The Biden Administration Has Begun It’s Search For Inflation Scapegoats

After almost a year of denial, the Federal Reserve has finally acknowledged that inflation is here. In a hearing in Congress in late November, Jerome Powel said it was time to “retire” the word “transitory” when it comes to inflation. https://news.yahoo.com/fed-chairman-jerome-powell-retires-the-word-transitory-in-describing-inflation-162510896.html

In a massive overreaction to COVID-19, the Federal Reserve pumped up M2 money supply by huge amounts in the early months of 2020. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4478065-inflation-and-the-great-supply-lie. This, in fact, is inflation. When most people speak of “inflation”, what they are referring to is a general rise in prices, which is a consequence of inflating the money supply.

The result of Federal Reserve monetary policy, combined with Congressional action like enhanced unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, is the biggest spike in the consumer price index in almost forty years.  https://thehill.com/policy/finance/585263-annual-inflation-rises-to-68-percent-the-highest-rate-since-1982

Unable to address the fundamental problems of government spending more money than it takes in as taxes, and the Federal Reserve’s monetization of the debt, the Biden Administration has found a new (old) scapegoat.

This was a popular scapegoat of politicians back in the 1970s when the United States last faced massive inflation: supposed corporate “profiteering”.

The argument goes something like this: business profits are increasing and prices are increasing, therefore, the reason prices are increasing is because of increased profits. The Biden administration is making this argument with respect to meat prices and meat producers.  As the Wall Street Journal notes:

Prices have climbed 16% at the meat counter in the last year…” (“Carving Up Biden’s Inflation Beef The White House needs a refresher in the law of supply and demand.” Jan. 7, 2022; https://www.wsj.com/articles/carving-up-bidens-inflation-beef-meat-producers-tyson-prices-11641587628?page=1 )

The Wall Street Journal article goes on to say that profits for meat companies are also up:

“The White House targets four large producers that publicly report financial information. It says gross profits at Tyson, JBS, Marfrig and Seaboard Foods have increased more than 120% since before the pandemic while their gross margins are up 50%. Tyson’s last quarter earnings report shows it ‘made record profits while actually selling less beef than before,’ the White House says.” (Id.)

The Biden Administration’s response to rising prices caused by inflation is to threaten antitrust action on meat companies. But, they haven’t bothered to ask a simple question: If companies could just arbitrarily raise prices and increase their profits like this, why didn’t they do it all along? Why did it just happen now?

Once it is understood that inflation of the money supply, that is printing of money by the Federal Reserve, is the primary culprit for a general rise in prices, then the increased profits can be properly seen as an effect of inflation. Furthermore, it can be seen that such increased profits are temporary, assuming that the Federal Reserve doesn’t continue to inflate the money supply.

Meat producer profits are up because the costs on the goods they are selling are from a time before the Fed’s money printing. As time passes, the costs of raw material and labor will catch up, and will cause those profits to evaporate.

It takes time for a product to be manufactured. A business uses inputs from an earlier time to sell that product at a later time. If the business produces a product at T1 (Time 1), when the value of the dollar is worth more, and then sells that product at T2 (Time 2), when the value of the dollar is now worth half what it was at T1, then the price of the product will get bid up twice as high in T2. This will create a profit on paper, but when the business goes to buy more raw materials and labor in T3, it is going to find that those prices have doubled, so the profit is short lived.

For instance, meat producers raised and grew cattle at a certain cost in T1. Their costs were for things like rental prices for land to graze the cattle on, feed for the cows, water, and labor costs to take care of the cows. Additionally, there are the costs for slaughtering and processing the cattle, which requires plants, laborers, and other equipment. Then there’s the cost of transporting the meat to grocery stores and storing it in refrigerators.

At T2 (Time 2), the Federal reserve then began inflating the money supply. This money was dispersed into the economy through bank loans, stimulus checks, and enhanced employment benefits to consumers. Since the amount of goods in the economy did not increase, this increased demand for goods and services, for things like beef, bid up prices by consumers using the new money. This led to a general rise in prices for goods and services in the economy.

On the meat company’s books, they had incurred costs for the beef already in stores at an earlier time, at T1. The increased consumer demand bid up the sales price of that beef already in stores that was produced in T1. This is then reflected in T2 as increased profits for meat producers.

However, when meat producers go back to produce more beef in T3 (Time 3), they will find that their costs have increased. Employees are demanding higher wages. Landlords are charging more for grazing cattle on land. The feed prices for cattle have increased. Energy costs for slaughtering, shipping, and refrigerating beef have increased. As a result, the profits, in terms of the percentage of their margin between the costs of production and the price of sale of beef, returns to what it was before the Federal Reserve began inflating the money supply.

George Reisman notes this phenomena in his book “Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics”:

“…inflation raises the apparent or, as economists say, the nominal rate of profit that businesses earn….To understand what is involved, it must be realized that the costs which enter into the profit computations of business firms are necessarily “historical”—that is, the outlays of money they represent are made prior to the sale of the products….Now to whatever extent inflation occurs, the sales revenues of business firms are automatically increased: the greater spending that inflation makes possible is simultaneously greater sales revenues to all the business firms that receive it. Since costs reflect the given outlays of earlier periods of time, the increase in sales revenues caused by inflation necessarily adds a corresponding amount to profits….The extra profits are almost all necessary to meet higher replacement costs of inventory and plant and equipment, and the rest are necessary to meet the higher prices of consumers’ goods that the owners of businesses were previously able to buy in their capacity, say, as stockholders receiving dividends.” ( Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, George Reisman, Kindle Location 10366 to 10389)

This assumes that the Federal Reserve doesn’t continue to inflate the money supply. Additional rounds of inflation will temporarily create more illusory profits for businesses. Furthermore, these businesses are likely to suffer reduced real profits, as opposed to their nominal profits, as they are pushed into higher income tax brackets, causing them to pay additional taxes.

The solution to the problem of a general rise in prices over time is for the Federal Reserve to stop inflating the money supply, and for Congress to reduce governmental spending to levels commensurate with the amount taken in as taxes, not to scapegoat the producers.

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The Ideas In The Communist Manifesto Compared And Contrasted With the Ideas of Ayn Rand

Over a hundred and fifty years later, the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels live on, like a cancer that has metastasized throughout academia and intellectual thought. As an economic system political leaders espouse, Marxism may be dead, but the “Marxist mindset” continually pops up in new forms.

The latest incarnation of Marxism appears to be in the realm of race relations. Recently, the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, presented a plan to teach school children “civics”. Essentially, as a conservative, Republican governor, he wants to teach children about what made America a great country. (Unfortunately, as a political conservative, with little understanding of philosophy or history, the Governor of Florida probably doesn’t fully grasp what made America great. I’m also wary of public schools teaching ideology, even when it is pro-American. But, at least his heart is in the right place.)

