The View From 1776

Liberal-progressives’ profession of concern for “the little guy” is really a propaganda tool for gasping the power to dictate behavioral limits for abstract social, economic, sexual, and racial classes.  Imposing liberal-progressives’ vision of social perfection, as Lenin supposedly said, figuratively at least has to come out of the business end of a gun barrel.

President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society grab-bag of welfare-state entitlements is a notorious example.  LBJ told a Howard University audience that the Great Society aimed to produce, not just equality of opportunity, but equality of result. 

This necessarily meant contravening the recently enacted Civil Rights legislation, which expressly forbade government discrimination among individuals or groups.  It required forced equality of income and wealth, without regard to personal ability, effort, or achievement.  That equality was to be achieved by confiscating property and income from workers and giving it to groups whose cultures glorified sexual promiscuity, marital infidelity, and obsession with sensual satisfaction of all types.

Results were the opposite of liberal-progressive expectations. Crime soared, unemployment skyrocketed, education fell off the cliff, drug addiction became common, single-parent families and illegitimate births rose to proportions never before experienced in history.  Yet, the liberal-progressive aristocracy remains firmly wedded to the Great Society and similar programs dating back to President Roosevelt’s New Deal. 

Liberal-progressives fought tooth and nail against welfare reform.  But it produced none of the feared results. Instead, it reduced welfare rolls, greatly improved people’s lives, and gave them a sense of personal worth and accomplishment as they began to support themselves with real jobs.

The same blindness to reality was exhibited during the 1920s and 1930s, when liberal-progressives worshipfully supported the Soviet Union’s liquidation of millions of its own people in the name of a theoretical, perfect political society to be realized at some undetermined future date.

There are two main explanations for this disconnect between utopian, liberal-progressive theory and real world results. 

First is the sense of entitlement-to-rule that liberal-progressives derive from their self-perception as beings of superior worth and intelligence, compared to ordinary working people.  See Today’s Revolutionary Aristocracy and Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

A second explanation for the disconnect between policy and reality is liberal-progressives’ affection for abstract, ivory-tower, academic theory.  As is said of the French, who inflicted socialism upon the world, they love theories, especially when the theories don’t work.

The common element in liberal-progressive theorizing is reifying, or treating theoretical categories as if they were single, objective things that respond predictably to government policy: fairness, the poor, blacks, Hispanics, women, education, the economy, the world community.

Spiritual needs, of course, do not exist in the secular world of liberal-progressivism.  Liberal-progressive sociologists and psychologists see humans as merely receptors of sensual pain or pleasure, induced by manipulating physical conditions.  Liberal-progressive policies, of necessity, always relate to providing or withholding material things, such as money, housing, medical care, clothing, and education.  Spirituality and personal morality, for liberal-progressives, are relics of Judeo-Christian ignorance.

A prominent present-day example of reification is Keynesian macroeconomics, which treats the economy as a single “thing” that can be manipulated precisely and predictably by raising taxes, imposing business regulations, and indulging in Federal deficit spending.  The nation’s economic activities are conducted by many millions of individual people, but liberal-progressives see only abstract, reified economic classes. 

The intellectual heresy of reification underlies 19th century theories of history propounded by Hegel in Germany, Comte in France, and Marx in his travels from Germany, to France, thence to England.  All three viewed history as a “thing in itself,” a unified phenomenon that could be analyzed “scientifically” and could therefore be predicted.  Comte preached the inevitable arrival of the age of science, the highest branch of which was to be his new abstraction, sociology.  Marx proclaimed the inevitable triumph of so-called scientific socialism.

The fundamental obstacle to liberal-progressives’ expectation that they can control the course of history with their welfare-state programs is that socialism is not science.  It’s a secular religion based on false premises.

Physical sciences like chemistry, cosmology, engineering, and nuclear particle physics deal with specific, tangible things.  These objects of scientific inquiry, allowing for surrounding conditions, are the same anywhere on earth that scientists study them. 

Sociology and psychology have no laws like those of chemistry or physics, which can predict chemical and atomic particle reactions with extraordinary accuracy.  Behavior of individual humans and social groups of humans is almost the polar opposite.  Human nature imposes broad limits upon emotions and physical capabilities. But expecting individual humans all to act in accordance with liberal-progressive designs is wishful thinking.  Socialism’s faith that government programs can change human nature is dangerous ignorance.

Science is observation and analysis of natural processes occurring in the physical world.  Scientists, in the physical disciplines like chemistry and physics, hypothesize possible explanations of observable behavior, which must be tested and confirmed by other scientists in order to become accepted science.

Liberal-progressive intellectuals reverse the scientific process.  They posit an abstract theory, then select bits and pieces of history to “prove” it, in the manner of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, shrieking, “Verdict first, trial afterwards!” They seek the power to force everyone, supposedly for his own good, to follow their orders.

At bottom, the liberal-progressive aristocracy’s “caring for the people” is no more than an egotistical exercise to usurp political power, rationalized by utopian abstractions.

