of socialism (particularly as conceived by Marx and Engels after the Paris Commune of 1871) are that the proletariat [workers] will control the means of production through a workers' state erected by the workers in their interests. Economic activity would still be organised through the use of incentive systems and social classes would still exist, but to a lesser and diminishing extent than under capitalism. III. Application Outside Of The West She entered 10 Downing Street determined to reverse what she perceived as a precipitous national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation, particularly of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, and the sale or closure of state-owned companies and withdrawal of subsidies to others. . . She took a hard line against trade unions. Perhaps most important in the turn from economic socialism, Thatcher significantly weakened the political power of Britain's labor unions, reforming them in a manner not too dissimilar to what we see occurring in Wisconsin today. Such was Britain's economic rebound under Thatcher that the Labour Party ultimately dispensed with the idea of promoting socialism as an economic model, withdrawing the infamous "Clause IV" of its plank calling for nationalization of industry and wide-scale redistribution of wealth. In addition, Labour has continued Thatcher's union policies. . . . [S]ocialists have warred against Christianity and Judaism for over two centuries. Indeed, when socialism was born in the crucible of the French Revolution, one of the first acts of the Revolutionary government was to initiate a systematic and brutal war on the Catholic Church and its clergy. VI. Conclusion
On this day in 1848, socialist philosopher Karl Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, first published their magnum opus, The Communist Manifesto. In it, Marx advocated for a complete reworking of society, starting with the formation of labor unions, building into socialism and then to communism. It marks the single most destructive and distorting philosophy ever put forth in history, bringing untold misery to the world and working destruction upon the fabric of Western civilization to this day. Its promise has always been that society can be perfected by government and utopia achieved on earth. And while it has done some societal good in the West, the overarching reality has been economic misery and massive bloodshed.
I. Background, Philosophy & Goals
At the time Marx wrote his book, he was responding to very real problems in European society during the Industrial Revolution. Sweat shops, dangerous work places and slave wages were only a few of those problems. Moreover, European society tended to be very stratified, with many obstacles to moving between economic and social classes. Marx was also responding to Europe's colonialism as a similar evil of "oppression." And indeed, colonialism of the era, as practiced by all but the British, at least in retrospect, could be so characterized. His solutions, as expressed in The Communist Manifesto and other works, were well intentioned, but as explained below, his basic assumption about the regulation of economic markets was wildly false and his analytical framework of history was both superficial and grossly distorting.
All of that is to say that Marx's socialism is not an inherent evil. Some aspects or legacies of socialism that have found their way throughout Western society since 1848 are quite legitimate. As Bookworm Room states in a very informative post on the topic, protections for workers and a safe workplace are some of those legacies. The great weakening of the class system and the rise of the welfare state are others. And while the latter has gotten wildly out of hand, the proposition that society should provide a minimalist, temporary safety net is quite legitimate. Unfortunately, for what good Marx's socialism has done for society at large, the harm it has done has been exponentially greater.
Marx did not invent socialism, but he greatly stengthened its philosophical underpinnings, as well as describing and agitating for the final stage of socialism, communism. As I described it previously:
Marx envisioned a multistep process to communism. The very first step, as he pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, was for workers to create unions:
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle . . .
For orthodox Marxists, socialism is the lower stage of communism based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution" while upper stage communism is based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"; the upper stage becoming possible only after the socialist stage further develops economic efficiency and the automation of production has led to a superabundance of goods and services.
A. Economic Model
As an economic model, neither communism nor socialism has ever succeeded in comparison to capitalism. This is because the central assumption of the socialist model - that governments can be a more efficient regulator of economies than free markets - has been proven false beyond any iota of rational argument. Related thereto, communism and socialism have failed because they look upon the fiscal self interest motivating the capitalist class as the penultimate sin.
"Greed" is not a dirty word, despite what our Commander in Chief might say in his attacks on capitalism. When fiscal self interest has been championed and combined with free market competition, it has massively lifted the standard of living for all in its ambit, including the lowest economic classes. And it should be noted that, in a free market economy, being a member of the lowest economic class at any given point is, for the vast majority, a transitory state. But when the opportunity to pursue one's fiscal self interest has been denied to the populace at large, as happens under socialism and communism, history has shown the result to be misery.