In the process of explaining about his civics courses, Governor DeSantis emphasized that there would be no funding in public schools for what is commonly called “critical race theory”. De Santis described this ideology as essentially Marxist:

“‘Critical Race Theory is basically teaching people to hate our country, hate each other. It’s divisive, and it’s basically an identity politics version of Marxism. It has no place in the classroom and certainly shouldn’t be funded by taxpayers,’ said the Governor.” (https://hannity.com/media-room/desantis-critical-race-theory-is-teaching-people-to-hate-our-country-and-hate-each-other/)

There is some debate as to whether and to what extent “critical race theory” is influenced by Marxism. (I believe it is.) But, before one could make the case for the intellectual connection between “critical race theory” and Marxism, one must first understand what Karl Marx said. That is the aim of this essay.

Here, I will be comparing and contrasting the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, as expressed in “The Communist Manifesto”, with the ideas of Ayn Rand.

Marx’s Collectivist Method of Thinking In The Social Sciences

Marx, like almost every economist and social scientist before or since, starts with a collectivist vision of mankind. Individual human beings become interchangeable entities. He starts with concepts like “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie”, and never connects that to actual people, living their actual lives. Rand, by contrast starts from the perspective of the individual:

“Mankind is not an entity, not an organism, or a coral bush. The entity involved in production and trade is man. It is with the study of man—not of the loose aggregate known as a “community”—that any science of the humanities has to begin . . . .

A great deal may be learned about society by studying man; but this process cannot be reversed: nothing can be learned about man by studying society—by studying the inter-relationships of entities one has never identified or defined.” (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “What is Capitalism”, Ayn Rand, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/individualism.html )

An example of Marx’s collectivist method of thinking can be seen when he discusses the “alienation” of the “proletarian”, whatever that is, from his labor brought on by industrialization. Here, Marx conflates a skilled artisan with a “workman”:

“Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

Mechanization allows a low-intelligence person to do what would have required a skilled workman before, while the higher-intelligence skilled workman can focus on the design of the technologies and machines. Both parties benefit from this.

This always occurs with technology. The high intelligence and high ambition people develop ways for the lower intelligence and lower ambition people to do part of the work. Think of the difference between a command line operating system and a graphical user interface in a computer. Lower intelligence people, with less inclination to learn DOS or UNIX, can now use a Microsoft Windows machine. I think this example of Windows replacing DOS is an example of what Economists call “comparative advantage”. (https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativeadvantage.html)

Imagine an Engineer and a high school dropout. There are two jobs that need to be done. The first job is the design of new computers. The second job is issuing commands to a computer to print out letters in an office, for the manager. Only the Engineer can do both of these things because the computer is quite complex, and it has no graphical user interface. It’s using some text-based operating system like DOS or UNIX. The Engineer has an absolute advantage over the high school dropout at both these jobs. In fact, the high school dropout can do neither job. Issuing commands in a text-based operating system is simply beyond his mental capability. The Engineer builds a graphical user interface for the high school dropout. Now, the dropout can issue the “print” command to the computer, by clicking on a visual icon to print out the boss’ letters. The Engineer prefers to let the dropout issue the commands to print the letter for the office boss, allowing him to focus on designing new and better computers.  By designing the graphical user interface, the Engineer has given the high school dropout a comparative advantage in printing letters for the boss as a sort of secretary or office worker.

In the Late Middle Ages, I suspect something similar happened with respect to skilled artisans. (This is more of a hypothesis on my part, that would require historical investigation to confirm.) The craftsman who made shoes, for instance, would both design them, and then also physically manufacture them. The assembly line system allows for splitting up of labor between those with high intelligence and knowledge and those with low intelligence or low knowledge.  The craftsman, who is good at coming up with designs for shoes, specializes in the design of shoes. He became what we would today call an “Engineer” -a designer of machines and products, but not the person who actually physically assembles them.  The manufacture of each shoe is broken down into simple steps that don’t require much intelligence or knowledge. (This process of designing the assembly line is usually done by another, Industrial, Engineer today. This is also an example of comparative advantage and the division of labor.) A single person need only learn how to shape a piece of rubber into the shape of a heel. Another person need only learn how to cut a piece of leather into a sole. Another person only need to learn how to make a shoelace. Etc., etc. These simple steps can be performed by people with relatively low intelligence, and/or who have little education. The Engineer created jobs for low-skilled/low-intelligence people that didn’t exist before, which allows the Engineer to focus on more creative endeavors.

Marx fails to see the phenomena of comparative advantage probably because of his collectivist mindset. He thinks of “workers” as interchangeable. To Marx, the Medieval craftsman is the same person that would then be put on an assembly line doing “mind-numbing” manual labor. In reality, that craftsman is the high-intelligence, high-knowledge person who is more likely to become the Engineer, who has created jobs for many low-intelligence and low-knowledge farm-hands or vagabonds. The Engineer has an absolute advantage over the factory worker – he could do both jobs better. Due to the principle of comparative advantage, however, which is based in the Engineer’s opportunity costs, he prefers to specialize in the design of products like shoes, while letting others physically assemble them.

I think this is what Ayn Rand meant when she spoke of the “pyramid of ability”:

“When you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receive an incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not only by your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in the world around you.

When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of the inventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.

The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden [an industrialist and inventor]? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.” (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.)

In the above quoted passage from “The Communist Manifesto”, Marx wants to make it seem like the skilled workman has been “alienated” from his labor -whatever that means. But, the skilled workman of the Middle Ages is the Engineer of today. The Engineer, backed up by the intellect of scientists like Isaac Newton, who were in turn backed up by the intellect of philosophers like Aristotle, created wealth for countless starving Medieval serfs and peasants, living a precarious, near-starvation, and very unfree, existence until the Industrial Revolution. The Engineer presumably gains enormous satisfaction from the design of new products and advancing the boundaries of technology and civilization. He’s hardly “alienated” from his labor. (Whatever “alienated” means in this context.) He derives a sense of purpose and meaning from his work. The assembly line worker making shoe heels, or the office worker using Microsoft Windows, can earn sufficient wealth more quickly, thanks to new technology. This gives some of these workers time to improve their skills by going to school if they are young, intelligent, and ambitious. If an assembly line or office worker is older, and perhaps of lower intelligence, it allows him to earn his daily bread more quickly. Then, he can get home to his wife and children. He may find his meaning and purpose in life through his growing family, rather than through his job. Either way, the assembly line worker and the office worker are better able to find whatever meaning there is to be found in their individual lives, thanks to the likes of Aristotle, Newton, and Thomas Edison.