Since the last decades of the 19th century, the United States has suffered slowly escalating conflict between its founding ethos and the ideology of secular socialism, the latter represented by the liberal-progressive elite.

The aim of the conflict initiated by liberal-progressives has been nothing short of revolutionary overthrow, however gradually executed, of the original constitutional structure of the nation and its replacement by an all-powerful, collectivized national government.  Such a government reduces the citizenry of the United States to servility under liberal-progressive bureaucrats in Washington, DC.  Think, for example, of the Environmental Protection Agency’s unilateral move to usurp regulation of CO2 in the face of majority opposition in Congress, an action that will bureaucratically doom much of the nation’s manufacturing and mining industries. 

Writers of the Constitution assumed the existence of a natural aristocracy of citizens, each of whom had, in his home district, earned the respect of his fellow citizens for his capabilities and judgment.  The structure of our Federal republic rested upon the expectation that such men would on the whole people local, state, and Federal legislatures and occupy executive positions in the various governments.  As that ideal could never be fully realized in a world of human beings, our Federal republic was structured to pit interest against interest in order to forestall aggregation of too much power in too few hands.

Recently united in common purpose to assert political independence from Great Britain, the citizens of the United States and their leaders in 1787 shared a common ethos.  That ethos was the product of centuries of English government, sharpened by the events leading up to England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution, which unseated autocratic James II.

The Glorious Revolution produced the English Bill of Rights and John Locke’s Treatises of Civil Government, which stated the case for inherent, inalienable, individual rights to life, liberty, and private property.  Locke wrote of a government founded in a social compact of mutual advantage for protection of those individual, natural-law rights against arbitrary exertion of power by the sovereign and against foreign enemies. 

In that conception, government did not grant political liberty to its citizens; government was to be restrained from infringing upon its citizens’ natural-law rights.  Today, in contrast, the liberal-progressive elite of the Democrat/Socialist party assert an aristocratic authority to cram down the people’s throats, purportedly for their own good, unpopular measures that abrogate our historical political liberties.  Such is President Obama’s intention to crush private health insurance companies and to nationalize healthcare, by whatever autocratic means he can employ.

The natural aristocracy of the United States, in its first century and a half of national existence, was composed of men of practical experience as independent farmers, merchants, and manufacturers. 

Today’s putative liberal-progressive aristocracy is an anti-business, academic class basing its claims upon academic, utopian theory.  It is an aristocracy without benefit of practical experience in the world of trade and manufacturing.  Today’s liberal-progressive elite, like the French in 1789, are confident that an ideal government can be conceived abstractly in the minds of academic intellectuals, who are ignorant of economics and devoid of practical business experience.

That intellectual presumption gave France the bloody Reign of Terror and a century and a half of unstable government, oscillating from socialism to restoration of the monarchy, under more than a dozen different constitutions.  Our liberal-progressive aristocracy has shoved the nation down the path toward servile dependence upon government and towards international bankruptcy, domestic inflation, and eventual domination by foreign powers.

How did the liberal-progressive aristocracy come to be?

Excesses of wealth in the post-Civil War Gilded Age gave impetus to the new class of intellectuals, who looked for their model of government, not to England and America’s past, but to the Continental European statism of France and the newly emergent German Empire.  There the prevailing ideology was the collectivism of the socialist political state.  In opposition to the English and American conception of natural-law, inherent, individual political liberties, the Continental powers envisioned the political state as creating and granting, when it deigned to do so, selected privileges to its citizens.

Liberal-progressive paternalism was evident in President Clinton’s response to proposed tax cuts.  He thought it a bad idea, he said, because American citizens would spend the money on the wrong things.  This presumption is evident in the current Democrat/Socialist government’s assertion that it will force socialized medicine upon the nation, because the people don’t know what is best for them.  It is evident in Democrat/Socialist regulatory desires to compel banks to make unwise loans and to pressure manufacturers to change production from profitable products desired by consumers to “green” products.

This new aristocracy, imposed by revolutionary means under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, was prominently delineated by Herbert Croly in his 1909 The Promise of American Life and in the 1913 A Preface to Politics by his colleague Walter Lippmann, who had been president of Harvard’s socialist club during his student days.

Croly and Lippmann were founding editors of The New Republic, the flagship journal of liberal-progressivism for most of the 20th century.  Both admired the German Empire’s focus upon professional administration of political functions and abhorred the messiness of legislation and administration in our Federal republic.  As had Auguste Comte in the 1820s of French socialism, Croly and Lippmann urged the subordination of legislative bodies to professional administrators.  Both favored a strong executive, who, like Bismarck in Germany, would seize the controls of political power and impose an educated, trained bureaucratic administration upon our nation, which, in their view, was mired in the outmoded beliefs of Jeffersonian individualism.  America was to achieve greatness to the extent that it emulated the statist governments of Continental Europe.

President Obama assertion that Americans will learn to like socialized healthcare after he has imposed it upon them is a quintessential example of the arbitrariness of beliefs and presumptions that define today’s liberal-progressive aristocracy.