Those nations that have embraced socialism, with the government owning the means of production, are - or were before their collapse - economic basket cases. The Soviet Union fell apart in the 90's as a result of economic collapse. Communist China was well on their way to following the Soviet Union until Deng Xiaoping become the leader of the country and replaced communist economics with free market economics, starting China's economy on the road to what has been decades of rapid expansion. Cuba, North Korea, and Burma maintain full blown socialist economic systems, and all three have some of the lowest standards of living in the world today. In South America, Chavez is still in the midst of moving Venezuela into socialism, and its standard of living is tanking with stagflation and food rationing.
Similarly, in the Middle East, socialism and its closely related variant, crony capitalism, abound. Neither have worked there. For example, Iran, where government clerics own - and get rich off of - the major industries, is an economic basket case. Egypt is another example of a state with dominant socialist economics - and indeed, economic conditions were the motivating factor behind the recent revolution.
B. Social/Political Model
As a political and social model, Marx's philosophy has been even more destructive than its economic model. Marx's utopian world required an all powerful central government to enforce the distribution of wealth, to perfect society, to enforce equality of outcome, and to motivate people to produce in the absence of a profit motive. Marxism further rejected Judeo-Christian morality, leaving the state as the unchecked final arbiter of what is right and wrong, and thus prioritized individual human life below political goals to benefit the "proletariat" and the state. The end result has been slaughter on a scale never before seen in history. Well over 100 million people were murdered by their own communist regimes in the 20th century.
In China, "official study materials published in 1948 [show that] Mao envisaged that "one-tenth of the peasants" (or about 50,000,000 [people]) "would have to be destroyed" to facilitate agrarian reform." In the end, between the agrarian reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, Mao actually exceeded that total by several million. The Soviet Union purged at least as many of its citizens, if not far more, from its inception through the end of Stalin's regime. China and the Soviet Union were not anamolies. Virtually every country that has seen the imposition of communism has also seen government sponsored mass murder on a wide, if not industrial scale. For example, in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered roughly 20% of its population. In North Korea, somewhere between 710,000 and 3,500,000 of the populace have been slaughtered by the Kim dynasty.
IV. Marxism In The West
Britain is a casebook study in the experimentation with Marx's socialist ethos, both economically through the 1980's and, in social policy, through today. In the aftermath of World War II, Britain embraced socialism, voting in 1945 to reject their war-time leader Winston Churchill, in favor of Labour's Clement Attlee. Attlees's first orders of business were the creation of the welfare state, the nationalization of major industry, the creation of nationalized medicine, and the divestiture of the empire. Tremendous power was placed in the hands of labor unions, and Britain suffered economically for decades. It took Margaret Thatcher to turn things around:
Much of Europe is incrementally trying to follow Britain's lead. Decades of European experimentation with socialism and the welfare state have given Europe moribund economies with slow growth and high unemployment. But that is changing. In the words of the NYT, "socialism is collapsing in Europe."
And socialism is not merely collapsing economically in Europe, it is also collapsing as a driver of society. Multiculturalism is a natural outgrowth of Marx's deeply distorting view that all of society should be analyzed in terms of the "oppressed and oppressor," and that, within that rubric, Western societies, with a history of colonialism and imperialism, are uniquely sinful oppressors. It is a belief system wholly detached from historical reality.
Euorpean multiculturalism encourages minorities to define themselves by the culture of their nationality or by their religion. And because Marxism holds indigenous Western culture to be irredeemably sinful, multiculturalism requires that non-indigenous cultures be accepted non-judgmentally and, indeed, seems to hold them to be superior to indigenous culture. It deliberately balkanizes society and it is particularly insidious as regards to Islamic minorities in Europe. Yet today, it is widely being acknowledged across Europe that multiculturalism has failed utterly. So says French President Sarkozy, Britain's David Cameron, and Germany's Angela Merkel. Hopefully this rejection of multiculturalism is sufficiently timely to cure the toxin Marxian multiculturalism has released into European society.
