The View From 1776

Abstract theories of liberal-progressive-socialism lead to collectivized tyranny, as we see in the long train of liberal-progressive obliterations of individual economic and political liberties, most recently under Barack Obama.

On Human Nature
By Robert Curry

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

James Madison

The Scottish theorists were very much aware how delicate this artificial structure of civilization was which rested on man’s more primitive and ferocious instincts…They were very far from holding such naïve views…as the “natural goodness of man,” or the existence of a “natural harmony of interests”…[They] showed how certain institutional arrangements would induce man to use his intelligence to the best effect and how institutions could be framed so that bad people could do least harm.

F. A. Hayek

Neither the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment nor the Founders were under any illusions about human nature.

If we want to understand the efforts of the Founders during that hot summer in 1787, we must see them as trying to design self-government with a very sober assessment of human nature in mind.  When in the next century Lord Acton wrote “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he captured in a ringing aphorism the view the Founders shared with the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment.

This view of the effect of power on human nature explains the Founders’ focus on defining and limiting federal power by distributing power among three branches, preserving the political independence of the states and creating a zone of liberty around the individual--even by further dividing the (supreme) legislative power itself, crafting two legislative bodies with separate powers and potentially competing interests.

Put yourself for a moment in the place of one of the Founders.  Imagine that it is your responsibility to craft a government by the people and for the people that can succeed and endure.  And, just for the moment, also imagine that you are, like them, under no illusions about the natural goodness of man.  Now, how do you define your challenge? 

Hayek’s contemporary, the philosopher Karl Popper offered a statement of the task of making a government that, I believe, illuminates the wisdom of the Founders.  He proposed that if we face from the beginning the possibility of bad government, the question then becomes “how can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” And that is just how the Founders approached their task.

It is perhaps the great tragedy of the modern world that the French did not follow the cautious example of the Founders or, like the Founders, make use of the wisdom of the Scottish Enlightenment.  After their Revolution of 1789 and under the influence of the rationalist utopianism of the French Enlightenment, France quickly descended into the Terror and soon plunged the world into war.  Even worse, it was the tragic destiny of France to create almost immediately the first model of the modern perversion of self-government, the evil twin of the Founders’ creation, and to bequeath it to posterity. It is important to remember that Napoleon gained power through a series of plebiscites.  Sophia Rosenfeld describes his accomplishment succinctly:

Napoleon’s great innovation…was to keep alive the idea of unlimited popular sovereignty…in the service of the curtailment of individual liberty and his own personal seizure of power.  He successfully mobilized ‘the people’ in support of policies that disempowered them.

By 1799 Napoleon had seized power and was on his way to the military conquest of Europe; Washington had already left office two years earlier and retired to Mount Vernon.

President Obama is dangerously misguided.  The inherent superficiality of liberal-progressivism, its instinctive expectation that everyone sees the world as liberal-progressives see it, leads the president to a foreign policy that is the equivalent of attempting to deflect a great white shark’s attack by singing a soft lullaby.

For a thousand years after Mohammed’s 622 hegira, there was never a decade when Muslim marauders were not overrunning Christian cities around the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East, slaughtering the men, and enslaving the women and children.  It is this history that Islamic Jihad strives to revive. 

Make no mistake about it: Islam is dedicated to death.  Islam commands its followers to beguile non-Muslims with appearances of friendship, awaiting an opportunity to attack and destroy.  Make no mistake about it: there is no milk of human kindness in Islamic Jihad.  Muslim warriors and suicide bombers long for death, yours and theirs.

Pat Buchanan’s Error
By Steve Kellmeyer

skellmeyer@bridegroompress.com

Over at Human Events, Pat Buchanan writes an essay that looks good on the surface, but doesn’t really hold up to a deeper analysis:

Buchanan begins by asking a salient question:
Why would people, who must believe themselves righteous and moral, keen and wail at the death of a monster who did what bin Laden had done?...

In one man’s judgment, Osama was admired because he alone in the Arab world had the astonishing audacity to stand up and smash a fist into the face of the world’s last superpower, which had become one of the most resented powers in the Middle East.
Buchanan then goes on to make a series of comparisons to other genocidal maniacs, men like Mao tse Tung, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. He argues that each of these men is held in honor within their own countries because they were seen as men who fought against imperialist powers like the British, the French, the Japanese and the Americans.

Like Mao, Ho and Castro, Osama tapped into the most powerful current of the age: ethnic nationalism, the desire of peoples to be rid of foreign rule and any oppressive foreign presence, and to put up against a wall all indigenous traitors who do the foreigners’ will.

This thesis plays well into the meme that Buchanan promotes - the idea that America should remove itself from most of the internal affairs of other nations.

Of course, that very idea is a contradiction in terms.

He wants America to be the last superpower, but he doesn’t want America meddling in the affairs of other nations.

