The Baltimore Riots, The Problems In The Black Inner Cities, & The Failure Of Progressive Ideals (Updated)

The following is Judge Andrew Napolitano, appearing on Fox News, opining that the investigation into the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, the ostensible justification for the recent riots there, has not been properly handled and that the riots might well have been avoided had the Baltimore City Police Department reacted with greater swiftness. That assumes of course that the investigation could have been concluded much quicker, and I do not know if that is accurate:



Regardless, Judge Napolitano is right about what should happen going forward. Freddie Gray is owed justice. There is also no question that Freddie Gray's wrongful death was the ostensible justification for the Baltimore riots. That said, the real issues plaguing a very substantial portion of the black community, particularly those in the inner cities, go far deeper than the issue of Freddie Gray's death or police misconduct.

Senator Harry Reid, the Democrat majority leader, though repeating the utter canards that racism is at the root of the problems experienced by inner city blacks, in fact came close to hitting the mark from the floor of the Senate Monday:

"[T]he underlying problem [giving rise to the Baltimore riot is] that millions of Americans feel powerless in the face of a system that is rigged against them.”

Reid stressed that “it’s easy to feel powerless when you see the rich getting richer while opportunities to build a better life for yourself and your family are nonexistent in your own community.”

“It’s easy to feel devalued when schools in your community are failing. It’s easy to believe the system is rigged against you when you spend years watching what President Obama called today ‘a slow-rolling crisis’ of troubling police interactions with people of color,” he continued. “No American should ever feel powerless. No American should ever feel like their life is not valued. But that is what our system says to many of our fellow citizens.”

“No American should be denied the opportunity to better their lives through their own hard work. But that is the reality that too many face. In a nation that prides itself on being a land of opportunity, millions of our fellow citizens live every day with little hope of building a better future no matter how hard they try. We cannot condone the violence we see in Baltimore. But we must not ignore the despair and hopelessness that gives rise to this kind of violence.”

The reality is that Democrats own the inner cities as well as this nation's response to the plight of our black citizens since the start of the Great Society and the welfare state. They try to maintain the canard that the only things holding back blacks in the inner city today are rampant (conservative) racism, white police racism, and but a bit more application of government spending. The reality is that racism is absent from all but the fringes of society today, that inner city black youths have exponentially far more to fear from other black youths than from white police, and that the Great Society welfare state has not just failed a substantial portion of the black community, but actually worsened their situation over the past half century.

Several writers have addressed this issue today. The Editorial Board of the WSJ points out the obvious, that the progressive blue-city model is a failure. As to Baltimore city in particular, the authors note:

The latest figures from Maryland’s Department of Labor show state unemployment at 5.4%, against 8.4% for Baltimore. A 2011 city report on the neighborhood of Freddie Gray—the African-American whose death in police custody sparked the riots—reported an area that is 96.9% black with unemployment at 21%. When it comes to providing hope and jobs, we should have learned by now that no government program can substitute for a healthy private economy.

Then there are the public schools. Residents will put up with a great deal if they know their children have a chance at upward mobility through education. But when the schools no longer perform, the parents who can afford to move to the suburbs do so—and those left behind are stuck with failure. There are many measures of failure in Baltimore schools, but consider that on state tests 72% of eighth graders scored below proficient in math, 45% in reading and 64% in science.

At National Review, Michael Tanner notes that Maryland maintains one of the highest tax rates in our nation, as well as a very generous welfare system, a highly unionized work force, and an environment largely hostile to private business. Baltimore city itself suffers from declining population, high crime, very high unemployment, high out-of-wedlock births, and poor schools. As he concludes:

Once order is restored in Baltimore, there will be time to take stock. We can expect to hear the usual chorus about neglected neighborhoods and the need for government jobs programs or additional social spending. Instead, we should take to heart President Obama’s admonition that “When what you’re doing doesn’t work for 50 years, it’s time to try something new.”

Big government has failed Baltimore. If we learn nothing from what just happened — if we simply go back to throwing money at the same tired old programs — it will be just a matter of time until this happens all over again."

In yet another article, Michelle Malkin makes the same point, that the left is out of ideas to address the problems in the black inner city communities beyond spending ever more money on exactly the same type of programs that have utterly failed to this point. But probably the most articulate on these issues today is Kevin Williamson writing at National Review:

St. Louis has not had a Republican mayor since the 1940s, . . . the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Baltimore has seen two Republicans sit in the mayor’s office since the 1920s — and none since the 1960s. Like St. Louis, it is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Philadelphia has not elected a Republican mayor since 1948. The last Republican to be elected mayor of Detroit was congratulated on his victory by President Eisenhower. Atlanta, a city so corrupt that its public schools are organized as a criminal conspiracy against its children, last had a Republican mayor in the 19th century. . . . Atlanta is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department.