Even as Europe moves away from socialism, Obama is trying to drive the U.S. towards the failed European economic model. Obama has set us on the road to nationalizing one sixth of our economy with Obamacare. Our government is today the majority owner of GM and Chrysler. Obama nationalized the student loan industry, ostensibly for greater efficiency. Moreover, Obama is insinuating the government deeply into our economy with a tsunami of new regulations, particularly in the areas of the environment and finance. Then there was the recent power grab to regulate the internet. Obama is ideologically committed to punishing the rich through taxes and redistributing their wealth for the 'greater good' of society. And lastly, Obama is showing a penchant for crony capitalism, picking winners and losers in the marketplace. If that is not incremental economic socialism, then nothing is.
It is not just Obama that is infected with the Marxist philosophy - it pervades the entire left wing in the U.S. The left in America today is not a monolith, but rather a mosaic of pigeon holed permanent victim groups - a toxin directly derived from Marx's oppressed / oppressor analytical framework. It is the maintenance of these 'oppressed' permanent victim groups - be they minority groups, gays, women, or public sector employees - that is the raison d'etre of the modern Democrat party. And indeed, the central financial foundation of the Democrats is taxpayer money laundered through public sector unions, the essential building block of Marx's march toward a communist utopia. This is not to say that a majority of Democrats are agitating to establish full blown socialism in America today. But it is to say that to understand our modern left and their trajectory, the first step is to read Marx. Step two is to study history in order to understand what will happen to our nation if they are allowed to pull our nation along that trajectory.
V. The War On Religion
Central to Marx's goal to entirely remake society was to drive Judaism and Christianity from society. Western culture, morality, history and societal structures are inextricably intertwined with the Judeo-Christian religions. Indeed, one could say that, at least until the Enlightenment, the history of Christianity, and to a lesser extent Judaism, were one and the same as the history of Western civilization. Thus Marx became an implacable enemy of these religions and started a war on them that the left continues to this day:
The left has waged this war against Christianity and Judaism ever since. Karl Marx, socialism's greatest philosopher, famously wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that religion is the "opium of the people" and that "[t]he abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." The British socialist party wrote in their 1911 manifesto that "it is a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion." In America, the socialist left has used activist Courts as an a means of removing all aspects of Christianity from the public square while in Britain, the Labour Party is demoting Christianity and deconstructing the Anglican Church. . . .
With the left's partial success in their war on Christianity has come an interesting phenomena - the search for something to replace Christianity among the newly secularized. It would seem that we humans are hard wired to look for what amounts to a religion to give ourselves a moral mooring and a greater purpose in life. Socialist governments recognized this. Indeed, the first socialists in France substituted government sponsored cult movements in place of the Catholic Church. In Communist countries, where raw police power was used - not wholly successfully - to crush Christianity and Judaism, socialism itself was raised to the level of a religion complete with a sainthood - the quasi-deification of communist leaders as part of a cult of personality. Catholics had the Shroud of Turin; Soviets had the mummy of Lenin.
On an individual level, the same search for a substitute is happening in the West. Many of the secular left today embrace environmentalism as a religion - and indeed, it was but a few months ago that UNEP explicitly called for the global warming movement to be pushed as a religious alternative to Christianity. Still others embrace the airy spiritualism of New Age thought.
All of this has existential ramifications for Western society. For the better part of two millennium, the Judeo-Christian ethic has provided a rock solid framework for morality at the heart of Western society - one that puts maximum value on each individual human life and one that provides moral clarity in such things as Christianity's Golden Rule and Judaism's "Great Commandment." Take that mooring away from the ancient expressions of our deity and all morality then becomes dependant on what any particular person or government defines as the greater good.
When governments and individuals can define by their whim what is moral or immoral, what is desirable and what is punishable, human life is almost inevitably devalued. Certainly Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot, between them responsible for the murder of well over a hundred million people in the 20th century, held to socialist belief systems that devalued human life and elevated in its stead political ideology. Many in the green movement argue that man is a parasite on the world and call for strictly limiting his impact using authoritarian means - including population control, forced sterilization and other such methods. . .