But America is the last superpower precisely because she is the last nation capable of meddling in the internal affairs of other nations without provoking declarations of war from the nations whose affairs she re-arranges. Indeed, that is pretty much the definition and measure of a superpower.

The old Roman empire became the superpower in the Mediterranean because she could dictate terms to anyone who bordered that Roman lake, including her major rival, Carthage itself.

Britain was a superpower because her armies enforced British law and British whims throughout the world. The Hindus had to stop burning widows on the pyre, the Chinese had to permit opium dens in their capital, the Muslims had to cease their jihad, for no one could stand up to the might of British arms.

America is now a superpower in no small part because we can inflict unacceptable levels of military mayhem on any nation foolish enough to oppose us in a course of action we have decided to take.

It is impossible to be a superpower and not meddle with others.
Superpowers remake the world in their own image, or try to.
And they get close enough to succeeding to worry their opponents.
That’s what makes them superpowers - they can overwhelm any other opponent, militarily, culturally, or in any other way you care to name.

Which takes us to our second point.

It is true that the men named by Buchanan have been honored by their respective governments. But do the great mass of citizens they ruled really have any love for these men? That is a much more difficult question.

It is true that a tyrant stays in power only because enough of the people in the tyrant’s country agree with his policies to keep him in power. This is, after all, how we got, and still keep, Barack Obama. But how many Chinese really honor Mao tse Tung? How many Vietnamese hold fond memories of Ho Chi Minh? How many Cubans really love Fidel Castro. How many Americans love the Oreo?

If these were the only errors in Buchanan’s essay, I wouldn’t bother to write this one. These are common errors and relatively harmless.

It is his final sentence, the summation of his essay, which must be contested.

Osama is dead and gone. But the ideas he tapped into—the desire of Arab peoples to break free, to reclaim their sovereignty, to restore their past greatness, to be rid of the foreigner and his lackeys—are also the motivating ideas of the Arab Spring.

And there is the fatal flaw.

This is not a fight to be rid of the foreigner and his lackeys.
There is no Arab Spring.

The Egyptians are not Arabs.
The Libyans are not Arabs.
The Tunisians are not Arabs.
The Syrians are not Arabs.
The Iraqis are not Arabs.
The Iranians are not Arabs.

All of these countries, all of these peoples, have long and glorious histories of their own.
Histories that are not Arab.
Histories that are not Muslim.

These nations may have a largely Muslim population today, but before their countries were raped by Arab Muslims centuries ago, these people were each their own people.

The Arabs know this.
The Muslims know this.

The Arab Muslims have worked hard to destroy these many, varied and rich histories.
It is no accident that the Egyptian museums were ransacked by Muslim crowds, artifacts destroyed by Muslim savages. The Coptic Christians are attacked not just because they are Christians and not Muslims, but also because they are Egyptians, and not Arabs.

If the British, French and Americans were foreign intruders in the nations Buchanan recalls, the Arab Muslims are no less foreign intruders in the lands Buchanan mis-characterizes. As far as the Persians, the Egyptians or the Tunisians are concerned, Mohammed and his Arabs are just another set of foreign rulers complete with sword-wielding lackeys.

Thus, we are not witnessing the rise of ethnic nationalism.
Quite the contrary.
We are witnessing the defeat of ethnic nationalism.
The ethnic nationals who led these countries are being deposed and replaced by a foreign power.

Buchanan has not only failed to answer his question, he failed to ask the real question: why do so many non-Arab nations laud and honor a foreigner who imposed a foreign way of life upon their nations? 

By failing to ask that question of Osama bin Laden, he demonstrates his complete failure to grasp the situation in the Middle East.

You see, Buchanan’s basic premise is flawed: America is not yet the last superpower.

Her military might is being very successfully challenged, her ability to project her culture is being very successfully combated, her ability to project her laws, project her vision for the world onto other lands is being very successfully fought. There is another power which wishes to project its culture (or lack thereof),its perverse laws, its unwholesome vision onto the world.

We are locked in a war more terrible than the Cold War if only because the vision this superpower projects has risen ascendant over nations not for a mere handful of decades, but for over one-and-a-half millennia. It has sucked billions into its alternative vision for mankind. We have fought this vision from our very founding as a nation, if only because it pre-existed our nation by twelve hundred years.

The Cold War was a 70-year training camp, a blip, a short Hell Week in a long military struggle against this much more insidious, much more evil, much more vicious foe. We know our enemy can survive because ithas survived despite everything the ancient and modern world has thrown at it. We have no similar assurance about our own survival abilities.

Today, we fight a foe that has terrorized Europe since 632 AD, a foe that has torn whole areas, indeed, has torn the entire southern half of the Mediterranean, from the embrace of Western civilization. It has suborned and decimated nations and peoples throughout the world.

America is not the last superpower.

