The View From 1776

Many commentators have argued that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) young, unemployed college graduates, burdened with large educational debts, have a point.  They followed the system and have, in effect, been defrauded by costly and ineffectual “educations.”

As many commentators also have observed, Wall Street is hardly the right focal point for their anger.  Their target should be the liberal-progressive educational system fostered in early decades of the 20th century by socialist John Dewey of the Columbia University school of education.  Liberal-progressives are the force opposed to requiring students to learn difficult academic subjects through hard work (which definitely necessitates memorization, test-taking, and performance grading). 

Diversity, self-esteem, and splinter-group identity (blacks, hispanics, feminists, homosexuals, and lesbians) have become the essence of present-day college “education.” Grade inflation and politically-correct speech-and-behavior codes have become the weapons to defraud college students, who have a right to expect that adult educators have some connection with the real world.

In that regard, Yale University historian Donald Kagan, in an article he wrote for Commentary Magazine, quotes former president of Harvard University Derek Bok:

“Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.”

It’s hardly surprising that, through no fault of their own, the overwhelming majority of people graduating from our school systems since the 1960s are economic ignoramuses who know almost nothing about the history of the United States or the rest of the world.  When they have been schooled in the mob tactics of socialist revolutions, from sit-ins to rioting in the streets, it’s hardly surprising that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) crowd and their Democrat/Socialist Party backers honestly believe that they have a moral right to foul private propertyand interfere with people living in the Zuccotti Park neighborhood, people working in Wall Street financial institutions, and business people operating small shops.

This op-ed piece from the Wall Street Journal deals very well with the presumed morality of OWS.

Occupying vs. Tea Partying
Freedom and the foundations of moral behavior.

By MATT KIBBE

My first instinct was to sympathize with Occupy Wall Street (OWS). At the time of the initial protests, I was in Italy giving a lecture on the tea party ethos to graduate students participating in the Istituto Bruno Leoni’s annual Mises Seminar. I was getting reports of OWS signs that I had often see at Tea Party protests, such as “End the Fed” and “Stop Crony Capitalism.” But something didn’t jibe. I wasn’t sure why.

The answer came from economist and Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith, who delivered the keynote address at the Mises Seminar. His lecture on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments focused on the question “how do social norms emerge spontaneously?” Both Smiths, Adam and Vernon, argue that individual freedoms and property rights are the foundations of moral behavior. Individuals, with full ownership of their life, liberty and property, judge themselves and care about the positive judgments of others. This accountability allows for cooperation, connects a community and enables human prosperity.

“The most sacred laws of justice, therefore, those whose violation seems to call loudest for vengeance and punishment, are the laws which guard the life and person of our neighbor,” wrote Adam Smith back in 1759, adding that “the next are those which guard his property and possessions.” America’s tea partiers put it another way: “Don’t hurt other people and don’t take their stuff.”

From these “sacred laws” come our righteous indignation with bailouts, deficit spending and other government intrusions into our lives, such as the mandate contained in the recent U.S. health-care reform that dictates to every American what health insurance he must buy and which treatments he may or may not access. Tea partiers oppose government forcing the responsible to subsidize the irresponsibility of others, because these policies hurt other people and take their stuff.

When tea partiers petition their government for a redress of such grievances, as more than one million did on Sept. 12, 2009, they don’t get into fights, they don’t get arrested, they say “excuse me” and “thank you,” they wait in hopelessly long lines for porta-johns, they pick up their trash and leave public spaces and private property exactly as they found them. No one told myself or other tea partiers to do these things; we just believe that you shouldn’t hurt other people and you shouldn’t take their stuff.

In contrast OWS, whose ranks represent a small fraction of total tea party protestors, has struggled to maintain civility or to even identify a unifying sense of purpose in their uprising. At Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, there is stealing, property damage and arrests often provoked by protestors wanting conflict with the police. Real people—not members of the so-called 1%—are being hurt as their small businesses are impacted and their property destroyed.