The bottom line is, regardless whether one believes in Judaism or Christianity, we will pay a very heavy price indeed for jettisoning them as the bedrock of Western society. Yet that is precisely what the left has sought for over two centuries, promising in their stead a secular heaven on earth. Ironically, should they fully succeed, history teaches us that their promised earthly heaven will be far more likely to resemble biblical hell.
The allure of Marx's socialist philosophy, despite its utter failure as an economic model and its evil, bloody history as a social and political model, is very much alive. People embrace its utopian ideals wholly irrepsective of historical reality. It is fair to say that, since Marx first published the Communist Manifesto, the clash between Marxist social and economic ethos on one hand and traditional Western freedoms and capitalism on the other has been a reoccurring and often predominant theme across all sectors of society and culture. And indeed, what we see happening in Wisconsin today, pitting democracy against labor unions, is simply one more event in the history of that conflict. Marx may be dead, but his ghost still very much haunts us today.
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Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Thomas Sowell Endorses Newt Gingrich
In the IBD article linked by Instapundit (see post below), conservative economist Thomas Sowell weighs in on the race for the Republican nomination. His endorsement goes to Newt Gingrich.
As a threshold matter, Jonah Goldberg, in his analysis of whether to vote for Romney or Gingrich, concluded in his post "Newtzilla:"
Mitt Romney is still the sensible choice if you believe these are rough, but generally sensible, times. If, however, you think these are crazy and extraordinary times, then perhaps they call for a crazy, extraordinary -- very high-risk, very high-reward -- figure like Gingrich.
Sowell, for his part, sees our nation in the midst of crazy and extraordinary times indeed:
This is not just another election and Barack Obama is not just another president whose policies we may not like. With all of President Obama's broken promises, glib demagoguery and cynical political moves, one promise he has kept all too well. That was his boast on the eve of the 2008 election:
"We are going to change the United States of America."
Many Americans are already saying that they can hardly recognize the country they grew up in. We have already started down the path that has led Western European nations to the brink of financial disaster.
Internationally, it is worse. A president who has pulled the rug out from under our allies, whether in Eastern Europe or the Middle East, tried to cozy up to our enemies, and has bowed low from the waist to foreign leaders certainly has not represented either the values or the interests of America. If he continues to do nothing that is likely to stop terrorist-sponsoring Iran from getting nuclear weapons, the consequences can be beyond our worst imagining.
Against that backdrop, Dr. Sowell analyzes which candidate is best prepared to right our ship of state - and comes down definitively on the side of Newt Gingrich:
While the televised debates are what gave Gingrich's candidacy a big boost, concrete accomplishments when in office are the real test. Gingrich engineered the first Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 40 years — followed by the first balanced budget in 40 years. The media called it "the Clinton surplus" but all spending bills start in the House of Representatives, and Gingrich was speaker of the House.
Speaker Gingrich also produced some long overdue welfare reforms, despite howls from liberals that the poor would be devastated. But nobody makes that claim any more.
Did Gingrich ruffle some feathers when he was speaker of the House? Yes, enough for it to cost him that position. But he also showed that he could produce results.
In a world where we can make our choices only among the alternatives actually available, the question is whether Newt Gingrich is better than Barack Obama — and better than Mitt Romney.
Romney is a smooth talker, but what did he actually accomplish as governor of Massachusetts, compared to what Gingrich accomplished as speaker of the House? When you don't accomplish much, you don't ruffle many feathers. But is that what we want?
Can you name one important positive thing that Romney accomplished as governor of Massachusetts? Can anyone? Does a candidate who represents the bland leading the bland increase the chances of victory in November 2012? A lot of candidates like that have lost, from Thomas E. Dewey to John McCain.