Given Marx’s Collectivist Method of Thinking About Society, He Develops Poorly-Defined Terms Like “Proletariat” and “Bourgeois”

The Communist Manifesto is based in the assumption of a “class struggle”:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

Marx says that “in a word” society that has existed until now has always been one of “class struggles” between “oppressor” and “oppressed”.

Marx and Engels speak of “oppressor and oppressed”, which forms the basis of the “class struggle”, which in turn is the history of all “hitherto existing society”, but what does it mean, “to oppress”?

Ayn Rand doesn’t speak of “oppression”, per se, but of concepts of “justice” and “individual rights”. For Rand, rights are violated by means of the initiation of physical force:

“Man’s rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment.” (The Virtue of Selfishness, “The Nature of Government”, Ayn Rand.)

“Oppression” implies the use of physical force in an unjust manner, or at least action in an unjust manner. What is Marx/Engels’ theory of justice? What does the term “justice” mean to them?  As will be discussed later, the logical implication of Marxism is that “justice” is nothing but a “tool” of the ruling class, and has no objective connection to the facts of reality or man’s life. The concept of “objectivity”, of true and false, would be considered a “bourgeoisie prejudice” by anyone following Marx and Engels’ ideas to their logical conclusion.

The Communist Manifesto assumes an inherent and inevitable conflict between different groups of people. Class relations are always class conflict. Force is the only means of conflict resolution. One side or the other will be destroyed:

“…the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

“Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

“…every class struggle is a political struggle.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

“In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.”  (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

Rand, by contrast, says that there are no conflicts of interest amongst rational men, in the ordinary course of life. (Possibly leaving aside “lifeboat emergencies”):

“The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.” (The Virtue of Selfishness, “The Objectivist Ethics”, Ayn Rand)

Instead of poorly defined terms like “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie”, Rand describes the “producer” and the “looter” as two groups of people fundamentally at odds:

“With very rare and brief exceptions, pre-capitalist societies had no place for the creative power of man’s mind, neither in the creation of ideas nor in the creation of wealth. Reason and its practical expression -free trade- were forbidden as a sin and a crime, or were tolerated, usually as ignoble activities, under the control of authorities who could revoke the tolerance at whim. Such societies were ruled by faith and its practical expression: force. There were no makers of knowledge and no makers of wealth; there were only witch doctors and tribal chiefs. These two figures dominate every anti-rational period of history, whether one calls them tribal chief and witch doctor -or absolute monarch and religious leader…” (For The New Intellectual, Ayn Rand.)

“You stand in the midst of the greatest achievement of the greatest productive civilization [The United States of America] and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood -money….Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves -slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers -as industrialists.” (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand)

Marx failed to distinguish between those who achieve wealth through production, and those who seize it by means of the initiation of physical force. To him, the Medieval nobility that held people in virtual slavery as serfs, and by force of arms, was no different from the voluntary relationship between the owner of a factory and one of his employees. But, one uses whips and weapons, while the other uses dollars and persuasion.

Marx on the Origin of the “Bourgeoise” and “Proletariat”

Although it is not a well-defined term, Marx describes the “bourgeoise” as having started out as medieval serfs, who formed independent towns in the European Middle Ages, then eventually displaced the Nobility and Monarchy altogether, to form the “modern state”:

“From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. “(Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

“Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility…or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility…in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

This is a fairly accurate description of how medieval towns formed. Historians have described the rise of the “burgers” and the “bourgeois”, who were often escaped serfs that had run away from the manor they were legally tied to:

“The term bourgeois originated in medieval France, where it denoted an inhabitant of a walled town.” ( https://www.britannica.com/topic/bourgeoisie )

These towns did form the social and economic basis on which Europe moved from its medieval social and economic organization to modern society:

“While the manor remained the principal unit of European society until the eighteenth century, the seeds of ‘modern’ civilization were being nourished as early as the eleventh. With the reopening of trade routes and the appearance of new marketing centers came the emergence of the towns that were destined to convert Europe from a rural to an urban society. The lords and peasants who remained on the manorial estates played a negligible role in the growth of these towns. An expanded cast of characters gradually appeared there, consisting of merchants, entrpeneurs, bankers, lawyers, artisans, and unskilled laborers. In the thirteenth century these groups made up but a fraction of Europe’s population (less than 10 percent), but their numbers were destined to grow until, by the twentieth century, they would be a majority….

…The mideval towns were essentially trading posts where local produce could be sold and foreign merchandise purchased…

The new towns presented an avenue of escape to men and women who were seeking release from the drudgery and routine of the manorial village. This was especially true for serfs who longed to cast off their inferior status. They could, if they grew desparate enough, run away from the manor and lose themselves in a distant town. According to custom of the period, they were legally free if the lord failed to recapture them within a ‘year and a day.’ (Later in the Middle Ages serfs could gain their freedom by making a cash payment to their lord.)” (A Brief History of Western Man, 3d Ed., Chapter 5, The Creation of Europe: Political and Social Foundations, by Thomas H. Greer)

Marx/Engels show ambivalence on whether the bourgeoise destruction of the old medieval order was a positive change. In fact, they seem to regard many aspects of pre-modern times as superior to the present, capitalist order:

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. … It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation….

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation….

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto; emphasis added.)

These above passages seem strange in light of Marx/Engels’ belief that all of history is the history of oppressor and oppressed. It also seems odd because of their belief that the bourgeoisie had their origins in runaway serfs who went to the towns and formed armed associations for mutual protection.

Marx/Engels, at least implicitly, seem to prefer the social organization of the Middle Ages to social relations existing since the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism.

Other Randian intellectuals have noted that socialists are often “closet medievalists”. While he was still associated with Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Nathaniel Brandon made this observation about psychologist Erich Fromm:

Scratch a collectivist and you will usually find a medievalist. Fromm is not an exception. Like so many socialists, he is a glamorizer of the Middle Ages. He [Erich Fromm] perfunctorily acknowledges the faults of that historical period—but in contrasting it with the capitalism that succeeded it, he is enchanted by what he regards as its virtues….

… It is not uncommon to encounter this sort of perspective on the Middle Ages, among writers on alienation…. The complete lack of control over any aspect of one’s existence, the ruthless suppression of intellectual freedom, the paralyzing restrictions on any form of individual initiative and independence—these are cardinal characteristics of the Middle Ages…. all of this is swept aside, so entranced is Fromm by the vision of a world in which men did not have to invent and compete, they had only to submit and obey.” (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “Alienation”, Nathaniel Brandon, emphasis added.)