Until we recognize, name and fight the real enemy, we will not be the last superpower.

A typical example of such superficiality is described in Are the Uninsured Getting a Free Ride?

Liberal-progressive obsession with “taxing the rich” is another example of superficiality, or more often today, mendacious political posturing.  Democrat-Socialists tell us that we can cover government’s gigantic spending deficits simply by repealing Bush-era tax cuts.  The fact is, of course, that taxing 100% of income from “the rich” would cover only a small fraction of present and mandated future deficit spending.

The true conservative view is that economic efficiency requires slow, incremental experimentation by millions of individuals over long enough time periods to conserve useful aspects and to detect and correct flaws before great damage is done.

None of that is part of the educational matrix that shaped President Obama’s view of the world.  His paradigm is shaped by the philosophical and secular religious views spawned in 1789 French Revolutionary socialism, nurtured in Hegelianism and Marxism of the German Empire universities, and imported thence to America’s elite universities in the late 1800s.  The finishing touches were applied by the revolutionary agenda of student anarchists of the 1960s and 70s, people like Obama’s friends and advisors Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Careful, incremental improvement was not part of Obama’s “change we can believe in.” The implicit end point of his New New Deal was displacing the existing Constitutional and Judeo-Christian religious ethos with an all embracing secular collectivism under Big Brother.  Nancy Pelosi’s legislative bulldozing to impose Obamacare over majority revulsion is consistent with that end point.

Obama’s administration accordingly has been heavily populated with ivory-tower, liberal-progressive theorists.  These are not people who gained their positions by demonstrating executive competence in the real world outside academia.

Liberal-progressives’ secular religious faith tells them that governmental and economic systems worked out over the ages, in particular free-market capitalism, are corrupt and must be replaced entirely.  It’s the grand schemes - man-made-global warming, Obamacare, or redistribution of wealth to transform human nature and perfect society - that appeal to them.  Invincible confidence in the righteousness of their aims and power of their intellects leads them to disdain cautions and objections from the common man.  The Tea Party phenomenon must, therefore, be nothing but a front for malevolent capitalists intent upon gaining monopoly control of the economy.

One of the best statements of this understanding is Bill Greene’s Common Genius: Guts, Grit and Common Sense: How Ordinary People Create Prosperous Societies and How Intellectuals Make Them Collapse.

Depriving individuals of their Bill-of-Rights political and economic liberties to achieve their grand schemes is inconsequential in the liberal-progressive view, because the original Constitution is presumed to have evolved in the synthesis fashioned through the Hegelian-Marxian clash of thesis and antithesis (which, of course, only they understand).

This combination of presumption and superficiality was prominently displayed during the Democrat-Socialist Party’s ram-rodding Obamacare through Congress.  Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrat-Socialists were unconcerned that hardly anyone had even read the entire bundle of Obamacare legislation, and that no one could foresee all of its destructive effects.  When asked whether certain aspects of Obamacare are unconstitutional, Mrs. Pelosi said, in effect, that there are no limits on government power; the Federal government (provided that it is in the hands of liberal-progressives) can do whatever it deems desirable.

Such arrogance arises from the spread of Godless socialism that infected our nation after the Civil War.  To a degree that is hard for people today to envision, socialism and liberal-progressivism, its American variant, were fashionable ideas between the 1890s and the 1920s. By 1912, socialism had become a favorite topic of magazine editorials, church sermons, college lectures, and academic theses. Socialist propaganda was pouring forth in magazines, novels, and dramas.

Herbert Croly, the founding editor of The New Republic, the most influential liberal-progressive publication in the first half of the 20th century, was an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson, himself an ardent liberal-progressive.  Croly’s classic statement of American liberal-progressivism (The Promise of American Life, 1909) illuminates an essential quality of liberal-progressive-socialism: its faith in the efficiency of experts and technicians, coupled with its disdain for the average person down where the rubber meets the road.  Above all, liberal-progressives abhor businessmen, a class synonymous in their view with greed and criminality.

The Eastern liberal establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, were schooled in this attitude by Ivy League universities.  Most of the best known late-19th-century and 20th-century writers and thinkers who influenced the understandings of college and university students considered themselves to be socialists or anarchists, and in a few cases communists. Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward, published in 1888, sold over a million copies; it described a paradisiacal socialist society of the future that had eliminated wars, crime, poverty, and all manner of human social ills.

In addition to John Dewey and Theodore Dreiser, there were playwrights George Bernard Shaw (a leader of the British socialist party) and Eugene O’Neil, as well as the young Walter Lippmann (fresh from the presidency of Harvard’s student socialist club). Others extolling socialism and damning American society included Carl Sandburg, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Harris, William Dean Howells, Jack London and Upton Sinclair. Journalists Henry Demarest Lloyd, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Herrick, Frank Norris, Charles Edward Russell, Allan Benson, and David Graham Phillips kept the promises of socialism in the public eye.