Dr. Sowell then makes the case that Newt's anti-conservative sins are merely venial and that his "baggage" - the marriages, the association with Freddie Mac - will not keep him from defeating Obama. He concludes with a final warning for Republicans who are focused on the negatives and baggage in Newt's past:
Those who want to concentrate on the baggage in Gingrich's past, rather than on the nation's future, should remember what Winston Churchill said: "If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost."
If that means a second term for Barack Obama, then it means lost big time.
On a final note, Dr. Sowell is the author of one of the finest tomes on economics I have ever read - and I've read many. In clear language and with numerous eye opening examples, Sowell makes the case for 'conservative' economics. The book is Basic Economics, 4th Edition, and if you want to give a gift to virtually any conservative - or if you want to watch their head explode, a leftie - who doesn't have a PhD in economics, Dr. Sowell's book should be at the top of your list.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics"
Last weekend, I began reading the recently released 4th edition of Thomas Sowell's tome, "Basic Economics.". It has been a number of years since I took economics in college. It turns out that I haven't forgotten any of the basic principles. But that said, the degree to which Sowell's book has enhanced my understanding of those principles surprised me greatly. Indeed, it did so to the point that I am writing this post to recommend his book to everyone who doesn't hold a PhD in economics (or who does hold one and is named Paul Krugman). Giving example after example of the basic principles of free market economics - and market distortions - in practice, Sowell eviscerates essentially every left wing economic meme of the past half century. It is an invaluable resource.
For but one of thousands of examples from "Basic Economics," Sowell addresses, on page 227, income differential between races in the U.S., pointing out that:
While gross statistics show large income differences among American racial and ethnic groups, finer breakdowns usually show much smaller differences. For example, black, white, and Hispanic males of the same age (29) and IQ (100) have all had average annual incomes within a thousand dollars of one another. In New Zealand, while there are substantial income differences between the Maori population and the white population, these differences likewise shrink drastically when comparing Maoris with other New Zealanders of the same age and with the same skills and literacy levels.
One other notable aspect of this book is how Sowell traces the ripples through the economy of market distortions. At any rate, this book should be required reading for every American. I can't recommend it strongly enough.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Marx & The Communist Manifesto, From Feb. 21, 1848 To Today
Steeped in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and born in the crucible of the French Revolution, socialism was meant to wholly rework society. Socialist philosophers, most notably Karl Marx, rejected class and religion as the bases for societal structure and advocated remaking society under the watchful eye of a central government that would redistribute the nation's wealth and mandate social equality. At the center of the socialist revolution was the Marxian belief that all events could and should be analyzed in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed, the victim classes and the victimizing class - a simplistic and distorting theme that makes up such a large part of our political discourse today. It creates, in its myopic view, a world of demons and perpetual victims. As Marx wrote in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. Inherent in that proposition is a rejection of Western values, history and norms and, in its stead, an embrace of militant secularism, moral relativism and, [in modern form], multiculturalism. II. The Process: . . . [T]he workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots. The Marxist conception of socialism is that of a specific historical phase that will displace capitalism and precede communism. The major characteristics of socialism (particularly as conceived by Marx and Engels after the Paris Commune of 1871) are that the proletariat [workers] will control the means of production through a workers' state erected by the workers in their interests. Economic activity would still be organised through the use of incentive systems and social classes would still exist, but to a lesser and diminishing extent than under capitalism. III. Application Outside Of The West She entered 10 Downing Street determined to reverse what she perceived as a precipitous national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation, particularly of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, and the sale or closure of state-owned companies and withdrawal of subsidies to others. . . She took a hard line against trade unions. Perhaps most important in the turn from economic socialism, Thatcher significantly weakened the political power of Britain's labor unions, reforming them in a manner not too dissimilar to what we see occurring in Wisconsin today. Such was Britain's economic rebound under Thatcher that the Labour Party ultimately dispensed with the idea of promoting socialism as an economic model, withdrawing the infamous "Clause IV" of its plank calling for nationalization of industry and wide-scale redistribution of wealth. In addition, Labour has continued Thatcher's union policies. . . . [S]ocialists have warred against Christianity and Judaism for over two centuries. Indeed, when socialism was born in the crucible of the French Revolution, one of the first acts of the Revolutionary government was to initiate a systematic and brutal war on the Catholic Church and its clergy. VI. Conclusion
On this day in 1848, socialist philosopher Karl Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, first published their magnum opus, The Communist Manifesto. In it, Marx advocated for a complete reworking of society, starting with the formation of labor unions, building into socialism and then to communism. It marks the single most destructive and distorting philosophy ever put forth in history, bringing untold misery to the world and working destruction upon the fabric of Western civilization to this day. Its promise has always been that society can be perfected and utopia achieved. And while it has done some societal good in the West, the overarching reality has been economic misery and, in terms of communism, massive bloodshed.