Black urban communities face institutional failure across the board every day. American cities are by and large Democratic-party monopolies, monopolies generally dominated by the so-called progressive wing of the party. The results have been catastrophic, and not only in poor black cities such as Baltimore and Detroit. Money can paper over some of the defects of progressivism in rich, white cities such as Portland and San Francisco, but those are pretty awful places to be non-white and non-rich, too: Blacks make up barely 9 percent of the population in San Francisco, but they represent 40 percent of those arrested for murder, and they are arrested for drug offenses at ten times their share of the population. Criminals make their own choices, sure, but you want to take a look at the racial disparity in educational outcomes and tell me that those low-income nine-year-olds in Wisconsin just need to buck up and bootstrap it?

There are people who should be made to answer for that: What has Martin O’Malley to say for himself? What can Ed Rendell say for himself other than that he secured a great deal of investment for the richest square mile in Philadelphia? What has Nancy Pelosi done about the radical racial divide in San Francisco?

. . . [The rioting] we have seen in places such as Ferguson and Baltimore is much more ordinarily criminal than political. But there is a legitimate concern here — from which no one seems to be willing to draw the obvious conclusion: There is someone to blame for what’s wrong in Baltimore.

Would any sentient adult American be shocked to learn that Baltimore has a corrupt and feckless police department enabled by a corrupt and feckless city government? I myself would not, and the local authorities’ dishonesty and stonewalling in the death of Freddie Gray is reminiscent of what we have seen in other cities. There’s a heap of evidence that the Baltimore police department is pretty bad. This did not come out of nowhere. While the progressives have been running the show in Baltimore, police commissioner Ed Norris was sent to prison on corruption charges (2004), two detectives were sentenced to 454 years in prison for dealing drugs (2005), an officer was dismissed after being videotaped verbally abusing a 14-year-old and then failing to file a report on his use of force against the same teenager (2011), an officer was been fired for sexually abusing a minor (2014), and the city paid a quarter-million-dollar settlement to a man police illegally arrested for the non-crime of recording them at work with his mobile phone. There’s a good deal more. Does that sound like a disciplined police organization to you?

Yes, Baltimore seems to have some police problems. But let us be clear about whose fecklessness and dishonesty we are talking about here: No Republican, and certainly no conservative, has left so much as a thumbprint on the public institutions of Baltimore in a generation. Baltimore’s police department is, like Detroit’s economy and Atlanta’s schools, the product of the progressive wing of the Democratic party enabled in no small part by black identity politics. This is entirely a left-wing project, and a Democratic-party project. When will the Left be held to account for the brutality in Baltimore — brutality for which it bears a measure of responsibility on both sides? There aren’t any Republicans out there cheering on the looters, and there aren’t any Republicans exercising real political power over the police or other municipal institutions in Baltimore. Community-organizer — a wretched term — Adam Jackson declared that in Baltimore “the Democrats and the Republicans have both failed.” Really? Which Republicans? Ulysses S. Grant? Unless I’m reading the charts wrong, the Baltimore city council is 100 percent Democratic.

The other Democratic monopolies aren’t looking too hot, either. We’re sending Atlanta educators to prison for running a criminal conspiracy to hide the fact that they failed, and failed woefully, to educate the children of that city. Isolated incident? Nope: Atlanta has another cheating scandal across town at the police academy. Who is being poorly served by the fact that Atlanta’s school system has been converted into crime syndicate? Mostly poor, mostly black families. Who is likely to suffer from any incompetents advanced through the Atlanta police department by its corrupt academy? Mostly poor, mostly black people. Who suffers most from the incompetence of Baltimore’s Democratic mayor? Mostly poor, mostly black families — should they feel better that she’s black? Who suffers most from the incompetence and corruption of Baltimore’s police department? Mostly poor, mostly black families. And it’s the same people who will suffer the most from the vandalism and pillaging going on in Baltimore, too. The evidence suggests very strongly that the left-wing, Democratic claques that run a great many American cities — particularly the poor and black cities — are not capable of running a school system or a police department. They are incompetent, they are corrupt, and they are breathtakingly arrogant. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore — this is what Democrats do.

And the kids in the street screaming about “inequality”? Somebody should tell them that the locale in these United States with the least economic inequality is Utah, i.e. the state farthest away from the reach of the people who run Baltimore.