Things have gone far worse in Europe. In Rome, just one week later and 468 kilometers south of the Mises Seminar, a protest aligning itself with the OWS movement quickly devolved into a full-on riot, with the demonstrators smashing shop windows and torching cars. “Clad in black with their faces covered,” the Associated Press reported, “protesters threw rocks, bottles and incendiary devices at banks and Rome police in riot gear. Some protesters had clubs, others had hammers. They destroyed bank ATMs, set trash bins on fire and assaulted at least two news crews from Sky Italia.”

Why so much violence? Many protesters in the U.S. have legitimate anger at the crony capitalism and high unemployment that have defined the first three years of the Obama Administration. Likewise, many young people in the euro zone can’t find jobs and face a perfect storm no-growth economies, crushing sovereign debt fueled by ingrained welfare states and public unions acting as barriers to entering the job market. But for tea partiers, who rose up against many of the same circumstances, tactical non-violence simply reflects the values that first brought us together.

When you look for defining values in Occupy Wall Street, you discover only a disparate set of competing demands. Many are against capitalism per se and wealth-creation in general. They want to redistribute the pie, not grow it. But whose claims are legitimate, and how might you reallocate the wealth of some to the benefit of those more entitled? This most difficult question is playing out in real life in Zuccotti Park, where a General Assembly allocates scarce resources among factions of protesters. One demand by a group of drummers for $8,000 for new musical instruments was demonstrative. “We have worked for you! Appreciate us!” one drummer shouted angrily to the General Assembly, as reported in the Huffington Post. When the bid failed, obscenities flew and the Huffington Post reports that “a physical fight nearly erupted.”

I can’t help but think of the fate of the Twentieth Century Motor Company in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” where the edict “to each according to their contribution” was replaced with “to each according to their need.” The disastrous results left an entire community—the 99%—jobless, angry and destitute.

Despite all of this, in America Occupy Wall Street has been celebrated by many in the media and the Democratic party as a legitimate counter to the tea party. All of the accusations that were wrongfully hurled at the tea party—from bigotry to violent tendencies—now seem to be occurring regularly at OWS protests. Yet they are ignored in deference to the supposed morally superiority of this new movement. Van Jones, formerly an environmental advisor to President Barack Obama, says we should ignore OWS defects because “they’ve got moral clarity.” Even Mr. Obama has said that “the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

Who knows, maybe cognitive dissonance is a good political strategy for the left. Can the king of crony capitalism win reelection having codified “too big to fail” into law? Can Congressional Democrats, having spent the past two years attaching Republicans to so-called “tea party extremism,” now embrace without consequence the radical demands, blatant anti-Semitism, violence and property damage of OWS?

Progressives’ burning desire to create a tea party of the left may be clouding their judgment. Even Mr. Jones has grudgingly conceded that tea partiers have out-crowd-sourced, out-organized, and out-performed the most sophisticated community organizers on the left. “Here’s the irony,” he said back in July. “They talk rugged individualist, but they act collectively.” He and his colleagues don’t seem to understand that communities can’t exist without respect for individual freedom. They can’t imagine how it is that millions of people located in disparate places with unique knowledge of their communities and circumstances can voluntarily cooperate and coordinate, creating something far greater and more valuable than any one individual could have done alone.

In the world of the contemporary Western left, someone needs to be in charge—a benevolent bureaucrat who knows better than you do. They can’t help but build hierarchical structures—a General Assembly perhaps—because they don’t understand how freedom works.

Mr. Kibbe is president of FreedomWorks, a fellow at the Austrian Economics Center in Vienna, and co-author of “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto” (HarperCollings, 2010)

Liberal-progressives speak about “investing” in education.  That investment has been a very poor one for the taxpayers, with no pay-off in improved education quality.

As the author of Education vs. Bureaucracy notes,

Federal spending on public education has increased 375% over the past four decades and spending per pupil has increased 128%, while reading, math, and science scores for 17-year-olds have remained stagnant, below scores in other nations that compete with us.  In that period, school enrollment has increased only about 10%, but the number of teachers and administrative staff (teachers’ union members) has doubled.

Federal funding for education is a sucker’s game.  Politicians are pushed into higher spending by unions that don’t hesitate to shut schools down with illegal strikes if they don’t get their way.  Moreover, teachers unions are one of the top contributors to Democrat/Socialist Party election campaigns, so politicians oppose the unions at their peril.  Every round of excessive pay and benefits increases augments membership in teachers’ unions and adds to their power to extort still greater, unmerited funds from taxpayers.