I. Background, Philosophy & Goals
At the time Marx wrote his book, he was responding to very real problems in European society during the Industrial Revolution. Sweat shops, dangerous work places and slave wages were only a few of those problems. Moreover, European society tended to be very stratified, with many obstacles to moving between economic and social classes. Marx was also responding to Europe's colonialism as a similar evil of "oppression." And indeed, colonialism of the era, as practiced by all but the British, at least in retrospect, could be so characterized. His solutions, as expressed in The Communist Manifesto and other works, were well intentioned, but as explained below, his basic assumption about the regulation of economic markets was wildly false and his analytical framework of history was both superficial and grossly distorting.
All of that is to say that Marx's socialism is not an inherent evil. Some aspects or legacies of socialism that have found their way throughout Western society since 1848 are quite legitimate. As Bookworm Room states in a very informative post on the topic, protections for workers and a safe workplace are some of those legacies. The great weakening of the class system and the rise of the welfare state are others. And while the latter has gotten wildly out of hand, the proposition that society should provide a minimalist, temporary safety net is quite legitimate. Unfortunately, for what good Marx's socialism has done for society at large, the harm it has done has been exponentially greater.
Marx did not invent socialism, but he greatly stengthened its philosophical underpinnings, as well as describing and agitating for the final stage of socialism, communism. As I described it previously:
Marx envisioned a multistep process to communism. The very first step, as he pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, was for workers to create unions:
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle . . .
For orthodox Marxists, socialism is the lower stage of communism based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution" while upper stage communism is based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"; the upper stage becoming possible only after the socialist stage further develops economic efficiency and the automation of production has led to a superabundance of goods and services.
A. Economic Model
As an economic model, neither communism nor socialism has ever succeeded in comparison to capitalism. This is because the central assumption of the socialist model - that governments can be a more efficient regulator of economies than free markets - has been proven false beyond any iota of rational argument. Related thereto, communism and socialism have failed because they look upon the fiscal self interest motivating the capitalist class as the penultimate sin.
"Greed" is not a dirty word, despite what our Commander in Chief might say in his attacks on capitalism. When fiscal self interest has been championed and combined with free market competition, it has massively lifted the standard of living for all in its ambit, including the lowest economic classes. And it should be noted that, in a free market economy, being a member of the lowest economic class at any given point is, for the vast majority, a transitory state. But when the opportunity to pursue one's fiscal self interest has been denied to the populace at large, as happens under socialism and communism, history has shown the result to be misery.
Those nations that have embraced socialism, with the government owning the means of production, are - or were before their collapse - economic basket cases. The Soviet Union fell apart in the 90's as a result of economic collapse. Communist China was well on their way to following the Soviet Union until Deng Xiaoping become the leader of the country and replaced communist economics with free market economics, starting China's economy on the road to what has been decades of rapid expansion. Cuba, North Korea, and Burma maintain full blown socialist economic systems, and all three have some of the lowest standards of living in the world today. In South America, Chavez is still in the midst of moving Venezuela into socialism, and its standard of living is tanking with stagflation and food rationing.
Similarly, in the Middle East, socialism and its closely related variant, crony capitalism, abound. Neither have worked there. For example, Iran, where government clerics own - and get rich off of - the major industries, is an economic basket case. Egypt is another example of a state with dominant socialist economics - and indeed, economic conditions were the motivating factor behind the recent revolution.
