Lenin circa 1920, Progressives circa 2012

Say that Obama is a socialist and the MSM will treat you with derision. But compare and contrast, if you will, the philosophy and methods of Lenin with those of our progressive left today - not only Obama and progressive law makers, but the MSM also - and you may well be surprised.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a brilliant man - he thoroughly understood the dark sides of power, of thought control, and the tools of oppression. But like all brilliant men, the mistakes he made were colossal. His central ideas, that economies could be forced to work without profit and could be centrally directed for the benefit of all, have proven disastrous on an epic scale. And yet, his central ideas as well as the blue print he created for achieving them live on with Obama and the 'progressives' of today:

Lenin - "A lie told often enough becomes the truth."

Once today's progressives settle on a meme, they stick to it with utter tenacity, the truth of it being irrelevant. It is the left's primary form of argument and examples are endless. Romney's tax plan will cause a $5 trillion increase in the deficit; the Tea Party is a fundamentally racist organization; the Benghazi attack was a spontaneous reaction to a youtube video, conservatives want to push granny off a cliff, ad infinitum . . . The protection against this in a free society is the MSM. But when the MSM is thoroughly vested in seeing the victory of the left, then lies all too often become the truth.

Lenin - "The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses."

One wonders how the members of the MSM see themselves today. The NYT, for example, ran front page stories on Abu Ghraib for 32 consecutive days. Yet as regards the most serious Presidential scandal in living memory - the murder of four Americans in Benghazi while the government did nothing - the New York times has run precisely zero front page stories. During the recent Sunday Morning talk shows, only Fox News's Chris Wallace pro-actively raised the issue of the Benghazi scandal. Our MSM today are not guardians of the truth, they are propagandists and agitators, whether in the affirmative or the negative.

Lenin - "When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward - or go back. He who now talks about the "freedom of the press" goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism."

There is no room for freedom of the press for the left, or indeed, for any contrary voice. Do recall that, despite our First Amendment protections, this administration did their best to discredit and to shut out Fox News on more than one occasion over the past four years. And of course, look at the treatment of anyone who wanders off the left's plantation - Buzz Bissinger and Stacey Dash being the most recent victims.

Lenin - "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation."

If Obama wanted to gut our nation, is there anything that he or the progressive left would be doing differently than they are today? While Obama is borrowing at an unheard of pace - 40 cents on every dollar of government spending - and spending our nation into penury, our Fed has the printing presses running overtime. Inflation in food and fuel is already hurting Americans, and if nothing is done, it will get far worse. And on top of that are not just the rising taxation (and hidden costs) that Obama has planned through Obamacare - he also has plans to raise taxes to punishing levels on capital gains, those in addition to more taxes on the 'wealthy'. It is a Lenin-esque recipe for destroying the American middle class. The penultimate irony is that the left presents themselves as the champion of the middle class.

Lenin - "Capitalists are no more capable of self-sacrifice than a man is capable of lifting himself up by his own bootstraps."

This really is the essence of the far left's view of our nation and the role of government. Profit is evil, businesses are the enemy (unless, of course, run by cronies or the spouses of progressive lawmakers), and the working man has no chance except those given to him by big government. The Life of Julia is but one crystal clear example. Moreover, capitalists believe that the most effective regulator of markets is competition. As suggested by Lenin, progressives see the only viable market regulator as draconian government regulation (unless it involves cronies, in which case actual subsidies and government created markets through mandates (e.g., ethanol, electric vehicles, solar power, wind power) are fine.

Lenin - "[E]conomic struggle, . . . described as “resistance to the capitalists”, . . . in free countries [means] the organised-labour syndical, or trade union struggle."

According to both Marx and Lenin, unions are the building blocks of communism. Additionally, they are, today, an anachronistic response to the long dead ills of the early days of the industrial revolution, they are the economic foundation of the left, and they are a plague on our nation. Public sector unions in particular serve no viable purpose, they are champions of big government and higher taxation wholly irrespective of economic effect, they make up the largest number of union members, and they are breaking the treasuries of our states. Yet the Obama administration has pushed so hard to fund and favor unions, whether it be the UAW, Boeing or, for that matter, using hundreds of billions of dollars to insure that public sector union workers remained employed during the recession?