Keep voting for the same thing, keep getting the same thing.

What happened to Freddie Gray demands justice. What has happened with a substantial portion of the black community over the past half century started as a tragedy, Today, in a nation as rich as ours, it has now reached the point of obscenity. It is every bit as equally deserving of justice.

Update: This from Powerline:

The Washington Post reports that a prisoner who was in the police van with Freddie Gray says he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed he “was intentionally trying to injure himself.” According to the Post, the prisoner’s statement is contained in an affidavit that’s part of an application by the police for search warrant seeking the seizure of the uniform worn by one of the officers involved in Gray’s arrest or transport.

I can’t tell for sure from the Post’s report whether the prisoner executed the affidavit or whether the affidavit is from a police officer who relates what the prisoner allegedly told him. It looks like the Post is saying it’s the latter.

It seems counter-intuitive to suppose that Gray inflicted serious bodily injury on himself. However, without knowing Gray’s state of mind at the time — e.g., was he high on drugs; was he trying to set up a claim of police brutality — it’s impossible to evaluate the plausibility of the perception that this is what happened.

In any event, if Gray’s fellow prisoner does indeed say he heard Gray banging against the walls and that Gray seemed to be trying intentionally to injure himself, this will cast doubt on claims that police mistreatment caused Gray to sustain injuries while he was in the van. Such evidence will also make it difficult to attribute Gray’s death to the police.

The Post says that “video shot by several bystanders to Gray’s arrest shows two officers on top of Gray, their knees in his back, and then dragging his seemingly limp body to the van as he cried out.” Thus, some of his injuries may be due to what happened during the arrest, while others may be due to what happened in the van.

There is also the police commissioner’s statement that officers violated policy by failing properly to restrain Gray via a seat belt while he was in the van. However, the police union is pushing back on this assertion.

The union president says that the policy mandating seat belts wasn’t emailed to officers until three days before Gray was arrested. Moreover, it was emailed as part of a package of five policy changes.

Officers should, of course, read about all policy changes. But human nature being what is, the union president’s statement that officers tend not to do so is plausible. It would be one thing if the officers who dealt with Gray had violated a longstanding, widely known policy on seat belts. It’s another if, as seems to be the case, the policy was brand new and had only just been communicated by email as part of package of policy changes.

In any event, the Post’s report suggests that the facts surrounding Gray’s unfortunate death may not be as straightforward as those who have rushed to condemn the police assert them to be. The best approach remains what it has been all along — wait for the facts before forming a judgment.

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Europe's Islamic Problem

One of the major problems that most European countries face today is a large and restive Muslim population within their individual borders that has not integrated. The great European experiment in multiculturalism has failed catastrophically, and this problem of an ever-growing and restive Muslim population in Europe is near intractable now, given the reality that Europe is at a stage where the problem is not simply immigrants who can be dealt with by repatriation if they are dangerously problematic, but second and third generation native born Muslims who are themselves failing to integrate into Western society.

Dr. Nicolai Sennels is a psychologist who works mostly with youths accused or convicted of crime in his native Denmark. That job has brought him into extensive contact with Muslim teens, a group that, along with older Muslims, commits violent crime at a rate many times greater than non-Muslim Danes. Dr. Sennels, in a very detailed and informative article, “Report from the therapy room: Why are Muslims more violent and criminal?” (provided to me by Ms. Bookworm Room), analyzes the causes of this violence, and finds the roots firmly in Islamic culture. It is of note that many of the patients Dr. Sennels dealt with are second and third generation native born Danes.

To sum up Dr. Sennels observations:

1. Muslim culture sees anger, aggression and even violence as appropriate responses to challenges or criticism.

2. Muslims are more likely to be insecure, and thus driven to anger, aggression and violence by anything they perceive as threatening their honor, including slights to their religion.

3. Muslim culture promotes a victim mentality as opposed to a sense of personal responsibility.

4. Muslims discriminate between Muslims and non-Muslims.

5. The extreme repression of women in Islam leads to a variety of dysfunctions, as well as a the very high incidence of homosexuality. Among the dysfunctions are bestiality, pedophilia, and rape ideations. This also fuels aggressive behavior in Muslim men.

6. While many believe that poverty is the primary cause of antisocial behavior among Muslims, the reality is the opposite. For Muslims in Denmark, it is antisocial behavior that leads to poverty. [To add my own note to that observation, most terrorists do not come from impoverished backgrounds, but from the middle class of Muslim society, something which the left regularly refuses to acknowledge. Doing so would mean making judgments about a non-western culture, and moreover, challenges the left's core belief that economics, and more particularly economic redistribution, is the penultimate answer to the world's problems.]

