Maggie's Farm

Two posts about Marxism on Maggie's in two days! That's a record. And now for a third:

The Left in the Western World, such as it is, remains Marxist at core. I have read and studied Marx, as has Mead. They have some worthwhile and interesting insights into psychology, sociology, and human nature.

The problem is their reductionism. The rare people in the modern world with fresh new insights - eg Freud, Marx and Engels, Adam Smith, Burke, etc. often find their notions reduced to simplistic, reductionistic equations which they might not have anticipated.

Re Marx and Engels, every human is, in part, Homo economicus. But only in part. Humans are also Homo spirito, Homo ludens, Homo conflictus, Homo everything. That's why freedom is so important, if we accept our Western idea of the uniqueness and, almost, sanctity (not almost, if one has religion) of the individual.

At Chicago Boyz, Seizing the Opportunity to Destroy Western Civilization. A quote:

Narrative reduces personal experience to a linear progression where cause and effect seem to have a purposeful order. These narratives can then be shared with others, leading to the best definition of history ever: history is a fable agreed upon. Most personal narratives will never be the equivalent of the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Gibbon; or even the fables of Aesop, La Fontaine, or Orwell. Most are simply humble habitual ways of thinking. As habits of thought, such narratives largely control how you react to unfolding events, whether it’s pricking your finger or waging a world war. 

At American Thinker, a brief word on the topic. 

America don't need no steenkin' noblesse. But, re the elites, Liberals are smarter. I knew that! They are smart and I am dumb. But not too dumb to be able to support my family and my wife's dumb animals in some degree of comfort and pleasure. 

Thank goodness for the equality of one dummie, one vote. I have two Ivy degrees but always doubted my brains. Guess I was right about something.

I do not know the history of how government unions came to be, but I deplore them. Who are they defending those employees from? Their evil neighbors who pay their salaries and their benefits?

The days of fat-cat evil Capitalists oppressing workers are long gone. Private sector unionization is in the dusk of its history, but government unionization is growing by leaps and bounds. Can anyone imagine a unionized military?

In my view, public employee unionization should be illegal because their opponent, in effect, is the public. But there is the basic right to free assembly. At the very least, public employee unions should be prohibited from politics and political contributions: that seems corrupt by definition but, again, there are logical consistency and freedom issues here.

People have been thinking about the topic lately:

From Declining unions, increasing stranglehold:

As the latest BLS statistics reveal, more union members – 7.9 million – now work for the government than the 7.4 million union members working for companies in the private economy, which has five times more workers. This imbalance has profound consequences for all workers, and for democracy itself.

From Rick Moran's WHAT DO WE OWE PUBLIC EMPLOYEES?

We have allowed public employees to ascend to a privileged place - a pedestal that they were never intended to occupy by the Founders - to the point where their influence over politicians, especially at the state and local level, have made them a force unto themselves in growing the size of government. More public employees means more union members, which means more dues money, which translates into more political contributions to friendly politicians who will gladly repeat the cycle.

This vicious circle must be ended. The biggest reason is that it is bankrupting us.

At Reason, Class War: How public servants became our masters:

People who are supposed to serve the public have become a privileged elite that exploits political power for financial gain and special perks. Because of its political power, this interest group has rigged the game so there are few meaningful checks on its demands. Government employees now receive far higher pay, benefits, and pensions than the vast majority of Americans working in the private sector. Even when they are incompetent or abusive, they can be fired only after a long process and only for the most grievous offenses.

It’s a two-tier system in which the rulers are making steady gains at the expense of the ruled. The predictable results: Higher taxes, eroded public services, unsustainable levels of debt, and massive roadblocks to reforming even the poorest performing agencies and school systems. If this system is left to grow unchecked, we will end up with a pale imitation of the free society envisioned by the Founders. 