Unfortunately, it is not just the government pushing unions from the top down. Unions wield incredible power in many states with a history of rule by Democrats. In Michigan, the voters are considering whether to enshrine union power in their Constitution, essentially giving public sector unions a super veto over most legislation that the legislature might pass. It would be hard to imagine a more insane piece of legislation - and yet, it is even odds that the measure might pass. As Lenin also once said, "capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." (As an aside, this may well be unconstitutional as it would deny Michigan a Republican form of Government, as required by the U.S. Constitution Art. 4, Sec. 4)

Lenin - "Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, . . . the capitalists. It is a slave society, since the “free” workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are “entitled” only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery."

The profit motive is central to capitalism - and utterly anathema to the far left. Has there ever been a President more damning of the profit motive in our history than Obama (cronies excluded of course). Recall how he demonized the health insurance industry and the GM bondholders (so he could use money rightfully theirs to pay off the unions) for seeking filthy profit. Just as it was to Lenin, so it is to today's progressives - profit is evil. Their problem, like Lenin's, is that they don't make the connection between punishing profit and the impact both on government revenues and economic growth.

Lenin - "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."

A reasonable argument can be made that this is the alpha and the omega of the problems our nation faces today. Over the past fifty years, conservatives went into business while progressives took control of our educational system, k through grad school. Communism and socialism should, in a rationale world, be in the dustbin of history. But a sizeable chunk of our population embraces the philosophy of those ideologies, blissfully ignorant of history and economics.

Lenin - "One man with a gun can control 100 without one."

The progressives love gun control - and ultimately for a good reason. As they know and as our Founding Fathers knew, a disarmed populace is subject to government control. Look at virtually any gun control legislation in the U.S., and what you will find is not an attempt to limit guns to criminals only, but rather to limit guns to criminal and law abiding citizen alike. Not only are such attempts nefarious, but they do nothing at all to stop crime. Indeed, take a look at the most violent areas and you will almost uniformly find the strictest gun control laws. Chicago, with its strict gun control laws, just had its 436th murder for the year. There is no rational reason to disarm law abiding citizens - other than to further the reach of government.

Lenin - "Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism."

The penultimate goal of the left is to substitute the government as the source and final arbiter of morality. Once that is achieved, then the government is unbound. It can punish undesirable thought with the police power of the state and it can substitute its own views of morality for religious based ethics. The history of the 20th century is written in the blood of that experiment, as the 'progress of the state' took precedence over individual human life. Over 100 million people were slaughtered for that progress, one only possible when the state drove religion out of the public square.

The progressives are openly hostile to Christianity, and have been using the Courts to move Christianity out of the public square for over fifty years. But with Obama, they have their first progressive able to take proactive action - which he has with the HHS mandate. That mandate is a direct assault on religious liberty in America.

Lenin - "It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed."

The nanny state and the green movement - both creations of the progressive left - are perhaps the most vivid examples of the rationing of liberty in the U.S. If the progressives have their way, they will be directing every aspect of our life - for our benefit of course. As Czech President Vaclav Klaus said, “It becomes evident that while discussing climate we are not witnessing a clash of views about the environment, but a clash of views about human freedom.” But as always, for those rich enough or close enough to power, the less rationing that occurs. When uber warmie Al Gore flies, he doesn't fly commercial to minimize his carbon footprint.

I am pretty terrified by my view of history and the state of the U.S. today. The ghost of Lenin lives on, regardless of what the progressives and the MSM would like you to believe.

Tweet

Read More...

Summary only...

Shades of Solidarnosi?

In advance of his visit to Cuba, Pope Benedict XVI has made a rather stunning statement:

Pope Benedict said on Friday that communism had failed in Cuba and offered the Church's help in creating a new economic model, drawing a reserved response from the Cuban government ahead of his visit to the island next week.

Speaking on the plane taking him from Rome for a six-day trip to Mexico and Cuba, the Roman Catholic leader told reporters: "Today it is evident that Marxist ideology in the way it was conceived no longer corresponds to reality." . . .