7. There is little emphasis in Islamic culture on knowledge and education outside of the Koran. This lack of respect for education severely limits opportunities in life for many Muslim immigrants in the West.

8. The prevalence of inbreeding among Muslims also has a significant impact on many aspects of immigrant lives, not the least of which is the inability to integrate because of a lack of education.

9. It is a canard to claim that criticism - whether under the rubric of "stigmatization," or, I will add, "Islamophobia" in the West - leads legitimately to feelings of victimization by Muslims and causes them to lash out.

10. In order for Muslims to integrate into Western society, they must want to integrate, they must be in an environment that allows for it, and they must have the capacity to integrate into a society whose values are very much at odds, in many ways, with Islamic teachings. Rarely, it seems, are those three conditions present, particularly in Europe where immigration has been so heavy, and the welfare state such, that Muslims tend to congregate in enclaves. Mr. Sennels then includes this nugget, which gives some sense of both the cause of and the degree to which lack of Muslim integration in European countries is predicated on a socialist welfare state:

First we have to ask ourselves: why should Muslim immigrants want to integrate? They can live their culture, receive enough money, and have a full functioning social life within their Muslim communities without even learning our language or even working. We have Muslim schools, Muslim parallel societies and even Muslim nursing homes. Muslim graveyards have existed for years, so even after death Muslim immigrants do not need to be close to non-Muslims.

After discussing in detail the facts summarized above -- and if you doubt his conclusions, I would urge you to read his article in its entirety -- Dr. Sennels gives his proposed solutions to the problems he has identified. They are sufficiently serious and worthy of consideration that I include them below in full:

Muslim immigration to the West is the greatest sociological and group psychological experiment in World History. The experiment is clearly going wrong, and statistics and facts show us that the problems are accelerating.

Any good scientist with common sense would in such a case start by putting the experiment to a complete halt: Stop Muslim immigration and cut citizenships to resident Muslim immigrants and refugees. Non-Western immigrants and refugees who have not yet attained Western citizenship should only be able to continue their life in our Western countries as long as they can support themselves and are not convicted of any violent crimes. There is nothing wrong with asking unpleasant guests to leave a party.

Our social workers and welfare system have to realize that we are dealing with people for whom cultural and religiously defined restrictions and consequences are the prime tools for regulating peoples’ behaviour.

In general we have to make it so practically difficult and economically unbeneficial not to integrate that immigrants who do not want to or are not able to integrate will find it more tempting to seek their happiness somewhere else. Denmark has an excellent law on repatriation – state sponsored emigration: Immigrants receive up to 15,000 Euros (20,000 USD) if they are willing to give up their citizenships or permanent residence permits and move home to their country of origin. They can also receive economic help for medicine in up to one year and support for buying equipment used for establishing a business in their home country.

Pedagogic strategies, police work, integration projects and social welfare checks are therefore wasted if we are not strictly consequential. Economic social help should be given to people who display social behaviour – it should not support anti-social lifestyles and be a leash so long that the destructive or unintegrated individuals only realize their unwelcome and islamonauseating behaviour when it is too late.

Another important Danish law that hopefully will inspire the rest of Europe is to limit the Child Support from the state to only include the first two children (the country’s average). In Denmark, this has meant that Danish families and well integrated immigrant families can still manage to have more than two children if they wish so — because they work, etc. Less successful immigrant parents will have to think twice, though, before they start or import big families – that by the way in most cases inherit the parents” lack of integration. Economic pressure should also consist of much better control of taxes and VAT in shops suspected or reported of cheating. It should not be possible to move to our countries and live from on Child Support or unpaid taxes to the government.

Muslim organisations and leaders should be able to prove that they are so-called moderate. This should include that they publicly renounce and disclaim any violent and racist passages in the Islamic scriptures, and acknowledge the freedom of women and speech, rule of secular laws, etc. Preaching the Quran as being the truth and stating Muhammed to be an excellent example of good behaviour is telling people to break the law. Islam has to adapt if it wants to be legal according to our constitutions.

Unfortunately we will also need to create laws that will affect the privacy of the general public: We need to install sufficient amount of surveillance equipment (cameras etc.) in areas with serious problems with crime and violent attitudes towards the authorities. Violent habitual offenders should wear a GPS device for a specific periods after being released, so that the police are able to track and follow the convicts.