Germany’s Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck detested individualism, preferring collectivized control by an aristocracy.  One of his insults was to dismiss an opponent as “no more than an English shopkeeper.” In the 1880s he created the world’s first welfare system.  The purpose, he candidly acknowledged, was to enable him to herd the German people like cattle (cf. FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and Obama’s multitude of socialistic initiatives).

Despite the German Empire’s great industrial, scientific, and educational achievements, laissez-faire individualism made, first Great Britain, then the United States, the greatest commercial and industrial powers in world history.

Tom Emerson emailed his summary of the case for allowing individuals political and economic liberty, without the suffocating embrace of Big Brother, to find new and efficient ways to improve human productivity and thereby to raise everyone’s standard of living.

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In a web discussion group, a liberal member issued an ad hominem attack on Washington Post columnist George F. Will for his recent column titled “Awash in Fossil Fuels”.  I felt compelled to write an answer, and that answer follows.  I thought your readers might enjoy reading it.
 
1.                   Let me begin with a defense of George F. Will.  Whether you agree with him or not (liberals always impugn the people they disagree with, rather than answering directly the points those people raise), George F. Will is an intellectual with a first-class mind.  His article was well-researched and purported to demonstrate that fossil fuels are not likely to be exhausted any time soon.  This argument can be buttressed by the observation that the earliest vascular land plants first appeared on our planet about half a billion years ago.  They have been thriving and evolving on our planet ever since, converting solar energy into hydrocarbons whose remains we refer to today as fossil fuels.  The idea that humans have, in a little more than a century, burned any sizable fraction of the stored energy of these prodigious life forms is, it seems to me, thoroughly ridiculous.  Humans are, in fact, now discovering new fossil fuel deposits at a rate that exceeds the rate at which we are consuming this resource, so it is not likely that fossil fuels will be depleted for at least several millennia.  When, at that far-distant time, fossil fuels are depleted, technology surely will have evolved to replace this energy and materials source with far superior sources of energy, plastics, etc.  The “scarcity argument” is a convenient liberal ruse to sell otherwise unappealing dogma to ignorant masses – not an argument to be taken seriously by serious people.

2.                   No one that I know is in favor of mankind destroying its nest, or even significantly fouling it.  That said, the same people who worship at the altar of environmentalism were, 30 years ago, warning just as vociferously of the dangers of “global cooling”.  Their arguments were not taken seriously then, and should not be now.  Their real agenda is not to “save the planet”, but to empower government to vastly increase its control over our people and redistribute wealth.

3.                   If they had been serious about clean energy, they would not have vigorously and irrationally impeded the proliferation of nuclear energy for the last 30 years.  They are now arguing that we can’t build more nuclear plants because there is no place to store the spent fuel rods – oblivious to the presence of the completed and very safe Yucca Mountain facility which they themselves have blocked from operation.

4.                   I believe that liberals fundamentally misunderstand what made America a great nation and the envy of most of the rest of the world.  The first permanent settlement of Europeans on the North American continent was Jamestown, VA (1608), followed closely by Plymouth, MA (1620).  So we and our ancestors have been here a little over four hundred years.  (I know that the Vikings and the Spanish were here earlier, but they didn’t stay, so that doesn’t count.)  In those four hundred years, America has given the world a lot of things:  The cotton gin, the steamboat, the telephone, the motion picture camera, the electric light (the last three by the same American inventor), radio (with some help from an Italian), television, nuclear power and weapons, the transistor, the microchip, the microprocessor, most of the software that runs the planet, the conquest of yellow fever, polio, measles, mumps, and dozens of other diseases, ultrasonic and magnetic resonance imaging, the movie and recorded music industries, animated cartoons, computer-generated graphics, the graphical user interface, the mouse, Ethernet, the transcontinental railroad, etc.

5.                   American contributions to science have been just as prodigious.  The building where I worked for the last 10 years on Carnegie Mellon’s main campus has been awarded seven Nobel Prizes (Herb Simon, Franco Modigliani, Merton Miller, Robert Lucas, Finn Kydland, Edward Prescott and Oliver Williamson), and that’s just one of Carnegie Mellon’s buildings!  Overall, Americans have won more Nobel prizes in science (let’s forget about Al Gore’s and Barack Obama’s peace prizes and other irrelevancies) than any other continent or region.  America’s great universities and our leadership in scientific research are envied the world over.

6.                   Americans have built a great civilization where no civilization existed in just a bit over four hundred years, but the American experiment in democracy began in 1787, and thus is less than 225 years old.  The men who assembled in Philadelphia to write the U. S. Constitution didn’t trust government very much.  Thomas Jefferson said it well:  “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.  The hand of man may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”  He also is alleged to have said, “That government governs best that governs least.”  A profound distrust of concentrated power (whether governmental, military of economic) is an enduring part of the American ethos.  The recent liberal power grab in Washington is running into that buzz saw as we speak.