Via View from 1776:

I will grant you that liberals always have the best of intentions.  They are always trying to make things better.  In doing so, they victimize many.  When I was growing up in rural Louisiana in the 1940s, both blacks and whites had strong, church-going families, low divorce rates, low rates of out-of-wedlock births and the crime rate was low.  Abortion was virtually unknown, and was certainly not a means of birth control.  All of that changed with LBJ’s Great Society programs.  In an effort to “help”, liberals gave people (both black and white) incentives to have children out of wedlock.  The result was several generations of welfare mothers, disintegration of the family, indigence, government dependency, soaring crime rates, etc.  All of this was predictable, but it was only ended in 1996 when, after two Presidential vetoes, a Republican Congress finally shamed Bill Clinton into living up to his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it”.  Yes, the Great Society had noble intentions, but it harmed poor whites and poor blacks indiscriminately, almost destroying the black family. Liberals always have the best of intentions, but the results are often disastrous.

The Fable of Market Meritocracy 

"Markets don't reward smart people. They reward value." Yes, that is what markets are for. Markets are ultimately about human psychology; the only way to determine value and price, given human nature, fiat currency, and the annoying limitations of reality.

From Glucksman at City Journal's The Velvet Philosophical Revolution -Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the battle for political freedom goes on.

During four decades of ideological confrontation, theoreticians and journalists had argued about how a society should move from capitalism to socialism. There was no research on the opposite question—that is, on the transition from socialism to capitalism—apart from a few inconclusive studies, most notably in Poland, concerning the possibility of introducing some elements of the free market into a Communist society. As the philosopher Josep Ramoneda has observed, the whole world—Communists, anti-Communists, and those in between—took it as given that the Soviet Union and its satellites could not “return” to capitalism. So when, during the Velvet Revolution, demonstrators posed exactly this question—How can we go from socialism to capitalism?—there was no ready answer.

As Western intellectuals watched Berlin in November 1989, they reconsidered their long belief that the world was fated to be Communist—but retained their belief in fate.

Jay Cost at RCP with America is not Ungovernable. A quote:

The solution the country ultimately settled on had five important features: checks and balances so that the branches would police one another; a large republic so that majority sentiment was fleeting and not intensely felt; a Senate where the states would be equal; enumerated congressional powers to limit the scope of governmental authority; and the Bill of Rights to offer extra protection against the government.

The end result was a government that is powerful, but not infinitely so. Additionally, it is schizophrenic. It can do great things when it is of a single mind - but quite often it is not of one mind. So, to govern, our leaders need to build a broad consensus. When there is no such consensus, the most likely outcome is that the government will do nothing.

The President's two major initiatives - cap-and-trade and health care - have failed because there was not a broad consensus to enact them. Our system is heavily biased against such proposals. That's a good thing.

Yes, it is a good thing. And, in general, government doing nothing is a good thing.

I love this quote from Reagan (if you didn't hear, this weekend would have been his 99th birthday). Borrowed from Moonbattery:

Right now ... I'm looking down on a busy city at rush hour. The streets below are twin ribbons of sparkling red and white.

I wonder about the people in those cars, who they are, what they do, what they are thinking about as they head for the warmth of home and family. Come to think of it, I've met them - oh, maybe not those particular individuals, but still I feel I know them. Some of our social planners refer to them as "the masses" which only proves they don't know them. I've been privileged to meet people all over this land in the special kind of way you meet them when you are campaigning. They are not "the masses," or as the elitists would have it - "the common man." They are very uncommon. Individuals each with his or her own hopes and dreams, plans and problems, and the kind of quiet courage that makes this whole country run better than just about any other place on earth.

January 27, 1978

The story of Germany's SDU is relevant to everyone these days, even though it sounds strange to hear people still talking about "workers" as they still do in Europe - as if it were some permanent condition of serfhood. One quote from the piece at Boston Review:

...social democracy may have settled the issues of industrial society, but it did so just in time for industrial society to give way to a globalized economy, one with its own complicated and pernicious effects on labor and social equality: immigration, fluctuating employment levels, and offshore outsourcing, to name a few.

Like the American Dems, political organizations like the SDU are fighting the last war.

The O admin seems determined to quietly undo Clinton's welfare reforms. We have learned over the years that the Dems and the Lefties want all the people on the government plantation that they can collect. That's what "health care" is was all about, but the people saw through it.