Additionally, Marx/Engels certainly prefer the tribal pre-historical past of mankind, which they regard as a sort of “lost golden age” of communism. The Communist Manifesto hints at a distant past in which there was no class struggle:

“That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792–1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisation of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan’s (1818–1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)] “ (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

“The “Manifesto” being our joint production, I consider myself bound to state that the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus, belongs to Marx. That proposition is: that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes” (Engles, Preface to Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

This is significant today, given the “multicultural” turn of modern leftism, in which primitive, “indigenous societies”, are viewed as “pure” and “good” while Modern, Western Civilization is viewed as always bad. There is textual support in The Communist Manifesto for this viewpoint held by the modern left.

Rand agrees that primitive tribes were fundamentally collectivist in organization. Unlike Marx and Engels, she recognizes that the modern move away from primitive tribes promotes and enhances the life of any person who wants to flourish. The “morality of altruism”, for Rand, is a “tribal phenomenon”:

“It is obvious why the morality of altruism is a tribal phenomenon. Prehistorical men were physically unable to survive without clinging to a tribe for leadership and protection against other tribes. The cause of altruism’s perpetuation into civilized eras is not physical, but psycho-epistemological: the men of self-arrested, perceptual mentality are unable to survive without tribal leadership and “protection” against reality. The doctrine of self-sacrifice does not offend them: they have no sense of self or of personal value—they do not know what it is that they are asked to sacrifice—they have no firsthand inkling of such things as intellectual integrity, love of truth, personally chosen values, or a passionate dedication to an idea.” (Philosophy: Who Needs It, “Selfishness Without A Self”, Ayn Rand.)

The Communist Manifesto seems to say the “proletariat” was inadvertently created by the “bourgeoisie”:

“But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians. “ (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

What is this “proletariat”?

“In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed – a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. “ (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

As already discussed, Marx’s description of those who own no property and live solely by being paid a wage is simply not an accurate description of reality under capitalism. Marx and Engels apparently had no concept of the economic concept of comparative advantage. They also had not even the slightest inkling of the “pyramid of ability” Ayn Rand has described. Capitalism and technological progress often create new jobs for people who have low skills or low intelligence. The example of the movement from text-based operating systems to graphical user interfaces, already discussed, is an example of this. Software engineers and entrepreneurs have made it possible for people with minimal computer skills to operate a computer by clicking on a series of “icons” on a computer screen. (Which was another invention -at one time all input and output on a computer was nothing but punched cards, requiring highly specialized knowledge and great intelligence to understand.) Every person working for wages in an office today has capitalism, and the technological inventiveness it unlocks, to thank for their increased productivity, which makes their higher standard of living possible:

“In proportion to the mental energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention, receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort that his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the ‘competition’ between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of ‘exploitation’ for which you have damned the strong.” (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.)

Marxist Determinism

Marx views the proletariat as the “exploited” and the bourgeoisie as the “exploiters”. The proletarians are perpetually the victims of the bourgeoisie, with no autonomy or free will whatsoever:

“No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

Note how Marx regards the proletarians as somehow lacking in agency. They are unable to resist paying for too large of an apartment or house by the landlord, unable to resist buying things from the shopkeeper, and also unable to continually seek high-interest loans from the pawnbroker. (Where the “proletarian” gets the stuff to pawn, Marx doesn’t say. The proletarian envisioned by him is both simultaneously unable to afford anything but the basics in life, and also has items of value to take to the pawnshop. I suppose I’m just not steeped in enough “Marxist Dialectic” to see past the contradiction.)

Since “proletariat” is a poorly defined term, in modern times, any group that is less culturally advanced tends to be viewed by political leftists as “exploited” by whatever group they regard as “bourgeoisie” -which, in practice, ends up meaning the more intelligent, knowledgeable, and better cultured people.

Marx views people as primarily products of their environment. Their ideas, attitudes and beliefs are shaped by their “material circumstances”:

“Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

Is there any sense in which Ayn Rand would agree with that? Rand recognized that a dogmatic refusal to question any aspect of the established social order seems to be a feature of many people’s minds. Rand described several different types of “collectivist thinking” that were common in human society. Two of these are the “tribal mindset” and the “second-hander”:

“What are the nature and the causes of modern tribalism? Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. It is a logical consequence of modern philosophy. If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live?

Obviously, they will seek to join some group—any group—which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group—they will be pulled obediently to join a group. But which group? Well, if you believe that you have no mind and no moral value, you cannot have the confidence to make choices—so the only thing for you to do is to join an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.

This, of course, is racism. But if your group is small enough, it will not be called “racism”: it will be called ‘ethnicity.’” (The Voice of Reason, “Global Balkanization”, Ayn Rand; http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/tribalism.html )

“Men were taught to regard second-handers—tyrants, emperors, dictators—as exponents of egoism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym.

From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded.

He invented altruism.

The creator—denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective.” (The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand; http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/second-handers.html)

For Rand, these aren’t mindsets to be blindly accepted by those who choose to think. Such irrationality should be criticized.  Social institutions, educational institutions, laws, and ethics should be aimed at critiquing and discouraging such a passive mindset. Until the early Twentieth Century, the United States of America had a set of institutions in place to discourage tribalism:

“Tribalism had no place in the United States—until recent decades. It could not take root here, its imported seedlings were withering away and turning to slag in the melting pot whose fire was fed by two inexhaustible sources of energy: individual rights and objective law; these two were the only protection man needed.” (Philosophy: Who Needs It, “The Missing Link” Ayn Rand, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/tribalism.html)

Furthermore, for Rand, tribalism and second-handedness are not an inevitable mindset. People become this way through their own default. They fail to think, and that is the result. The solution is to encourage thought. What system of social organization encourages thought and discourages the failure to think?

“Capitalism demands the best of every man—his rationality—and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him. His success depends on the objective value of his work and on the rationality of those who recognize that value. When men are free to trade, with reason and reality as their only arbiter, when no man may use physical force to extort the consent of another, it is the best product and the best judgment that win in every field of human endeavor, and raise the standard of living—and of thought—ever higher for all those who take part in mankind’s productive activity.” (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “What is Capitalism”, Ayn Rand, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/capitalism.html )

The Communist Manifesto on Women

In a departure from the more modern, “feminist”, interpretation of Marxism, The Communist Manifesto regards the damage to the family as another harm caused by the “bourgeoisie”. Specifically, Marx and Engels say capitalism has made women too independent:

“Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. …The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

For Marx, the Industrial Revolution has made it possible for women to do the work that used to be done by men, and that is a bad thing. Jobs that would have required great physical strength are replaced by machines, which can be operated by comparatively physically weaker women. Even poor women no longer need be dependent on men for their subsistence.