It goes without saying that we of course should fight the spread of sharia, cancel all present and future attempts of islamization, reassert our own cultural values and do what is necessary to reinstall and secure peace and the rule of secular law in the Muslim ghettos – effectively.

Finally, we need to free the Muslim women. The freedom of the women is our best tool against any kind of aggressive or backward religious tendencies. Female social workers should have regular meetings with the women from immigrant groups that are known for suppression of women (primarily the Muslim groups of immigrants). In this way we have a chance of making sure that the women are safe, free and know their rights to repatriation, to move to a women’s shelter, to contraception, etc. If their men do not like this kind of interference, they are free to leave the country: We will not accept that a medieval view of women takes root in our societies, and we will fight traditional Islam by freeing the Muslim women.

If we do this, we should have a fair chance to integrate the remaining Muslims, minimize their pressure on our democracy, protect the feeling of safety and social coherence in our societies, and keep our welfare systems to a satisfying degree.

Besides actively fighting organisations and regimes that threaten our existence or way of living, our foreign policy must aim at diminishing the population growth in the poor countries. Overpopulation is a cause for conflicts about space, food, pure drinking water, pastures, areas for cultivation, and other important resources. It is also a strain on the environment and climate. It is impossible to create the necessary infrastructure, educational system and a sufficient amount of jobs in overpopulated countries — which of course leads to poverty.

Our development aid to the third world should not be given to their often corrupt governments. Instead it should be given directly to the citizens following the same model as the Nobel Prize winning micro credits: E.g. One dollar per day if one has no or one child, half a dollar per day if one has two children and no money if one starts a big family. In this way the parents do not need to give birth to a lot of children hoping that at least one of them will be so successful that he or she can support the parents when they get too old to work. The parents will then be economically capable to give their children proper education and nourishment (malnutrition harms the development of the brain) which can create the educated middle class that is the motor in all successful societies.

Hungry, poor and uneducated people are usually bad democrats and easily become tempted by the cornucopia of simple explanations and promises offered by political Islam. Putting a lid on the population explosion and thereby focusing on long term solutions for limiting poverty and raising the educational level are necessary tools in fighting the growing religious fanaticism in the Third World. This again will lessen the amount of internal and international violent conflicts in those areas, thereby minimizing the flow of refugees and immigrants to the West.

The many threats and dangers resulting from illegal immigration, including crime, terror, negative economic consequences, social unrest and a general decrease in social coherence, makes it imperative that states and supranational institutions such as the EU and UN secure our national borders and the borders of Europe effectively.

Thankfully, America, with its relatively small population of Muslims and much better track record of integration, is not experiencing the degree pf problems of Europe. But if something radical is not done in Europe to address this problem posed by a lack of integration, it is hard to see how this issue will be resolved in the long term by anything other than bloodshed.

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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.

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The Left's Constitutional Wish List

Do the left wing in our country see our Constitution as an archaic obstacle to their goals? The recent evidence certainly points to it. The question then becomes, if the left could wage a magic wand, with what would they replace our Constitution?

It was about two years ago that the left's "go to guy" for policy issues, Ezra Klein, complained about the Constitution, that "the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago."  The left has been working through the Courts to work fundamental changes to the Constitution for 50 years, creating new rights out of whole cloth in many instances while, in other areas of  enumerated rights, limiting them. As to the latter, religion and property rights have been the arenas of the most judicial activism.

Thus it was no surprise when a sitting left wing Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, should opine that Egypt should not look to the U.S. Constitution as a model, but rather to South Africa's Constitution, as it "embrace[s] basic human rights . . . [and] an independent judiciary." Nor is it surprising to see the New York Times weigh in with an editorial, suggesting that our Constitution has many faults. "The rights guaranteed by the American Constitution are parsimonious by international standards," and the Constitution is "difficult to amend." I add as a comment here that it is not difficult to amend our Constitution if you are a federal judge who wants to see their own personal policy choices made into Constitutional law. At any rate, the NYT author then launches into the crux of the left wing criticism of our Constitution:

Americans recognize rights not widely protected, including ones to a speedy and public trial, and are outliers in prohibiting government establishment of religion. But the Constitution is out of step with the rest of the world in failing to protect, at least in so many words, a right to travel, the presumption of innocence and entitlement to food, education and health care.

It has its idiosyncrasies. Only 2 percent of the world’s constitutions protect, as the Second Amendment does, a right to bear arms."

As to a right to travel and a presumption of innocence, the NYT criticism is ridiculous.  Those have been fundamental rights recognized by our Courts since the time of our founding.  Likewise, the left  uniformly hates the thought of an armed populace.  But the real nub of the NYT criticism is that our Constitution does not make us all wards of the state by entitling us all to "food, education and welfare."    