B. Social/Political Model
As a political and social model, Marx's philosophy has been even more destructive than its economic model. Marx's utopian world required an all powerful central government to enforce the distribution of wealth, to perfect society, to enforce equality of outcome, and to motivate people to produce in the absence of a profit motive. Marxism further rejected Judeo-Christian morality, leaving the state as the unchecked final arbiter of what is right and wrong, and thus prioritized individual human life below political goals to benefit the "proletariat" and the state. The end result has been slaughter on a scale never before seen in history. Well over 100 million people were murdered by their own communist regimes in the 20th century.
In China, "official study materials published in 1948 [show that] Mao envisaged that "one-tenth of the peasants" (or about 50,000,000 [people]) "would have to be destroyed" to facilitate agrarian reform." In the end, between the agrarian reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, Mao actually exceeded that total by several million. The Soviet Union purged at least as many of its citizens, if not far more, from its inception through the end of Stalin's regime. China and the Soviet Union were not anamolies. Virtually every country that has seen the imposition of communism has also seen government sponsored mass murder on a wide, if not industrial scale. For example, in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered roughly 20% of its population. In North Korea, somewhere between 710,000 and 3,500,000 of the populace have been slaughtered by the Kim dynasty.
IV. Marxism In The West
Britain is a casebook study in the experimentation with Marx's socialist ethos, both economically through the 1980's and, in social policy, through today. In the aftermath of World War II, Britain embraced socialism, voting in 1945 to reject their war-time leader Winston Churchill, in favor of Labour's Clement Attlee. Attlees's first orders of business were the creation of the welfare state, the nationalization of major industry, the creation of nationalized medicine, and the divestiture of the empire. Tremendous power was placed in the hands of labor unions, and Britain suffered economically for decades. It took Margaret Thatcher to turn things around:
Much of Europe is incrementally trying to follow Britain's lead. Decades of European experimentation with socialism and the welfare state have given Europe moribund economies with slow growth and high unemployment. But that is changing. In the words of the NYT, "socialism is collapsing in Europe."
And socialism is not merely collapsing economically in Europe, it is also collapsing as a driver of society. Multiculturalism is a natural outgrowth of Marx's deeply distorting view that all of society should be analyzed in terms of the "oppressed and oppressor," and that, within that rubric, Western societies, with a history of colonialism and imperialism, are uniquely sinful oppressors. It is a belief system wholly detached from historical reality.
Euorpean multiculturalism encourages minorities to define themselves by the culture of their nationality or by their religion. And because Marxism holds indigenous Western culture to be irredeemably sinful, multiculturalism requires that non-indigenous cultures be accepted non-judgmentally and, indeed, seems to hold them to be superior to indigenous culture. It deliberately balkanizes society and it is particularly insidious as regards to Islamic minorities in Europe. Yet today, it is widely being acknowledged across Europe that multiculturalism has failed utterly. So says French President Sarkozy, Britain's David Cameron, and Germany's Angela Merkel. Hopefully this rejection of multiculturalism is sufficiently timely to cure the toxin Marxian multiculturalism has released into European society.
Even as Europe moves away from socialism, Obama is trying to drive the U.S. towards the failed European economic model. Obama has set us on the road to nationalizing one sixth of our economy with Obamacare. Our government is today the majority owner of GM and Chrysler. Obama nationalized the student loan industry, ostensibly for greater efficiency. Moreover, Obama is insinuating the government deeply into our economy with a tsunami of new regulations, particularly in the areas of the environment and finance. Then there was the recent power grab to regulate the internet. Obama is ideologically committed to punishing the rich through taxes and redistributing their wealth for the 'greater good' of society. And lastly, Obama is showing a penchant for crony capitalism, picking winners and losers in the marketplace. If that is not incremental economic socialism, then nothing is.