Further, in a knowledge-based, intelligence-based, industrial economy, intelligence becomes more important than physical strength, allowing for women to rise in the business world, if they so choose. Ayn Rand recognized this fact, which is why she created the character of Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged: A female businesswoman and engineer. Rand agrees with Marx that capitalism and the Industrial Revolution gave women greater independence. As one writer in a collection of essays approved by Rand noted:

“The factories were held responsible, by such critics, for every social problem of that age, including promiscuity, infidelity, and prostitution. Implicit in the condemnation of women working in the factories was the notion that a woman’s place is in the home and that her only proper role is to keep house for her husband and to rear his children….

The factories were blamed simultaneously for removing girls from the watchful restraints of their parents and for encouraging early marriages; and later, for fostering maternal negligence and incompetent housekeeping, as well as for encouraging lack of female subordination and the desire for luxuries….” (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Women and Children”, Robert Hessen.)

In reality, the factory system provided women with a means of survival and independence unavailable to them before the advent of the Industrial Revolution:

“What the factory system offered these women was—not misery and degradation—but a means of survival, of economic independence, of rising above the barest subsistence….

…women increasingly preferred work in the factories to any other alternatives open to them, such as domestic service, or back-breaking work in agricultural gangs, or working as haulers and pullers in the mines; moreover, if a woman could support herself, she was not driven into early marriage.” (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “The Effects of the Industrial Revolution on Women and Children”, Robert Hessen.)

Capitalism has done more to liberate women than all the political agitation of feminists, to Marx and Engels’ consternation.

The Communist Manifesto on Property

Marx says that the abolition of property is not a “distinctive feature of communism”:

“The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

Instead, Communism aims at the abolition of only “bourgeoisie property”:

“The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.“ (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

Marx says he does not mean he advocates the abolition of the property acquired by “the fruit of one’s labor”:

“We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

But, Marx says, such private property is no longer a feature of the system of “bourgeoisie property”:

“Hard won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

Marx says that modern “wage labor” does not create private property for the laborer:

“But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

“Capital”, by which Marx seems to mean “property” as that term is understood in modern times, is collectively produced by proletarians, and is a tool of exploitation by the capitalist:

“To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power. “ (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

So, for Marx, the “liberation” of “capital” by the proletarians is not theft, it is merely an elimination of its “class character”:

“When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.“ (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

As has already been discussed, Rand would simply have a fundamental disagreement with Marx about (a) studying groups of people and social systems without understanding the fundamental nature of man; (b) the grouping together in Marx’s mind of all people into either “proletarians” or “bourgeoisie”, without recognizing the individual nature of human beings; and (c) the assumption that technology, created by the more knowledgeable and intelligent people, is somehow “exploiting” the less knowledgeable and intelligent. Instead, Rand, in accordance with the “Pyramid of Ability” principle, would say that the more able make life better for the less able -although Rand would also adamantly say this is not, and should not be, the life’s goal of property owners:

“The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man…” (The Virtue of Selfishness, “The Objectivist Ethics”, Ayn Rand; http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/selfishness.html)

For Marx, property rights are a form of “exploitation”. For Rand, property rights are moral principles defining and sanctioning an individual’s freedom of action to live his life in a social environment. To create the material means of his survival and flourishing:

“Bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.” (The Virtue of Selfishness, “Man’s Rights”, Ayn Rand.)

Also, for Rand, since the interests of rational men generally do not conflict in a free society, the fact that the more able are able to produce great new technologies actually benefits their intellectual inferiors, in accordance with the economic principle of “comparative advantage” and Rand’s concept of the “pyramid of ability”.

Marxist Epistemology

For Marx, at least when it comes to normative concepts like “law”, “morality” and “government”, there is no such thing as “objectivity” -of “true” and “false”.  All ideas are just a product of one’s “material conditions”:

“But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto; emphasis added.)

Marx views the contents of the human mind, our ideas, as nothing but a sort of rationalization for advancing our class. For instance, when addressing some of the criticisms of communism, Marx notes that:

“The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

Why does Marx dismiss philosophical and “ideological” criticisms of his viewpoint? Because all philosophy and ideology is nothing but rationalization for him. There is no such thing as “objectivity” for Marx and Engels:

“Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

The predominate ideas of a society are nothing but the “ideas of the ruling class”:

“What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

Education of children is premised on the idea that some ideas are true, while others are false. It is also based in the belief that some concepts will help you to live your life better. You learn how to read because literacy is better than being illiterate. It allows for greater communication and easier learning. You learn arithmetic to keep a budget of your spending, and to determine quantities more quickly than you could through simple counting. You learn calculus to be able to determine the instantaneous velocity of a rocket to put satellites into orbit for tracking the weather. Etc., etc. But for Marx, all education is nothing but a perpetuation of the system of exploitation by the “bourgeoisie”:

“And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto; emphasis added.)

Normative concepts like “law” or “morality” for Marx merely reflect the “selfish interests” of some particular group. All such concepts are merely a reflection of “present modes of production”:

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto; emphasis added.)

Strangely, Marx uses the term “selfishness” here to refer to a group interest, not self-interest -the supposed group interest of the “bourgeoisie”, whatever that is.

Rand agrees with Marx that reason and the discovery of laws of nature is only necessary if one is selfish. She agrees that property rights are related to selfishness. But, for Rand, “selfishness” is actually related to a “self”, which Marx, as a collectivist, barely even recognizes:

“…the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.

This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.”  (The Virtue of Selfishness, “The Objectivist Ethics”, Ayn Rand.)

Rand, unlike Marx, regards one’s self-interest as the only reason ethics, politics, or any other normative concept is necessary. It is because one chooses to live that ethics, rights, or questions of the concept of “property” even arise:

“There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms….It is only the concept of “Life” that makes the concept of “Value” possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.” (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, emphasis added.)

Marx, like almost every philosopher before him, starts from the assumption that the only way for there to be “truly objective” concepts like “rights”, “law”, “government” or “ethics” is to somehow eliminate all self-interest from the equation. Since that is not possible without dying, Marx throws up his hands and declares the whole enterprise to find objective law and government nothing but  “….the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property…”

Rand, on the other hand, recognizes that it is only because one wants to live that these concepts are necessary. Therefore, an objective definition of “rights” or “law”, to say nothing of morality, depends on man’s choice to live:

“My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these.” (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand)

The Communist Manifesto’s Nihilistic Tendency

As discussed, Marx views all ideas as nothing but the ideas of the “ruling class”:

“What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. “ (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

In reality, some ideas are true and others are false. What makes an idea “true” or false”? It’s correspondence to reality. The idea that the Earth is flat is false and the idea that the Earth is round is true. Why does one accept the latter and reject the former? Because it has consequences for living. If you operated on the assumption that the Earth was flat, it would lead to a whole host of contradictions, and would put you at war with reality. Human life would be worse if people continued to insist that the Earth was flat.

