The View From 1776

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News reporters, editorialists, academics, and liberal-progressive politicians generally deny that the Obama administration is socialistic.  Socialism, they say, is a political state in which the government owns the means of production and distribution of goods and services.  Because some businesses still are privately owned, ipso facto, ours is not a socialistic government.

That definition is confuted by the earliest theoretical writings on socialism.  In France, Henri de Saint-Simon, in the first decades of the 1800s, and his pupil and colleague Auguste Comte, in the 1820s and 30s, along with Robert Owen contemporaneously in England, stated that the essential feature of what Owen called socialism is government regulation of the means of production and distribution. 

Equally important is regulation of banking and education.  When the government controls the volume of money and its economic applications, it has the economy in a stranglehold.  When government controls education so that nothing other than secular socialism may be taught, as Saint-Simon advocated, it controls the future destiny of a nation.

Not until the advent of the Soviet Union after the 1917 Communist Revolution did the idea become general that socialism meant government seizing ownership of the economy.  Experience in 19th and 20th century France, England, and Germany, however, made it clear that regulatory control by government bureaucrats is sufficient to implement socialism.

In addition to the Obama administration’s nationalizing General Motors, Chrysler, and major banks, it’s abundantly clear that the president strives to bring ever greater parts of the economy under stringent, socialistic regulatory control. 

Obamacare is exhibit A.  Another example is Obama’s January 17, 2008, interview with the San Francisco Chronicle:

Let me sort of describe my overall policy.

What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.

I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

Plans are now afoot to do just that, as Congress returns to cap-and-trade legislation.

Why this urge by liberal-progressive-socialists to impose regulatory control of the economy as widely as possible?

We can find the root of it in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.  Marx taught that the only source of real value is physical labor, which means that only the workers are entitled to share in the proceeds from sale of goods and services.  Entrepreneurs, inventors, business managers, individual savers, and wealthy capitalists who finance innovation and expansion of production are therefore parasites who feed upon what is, under liberal-progressive social justice, income that belongs to the workers.  Hence the IRS’s definition of interest and dividends as unearned income.

Profit thus is a dirty word, a reflection of savage competition and personal greed.  One can hear this dogmatic view in President Obama’s repeated attacks upon businessmen and bankers, whose greed, he says, caused the collapse of housing and the credit markets, as well as the highest rates of unemployment since the 1930s Depression.

Vitriol of the liberal-progressive attack upon supporters of the original Constitution’s checks and balances reflects its religious nature: secular materialism vs the founding Judeo-Christian individuality.

It must be understood that liberal-progressivism is the principal American sect of the international, secular, and materialist religion of socialism, which by the way, has encompassed in recent decades the pagan worship of irrational environmentalism.  Any rationalization for more stifling regulation is embraced by liberal-progressives and the Democrat/Socialist Party leadership.

Thinking of socialism as a religion may surprise you.  Generations of American students since the end of World War II have been deliberately deluded by liberal-progressive educators to believe that socialism is simply an economic doctrine calling for government ownership of business.  Socialism is in fact more than an economic doctrine, and instituting it does not require government ownership of business.  New Deal-style regulation is more than sufficient.

The late Bertrand Russell, one of the world

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The following is a quote from a Wall Street Journal article published today (Bonds Cap Epic Comeback):

Quote:

The Fed expanded this program on March 18, of last year, to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage securities, along with $200 billion in debt of Fannie and Freddie and up to $300 billion in long-term Treasury debt. The expansion fueled the second leg of the credit rally, which hasn’t stopped yet.

Fed officials wouldn’t comment on whether they intended this secondary effect when designing their asset-purchase program. But they have suggested in speeches that it was a predictable outcome.

“With lower prospective returns on Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities, investors would naturally bid up the prices of other investments, including riskier assets such as corporate bonds and equities,” Brian Sack, head of open-market operations at the New York Fed, said in a speech in early December last year.

The Fed added to the buying pressure in December 2008 by cutting its target for the federal-funds rate

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An opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal gives us a quick overview of liberal-progressives’ relentless drive to eliminate personal freedom.

Wall Street Journal
MARCH 23, 2010, 3:17 P.M. ET
Environmental ‘Crisis’ and Government Power
The IPCC’s climate-change fearmongering is only the latest excuse to expand the public sector.

By BARUN S. MITRA

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted for the first time last month that it is facing a crisis of confidence. But the IPCC’s failings go far beyond the recent spate of errors identified in its reports. The problem began with the global political climate that led to the formation of the IPCC two decades ago.

Contrary to popular perception, the IPCC is not a scientific organization. It does no research of its own. Composed of scientists nominated by different governments, its key function is to collate evidence of human-induced climate change, not just changes in climate.