It is not just Obama that is infected with the Marxist philosophy - it pervades the entire left wing in the U.S. The left in America today is not a monolith, but rather a mosaic of pigeon holed permanent victim groups - a toxin directly derived from Marx's oppressed / oppressor analytical framework. It is the maintenance of these 'oppressed' permanent victim groups - be they minority groups, gays, women, or public sector employees - that is the raison d'etre of the modern Democrat party. And indeed, the central financial foundation of the Democrats is taxpayer money laundered through public sector unions, the essential building block of Marx's march toward a communist utopia. This is not to say that a majority of Democrats are agitating to establish full blown socialism in America today. But it is to say that to understand our modern left and their trajectory, the first step is to read Marx. Step two is to study history in order to understand what will happen to our nation if they are allowed to pull our nation along that trajectory.
V. The War On Religion
Central to Marx's goal to entirely remake society was to drive Judaism and Christianity from society. Western culture, morality, history and societal structures are inextricably intertwined with the Judeo-Christian religions. Indeed, one could say that, at least until the Enlightenment, the history of Christianity, and to a lesser extent Judaism, were one and the same as the history of Western civilization. Thus Marx became an implacable enemy of these religions and started a war on them that the left continues to this day:
The left has waged this war against Christianity and Judaism ever since. Karl Marx, socialism's greatest philosopher, famously wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that religion is the "opium of the people" and that "[t]he abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." The British socialist party wrote in their 1911 manifesto that "it is a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion." In America, the socialist left has used activist Courts as an a means of removing all aspects of Christianity from the public square while in Britain, the Labour Party is demoting Christianity and deconstructing the Anglican Church. . . .
With the left's partial success in their war on Christianity has come an interesting phenomena - the search for something to replace Christianity among the newly secularized. It would seem that we humans are hard wired to look for what amounts to a religion to give ourselves a moral mooring and a greater purpose in life. Socialist governments recognized this. Indeed, the first socialists in France substituted government sponsored cult movements in place of the Catholic Church. In Communist countries, where raw police power was used - not wholly successfully - to crush Christianity and Judaism, socialism itself was raised to the level of a religion complete with a sainthood - the quasi-deification of communist leaders as part of a cult of personality. Catholics had the Shroud of Turin; Soviets had the mummy of Lenin.
On an individual level, the same search for a substitute is happening in the West. Many of the secular left today embrace environmentalism as a religion - and indeed, it was but a few months ago that UNEP explicitly called for the global warming movement to be pushed as a religious alternative to Christianity. Still others embrace the airy spiritualism of New Age thought.
All of this has existential ramifications for Western society. For the better part of two millennium, the Judeo-Christian ethic has provided a rock solid framework for morality at the heart of Western society - one that puts maximum value on each individual human life and one that provides moral clarity in such things as Christianity's Golden Rule and Judaism's "Great Commandment." Take that mooring away from the ancient expressions of our deity and all morality then becomes dependant on what any particular person or government defines as the greater good.
When governments and individuals can define by their whim what is moral or immoral, what is desirable and what is punishable, human life is almost inevitably devalued. Certainly Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot, between them responsible for the murder of well over a hundred million people in the 20th century, held to socialist belief systems that devalued human life and elevated in its stead political ideology. Many in the green movement argue that man is a parasite on the world and call for strictly limiting his impact using authoritarian means - including population control, forced sterilization and other such methods. . .
The bottom line is, regardless whether one believes in Judaism or Christianity, we will pay a very heavy price indeed for jettisoning them as the bedrock of Western society. Yet that is precisely what the left has sought for over two centuries, promising in their stead a secular heaven on earth. Ironically, should they fully succeed, history teaches us that their promised earthly heaven will be far more likely to resemble biblical hell.
The allure of Marx's socialist philosophy, despite its utter failure as an economic model and its evil, bloody history as a social and political model, is very much alive. People embrace its utopian ideals wholly irrepsective of historical reality. It is fair to say that, since Marx first published the Communist Manifesto, the clash between Marxist social and economic ethos on one hand and traditional Western freedoms and capitalism on the other has been a reoccurring and often predominant theme across all sectors of society and culture. And indeed, what we see happening in Wisconsin today, pitting democracy against labor unions, is simply one more event in the history of that conflict. Marx may be dead, but his ghost still very much haunts us today.
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