Most dangerous in the long run is teachers’ unions, and the liberal-progressive Federal bureaucracy dispensing educational funds, effectively inculcating socialism and its philosophy of materialism in the minds of callow students.  Using Federal textbook guidelines and following teaching methodologies propounded at Columbia University’s school of education, the original fountainhead of socialist education in the United States, teachers teach that the United States was founded in greed and crimes against humanity and that one-world socialism is the path of righteousness.  President Obama is a prime product of that milieu.

The American War of Independence was based philosophically upon diametrically opposed principles: the Judeo-Christian tradition of natural law, the idea of higher law of Divine origin.

The legitimization for our struggle with the British crown in 1776 was that George III had broken the natural-law compact that postulated inalienable, individual natural-law rights to life, liberty, and property. “No taxation without representation.”

In contrast, Nancy Pelosi tells us unhesitatingly that there is no constitutional limit on what Congress may impose upon us, while teachers’ unions applaud.

Jefferson’s references in the Declaration to “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” are meaningless except in the context of natural law. Ditto with regard to the Bill of Rights.
Natural law, since Aristotle, has been identified with the teleological, intelligent-design paradigm of the cosmos. Aristotle’s natural law, via Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, opened the field of European medieval law to the concept of separation of church and state into political and spiritual realms. One dealt with making people good citizens, the other with making people good humans. Both were rooted in natural law, and natural law was God-given.

This was the entire foundation of everything that we now call Western civilization, to which the teachers’ unions stand opposed.

American liberal-socialism demands that only the secular doctrine of socialism and Comte’s Positivism be taught in our schools. Because of support from our Federal courts, socialism has been established as the only scientific truth. The natural-law, spiritual-religion foundation of our nation has been dismissed as ignorance from a pre-scientific age. If that position holds, then the Declaration and the Constitution are meaningless drivel that “evolves” in Darwin’s hypothesized evolutionary fashion, subject only to random, chaotic materialistic forces.

As our first socialist Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote, there is no such thing as a higher law of morality, merely whatever a particular judge thinks that the law ought to be. Holmes opined that, if secular materialism changed public opinion to the belief that we should scrap the Constitution and institute Bolshevism, then neither the Court not the Constitution should stand in the way. That contempt for tradition and precedent, for the entirety of Western civilization, has, too often since the 1920s, informed Federal judicial practice, making the Constitution into a Rorschach ink-blot.  That is the philosophical position governing teachers’ union extortion.

The materialistic and secular doctrine of socialism, pushed by the ACLU (e.g., the Scopes monkey trial), liberal-progressive-socialist politicians, and the teachers’ unions, in effect decapitates Western civilization. We see this daily in denigration of subject matter produced by “dead white men” and John Dewey’s maxim that “dead” history has no place in the Progressive Education curriculum. William F. Buckley, Jr., documented it in his 1951 God and Man at Yale, and Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate have updated it in The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on Americas Campuses.

Socialism’s conceptualizers were correct in perceiving that control of education is the most effective way to destroy the spiritual essence of Western civilization and replace it with the secular and materialistic religion of socialism. 

Responding to Reactions To The Fed’s QE2, a reader commented:

That statement [“We didn’t get here because some politician decided to invest in the latest politically correct fad. We got here because we made it attractive for individuals to invest their capital here and because our policies provided a stable environment in which to do so.”] misses the deeper point of WHY it made economic sense to invest here - and part of the reason for our current decline.  In the recent past we were the world leaders in education and scientific innovation.  Over the last decade we have dropped that ball, letting our leads in these fields slip to 10th or 12th in the world.  We focused instead on financial gimmicks, convincing ourselves that churning financial instruments constituted “production” and “Gross National Product.”

Obama has attempted to focus our attention again on the importance of education and science, but is receiving little help from across the aisle.