It is hardly surprising that with such an inherently biased objective the scientists lost their objectivity. Many of them went on a crusade to support the political goal of proving anthropogenic global warming. Concerns about scientific objectivity and critical discourse were thrown overboard.
Why did political masters set such a nonscientific mandate for their scientists at the IPCC? Because over the past half century, governments have often ridden the green bandwagon to justify public-sector expansion.

Almost every decade we have witnessed the birth of a new green scare, apparently based on new scientific findings. First came the campaign against the pesticide DDT in the 1960s, followed by the population bomb in the 1970s. Then we had the campaign to protect forests and species in the 1980s, the ozone hole in the 1990s, and most recently the crescendo over climate change leading up to last year’s Copenhagen summit.

Each time, the scare was shown to be false or overhyped. For instance, millions of people in the developing world died of malaria because DDT was wrongly vilified. It took decades to overcome the blanket ban of the chemical, and now it is once again being used to control mosquitoes in Africa.

Predictions of a rising population depleting the world’s resources have proven equally false and destructive. India today is enjoying the demographic dividend of a young workforce, while China is getting worried at the prospect that it may become the first society in history to grow old before it becomes rich. Likewise, forests are making a surprising comeback in many parts of the world, as the rise in agricultural productivity and economic growth are lowering demand for agricultural land.

Clearly, the track record of green prophecies has been pathetic. And with the collapse of the Soviet empire, and periodic economic turmoil, (such as the Asian economic crisis in 1997, and the dot-com bust in 2000), the public’s confidence in their leaders’ capacity to make effective economic policies has been shaken. It is in this context that climate change provided a new opportunity for many governments to legitimize their role, and expand their scope.

The formation of the IPCC and its apparent focus on the science of climate change allowed the political establishments to claim science as the basis for proposed climate policies that increased the power of government and curtailed the private sector. The time frame of the projected climate change was longer than earlier green crusades, typically from 50 to 100 years. This allowed policy makers to escape accountability for their misguided policies since they would be out of office by the time the consequences became apparent.

The relationship between a section of political leaders and scientists turned out to be mutually reinforcing. Policy makers justified their empire building on the basis of “scientific consensus,” and scientists found a very profitable avenue for political influence and access to funding.
To sell this climate strategy, political leaders and scientists adopted the classic carrot-and-stick approach. The rich countries offered money to the poor ones in an attempt to buy support for the climate policies. More recently there is the threat of trade sanctions, which reflect the stick.

This approach was apparent in the build-up to the Copenhagen summit last December. The distinction between scientists and activists virtually disappeared as the scaremongering reached a new depth. The rich countries’ carrots virtually broke the Group of 77 developing-world nations, as some of the poorest countries found the lure of easy money in hand more attractive than the fruits of economic growth in the future.

The grand design failed on three counts, and the world was saved from the onslaught of the climate crusade. Copenhagen coincided with the global economic slowdown, and therefore the promise of money seemed more like a mirage. Second, the scientific authority of the IPCC collapsed. And finally, deepening developmental aspirations in some of the major developing countries, such as Brazil, China, India and South Africa, meant that the leadership in these countries could not afford to barter their economic future for the sake of some small change today.

The current crisis in the environmental movement is not limited to a few leading climate scientists; its root lies in the political shifts taking place in many countries. Leaders are being forced to take their responsibilities more seriously, and not to outsource it to scientists. And scientists will have to regain public confidence by returning to their traditional values of objectivity and intellectual rigor.

Mr. Mitra is director of the Liberty Institute, an independent think tank in New Delhi, and a columnist for WSJ.com.

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Before the student-anarchist activism that upended educational practices in the 1960s, black students performed at around 80% of white students’ test score levels.  And the gap was narrowing year by year.  Today those performance levels are roughly 50% lower.

What went wrong?

First and foremost was President Johnson’s Great Society entitlements programs, which delivered the message that blacks and Hispanics were not as economically successful as whites, because whitey had rigged the system against them.  If you were poor, it was not your fault, and there was no reason for you to study and work hard in school.  Whitey would prevent you from succeeding.

As Bill Cosby points out in his lonely crusade, black role models became people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, political parasites living off pseudo-civil-rights extortion.  Or athletic and entertainment stars, who sent the message to black and Hispanic teenage boys that men are entitled to unlimited sexual promiscuity, fathering several children by different women and taking responsibility for none of them.

Victimization became a life-style and living off welfare, a career.  Educational quota systems, whether we call them diversity or affirmative action, became, not a way to bring up black and Hispanic educational performance, but a guaranteed way to drag all educational standards downward.

George Will describes the pandering of Obama’s Education Secretary and his failure to acknowledge the real reasons why blacks and Hispanics fall well short of the levels of educational competence they displayed in the 1950s.

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Read Chris DeMuth’s post on the American Enterprise Institute website.

Quote:

Gerard Alexander delivered a fine lecture at the American Enterprise Institute last evening, diagnosing a striking feature of contemporary political debate

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