Now if he would only stop on our side of the pond and pass that message to Obama and the rest of our far lefties. At any rate, as to Cuba, Pope Benedict XVI was perhaps Pope John Paul II's closest confidant during the 1980's when the Papacy played a crucial role in the Polish revolution that threw off the yoke of the Soviet Union. Perhaps the Pope sees a similar role for the Church in Cuba.

Tweet

Read More...

Summary only...

Cambodia & The Socialist Ethic

One of my constant themes on this blog concerns the decades long effort of the left to drive Judaism and Christianity from the public square, thus allowing government to become the sole moral arbiter, unmoored from the Judeo Christian ethic.  In the Judeo-Christian world, human life is sacrosanct, and thus the government is limited as to when it subjects may be imprisoned, executed or otherwise subject to coercion.  The secular left devalues human life, elevating in its stead the power of government and the principle of "equality." Where that leads is discussed by Prof. Douglas Levene in Reflections on Cambodia, an essay at NRO:

Cambodia suffered deeply under the Khmer Rouge. Perhaps as much as 20 percent of its people were murdered in killing fields like Choeung Ek or died as a result of starvation or disease following the expulsion of the urban populations to the countryside and the forced collectivization of agriculture. But calling these murders “genocide” troubles me.

Cambodia is now and was then one of the most ethnically unitary countries in the world: 95 percent of all Cambodians are ethnically Khmer; the remaining 5 percent include Chinese, Vietnamese, Laotians, Hmong, Cham, and others. And 95 percent of all Cambodians, of whatever ethnicity, are Buddhist. Most of the killings were Khmer on Khmer, although the Khmer Rouge did also target Cambodia’s very small Cham Muslim minority.

The term “genocide” historically refers to the mass extermination of a race or ethnicity, as with the Turks and the Armenians, or the Germans and the Jews, or the Serbs and the Bosnians. It doesn’t seem to fit what happened in Cambodia, except for the scale of the slaughter.

Rather, what happened in Cambodia is what happened in the French Revolution, and in Stalin’s purges and mass collectivization campaigns, and in Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, only on a proportionately larger scale. It was mass murder in the name of equality. It wasn’t “genocide”; it was Communist utopianism carried to its logical extreme. The Khmer Rouge, who called themselves Maoists, believed that the most important social and political value was equality and that in order to create their new, classless society in which everyone was equal, it was necessary to exterminate anyone who might be smarter, or better educated, or wealthier, or more talented than anyone else. Thus, they killed the educated, the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, and the rich; movie stars, pop singers, authors, urban residents, and workers for the former government; and anyone who protested — as well as the families of all the above. Towards the end, they also killed cadres who were thought to be a political threat. Whatever their crimes were, the Khmer Rouge do not seem to have been motivated by racial, ethnic, or religious hatred.

Why then do Cambodians and the world call the mass murders by the Khmer Rouge “genocide”? I can think of several possible reasons. One is the superficial similarity to other mass slaughters — as noted earlier, the pictures of the Cambodian killing fields look very much like the pictures from the German concentration camps. Surely many people who are largely ignorant of history know only that similarity. Another reason is the fact that the victims of genocide are sympathetic. The U.N. creates commissions, and wealthy countries send money. Cambodia today is filled with NGOs bringing aid of various kinds. The desire for international sympathy might explain why Cambodians use the genocide label.

However, I suspect that the most important reason for the usage worldwide is that many people in the international media, international agencies, and international NGOs (not to mention academia) are reluctant to face up to the crimes committed by Communism in the name of equality. To do so might call into question the weight attached by them to equality as the most important social value and undermine the multicultural faith that evil is predominantly the product of inequality, racism, ethnic hatred, or religious fanaticism. That cannot be permitted, so such crimes must be either ignored or mislabeled. . . .

Tweet

Read More...

Summary only...

A Turning Point In History - Feb. 21, 1848: Marx Publishes The Communist Manifesto

Reposted From Feb. 21, 2011:


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:

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:

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:

. . . [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.

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 . . .

From there, Marx envisioned society passing into socialism, with the state owning the means of production, and then into finally into full communism:

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.