 The South African Constitution so beloved of Justice Ginsburg goes further than merely "food, education and welfare."  It includes:

-  a right to housing;
-  makes affirmative action Constitutional;
-  has a provision requiring regulation of hate speech;
-  provides a right of all workers to unionize and strike;
-  provides a right to a clean environment;
-  allows property to be expropriated not merely for a public purpose, but also "in the public interest;
-  provides an extensive children's bill of rights; and finally,
-  it contains a clause that allows the government to limit the above rights as it deems necessary.

In short it is a leftie's wet dream.  It provides cradle to grave welfare, extensive unionization, it limits property rights, allows for government thought control under the auspices of hate speech, and finally, contains a catch all provision that allows the government to limit all of the above rights.  It is a Constitution that requires big government, massive taxation to provide  the welfare state, and that allows religious freedom on one hand but limits it on the other through hate speech laws and by requiring the state to assume functions that are traditionally charitable.  And on top of that, the catch all provision would allow the government expansive power to drive a gaping hole through every one of the rights.

If you want to see where the left would lead our nation, Ginsburg and the NYT are not exactly hiding the ball.  They would take us from a nation of limited government to a socialist nation with an expansive government.  Unfortunately, through judicial activisim, they are well on the way to achieving their goal.  It is a process that, as Newt Gingrich and Andrew McCarthy point out, must end.

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What Is Romney's Vision & What Does It Mean For Our Country?

"I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there."

Mitt Romney, CNN Interview, 1 February 2012

As Mark Levin asked on his show the other day, does Romney have a clue about capitalism? I would add, does he have a clue about the failure of the welfare state, the plight of those caught in generational poverty, or for that matter, the role of Democrats in insuring that nothing is done about it?

My gravest concern about Romney's electability is that the left is going to be able to successfully portray him as a combination Dr. Evil / Gordon Gecko / Robber barron in what is going to be a take no prisoners bout of class warfare. And if they do, Obama may well win. After all, if nothing else, Romney's campaign has taught us how saturation negative ads can indeed work to destroy one's opponent, irrespective of fairness or accuracy.

What Romney said in the quote above is beyond tin ear. It not only plays right into the left's class warfare meme, it just shows almost a complete failure to grasp the plight of America. The left will make a huge deal out of this. The right should also, as we are getting very close to making this man our nominee for President.

What a conservative candidate should have said:

President Obama's economy has driven millions of people into poverty and threatens to drive many more there unless we turn things around. History tells us with 100% certainty that the way to do that is through capitalism and wealth creation.

And yet, President Obama answer to all of this is to punish wealth creation out of "fairness." That language is also found in the history books. It is the language of class warfare, of socialism, and of economic ruin. Obama's appeal to "fairness" falsely appeals to our sense of justice. Inevitably, it will cripple our nation and make life that much harder for our declining middle class.

President Obama thinks he can tax and regulate us to prosperity. He thinks that he can do better than capitalism by pouring billions into creating new markets out of whole cloth with huge government mandates. President Obama's idea of capitalism is crony capitalism, where he, not the marketplace, picks the winners and losers. It is great if you are a crony of the President - but it hurts every other person in this country. No nation on earth has ever succeeded with the economic policies this President embraces.

But even beyond that, the welfare and entitlement society are driving our nation into bankruptcy. As to the welfare state, it has utterly failed the many poor in our society who are caught in generational cycles of poverty. It is a tragedy and a travesty that fifty years on from the start of the welfare state, 25% of the black population is still living below the poverty line. But we know how to stop that cycle. Education is the key. To paraphrase Juan Williams, the most important thing we can do for the perennial poor is to allow their children to receive precisely the same level of quality education that President Obama's children receive.

Sasha and Malia are receiving the very finest education available in a private school in Washinton D.C. Yet one of the first acts of President Obama was to end a program that gave the poor children of Washington, D.C. the opportunity to get that same education as his children. Instead, President Obama consigned the DC's poor to the worst public educational system in America. He did that because the Teacher's Unions - the economic foundation of the Democrat Party and the single biggest impediment to improving education in America - complained.

Unfortunately, if you vote for President Obama, if you are poor or, for that matter, for many in the middle class, your children will never get that opportunity that Sasha and Malia Obama have. There is no excuse for any child born of this country to be forced into a substandard education. Unfortunately, that cycle will never end under President Obama and the Democrats, because they value the dollars they get from the Teachers' unions more than they care about the generational poor in this country.