It's what most Dem programs are about: everybody a slave to the Massas in Washington, and relying on their "generosity"  (see Medicare).

Heather MacDonald now reports in Championing Dependency that New York is experiencing attacks on Clinton's welfare reform. Good essay. One quote:

This double-sided attack on New York’s welfare reform lacks all empirical basis. Since 1995, the city’s welfare rolls have dropped nearly 70 percent, from 1.1 million to 350,000. Rather than increasing, as opponents of welfare reform warned, the child poverty rate in New York City dropped 34 percent during the same period, compared with a 5 percent drop nationwide. In 2008, New York City had the lowest child poverty rate—26.5 percent—and the lowest total poverty rate—18.2 percent—of the country’s eight largest cities.

Work, even at minimum wage, remains the best route out of poverty. When tax credits and medical and housing benefits are included, an average single mother of two with an $8.25-an-hour job in New York City receives a $63,000 annual income. On welfare alone, that same mother would pull in $43,000 a year—a whopping amount for non-work, to be sure, but still less than work provides.

At City Journal. One quote:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats. It is as if he has read, and taken to heart, the work of Sinclair Lewis, but never even skimmed the work of Kafka.

At most times and places in history, state authorities have had pretty wide discretion to help or hurt folks.  People knew to submit to authorities, and to accept occasional arbitrary applications of authority power.  Thankfully, such applications were limited by the fact that authorities were distracted trying to keep their power via keeping the peace, meeting revenue targets, etc.,

Today folks proudly bask in a glow of higher status by believing that they have more control over their government.  They believe democracy puts them in charge, and that a “rule of law” drastically discourages arbitrary applications of authority power.  They are deluded.

Whole piece at Overcoming Bias.

One quote:

Zinn’s wretched tract, A People’s History of the United States, is worthless as history, and it is a national tragedy that so many Americans have fallen under its spell. It is a political cartoon which even the socialist magazine Dissent described as an intellectual fraud, which it is. All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill. Like his partner in crime, Noam Chomsky, Zinn was a wicked man and his life’s work was a pernicious influence on the young and ignorant, with destructive consequences for people everywhere.

The whole thing here.

We linked this piece at Reason earlier this week, but it's worth highlighting. Class War - How public servants became our masters. One quote:

The United States had 2.3 state and local government employees per 100 citizens in 1946 and has 6.5 state and local government employees per 100 citizens now. In 1947, Hodges writes, 78 percent of the national income went to the private sector, 16 percent to the federal sector, and 6 percent to the state and local government sector. Now 54 percent of the economy is private, 28 percent goes to the feds, and 18 percent goes to state and local governments. The trend lines are ominous.

The trend line leads to 100%. Then what?

VDH at NRO (this is his entire post):

When Obama gives the usual review of all the programs, stimulus efforts, and new entitlements he's overseeing, almost no one seems to conclude that he is simply detailing how he is going to redistribute nearly $2 trillion a year in annual borrowing. When we cut through all the soaring Great Society rhetoric, we are left with a "Gorge the Beast" strategy in which money is borrowed and given to favored constituencies before being paid back by less popular groups through higher taxes.

Given the aggregate $7-10 trillion in additional debt envisioned over the next four years, Obama may well become the greatest redistributor in U.S. history, at last addressing his 2001 lamentation about the absence of meaningful "redistributive change" in America. The only question at this point is whether Obama's gargantuan deficits are aimed primarily at lavishing constituencies with cash, or rather at making it necessary to raise taxes in a way that serves to reduce income inequality.

In addition to growing government, I think VDH gets right to the core of the underlying Dem agenda. When you think about it that way, they are being fairly successful.

I agree with The Englishman:

...the hijacking of the environmental movement by climate change campaigners is the worse thing that ever happened to it. All decent people want to see a clean environment, cuddly bunnies bouncing in verdant pastures breathing pure air and drinking safe water. How we safeguard, clean up, maintain and utilise the environment has been overshadowed by strident political statements, the sooner they are dismissed the better it is for real environmentalists.

Yes, the movement was indeed co-opted by politics - by Lefties who never took a serious basic science course, and world-government types. Maybe now we can get back to good old conservation.