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.

III. Application Outside Of The West

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

A. Europe

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:

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.

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.

B. U.S.

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:

. . . [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.

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.

VI. Conclusion

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.

Tweet

Read More...

Summary only...

"Fairness" - The Essence Of Marx

The worth of a good pundit is that they get to the essence of things with brevity and clarity. And here is Charles Krauthammer doing precisely that in his most recent article on Obama's State of the Union Flop:

Hope and change are long gone. It’s now equality and fairness.

That certainly is a large idea. Lenin and Mao went pretty far with it. As did Clement Attlee and his social-democratic counterparts in postwar Europe. . . .

Back in 2008, Obama was asked if he would still support raising the capital-gains tax rate (the intended effect of the Buffett Rule) if this would decrease government revenue.

Obama said yes. In the name of fairness.

This is redistribution for its own sake — the cost be damned. . . .

Read More...

Summary only...

Marx & The Communist Manifesto, From Feb. 21, 1848 To Today

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:

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:

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:

. . . [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.

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 . . .

From there, Marx envisioned society passing into socialism, with the state owning the means of production, and then into finally into full communism:

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.

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.

III. Application Outside Of The West

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

A. Europe

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:

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.

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.

B. U.S.

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:

. . . [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.

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.

VI. Conclusion

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.

Read More...

Summary only...

Krauthammer on The New Socialism & The Obama EPA's Power Grab

Columnist Charles Krauthammer, in his column this week, examines the socialist origins of AGW, their dual goals of accreting power and (our) wealth, and the end run around the Constitution that was the Obama EPA's decision to label carbon dioxide a pollutant dangerous to humans under the Clean Air Act.

If there is anyone who has forgotten how intertwined AGW is with socialism, Mr. Krauthammer reminds us by looking at the movements history.

In the 1970s and early '80s, having seized control of the U.N. apparatus (by power of numbers), Third World countries decided to cash in. OPEC was pulling off the greatest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. Why not them? So in grand U.N. declarations and conferences, they began calling for a "New International Economic Order." The NIEO's essential demand was simple: to transfer fantastic chunks of wealth from the industrialized West to the Third World.

On what grounds? In the name of equality -- wealth redistribution via global socialism -- with a dose of post-colonial reparations thrown in.

The idea of essentially taxing hardworking citizens of the democracies to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early '80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.

But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.

One of the major goals of the Copenhagen climate summit is another NIEO shakedown: the transfer of hundreds of billions from the industrial West to the Third World to save the planet by, for example, planting green industries in the tristes tropiques.

Politically it's an idea of genius, engaging at once every left-wing erogenous zone: rich man's guilt, post-colonial guilt, environmental guilt. But the idea of shaking down the industrial democracies in the name of the environment thrives not just in the refined internationalist precincts of Copenhagen. It thrives on the national scale, too.

And indeed, according to Gary North at Specific Answers, you can trace one of the first calls for socialists to move over to the green movement to socialist economist, Robert Heilbroner, who who made the call in the Sep. 10, 1990 issue of the New Yorker, describing it as "the best political means for promoting central planning." And to quote from Dr. George Reisman, writing in his book, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics:

. . . It should not be surprising to see hordes of former Reds, or of those who otherwise would have become Reds, turning from Marxism and becoming the Greens of the ecology movement. It is the same fundamental philosophy in a different guise, ready as ever to wage war on the freedom and well-being of the individual.

What it appears that we are seeing, with the surreal juxtaposition of Climategate and Copenhagen and with the AGW crowd doing their best to wholly delegitimize Climategate, is that climate science is not about the search for the truth. It is, first and foremost, a search for power and money on a grand scale. To continue with Mr. Krauthammer:

On the day Copenhagen opened, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claimed jurisdiction over the regulation of carbon emissions by declaring them an "endangerment" to human health.

Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything . . . Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.

This naked assertion of vast executive power in the name of the environment is the perfect fulfillment of the prediction of Czech President (and economist) Vaclav Klaus that environmentalism is becoming the new socialism, i.e., the totemic ideal in the name of which government seizes the commanding heights of the economy and society.