A few reactions:

First, the force that pushed performance of American education off the cliff is the 1960s advent of militant, socialistic teachers’ unions.  Those unions would have had little nationwide effect absent Federal funding and Federal interference in local affairs.  Obama’s aim to augment Federal control over education strengthens anti-American teachers’ unions and diminishes prospects for the future well being of the nation.

Teachers’ unions, avidly supported and courted by the Democrat/Socialist Party, prefer to have students poorly educated, rather than allow incompetent teachers to be fired.  Teachers’ unions focus upon enlarging their membership rolls and upon milking the public taxpayers to fund gold-plated benefits packages.  More money is spent for overhead costs to meet Federal mandates than is spent upon teaching essential, basic subject matter.  Diversity and multi-cultural education have eliminated performance standards; feel-good teaching methods guarantee mediocrity.

American education has degenerated, to a dangerous degree, into proselytizing callow students for the secular religion of socialism.  Under socialism’s world-government paradigm, students are taught to be ashamed of our history, to redistribute our wealth to other nations, and to view national interests of foreign powers as equal to or more important than our own.  Attention is focused on objects of pagan Gaia worship, such as wasteful and ineffective recycling and alleged man-made global warming.

Second is the notion that businesses find investment less attractive in the United States because “we have dropped the ball” on education.  The commenter may not have meant it in that way, but his choice of words unconsciously exudes the liberal-progressive predisposition to collective action, which presumes that only the all-powerful political state has the capacity or knowledge to improve people’s living standards.  Standards were considerably higher before the 1960s, when education was funded at the local level and controlled by individuals known to and accountable to their communities.

The “economy” is a conceptual, statistical abstraction.  Reality is that productive and beneficial economic activity - let’s call it private business - originates as individual entrepreneurship, either within a large company, or in the proverbial garage (viz. Apple, Hewlett-Packard).

The anti-individual, collectivized Japan, Inc. model, beloved of President Clinton’s early advisors, led to financial collapse and domestic economic stagnation in Japan.  Under the Japan, Inc. model, MITI, the powerful government bureau, along with Japan’s giant banks and its giant ziabatsu / keiretsu industrial, financial, and commercial conglomerates, had final say over business investment decisions.  Shortly after the start of President Clinton’s first administration, Japan suffered a business and financial meltdown.  It then became apparent that centralized, politically-controlled direction of economic activity promoted very bad investment decisions.  Bureaucratic intellectuals, isolated from the real world of economic competition, are no match for the hundreds of millions of individual adjustments to changing prices and conditions, adjustments that constitute a capitalistic marketplace.

Japan, Inc. is the direction of Obama’s take-over and regulatory control of major industrial corporations and the banking industry.  Promoting green jobs or green products by regulation, government subsidy, or tax favoritism is the equivalent of pouring money down a rat hole.  GM’s money-loser Volt is an example.

Federal interference in education since President Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education program (1965), far from improving the outlook for new business investment here, has made such investment steadily less attractive.  Students coming out of our educational system are less competent and less productive than students before the 1960s. 

In addition, ease of forming job-creating businesses has been steadily constricted by ever mounting labor costs, millions of new government regulations, and extortionate class-action lawsuits by the Democrat/Socialist Party’s fund-raising subsidiary, the tort bar.  President Obama’s ideological commitment to man-made global warming, if fully manifested in Federal regulations and punitive taxes, will reduce our living standards to the level of the early 19th century. 

Since the 1960s, we have had two generations of students, the innocent victims of Federally directed education, who are ignorant of mathematics, economics, business, and American history.  Students are taught to believe that business is motivated solely by a lust to defraud and to harm consumers and workers.  President Obama and his wife continually condemn business as greed and urge students to enter public service.  Only working for the collectivized government is held to be admirable.

Our educational system is, in effect, training an army to combat private business and to smother individual initiative with the great gray blob that is government bureaucracy.

Business investment funds go where there is the greatest promise of secure and adequate return on investment, allowing for government attitudes, regulations, taxes, and socialistic labor union militancy.  Just as British investors in the 19th century poured money into investments in canals and railroads in the United States, because of higher returns here than in Great Britain, American companies are heeding Obama’s militant anti-business rhetoric and actions and moving where their capital is more welcome and less punished by government.

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.