People who continue to accept false ideas will be less successful at living. People who insist that vaccination is, on the whole, bad for them, will tend to be killed by that idea. People who regard vaccination as generally a good will tend to live longer and better lives.

Taken to its logical extreme, a Marxist analysis of vaccination will call it nothing but a “bourgeoisie prejudice” and claim that the reason the vaccinated live longer and better lives than the unvaccinated is due to “exploitation” of the later by the former.

Furthermore, taken to its logical extreme, a Marxist analysis of vaccination would say that precisely because people who are vaccinated are living longer is proof that they are exploiters, and that they must be “swept aside”. The desire to live as the basis for objectivity is regarded as a distorting agent by Marxists. Those implementing Marxist political theory will then hold a simmering grudge against the successful and the able. The able tend to be the people who want to live, and therefore conform the contents of their minds to reality in order to achieve that objective. Marxist resentment will focus on the most rational and most successful people. It focuses it’s hatred on us, the living. The Marxist mindset is a psychology of nihilism -of hatred of the good.

This is why Marxism tends to devolve into full-throttle mass-murder and destruction of the able wherever it is implemented. (For instance, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge murdered anyone who spoke a foreign language or wore glasses because they were viewed as intellectuals -as people who used ideas to improve their lives.  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399)

Marx said:

“The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” (Communist Manifesto; https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifesto)

In practice, this has meant the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution of China, and the Gulags of Stalinist Russia. The blood of the people murdered under those regimes is on the intellectual hands of Marx and Engels.

The Environmentalist Empire is Striking Back- Blame Another Energy Source Texas Was Pushed Onto For the Failure of Wind

The Environmentalist Empire is Striking Back with a new strategy to control the damage from the failure of wind power during the Great Texas Power Outage Debacle of 2021.

With the failure of wind turbines, which froze up during the Arctic blast, the Enviros have had to throw another, less “politically correct”, alternative energy source under the bus. Their victim: natural gas generation. (“Sorry, Comrade, but your execution is necessary for the good of the State.”)

Several news articles are already pushing the “Green Party Line” regarding the debacle in Texas:

“Woodfin said Tuesday that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, mostly wind generation, are offline and that 30 gigawatts of thermal sources, which include gas, coal and nuclear energy, are offline.” ( https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/16/natural-gas-power-storm/ )

But the news articles cannot completely hide the truth. If you read between the lines, you will discover an essential clue to our problem in Texas:

“A combination of mostly natural gas, some coal and a nuclear power plant failed to meet up with the demand that customers had, Cohan [Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University] said.” (https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/02/16/texas-weather-power-outage-rolling-blackouts-leave-millions-dark/6764764002/ )

Ultimately, this USA Today article notes that it was a failure of natural gas generating capacity, and that we wouldn’t have had this problem with coal:

“Third, some natural gas plants may not have been able to get adequate supply of gas to be converted into electricity, Cohan  said. Unlike a coal plant that has an  ready stockpile, natural gas plants don’t store as much on site, meaning any disruption at the supply source will lead to a disruption in turning on the lights.” (Emphasis added.) (https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/02/16/texas-weather-power-outage-rolling-blackouts-leave-millions-dark/6764764002/ )

Do you see that? We wouldn’t have had that problem with coal, which has fuel stored on site.
“Still, Cohan said issues on the supply side better explain what happened. “I think there wasn’t enough planning for how interdependent our natural gas and electricity systems were.”” (Emphasis added) (https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/02/16/texas-weather-power-outage-rolling-blackouts-leave-millions-dark/6764764002/ )

So, they’re going to sacrifice natural gas (less politically correct) in order to save wind power (more politically correct). But, a more traditional energy source is “completely off the table”, as it were. (Coal.)

Why has Texas become so dependent on natural gas?

Is it because we’ve been moving away from some other, more reliable, and tested source of power? (Perhaps due to EPA regulations and mandates?)

Several news articles over the years provide us with a hint of  this:

For instance, this article notes that coal power plants are being shut down in Texas to meet Federal Clean Air Standards:

“Billed as ‘a practical and lower-cost option for helping the area attain higher federal clean air standards'” ( Xcel Energy to convert oldest Texas coal plant to burn natural gas by January 2025) (https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/natural-gas/111620-xcel-energy-to-convert-oldest-texas-coal-plant-to-burn-natural-gas-by-january-2025)

There has been a headlong rush in conversion of power plants from coal to natural gas in Texas:

“One of the latest electrical power plants in Texas to make the switch from coal to natural gas is in the Panhandle.” (http://www.okenergytoday.com/2020/11/texas-panhandle-power-plant-switching-from-coal-to-natural-gas/ )

Some coal plants are just being shut down entirely due to Federal Environmental Rules:

“A coal-fired power plant in East Texas will close and another will stop using the fuel to comply with federal environmental rules…” ( https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Another-coal-plant-to-close-in-Texas-15708417.php )

Since 2010, Texas has drastically increased its reliance on natural gas, while drastically reducing the use of Coal:

“Texas’ fuel mix has changed considerably in the past decade. In 2009, coal-fired plants generated nearly 37 percent of the state’s electricity while wind provided about 6 percent. Since then, three Texas coal-fired plants have closed and the use of wind power has more than quadrupled, as more transmission lines bringing electricity from remote wind farms to urban market centers came online. “ (https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2020/august/ercot.php)

An article from the Financial Times shows how the use of Coal has gone from more than 40% of the energy mix in Texas to less than 20% in the past ten years. Natural gas has risen from about 40% to 50% and wind has gone from ten percent to about 25%:

“Wind power surged past coal in Texas’ electricity mix for the first time in 2020, the latest sign of renewable energy’s rising prominence in America’s fossil fuel heartland.” (https://www.ft.com/content/225dacb0-fa6e-4f38-a8d2-64517731a228)

Screen Shot 2021-02-17 at 8.23.42 AM

It is 9:10am in the morning on Wednesday, the 17th of February, 2021, as I write this from Plano, Texas. My phone is pared to my laptop, since the power is out again. Since early Sunday morning, we’ve had power about half that time. Since yesterday afternoon, the blackouts seem to be on a schedule. Off for four hours, and on for about two.