. . . With the Senate blocking President Obama's cap-and-trade carbon legislation, the EPA [executed a] coup d'etat . . . Either the Senate passes cap-and-trade, or the EPA will impose even more draconian measures: all cap, no trade.

Forget for a moment the economic effects of severe carbon chastity. There's the matter of constitutional decency. If you want to revolutionize society -- as will drastic carbon regulation and taxation in an energy economy that is 85 percent carbon-based -- you do it through Congress reflecting popular will. Not by administrative fiat of EPA bureaucrats.

Congress should not just resist this executive overreaching, but trump it: Amend clean-air laws and restore their original intent by excluding CO2 from EPA control and reserving that power for Congress and future legislation.

Do it now. Do it soon. Because Big Brother isn't lurking in CIA cloak. He's knocking on your door, smiling under an EPA cap.

Read the entire article. My only quible is whether we should be concerned with Big Brother . . . or Big Sister.

Read More...

Summary only...

The Socialists Are Coming!!! The Socialists Are Coming!!!

Two things of note occurred in 1776. Adam Smith wrote the seminal treatise of the era on capitalism, "The Wealth of Nations." The basic precepts that he espoused in that book are the foundation of America's wealth today. And 1776, we had the American Revolution. If the famous patriot of that era, Paul Revere, were alive today, he would no doubt be making another midnight ride to warn of the impending existential danger to our nation crossing over the horizon. Today, that threat is internal, from those who wish to dispense with the capitalist system that has made America the wealthiest nation on earth - top to bottom the wealthiest - and put in its place a system of socialism where, as the saying goes, the misery can be shared equally by all. Leading the call today is E.J. Dionne, who sees the economic cycle of capitalism as a reason to dispense with it.
_________________________________________________________

This from Mr. Dionne, a man sorely in need of a lesson in economic history:

The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.

Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to "grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is "protectionism."

The old script is in rewrite. "We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation," Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.

He noted that in 1999 when Congress replaced the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act with a set of looser banking rules, "we let investment banks get into a much wider range of activities without regulation." This helped create the subprime mortgage mess and the cascading calamity in banking.

While Frank is a liberal, the same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Yet in a speech on Tuesday, Bernanke sounded like a born-again New Dealer in calling for "a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers."

Bernanke said the Fed needed more authority to get inside "the structure and workings of financial markets" because "recent experience has clearly illustrated the importance, for the purpose of promoting financial stability, of having detailed information about money markets and the activities of borrowers and lenders in those markets." Sure sounds like Big Government to me.

This is the third time in 100 years that support for taken-for-granted economic ideas has crumbled. The Great Depression discredited the radical laissez-faire doctrines of the Coolidge era. Stagflation in the 1970s and early '80s undermined New Deal ideas and called forth a rebirth of radical free-market notions. What's becoming the Panic of 2008 will mean an end to the latest Capital Rules era.

What's striking is that conservatives who revere capitalism are offering their own criticisms of the way the system is working. Irwin Stelzer, director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies at the Hudson Institute, says the subprime crisis arose in part because lenders quickly sold their mortgages to others and bore no risk if the loans went bad.

"You have to have the person who's writing the risk bearing the risk," he says. "That means a whole host of regulations. There's no way around that."

While some conservatives now worry about the social and economic impact of growing inequalities, Stelzer isn't one of them. But he is highly critical of "the process that produces inequality."

"I don't like three of your friends on a board voting you a zillion dollars," Stelzer, who is also a business consultant, told me. "A cozy boardroom back-scratching operation offends me." He argues that "the preservation of the capitalist system" requires finding new ways of "linking compensation to performance."

Frank takes a similar view, arguing that CEOs "benefit substantially if the risks they take pay off" but "pay no penalty" if their risks lead to losses or even catastrophe -- another sign that capitalism, in its current form, isn't living by its own rules.

Frank also calls for new thinking on the impact of free trade. He argues it can no longer be denied that globalization "is a contributor to the stagnation of wages and it has produced large pools of highly mobile capital." Mobile capital and the threat of moving a plant abroad give employers a huge advantage in negotiations with employees. "If you're dealing with someone and you can pick up and leave and he can't, you have the advantage."