7.                   Since our founders didn’t trust government very much, they filled the Constitution with blocking mechanisms.  A bi-cameral legislature, Presidential approval of laws, confirmation of Presidential appointees by the Senate, the Presidential Veto and the two-thirds vote of both houses to over-ride, an independent judiciary to oversee it all, with a Supreme Court that had no direct powers except to interpret and nullify, but was all-powerful in those functions.  The Constitution was amended ten times before ratification to add James Madison’s powerfully and succinctly written Bill of Rights, which imposed significant limits on the powers of the government.  “Congress shall make no law. . . “  The founders were also concerned about the protection of private and intellectual property.  Perhaps you didn’t know, but the first U. S. Commissioner of Patents was Thomas Jefferson.  The founders believed strongly that a citizen should be entitled to the fruits of his own intellect – an unknown concept prior to 1787.  

8.                   Winston Churchill always marveled at the power of “an aroused democracy”.  There are many examples of this, but the best probably come from the WW II era.  To illustrate, consider that, at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the U. S. Navy operated four aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean (Hornet, Lexington, Yorktown and Enterprise).  Three months after Pearl Harbor, we lost the Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea.  Three months after that, we lost the Yorktown in the Battle of Midway.  So in June of 1942, the U. S. Navy had two aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean.  Fast forward two years to June of 1944 and the Battle of the Philippine Sea.  Twenty-three fully armed and equipped U. S. aircraft carriers took part in that battle alone.  That means ships, crews, armaments, airplanes, trained pilots and weapons.  And that “aroused democracy” did that while fighting a major war in Europe!  In fact, by 1943 the City of Pittsburgh was producing more steel than the Continent of Europe.  Yes, there is great power in an aroused democracy.

9.                   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.

10.               In January of 2006, I spent 10 days in and around the Indian City of Bangalore, where an entrepreneurial revolution is going on.  I visited many of the companies that were leading that rebirth of Indian capitalism, including a 15-year-old company called Infosys.  Infosys had gone from zero to more than 50,000 employees in less than 15 years.  (Talk about creating jobs!)  Their ultra-modern campus in Bangalore would put Microsoft’s Redmond campus to shame!  (I have visited both.)  I asked the founder of Infosys what accounted for the company’s phenomenal success.  His answer was revealing:  “Dr. Emerson, the government got out of the way!  When we started this company 15 years ago, we had to pay three times the world price to buy a computer.  Today, we pay the world price.  The government got out of the way!”

11.               The U. S. economy will recover far more vigorously and quickly if the U. S. Government will stop trying to “help” and just get out of the way.
I could go on, but the above is probably enough of a rant.  The bottom line is that America’s great achievements have been the result of an industrious and creative people operating in a free-market system where government allowed both success and failure, protected private and intellectual property, and didn’t worry too much about the fairness of outcomes, as long as everyone had an equal chance at success.  Government should intervene to prevent concentrations of power from impeding the success of individuals, but failure is part of what Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “creative destruction”.  Failure is thus essential to continued success.  We would be far better off in the long run if Chrysler, General Motors and a few more large banks had been allowed to fail in the recent crisis.  That is not to say that their depositors should have been hurt, but the “moral hazard” of bailing out shareholders, failing managements and outmoded unions should not be encouraged by government.
 
I appreciate that liberals have good intentions, but you know what they say about the road to Hell.
 
S. Thomas Emerson, Ph. D. 

The David T. and Lindsay J. Morgenthaler Chair in Entrepreneurship

Carnegie Mellon University

Change that candidate Obama promised turns out to be restructuring society to achieve social justice, which in the socialist lexicon is egalitarian redistribution of income and wealth.  That means higher taxes, tight regulation of all sectors of the economy, and further enervation of a population increasingly dependent upon the political state for its sustenance. 

The president’s pattern of industry czars and heavy new regulations, along with government financing and partial government ownership of major private companies is reminiscent of Mussolini’s Fascist State Corporatism in the 1920s and 30s, as well as of Hitler’s tight regulation of German industry after 1933.  In neither case did these dictators seize full ownership of private industry, which liberal-progressives tell us is the definition of socialism.  Instead, Mussolini and Hitler followed the prescription of socialism’s early theorists: regulation alone is sufficient to impose socialist statism.

Elite councils of people like David Axelrod, a Chicago socialist agitator who formulates the president’s views, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who were leaders of Weatherman assassins, and San Francisco socialist Nancy Pelosi will decide what is best for you and me.  As the president said with regard to people who question his programs, they should shut up and get out of the way.

More threatening to the survival of the United States is Obama’s continual diminishment of American political, economic, and military stature as a step toward world government, a sort of international egalitarianism.  If the United States is impoverished by high taxes and socialistic regulation, and other nations become equally so, a world government will be at hand.  Hypothetically war will cease to exist as an instrument of national policy.  All of us will live harmoniously while scrounging for crumbs that remain from the former period of capitalistic plenty.