Superb, from Dr. Zero at Hot Air:

The middle class is the great enemy of collectivist politics, under any of its names: progressivism, communism, fascism, or “liberalism.” As far back as Karl Marx, the apostles of collectivism have understood that they must subjugate the middle class before they can claim total victory.

The upper class isn’t a big problem – they don’t have the votes to block a collectivist agenda in a democracy, and they generally find ways to maintain, or increase, their power and wealth under a total State. The power of the State can be extremely valuable to them, for manipulating markets and thwarting upstart competitors. Many of them are willing to trade a little wealth for power, or find moral nourishment in supporting a collective agenda.

The members of the lower class are generally seen as the clients of a collectivist movement, the recipients of the social benefits it promises. Their desperation and anger become fuel for the movement, providing both righteousness and voting power. The collectivist only needs to conceal any hope of finding prosperity beyond the generosity of the State, and keep the lower class convinced that government is the only moral actor in the economy. Review the speeches of Barack Obama, and search for anything that suggests the poor should look anywhere beyond the government and its social programs for salvation.

It’s clear that the middle class is the great enemy of collectivism...

From Roger Kimball's excellent Obama Gets It Right on the core political issues:

What are those issues? One concerns the proper role of government in American life.  The Constitution was primarily an effort to define, to set limits, to the power of the state. The Founders understood both the need for  federalism and the dangers of statism. In their effort to “form a more perfect Union” and “secure the Blessings of Liberty  to ourselves and our Posterity,” they were everywhere at pains to circumscribe the reach of state power. Having tasted tyranny first hand, and having pondered the melancholy lessons of history, they understood the awful metabolism of servitude. President Obama was quite right when, way back in 2001,  he described the Constitution as “a charter of negative liberties.”  What he did not understand then — and what he clearly still cannot get his mind around — is that fact that this “negative,” “merely formal” quality of the Constitution is one of its great strengths, not a weakness. In 2001, Senator Obama complained that the Constitution only told you what the state and federal government “can’t do to you,” not what it must do for you. As I noted at the time,

For a couple thousand years, people were desperately eager to frame constraints that would apply to their governments, that would limit, for example, the government’s ability to expropriate their property, to force them to educate their children in a certain way, or subscribe to certain government-mandated beliefs.

That sort of traditional political freedom is not enough for left-wingers. Ever since Marx decried bourgeois freedom as merely “formal,” the left has set out not to preserve freedom but to remake society according to a utopian scheme.

This is exactly what Obama wants to do. The “tragedy” of the civil-rights movement, he said, is that in focusing on “negative” freedom, it tended to “lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”

Bringing about “redistributive change” is what the Obama administration is all about.

A quote from Yuval Levin's Capitalism at NRO:

Part of the problem I have with some versions of the libertarian case is that they take capitalism (if not classical liberalism more generally) to be an argument against the need for restraints on our appetites and passions, rather than an argument for the possibility of such restraints — to be an argument for libertinism rather than liberty. I’m with Edmund Burke, who said that “men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.”

What are "intellectuals" anyway?

When I was young and vain I thought I was one. I read lots of books, got myself overly-eddicated, used to read the New York Times daily, and robotically held most of the socially-acceptable, arrogant, bien pensant views. Now I know I am a regular person who just tries to live in reality as best I can, fully aware that many non-tweedy, non-Ivy grads understand life far better than I do. Uncommon sense and sensibilities can replace common sense.  From Tom Sowell's new book, with interview video, at SDA:

Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society - intellectuals certainly can renounce war, “and that does not stop your neighbor from building up the biggest army in the world and coming in and killing you.”

H/t to Vanderleun for Spengler's essay, A Commedia for our times. One quote:

The most onerous expression of idolatry in the modern era was the communist conceit that the scientific ordering of society can eliminate uncertainty. Scientific socialism was supposed to eliminate economic crises and war; instead, it brought about 100 million deaths and reduced once-prosperous countries to penury. Seventy years after its founding, the entire value of the industrial plant of the Soviet Union and its satellites was less than its scrap value, taking into account the costs of environmental cleanup. The life expectancy of Russian men has fallen to only 55 years, and the most frequent cause of death is alcoholism. Russia and its former satellites have such low fertility that their populations will fall by between one-third and one-half by mid-century. Europe's nanny-state version of social democracy is a low-grade version of the same infection.