"Free trade has increased wealth, but it's been monopolized by a very small number of people," Frank said. The coming debate will focus not on shutting globalization down but rather on managing its effects with an eye toward the interests of "the most vulnerable people in the country."

In the campaign so far, John McCain has been clinging to the old economic orthodoxy while Barack Obama has proposed a modestly more active role for government. But the economic assumptions are changing faster than the rhetoric of the campaign. "Reality has broken in," says Frank. And none too soon.

Read the entire article. The fact that we are in a place today where such idiocy is can be spoken in polite discourse shows the grave danger to our way of life and the inroads made by the far left into becoming accepted as mainstream in America. The day they take power, you can mark your calendar as the start of the decline of America.

Read More...

Summary only...

The Hammer & Sickle Of The EU

British Lord Monckton has published an article on how closely the EU resembles the Soviet model in organization and powers.



________________________________________________________

The article below, "EU's Lisbon Treaty Means Dictatorship" is by Lord Christopher Monkton, former policy advisor to PM Margaret Thatcher. The article appears in Executive Intelligence Review (subscription only). Since you can only get to it by subscription, I will beg forgiveness of EIR and publish the article here essentially in full with an admonishment that, if you like the article, do visit EIR and consider subscribing:

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Communist species of fascism has spread westward by stealth to infect the European Union, whose complex treaties—now hated and feared by the overtaxed, over-regulated peoples of Europe—more closely parallel the Soviet Constitution than they do any constitution of liberty or democracy. . . .

The new “President of Europe” (it may well be Tony Blair, who did his best to buy the
job at UK taxpayers’ expense by agreeing to increase the UK’s tribute to the dismal empire of Brussels by a staggering $50 billion a year) will have all the powers of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The European Commission, like the Politburo to which it is functionally identical, has the sole power to propose and hence to reject European legislation. Like the Politburo, it is unelected and self-perpetuating. Any Commissioner (and it is neither joke nor coincidence that the German word for “Commissioner” is “Kommissar”) has the power to issue an edict which has the immediate force of supreme law throughout the subject territories, no longer known as “member States” but as “regions”—effectively, regional Soviets subsidiary to, and now utterly subservient to, the Supreme Soviet in Brussels. The European Parliament, like the Duma or People’s Congress of the Soviet Union, has no power to propose legislation, and its decisions can be (and often are) overridden by the Kommissars.

The Parliaments of the “regions,” such as the UK Parliament, have no power to amend or reject any of the Kommissars’ edicts, whose undemocratic nature may be deduced from their official name—“Directives.” On 200 occasions in the past decade alone, the legislative scrutiny committee of the House of Commons has rejected European directives, but the functionally-Communist regional gauleiters Blair and [British Prime Minister Gordon] Brown have enacted every one of the Directives, regardless of the will of the people’s elected representatices.


Civil Rights Trampled

As of last December, the power which I once had as a Deputy Lieutenant of London to order the troops on to the streets to assist in civil emergencies or disasters was taken away by order of a Kommissar, and Britain no longer has the legal right put her army on to her own streets without that Kommissar’s express permission. As of this year, under the pretext of compliance with a European anti-terrorist Directive, the right to a fair trial before a properly-constituted and impartial court was abolished in the UK for any criminal case defined as “serious”: and even offences as trivial as dropping litter in public places are now treated by the regional gauleiters as serious. Without a hearing, without the right of legalrepresentation, the gauleiters can imprison any UK citizen for five years at a time, confiscate his house, freeze his bank accounts, close or compulsorily take over any business which he may own, or extradite him to any overseas country (including the most unspeakable dictatorships) even in the absence of any prima facie evidence whatsoever against him.

The news media say little about any of this, for it is now regarded as almost an offense to speak out against the gauleiters or against the European dictatorship, which in any event deploys an annual propaganda budget of $2.5 billion — an amount of which the late Dr. Goebbels could only dream. The BBC alone received $300 million from the Kommissars last year. It very seldom utters a word of criticism against the European Union. What do the British people think about this?