The president’s proposed National Socialist healthcare program is an example on the domestic stage.  Obama offered several different rationalizations for partial socialization and extensive restructuring of our medical care system, all of them shown to be false or of doubtful effect.  If the president’s aim had been only to provide medical insurance for the 15% of American citizens who allegedly lack it, there were far less costly and less intrusive ways to do so. 

Choosing instead government takeover of most of the medical care industry makes clear that his vision of change, in consonance with the Democrat/Socialist Party platform of the past five decades, is British and Canadian style socialized medicine.

The same sort of thinking is apparent in the president’s nationalizing two of the Big Three automakers, as well as in his partial nationalization of the major banks.  His czars, with the guidance of Congressmen like Representative Barney Frank, are regulating executive compensation, the types of loans that banks can or must make, facilities locations, and the sorts of automobiles that Government Motors will be permitted to make.  And, in the automakers’ case, the president disregarded priority rights of bondholders in order to give substantial control of company assets to those quintessential exemplars of socialism, the labor unions.

On the foreign policy front, the president’s faith in pagan worship of Al Gore’s global-warming myth will grind industry to a halt, eliminate millions of jobs, and reduce all Western nations to poverty levels equal to those of the lowest tier of economically emerging nations.  To a vicious degree, propositions supported by Obama will impose egalitarianism here and abroad.

The president has toured the world, kowtowing to Muslim dictators and to socialist strong men like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Castro brothers.  His obsequious pleas to Iran have been met with insulting counter demands.  He is now proposing to make meaningless the sacrifice of our armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq by premature withdrawals and curtailment of military support.  This cowering self-denigration of the United States before the world’s forces of evil is again in consonance with the aboriginal doctrine of socialism, supported by the Nobel Peace Prize committee in socialist Norway.

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius writes that President Obama’s foreign policy is based, not on the real-world passions of international relations, but on a presumption that everyone can and should follow the rules of behavior he advocates. 

Quote:

This vision of a global rule of law exemplifies what we are coming to understand as Obama’s way of thinking—optimistic, rational, practical. But like the mantra of “change” that got him elected, it is an empty vessel waiting to be filled with the details of real life. It’s not a strategy. It’s a formula for how to solve problems—which is not the same as global leadership.

Liberal-progressives’ assume that their beliefs, from New Soviet Man to world government under the UN, are so compellingly clear and indisputable that merely enunciating them is sufficient to lead the world back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s imagined paradise of propertyless beneficence and harmony.

Whatever its proclaimed intentions for the betterment of society, socialism must diminish your range of individual political and economic freedoms, transferring them to state bureaucrats who promulgate regulations. 

One socialist aim, for example, is to reduce or eliminate unemployment, a major concern near the end of World War II.  At that time, the British socialist Labour Party was planning its takeover of government, and Friedrich Hayek wrote “The Road to Serfdom” to describe what lay ahead for the British people.  Sir William Beveridge, a Labour Party leader, candidly stated the basic fact of the socialized welfare state: 

…the State, in [attempting to guarantee full employment] is not wholly master of events so long as it desires to preserve the freedom of individuals……the State cannot undertake the responsibility for full employment without full powers.

In other words, central planning necessary for reducing unemployment, imposing socialized medicine and “green” environmental regulations, along with compelling businesses to permit labor union takeovers of their workforces, cannot become effective without subordinating the rights of individuals to the goals of state planners.  The result is a degree of servility on the road to serfdom.

Today we are moving at a faster pace in that direction (for some specifics, see A Jackboot at Home, an Olive Branch Abroad).

At the root level is a conflict between the Judeo-Christian ethos of western civilization and the paradigm of “scientific” socialism that unfolded in the 19th century.

Western civilization was founded upon Judeo-Christian morality that had become dominant by the time of the collapse of the western Roman Empire.  The common bond among European kingdoms and fiefdoms was the embodiment of that morality in the Christian religion.  From the fifth century until late in the 19th century it was accurate to refer to western Europe as Christendom.

In contrast to the socialist collectivism of the welfare state, which has increasingly attracted the allegiance of Americans since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, the Judeo-Christian ethic focuses upon individual moral responsibility in our daily dealing with our families, with our neighbors, with fellow members of our churches and synagogues, and with our local communities.  The core of Hebraic and Christian teaching, found in the Old and New testaments of the Bible, is love of God, which emanates in personal moral responsibility for fair dealing and helping those in need.  Under the Judeo-Christian ethic every individual has a direct relationship with God, a relationship that implies person accountability for acting or failing to act.  Humans must exercise their God-given free will, they must make choices between spiritual life and the spiritual death inherent in philosophical materialism.  Humanity’s survival requires that spiritual needs, love of God, take primacy over material things.

Social ills, in the materialistic religion of socialism, result from the structure of society.  Those ills, according to liberal-progressive-socialist doctrine, can be remedied by the political state’s taking from those who have more, and giving it to favored classes.  In this paradigm, the political state is humanity’s ultimate savior.