Before that, we’d go for as long as eight hours without power. The randomness of it was the worst part. I understand why they torture POW’s with irregular sleep, eating, light/dark schedules now. I understand why totalitarian states can completely destroy the will of a people with their randomly applied rules and regulations, that seem to only apply some of the time, to some of the people. You never know when the Sword of Damocles will drop on your head. It makes any sort of planning or long-range action impossible. It destroys any achievement you may wish to accomplish with your life. We’ve been reduced to a stone age mindset, even if some of our technology remains behind, like Ancient Roman aqueducts that continued to work during the Dark Ages. But, I think that’s exactly what the environmentalists want:

The deeper significance of the ecological crusade lies in the fact that it does expose a profound threat to mankind – though not in the sense its leaders allege. It exposes the ultimate motive of the collectivists -the naked essence of hatred for achievement, which means: hatred for reason, for man, for life.” (Ayn Rand, The Anti-Industrial Revolution.)

 

 

 

Rolling Blackouts in Texas – Good Thing We’ve Got That Wind Power…

IMG_1291

https://www.kxan.com/weather/green-energy-report-where-does-texas-rank-in-solar-wind-nuclear-energy/

I sit here in my room at home. It’s about 18 degrees Fahrenheit outside. I’ve paired my phone to my laptop computer to post this. [EDIT 3: In the daytime. At night, its more like 5 degrees.]

Starting at about one o’clock this morning, we’ve been experiencing rolling blackouts in North Texas.

Initially, they lasted about forty-five minutes.

This last one has been going on three hours. [EDIT: It stayed out from 10am to 6:00pm on Monday.] [EDIT 2:  It went back out at 6:25pm on Monday.] [EDIT 3: power came on about 2am, Tuesday. Stayed on until about 4am. Came back on about 8:00am, and has been on until now (9am, Tuesday).]

I’ve written before on the dangers of “alternative energy sources” in California and the deterioration of that state’s power infrastructure and the resulting forest fires.

It turns out the environmentalist ideological rot has infested Texas, as well.

Over the past decade, Texas has increased it’s dependence on wind-power generation until it constitutes about 23% of the power generation in this state.

Guess what happens when it gets really cold, and there is snow and ice?

Of course, the media mentions that the increased wind is adding additional generation from other turbines.

Until they freeze over, I suppose.

[EDIT 4:] This editorial from a professor of Economics at the University of Michigan, Mark J. Perry, written last year, notes that Texas has become so dependent on wind power, that when part of that system fails, it can cripple the rest of the energy infrastructure with suddenly excess demand. As he notes, only Nuclear and Coal can provide the sort of round-the-clock stable energy production necessary for our electric generation system:

As millions of Texans sweated through a heatwave last summer, the electric grid was pushed to its limits. Power demand surged to a record high. Texas wind generation — which provides more than 20% of the state’s power — flopped.

Because wind turbines don’t operate in the still air of July, reserve margins evaporated. Officials with ERCOT, the state’s main power supplier, looked on in disbelief as electricity prices spiked from the normal range of $20 to $30 per megawatt-hour to $9,000 not once but twice.

Had a power plant or two gone offline for maintenance or a gas pipeline ruptured, the entire electric power system would have come undone. Renewables supply power only when the wind blows and the sun shines, and there is no technology available for storing large amounts of power. Fortunately, there were no rolling blackouts or brownouts. Texas dodged the bullet…” https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2020/06/03/opinion-electricity-reliability-tightrope/3128224001/

This editorial notes that Texas got lucky in 2019. In 2021, our luck with wind power ran out.

I Voted for Donald Trump

Making choices based on less than perfect information, when the available options are all bad, is difficult.

That is certainly true of the 2020 Presidential election.

The choices as I saw them were: (1) Not vote; (2) Vote for Biden; (3) Vote for Trump; or (4) Vote Libertarian.

(There are other party choices, like the Green Party, but given my ideology, these are not options for me.)

The Libertarian choice was eliminated in my mind almost immediately. Gary Johnson was a one-time Republican and Governor of New Mexico. If he was unable to do significantly well in 2016, then the current Libertarian candidate wasn’t going to do better, plus, I didn’t know anything about her. There are some real “kooks” in the Libertarian Party and, for all I know, she could be one of them.

The next choice is a vote for Biden. The Democratic Party has gone too far to the left for me to consider voting Democratic. After rioting in major US cities,  the Democratic response was to call for “de-funding the police”, and to say that race-rioting and looting by black people is excused because of nebulous “concepts” like “white privilege” and “systemic racism”.

The Democratic Party in states like California and New York also responded to the COVID-19 crisis by enforcing “lock-downs”. They made it impossible for lower class and service industry people to work by shutting down bars, restaurants, and other businesses. It was a fundamental attack on the right to freedom of contract, property, and to live. I assume that if Joe Biden becomes President, he will attempt to impose the same policies on a national level.

Additionally, Joe Biden is elderly. He is 77 years old. After four years, he will be 81. Four years after that he will be 85. The average American male lives to be about 76. There is a real possibility that his running-mate may become President due to his death or incapacity. Joe Biden may not be in favor of “de-funding the police”, but Kamalla Harris won’t give a straight answer on the question. Even the Austin American Statesman, a left-wing newspaper, in a left-wing city, noted that:

In an early June episode of ‘The View,’ host Meghan McCain asked Harris: ‘Are you for de-funding the police?’ After some back-and-forth about the definition, Harris demurred….On June 25, she said: ‘For far too long, the status quo thinking has been to believe that by putting more police on the street, you’re going to have more  safety — and that’s just wrong.’…While Harris has alluded to some key points of the ‘defund the police’ movement, she hasn’t offered her support. The Hill reported in June that, before she  joined the Biden campaign, Harris was trying to ‘straddle the divide on the left over police reform.'” (https://www.statesman.com/news/20201009/fact-check-does-kamala-harris-support-police-defunding)
I think this sort of “political triangulation” and “pragmatism” by Harris, of not wanting to say she opposes de-funding the police, while also not saying she supports it, will eventually mean total capitulation by her to the left wing of her party:

There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar as single teaspoon of one’s silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender -the recognition of his right to one’s property.” (“Doesn’t Life Require Compromise”, Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, https://courses.aynrand.org/works/doesnt-life-require-compromise/ )

The Democratic Party wants to ban all privately-owned guns so that no one can defend themselves, and it also wants to eliminate all police. The consequence will be victimization of the law-abiding by force-initiators. The desire of that party to eliminate one of the few, legitimate functions of government in favor of more taxes, regulation and welfare is too far. The Democratic party has completely capitulated to evil with the push to “de-fund police”.

Additionally, the Democratic Party Controls the US House of Representatives, and will almost certainly control it after the election. At this point, the Republicans may continue to control the Senate, or it could be a  50-50 split, or even in Democratic hands. Keeping a Democrat out of the White House is the best way to ensure divided government, since the Senate might end up in Biden’s hands if it is a 50-50 split. (Kamalla Harris, as Vice President would break ties.)  I didn’t vote Republican in 2016 in part because they controlled the the US House and the Senate. A Democratic President could only do so much damage. (Laws like the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank came about during the first two years of the Obama Administration, when Democrats controlled both the legislative and executive branches.)