We really are at an absolutely critical point in our nation's history. Progressivism has built up in our machinery of state to levels that have worked fundamental change to our nation and that threaten to drag us down into bankruptcy and societal failure. Wholesale fundamental changes need to occur to clean out the machinery before it becomes irrevocably broken. Our educational system desperately needs to be overhauled. The out of control regulatory bureaucracies need to be systemically altered to restore democratic control. The EPA should never be able to regulate carbon without an affirmative vote of Congress. HHS should never be able to force Christians to fund acts that directly violate their religion's core beleifs without an affirmative vote of Congress. The FCC should never be able to unilaterally exercise control over the internet without an affirmative vote of Congress. The methods by which the left funnels hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to left wing organizations needs to end. Unions need to be brought to heel. No person in America should be forced to pay dues to a union simply so that they can get a job in a particular industry. The greens' keys to the courthouse, where decisions are made that should only be made by Congress, needs to end. The left's war on our military needs to end before we become so weakened that other nation's are willing to become adventurous. And then there are the entitlement programs that have us on the knife's edge of ruin.

I look at all of the above and ask myself, will Romney make any of those changes? Does he have a vision for America that addresses any of these fundamental issues? I don't think so. At best, I think that he will tinker around the margins for most of them. Villagers With Torches has a very good post up answering the question similarly. But each primary voter really needs to look at it and answer that question for themselves. Romney would be better for America than Obama, true, but is he, at this critical moment, the best choice that Republicans can make?

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A Primer On The Euro Crisis

The Euro is the official currency of the "eurozone," adopted as the national currency by 17 of 27 of the member states of the European Union. It is the world's second largest reserve currency as well as the second most traded currency behind the dollar. All monetary policy for the Euro is set by the European Central Bank (ECB).

The Euro officially became an "accounting currency" subject to ECB control in 1992, with members of the Eurozone normalizing the value of their currency to a "Euro" standard. The euro as an actual physical currency didn't occur until 2002.

Nominally, the adoption of a single currency was sold on several theoretical benefits. It would eliminate the currency exchange fees from the cost of doing business between the European states. It would encourage competition by allowing quick comparison of prices. And by encouraging stability and efficiency, the hope was that the euro would stimulate economic growth, reduce the unemployment rates in the eurozone, and encourage international investment.

The reality has proven that the downsides were not sufficiently examined. Because all monetary power, including the power to set EU wide interest rates, resides with the ECB, this poses a huge problem for nations with weaker economies during times of economic downturn. One way in which weak nations have been able to survive such problems is to intentionally devalue their currency by speeding up the printing presses. While such a move brings inflation, it gives the nation a window in which to pay off its debts. The flip side of such a drastic action is that, if there is not enough discipline in the government to carefully limit the presses and pay off the debts, you end up with Zimbabwe.

It also poses a problem for nations that need to stimulate growth. Normally, a sovereign nation that wants to stimulate growth will lower its prime interest rate. But again, that is not something that the individual member states of the EU can do. They are stuck with whatever ECB decides for the eurozone as a whole - and the ECB is avoiding inflation like the plague. That leaves only tax policy to stimulate growth among the troubled eurozone members, but at this point, each is being pressured - and indeed, has agreed - to raise taxes in an effort to lower its sovereign debt.

Several people, such as Robert Samuelson, have painted the Eurozone crisis as simply a failure of the European welfare state model. Others, on the left, such as Paul Krugman, have claimed that the crisis has nothing to do with the welfare state model. Setting that argument aside for a separate post, it seems clear that the high cost of the welfare state has played a role. But there are also systemic issues, mentioned above, that are combining with a host of issues unique to individual countries such that at least five Eurozone member countries sit on the brink of fiscal ruin. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland are all in danger of defaulting on their sovereign debt. The general rule of thumb is that, when a country cannot sell 10 yr. bonds with a rate of return below 7%, the likelihood of an eventual default becomes real. With the exception of Spain, all of the troubled EU nations have crossed the 7% level. Spain is flirting with it.

In the cases of Greece and Italy, deficit spending on a bloated public sector and overgenerous welfare state drove their national debt significantly above 100% of GDP (Greece - 142%; Italy 119%). Ultimately, this drove their cost of borrowing above the magic line - 7% on 10 year bonds.

Portugal is Greece without the international press. It has a debt to GDP ratio of 93%, much of it coming from deficit spending over the past decade on the welfare state. Their cost of borrowing reached a high this month of 13.47% on ten year bonds. That said, Portugal is in the midst of cutting public sector benefits and increasing taxes.