One implication of this paradigm is the elimination of personal responsibility and free will to make real choices.  Instead, politically favored classes of citizens are entitled to share in society’s production of goods and services, solely on the basis of need, which, of course, is to be defined by bureaucratic planners.

This means that the socialist political state deals with collective abstractions, such as “the poor” or “the oppressed.” When individual human suffering is reduced to such grand abstractions, it becomes easy for liberal-progressive-socialists to pat themselves on the back for their humanity when they do no more than denounce businessmen and conservative politicians in social gatherings and street demonstrations.  Socialism is a religion that makes few demands on its adherents for personal sacrifice or involvement beyond reading the New York Times editorial pages.

Among the benefits doled out by the political state there is no place for spiritual needs.  Socialism is a materialistic religion that sees humans as merely receptors of physical pleasure and pain.  By giving or withholding material things that can be purchased with money, the political state can control its citizens when they have been reduced to dependency upon the state for medical care, food, clothing, housing, jobs, and education. 

That was the insight of Otto von Bismarck, the German Chancellor who created the German Empire in the 1860s under Prussian domination.  Bismarck was a member of the Prussian landed aristocracy and no friend of the Reichstag’s majority socialist party.  Nonetheless, he instituted the world’s first welfare-state benefits programs, because, he said, people who became dependent upon the political state could be herded like cattle.

In sharp contrast, under the Judeo-Christian ethic of western civilization, as our Declaration of Independence puts it, even the ruler is subject to the laws of Nature’s God.  God is the higher power to Whom all of us, rulers and ruled, must answer.

But under liberal-progressive-socialism, we are to worship the goddess Reason.  Having no higher power than the minds of intellectuals to answer to, state planners have potentially unlimited power to tyrannize citizens, as we saw in Hitler’s National Socialism and in the Soviet Union.  That is why Friedrich Hayek’s celebrated description of life under socialism is called “The Road to Serfdom.”

Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, opposing Marxian collectivism in 1872, described what life was to be under socialism:

“The government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today.  It will administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land…All that will demand the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes.  There will be a new class, a new hierarchy…the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority.  And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!”

David Airth, a reader who frequently posts thought-provoking ripostes to articles appearing on this website, commented in response to AIG Employees’ Side of the Story.

He wrote, in part:

It has always been government that first establishes the favorable circumstances and the common sense in which a healthy economy can and will flourish.

The validity of Mr. Airth’s assertion depends upon how one defines a healthy economy.  If by healthy economy is meant one in which production of useful goods is maximized and individual standards of living rise significantly from generation to generation, then I do not believe one can find any such economy prior to the 17th century.  Certainly not always has Mr. Airth’s assertion been valid.

Mr. Airth also comments:

Today’s politicians don’t want the job of creating a health economy. They just want to reestablish the environment in which ordinary people will themselves recreate a healthy economy...

Were that true, we would not have President Obama’s stimulus plan and his budget, both necessitating a vast growth of government and far-reaching extension of collectivized bureaucratic regulation, funded by the greatest proposed increase of inflationary government deficit financing in world history.

Mr. Airth’s further comment suggests that “favorable circumstances and common sense in which a healthy economy can and will flourish” are the collectivized, bureaucratic rule that is socialism:

I am thinking of Reaganomics, which virtually laid the groundwork for today’s economic crisis, with it supply-side economics. It started the ball rolling towards the excesses that have now hobbled the economy.

The universal political condition prior to the 17th century in England and Holland, was one that gave rise to the view that history revolved in a perpetual cycle, always returning to earlier conditions.  While the Catholic Church succeeded in getting temporal rulers in Western Europe to eliminate the slavery that prevailed during the Roman Empire, slavery was replaced by feudalism.  Feudalism guaranteed that the mass of subjects, the serfs, would remain perpetually bound to their feudally-granted land parcels, generally groaning under the weight of taxes, in the form of produce and labor, at the whim of the local sovereign.

Mr. Airth’s implicit view of government’s socialistic role is nearly indistinguishable from the conditions of medieval serfdom.  That’s why Friedrich Hayek named his well-known and on-target predictions about British socialism The Road to Serfdom.

Collectivistic government of the sort that Democrat/Socialists favor in the United States has always been at the core of socialist doctrine, from its beginning in mid-18th century France: the theory that only intellectual councils have the mental capacity and knowledge to structure an economy that will produce their conception of social justice.  Social justice is defined as equal distribution of income and wealth, evidenced in free access by every citizens to the fruits of the economy’s labor, without regard to whether those individuals have contributed anything to the production of those fruits.

Prior to the French Revolution of 1789, with two notable exceptions, the prevailing political and economic doctrine was that the ruler’s word was law.  The boldest statement thereof was in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, ca. 1651, in rebuttal to the English Civil War and the English Puritans’ execution of Charles I.  In that doctrine, as expressed by Hobbes, without the iron fist of the ruler, society would be chaotic, with life nasty, brutish, and short. 