You will recall that the despicable race-monger and hate-monger Al Sharpton made his name with the Tawana Brawley case. It was, of course, a hoax, the victims of which were the then-15 year old Tawana herself - and police officer Steven Pagones. 

Our link this morning to Powerline's The radical feminist empire strikes back at Duke got me to thinking about one of our perennial themes here at Maggie's (namely the bullsh-t people and the MSM feed us) which we specifically touched upon three years ago in a random post on Truthiness, from which I borrow these quotes:

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Aldous Huxley 

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.
Mark Twain

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.
Bob Dylan

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.
Dr. Karl Menninger

What is Truth? 
Pontius Pilate

There is no doubt in my mind that many careerists, opportunists, cranks with an axe to grind, neurotic cause-seekers, victim addicts, grievance-seekers, and folks with passionate political agendas use Tawana Brawley Case methods to advance their causes. These people need problems to justify their work, their income, or their very raison d'etre. If they have a sociopathic streak, they are not above inventing or exaggerating those problems:

Those Duke profs want more rape.

The warmists want more warming.

The race-mongers want more racism.

The transfat haters want more heart attacks.

The capitalism-phobics want more poverty.

Educators want more ignorance.

The race-mongers want more black kids to fail in school.

The Moslems want to be insulted.

And so on. Yes, I always want more legal cases too.

Photo is Al Sharpton with Tawana Brawley, 1988.

From a piece by Lazarowitz at Am Thinker:

With our inalienable rights to life and liberty, one might assume that among our unenumerated rights would also rest the rights of voluntary association and contract (such as the relationship between a doctor and patient) and the right to not buy insurance if one doesn't want it, as well as the right to opt out of a government health scheme. One might also assume that individuals have an inalienable, natural right to not report their medical status to the government.

The Founders were clear that such unenumerated rights would be recognized by natural law -- that is why they wrote and unanimously approved the Declaration of Independence -- but our natural rights may not be protected by constitutional law. Barnett has also wondered whether "mandatory insurance" is unconstitutional. However, given that our natural rights are inalienable, meaning that government may not take them away for any reason, it really should not matter if any of the health care proposals in Congress are unconstitutional.

Re John Adams and freedom, a quote from Serfdom vs. liberty in 2010 in the Pittsburgh Trib:

Mr. Adams, of course, would have been labeled a "right-wing extremist" or a "militia maniac" by today's "progressives" in Congress who have been working so assiduously to soil the fabric of America. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would dismiss Adams' sentiment as "un-American" and tap dance around its implications of unconstitutional freelancing.

But on the cusp of a new year and the second decade of the 21st century, this is where America finds itself: Constitutional perverts and rule of law scofflaws are in charge, the once-creeping crud of socialism has broken into a trot and an increasing number of good and decent people really are mad as hell and not willing to take another centimeter of the shaft.

Image: John Adams, right-wing nutjob

Blogcritics: The Government is Too Damn Big, Slow, Inefficient, and Intrusive. One quote:

During FDR's New Deal, numerous “alphabet agencies” were created to pull the country out of a depression. Many of those agencies still exist, although their efforts to end the depression were largely ineffective. World War II was mainly responsible for ending the depression. The agencies not only continue to exist, they have “growed like Topsy” during the more than half century since their creation; they continue to do so, and it is at least questionable whether they do more to help the country than to harm it.

Most of the actual work done by the government is done by its Administrative Agencies. Let's look at how a typical agency works. I practiced communications law in Washington, D.C. for twenty years, and all of my clients had dealings with the Federal Communication Commission. That is the agency with which I am most familiar, and even though it was not created to end the Great Depression, it is typical in many respects of the other alphabet agencies. I should add that I retired twelve years ago, and so some of my observations may be dated; still, I think that not much has changed or ever will.