In 1906, Upton Sinclair and Jack London founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Journalist John Reed, a staff writer for Max Eastman’s The Masses, wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, the 1919 account of the Bolshevik revolution that made him an official hero of the Soviet Union. In recent years Reed was made the subject of the sympathetic Hollywood movie Reds.

Economist Thorstein Veblen savaged the capitalist system in his 1899 Theory of the Leisure Class. In 1913, Charles A. Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States endeavored to prove that the Constitution was no more than a conspiracy by wealthy property owners to exploit the workers. Historians like Vernon L. Parrington in his Main Currents in American Thought ignored the property rights concerns of colonists that led to the 1776 War of Independence, instead declaring that the essence of American history was its conversion to French-style socialism at the expense of inalienable natural-law rights to private property.

Despite the consistent failures and frequent horrific savagery of socialism around the world, superficiality enables liberal-progressives to remain confident that they alone can divine the future course of history, inculcated by our educational system.  They are determined to follow Democrat-Socialist Party leaders toward the cliff, focusing upon far away dream clouds, ignoring the destruction just ahead of them.

It’s convenient for politicians and economically-uninformed news organizations to lay the blame on speculators.  That thesis won’t hold up to scrutiny of the facts.  See Are Speculators Gouging Us At The Pump? on the Forbes Magazine website.

Gasoline prices, outside of socialized, closed economies, are a function of supply and demand.  If the supply of oil or refined products like gasoline drops and demand remains unchanged, prices will tend to rise until some users are unwilling to pay the higher prices.  When supplies equal or exceed demand, prices will stabilize or drop.

Non-governmental corporations such as Exxon-Mobil, BP, or Shell control far less than 10% of the world’s petroleum reserves.  Ninety percent or more of the world’s currently producable reserves and their production rates are controlled by government petroleum agencies around the world.  From time to time we see news reports that OPEC or Saudi Arabia, for instance, have decided to adjust their well output rates to bring world supplies into balance with perceived world demand.  It is these governmental oil producers who control world market supplies and therefore ultimately determine world petroleum prices.

When the oil supply from one of the those large governmental agencies is removed from the market, as is the case now with the civil war in Libya, world oil prices are bound to spike.

In addition to this basic determinant of world oil supply, there are two powerful inflationary elements affecting the prices we pay here in the United States for gasoline.

Environmentalist pagan religion adds a major push toward higher gasoline prices.  Environmental extremists have blocked most efforts to increase domestic oil production and they have for more than thirty years prevented building new petroleum refineries in the United States.  In addition, they have blocked nearly all efforts to expand capacity of existing refineries.

It’s elementary common sense that gasoline prices in the United States will rise when gasoline demand from a steadily growing population confronts regulatory limits on the supply of oil and gasoline. “Green” energy programs exacerbate the problem.  Producing every gallon of ethanol, for instance, requires the consumption of approximately 1.7 gallons of gasoline.

The other major factor driving up the price of gasoline is the decline in purchasing power of the U.S. dollar engineered by the United States Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve board.  See The Price We Must Pay.

The price per barrel of our growing oil imports is almost unchanged, measured in gold or silver.  But the declining value of the dollar forces us to pay higher prices in dollars.

The dollar, along with oil and other products, declines in value (i.e., its price measured in other currencies) when its supply increases more than the demand for it.  Indeed, the declining purchasing power of the dollar under President Nixon was a primary impetus for OPEC’s concerted action in the 1970s to take control of world oil production and to raise the dollar price of oil, then $5 to $10 per barrel.  That process has continued essentially unabated while the dollar has, apart for brief intervals, declined in purchasing power against trade-weighted indexes of currency values.  Today’s $70 t0 $110 per barrel is a reflection of the Fed’s steady inflation of the money supply to fund Federal deficits.

Higher gasoline prices, along with loss of purchasing power of our life’s savings, is a price we pay to fund the collectivized, socialistic, welfare state.  As noted in Don’t Blame Business For Our Inflation, politicians will always falsely blame inflation on businessmen’s “greed.” But only government deficit spending using fiat money can create inflation.  Inflation consists in increasing the money supply faster than the increase in production of goods that people want, the condition we endure today, in spades. 

In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt arbitrarily imposed a 40% devaluation of the dollar. His aim was to provide phony funds to pay for his imposition of socialism on our nation.  In those days, the Federal Reserve’s ability to inflate the money supply was tied to the dollar amount of gold it held in reserve.  When the legal ratio of gold per dollar was sharply cut by FDR’s decree, the Fed’s power to inflate the money supply ballooned.

We are still paying for Franklin Roosevelt’s socialist welfare state today with relentlessly climbing prices, year after year, at the gasoline pump, in grocery stores, clothing stores, housing costs, and all other aspects of our daily lives.