Socialistic doctrine substitutes socialist intellectual councils for the iron-fisted sovereign, which opens the door to seizure of power by the supreme political counsellor.  Hence the inescapable tendency of socialism is to some degree of tyranny, the extreme examples being the Soviet Union, Hitler’s National Socialism, and Mao’s Red China.

Anyone who does not recognize that President Obama’s budget proposals entail great losses of individual economic and political freedom is blind or self-deluded.

The two notable exceptions to the collectivistic, authoritarian government were Holland, after its 1648 independence from Spanish and Hapsburg rule, and England after the 1689 Glorious Revolution that ousted tyrannical James II and established the principle that even the sovereign is subject to the natural law individual liberties ordained by God.

Thereafter, both nations were increasingly open to individual economic initiative, with a very light hand of government.  In England, that took the form of laissez-faire, free-trade economic policies, which are anathema to our own Democrat/Socialists.

First Holland, then England flourished and attained the highest level of economic well-being for individuals ever experienced in history, as individuals’ private property rights increasingly curtailed the sovereign’s arbitrary power.

Only such conditions qualify as “the favorable circumstances and the common sense in which a healthy economy can and will flourish.”

No boundaries, no moral order, no civil society
Gary Kelly
EarsToHear.net
 
“There is a way which seems right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” Proverbs 14:12
 
America’s Founders confronted EVERY issue, social, economic, and primarily personal, with the Biblical moral virtue that formed the basis for the boundaries they established in creating and designing the Republic. American “leaders” today confront EVERY issue with secular “political correctness.” Until “We the people” correct this, America will continue its moral, social decline and will result in relinquishing its standing as the leader of the free world. Then who will the oppressed turn to?
 
“Son of man, you dwell in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not: for they are a rebellious house.” Ezekiel 12:2
 
America is continuing to witness the breakdown of the family, the redefinition of marriage, and the promotion of abortion, all which violate “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” There is corruption at all corporate and government levels, indicating obvious moves away from personal and corporate responsibility, accountability, respect, commitment, self-discipline, self-motivation, and independence, into a reliance on a government that has proven it is incapable of meeting the needs of any current government-run program, including, and especially education.
 
America may be now witnessing what Ronald Reagan warned: “Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction.”
 
Public schools and “higher” education institutions have purposely neglected to teach the American Christian Heritage in favor of a secular “politically correct” dogma of humanism and globalization over sovereignty.
 
“A trained intelligence can do much, but there is no substitute for morality, character and religious conviction.” President Calvin Coolidge, 1924
 
The American way of life of past generations is no longer attainable due to an uncivil, immoral society. This all because secularism rejects any and all moral boundaries and primarily because citizens of the Kingdom of God have neglected, and continue to neglect, preaching the Kingdom of God, as well as refusing to “reprove the world of sin.” Kingdom citizens have been duped into believing the “politically correct” lie that “we are not to judge.” The result is America is fast becoming just another nation which refuses to be bound by “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” which was the Declaratory foundation of America and its Constitution.
 
The Constitution’s primary author, James Madison, wrote Thomas Jefferson on 8 February 1825, these words concerning the supremacy of the Declaration of Independence over our nation’s Constitution: “On the distinctive principles of the Government...of the U. States, the best guides are to be found in...The Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental Act of Union of these States.” President James Madison also stated on June 20, 1785: “Before any man can be considered as a member of Civilized Society, he must first be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.” He also wrote, “The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities impressed with it.” And: “I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” James Madison
 
On August 1, 1776, Samuel Adams stood before a large crowd on the steps of the Philadelphia Statehouse and delivered a speech before the formal signing of the Declaration Of Independence on August 2, 1776. In his speech he stated: “We have explored the temple of Royalty and found that the idol that we have bowed down to has Eyes which see not, Ears that hear not our Prayers, and a heart like the nether millstone. We have this day restored the Sovereign to Whom alone all men ought to be obedient; He reigns in Heaven, and with a propitious Eye beholds His subjects assuming that freedom of thought, and dignity of self direction, which He bestowed upon them. From the rising to the setting Sun, may His Kingdom come.” Samuel Adams also said: “[N]either the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.”
 
President John Adams: “From the day of the Declaration . . .they [the American people] were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of the Gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledge as the rules of their conduct.” And, “"From the day of the Declaration . . .they [the American people] were bound by the laws of God, which they all, and by the laws of the Gospel, which they nearly all, acknowledge as the rules of their conduct.” - President John Adams  ...And, “[This] Form of Government…is productive of every Thing which is great and excellent among Men. But its Principles are as easily destroyed, as human nature is corrupted….A Government is only to be supported by pure Religion or Austere Morals. Private and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.”—John Adams, 2nd president of the United States of America (Warren-Adams Letters, Massachusetts Historical Society, 1917, Vol. 1, p. 222)
 
“Nothing is more certain than that a general profligacy and corruption of manners make a people ripe for destruction. A good form of government may hold the rotten materials together for some time, but beyond a certain pitch, even the best constitution will be ineffectual, and slavery must ensue.” John Witherspoon (The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men, 1776) Reference: The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon, Miller ed. (140-1)
 
Conservatives stop at the fact that America’s Founders established our Republican form of limited government upon laws and boundaries while they forget that the underlying reason was derived from the Biblical moral virtue of America’s Founders, as evident by how “Rights” were to be “entitled,” if they DID NOT violate “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” (See America’s Founding Document.)
 