Italy, unlike Greece and Portugal, has a strong manufacturing base and a relatively frugal population. Nonetheless, Italy "suffers from an overall failure to implement reforms needed to boost productivity and growth," which, when combined with the size of their national debt, is proving toxic.

Ireland is also in dire straights. Ireland's welfare state was not overlarge, and indeed, Ireland was running a budget surplus through 2005. But today, Ireland has a debt to GDP ratio of 94.9% and is having to borrow over 40% of every Euro to finance its government spending. What drove Ireland into its hole was an ill advised easing of credit standards and a housing bubble that burst in 2007. The Irish government than stepped in and nationalized the bad debts being held by the banks, causing a massive increase in publicly held debt. Ireland's cost of borrowing is today 7.74% on ten year bonds.

As to Spain, it's national debt was a comparatively paltry 61% as of last year, though much of that has come with recent increase in deficit spending. Spain's true problems are massive privately held debt and a horrendous economic outlook. Unemployment at or near 20% combined with both a housing bubble that makes the U.S.'s look small by comparison and a country that, because it does not produce any domestic energy, is subject to extreme shock when the price of oil jumps as it did in 2008, have all combined to make Spain's economy look extremely weak. All that has driven Spain's cost of borrowing rising, recently to a high of 6.7%:

In many ways, the economic situation in Spain is now even worse than the economic situation in Greece. Spain's unemployment was already above 20 percent even before this recent crisis. There are now 4.6 million people without jobs in Spain. There are 1.6 million unsold properties in Spain, six times the level per capita in the United States. Total public/private debt in Spain has reached 270 percent of GDP.

The BBC has a very good article on Spain's deep economic troubles and how its problems do not fit the mold of profligate welfare state spending.

It is safe to say that, in each of these countries, the fact that they cannot manipulate their currency or make monetary policy has removed the traditional tools of the sovereign for saving their countries from economic disaster. To explain in greater detail, this from Edward Harrison:

Now that crisis is upon us, the currency trilemma of a currency union that is the Impossible Trinity of fixed exchange rates, independent monetary policy and free movement of capital has reared its head. Hands are tied; in a currency union, there is no devaluation to recoup competitiveness, no room for fiscal freedom, and no control over monetary policy. This leaves so-called internal devaluation and/or sovereign default as the remaining ways to escape crisis. The political will to go through this is impaired because internal devaluation (across the board wage and price cuts) leads to a long and arduous depression . . . And default leads to massive creditor losses – not just in Ireland but also in Germany. So the Eurozone is trying to figure out how to keep its union together while minimizing costs – with the ECB and IMF integrally involved.

On the flip side of the coin, there is no central authority overseeing individual nation's budgets or taxes, as if the EU were a true sovereign. So, essentially, the Eurozone presents the worst of all worlds.

In an effort to save the Euro, those five nations in trouble are being forced to adopt significant "austerity" measures. Those measures, across the board, mean a significant reduction in the size of government and their welfare programs. For example, in Greece, the public sector is set to be reduced in size by and all public sector wages are being cut by almost a third. Collective bargaining is limited. The pensions of public sector workers are being sliced by 20% to 40%.

Further, all nations in the EU, led by Germany (the rise of the Fifth Reich), are meeting to consider systemic changes to the eurozone in an effort to save the Euro. This from Reuters:

Germany - Europe's biggest economy - was intent on changing the European Union's treaty to enshrine stricter budget discipline and penalties for countries that failed to adhere to them, to ensure there could be no repeat of the current crisis. From the German perspective, only by reforming economies, cutting social benefits and working longer would the indebted members of the euro zone and the single currency project itself emerge from the turmoil. Printing money would buy only a temporary respite and would remove the incentive to reform.

As to whether the Euro can be saved, the general consensus seems to be that it cannot. That said, a detailed analysis from Goldman Sachs concludes that the Euro may be salvagable, but that all ways forward are problematic. Ultimately, the eurozone countries must either come together in a much tighter economic union with a structure much like the U.S., or Germany and other core nations are going to have to weaken their economies in favor of the "peripheral" nations. In any event, Goldman Sachs paints the consquences of the failure of the Euro as dire - with the seizing up of credit and equity markets as the first step.

But the Euro crisis is also having another, much more insidious impact. The European Union is anti-democratic, and that this monetary crisis has been the springboard for actions that are direct assaults by the EU on democracy in the European states. Indeed, both Italy and Greece have been subject to coups at the direction of the EU.

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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.

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