The few who know about it — and it is no coincidence that they are the same few who know what a false and dishonest scam the “global warming” scare is—are horrified. The people as a whole are now so uneasy about what is happening that, even though few know the full details, they are now making it clear in every opinion poll that they do not want the Lisbon Treaty. Indeed, it is now certain that if there were a referendum on the Treaty in the UK, it would be crushingly defeated.

The two functionally-Communist parties in the regional legislature at Westminster—the majority Labour party and the “Liberal” “Democrats”—each made written promises in their manifestoes for the last national elections that they would give the British people a referendum on the Treaty before it was ratified.

Recently, the leaderships of both parties, knowing that any referendum would reject the Treaty overwhelmingly, have accordingly reneged on their promises, and samizdat debates are now being held on the question whether their failure to honor those promises and their consequent transfer of our own elected representatives’ powers to the unelected hands of the alien power that the European Union has become constitutes treason.

It is indeed treason: but the UK courts are now mere rubber-stamps for the dictators. In the British constitution, the largest body of Members of Parliament not belonging to the governing party used to be known as “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.” However, the Conservative Party under its current weak, vapid, and policy-averse leadership has consistently failed to oppose the inexorable and soon-to-be-final extinction of what was once our democracy. In the absence of any Parliamentary opposition, millions of Britain’s leading minds have already fled overseas, taking their wealth and their talent with them, in a brain drain not seen since the ghastly days of Harold Wilson and the dominance of the Communist-led trades unions. I myself spent ten years overseas, but have recently returned and shall be doing my best to fight to regain my nation’s independence and democratic liberties.

Britain Now a Police State

Britain is now a closed country—a police state, with a Secret Police to rival the KGB. Our Secret Police was secretly founded by the present Government in 1998, and now its privileged and untouchable members mount dawn raids just like the KGB and then lie through their teeth in court to secure convictions against any citizen who has offended the regional gauleiters or the European Kommissars. There are “security” cameras every few inches—more of them than in any other nation. At current rates of growth, there will be a “security” camera for every UK citizen within a decade. In a sinister sequence of more than 90 criminal justice Bills in ten years, the present Government has removed every last one of the rights and freedoms of which Britain was once justly proud. We are no longer allowed even to demonstrate outside Parliament. It was the ninetieth of those Bills—passed with very little attempt at opposition—that took away the right of criminal trial.

Now, our “leaders” fawn as sycophantically upon our new, grim, European masters as their predecessors once did during the long and foolish period of appeasement that tempted Hitler to rearm unopposed and then to provoke the Second World War. This time, though, it is sycophancy by stealth. Not so long ago, a UK Cabinet Minister who refused to sign a European “Directive” was told by his own civil servants that if he did not sign it he could and would be stripped of his office and have all his possessions confiscated. Instead of resigning and going public, he cravenly and secretly signed. His story has never been made public. Another UK Cabinet Minister, who had agreed with a Directive and had written to congratulate the Kommissars on it, was summoned to Brussels and told that, although all the “regions” and the European Parliament had agreed the Directive, the Kommissars of Europe (who had proposed it, for they alone have the power to do so) had decided that it was not of any consequence and that it would not be enacted into law. When the astonished Minister was asked why, he was told that the Kommissars had wanted to make it clear to elected Ministers in all of the “regions” where the real power in Europe now lay—and it was not in their elected hands. He told me, “I had once been wholeheartedly in favor of the European Union. But it was at that moment that the scales fell from my eyes.” He died an implacable opponent of the new Europe.

And my own view? I am in favor of European democracy, and therefore firmly opposed to the atheistic-humanist, bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship that the European Union for which I once voted has so stealthily become. In Scotland, where the current “regional” gauleiter wants us to be independent of Westminster (which makes one tenth of our laws) but still subject to the dismal empire of Brussels (which makes nine-tenths of our laws), I lead a small but rapidly-growing movement in the Highlands and Islands which is aiming for independence from both Edinburgh and Brussels, but continuing loyalty to the Crown. We want our freedom back, and we are quietly planning to take it back, whether the gauleiters of the UK or the dictators of Europe like it or not. We will rise up and be a nation again.

Let freedom ring!

Read More...

Summary only...