“The establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the Motive which induced me to the Field—the object is attained—and it now remains to be my earnest wish & prayer, that the Citizens of the United States could make a wise and virtuous use of the blessings placed before them.” George Washington
 
Conservatives must confront any and all secular liberal politically correct advances by demanding by what other foundation other than “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” do they employ to justify “a way which seems right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” Proverbs 14:12 (I.E. Abortion, same-sex relationships.)
 
The same can be said of preachers: While many can quote what Jesus said in John 3:16, how many can quote what He said in the same breath, up through verse 21? (See immediately below.) The moral decline and resulting “culture wars” dividing America are a result of preachers preaching “from their head and their heart” and neglecting to preach what they were commissioned to preach - the Kingdom of God, the Word of God, and their failure to reprove the world of sin. Therefore people no longer go to church, they go to their government.
 
John 3:16-21: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believes on him is not condemned: but he that believes not is condemned already, because he has not believed in the Name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hates the light, neither comes to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that does truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.”
 
Until citizens of the Kingdom of God begin to honor their commission to preach God’s Word instead of their own, how can God cause an increase?
 
Christians must begin to confront any and all violations of God’s Law by demanding what other foundation, if not God’s Law, do secular liberals employ to justify sin.
 
It is imperative that we ask those who are politically correct to justify, clarify, and provide an answer as to exactly what basis, what foundation do they employ for establishing boundaries, if any, when “Rights” are to be “entitled” or taken away? 
 
What human wisdom do they employ? How is it they have come to claim the Judeo-Christian heritage is now discriminatory? By what foundation do secular liberal progressives establish legal boundaries if not by “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” which America’s Founding Document determined how “Rights” were to be “entitled.”
 
2 Timothy 4:1: I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
 
That “time” is here. Until the foundation of Biblical moral value once again permeates the land, the decline into liberal secularism where government replaces God will continue to erode America’s very existence. Election 2008 will determine much, however, American citizens who are also citizens of the Kingdom of God will determine much more.

Radical-left activist doctrine ignores the historical fact that every cohesive and enduring political society must be ordered by a commonly held understanding of human nature and human morality.

The profile in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine is a long and revealing one.  Outside Agitator: Naomi Klein and the new new left gives the reader a sympathetic view of the anti-everything orientation of the present-day progeny of early 20th century families who were thoroughly imbued with gnostic expectations of a socialist heaven on earth.  Families who passionately believed in remaking human society and human nature to achieve blissful, benevolent social conditions by purely materialistic means.

The common theme of these radical activists throughout the 20th century and in today’s New Left is dissatisfaction with existing conditions.  See Gnostic Education for a more detailed description.

As the New Yorker profile tells us in lengthy detail, there is hardly any aspect of present Western culture that Naomi Klein and her followers do not regard with antagonistic disgust.  What sent her into rhapsodies of pleasure was witnessing anarchic turmoil amid the disintegration of governmental authority in Argentina, a time when housewives gathered on street corners anxiously seeking some way to provide for their families’ daily needs.

The unexpressed subtext is radical activism’s complete divorce from the spiritual aspirations, the moral strivings that are a more real, fundamental part of human nature than the material externalities that get all of the activists’ attention.

Gnostic activists like Klein, whether under the rubric of progressivism, positivism, or scientism, focus their energies upon tearing down the moral and social structure of society.  The goal is to destroy what created the United States and to open the gates to the socialist welfare state, expecting tranquility, happiness, and social order magically to follow.

The ineluctable problem is that human nature does not change, Darwinian evolution not withstanding.  Earliest histories, as well as archaeological research into prehistorical times, make this abundantly clear. 

As Eric Voegelin wrote in The New Science of Politics:

The closure of the soul in modern gnosticism can repress the truth of the soul, as well as the experiences which manifest themselves in philosophy and Christianity, but it cannot remove the soul and its transcendence from the structure of reality.

New leftists like Naomi Klein speak in the vocabulary of hard-boiled practicality.  But what they advocate is recognizable as arrant nonsense by anyone who ever has had to deal with the real wold in an executive capacity.  Another of Professor Voegelin’s observations is apt:

...the obsession of replacing the world of reality by the transfigured dream world has become the obsession of the one world in which the dreamers adopt the vocabulary of reality, while changing its meaning, as if the dream were reality.

When critics are unkind enough to point out that transfiguration of society in the socialist model always results in government deficits, inflation, economic repression, shortages, and lower incomes for everyone, Naomi Klein and her followers blame their failures on someone or something other than themselves and their gnostic fantasy of a materialistic heaven on earth.