I disagree with Trump on his immigration policies. I disagree with the idea of “building a wall” at the border. I disagree with him on issues like abortion, and tariffs on international trade. He doesn’t understand what made America Great in the first place. It was economic freedom and respect for private property rights. Environmental laws and other regulations are largely responsible for the off-shoring of US industrial production of items like pharmaceuticals.

I don’t disagree with Trump’s decision not to impose a national lock-down on COVID-19. Pandemic response is largely a matter for the states under the Constitution, and that is one of the major issues in this year’s elections. I think Trump’s biggest mistake was encouraging states to take such measures.

I could have not voted for President, which was a close second to what I did. But, in the end, too much has happened to just sit on the sidelines. COVID-19 state-government-enforced restrictions on freedom, and race-based looting in major cities makes that an unacceptable decision this year. I certainly think reasonable minds can disagree with my decision. I’m operating on a spectrum of probability, with less than perfect information.

So, I voted for Donald Trump. With a Democratic House of Representatives to act as a “check” for at least the next two years, I think divided government is the best option from a bad set of choices.

Theory and Practice: Riots and Mayhem In 2020

The riots  that occurred in early June of 2020 reflect certain ideas in practice. To understand this, one must understand the role of ideas in historical events. Ultimately, the dominant ideas in a society have certain consequences. This is true even if the ideas being pushed by most intellectuals today expressly state that ideas have no correspondence to the facts, and therefore have no consequences.  In 1964, Ayn Rand gave a speech that was subsequently transcribed into an article. She addressed a common question presented to her:

Is ‘Atlas Shrugged’ a prophetic novel -or a historical one?” (Rand, Ayn, et al. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “Is Atlas Shrugging?”, Penguin Publishing Group, 1986.)

Since her last novel’s publication in 1957, her fans would write Miss Rand letters pointing to parallels between it and current events. Bad economic ideas were leading to bad events. She explained in her Ford Hall Forum speech that Atlas Shrugged is a novel about ideas, and when those ideas are implemented, there will be certain probable results. As she put it:

Are you inclined to believe that [bad] theories of this kind will have no results in practice?” (Rand, Ayn, et al. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “Is Atlas Shrugging?”, Penguin Publishing Group, 1986.)

Rand believed that good ideas in a social system would tend to have good results, and bad ideas would have bad results. At root, this was a reflection of her concept of “objectivity”. Rand believed that some ideas have more or less correspondence to reality than other ideas:

Objectivity is both a metaphysical and an epistemological concept. It pertains to the relationship of consciousness to existence. Metaphysically, it is the recognition of the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver’s consciousness. Epistemologically, it is the recognition of the fact that a perceiver’s (man’s) consciousness must acquire knowledge of realty by certain means (reason) in accordance with certain rules (logic). This means that although reality is immutable and, in any given context, only one answer is true, the truth is not automatically available to a human consciousness and can only be obtained by a certain mental process which is required of every man who seeks knowledge -that there is no substitute for this process, no escape  from the responsibility for it, no shortcuts, no special revelations or privileged observers -and there can be no such thing as a final ‘authority’ in matters pertaining to human knowledge.” (Rand, Ayn, The Voice of Reason, “Who Is the Final Authority On Ethics?”; https://courses.aynrand.org/works/who-is-the-final-authority-in-ethics/)

Furthermore, Ayn Rand believed that ideas have life and death significance. Good ideas are good because they correspond to reality, and thereby allow man to discover the nature of reality, and enact the necessary principles of action and behavior that will promote his long-range survival:

Most people…think abstract thinking must be ‘impersonal’-which means that ideas must hold no personal meaning, value or importance to the thinker. This notion rests on the premise that a personal interest is an agent of distortion. But ‘personal’ does not mean ‘non-objective’; it depends on the kind of person you are. If your thinking is determined by your emotions, then you will not be able to judge anything, personally or impersonally. But if you are the kind of person who knows that reality is not your enemy, that truth and knowledge are of crucial, personal, selfish importance to you and to your own life -then the more passionately personal the thinking, the clearer and truer.” (Rand, Ayn Philosophy: Who Needs It, “Philosophical Detection”)

For Rand, historical and current events therefore tend to be a reflection of the dominant ideas held by people. A nation or culture that holds good ideas will tend to succeed and thrive, while a nation or culture with bad ideas will tend to fail. Baring natural disasters, over the long-run, historical events tend to be driven by the ideas men hold:

“…Contrary to the prevalent views of today’s alleged scholars, history is not an unintelligible chaos ruled by chance and whim—historical trends can be predicted, and changed—men are not helpless, blind, doomed creatures carried to destruction by incomprehensible forces beyond their control. There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man’s rational faculty—the power of ideas. If you know a man’s convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course. But convictions and philosophy are matters open to man’s choice. There is no fatalistic, predetermined historical necessity.… Since men have free will, no one can predict with certainty the outcome of an ideological conflict nor how long such a conflict will last…” (Rand, Ayn, et al. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “Is Atlas Shrugging?”, Penguin Publishing Group, 1986, emphasis added.)

This does not mean that everyone is an originator of the ideas they hold. Most people are not. Especially as children and young adults, they tend to accept the ideas they hear from their parents, teachers, elders, and the media uncritically:

You have no choice about the necessity to integrate your observations, your experiences, your knowledge into abstract ideas, i.e., into principles. Your only choice is whether these principles are true or false, whether they represent your conscious, rational convictions—or a grab-bag of notions snatched at random, whose sources, validity, context and consequences you do not know, notions which, more often than not, you would drop like a hot potato if you knew….

Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted.” (Rand, Ayn, Philosophy: Who Needs It.)

Briefly, and by way of contrast, other philosophers have interpreted history differently, and not primarily as a result of the ideas that people hold, either consciously or subconsciously. They have seen history as the unfolding of circumstances in their environment, or other factors beyond their control. For instance, Marx views your behavior as governed by your “material circumstances”, and that your ideas are mere rationalization. This reflects the “postmodern” attitude after Kant that the concept of objectivity is illusory. As a result, ideas have no correspondence to “things in themselves”. What you hold as “objective fact” is “distorted” by your consciousness:

The ‘phenomenal’ world, said [Immanuel] Kant, is not real: reality, as perceived by man’s mind, is a distortion. The distorting mechanism is man’s conceptual faculty: man’s basic concepts (such as time, space, existence) are not derived from experience or reality, but come from an automatic system of filters in his consciousness (labeled ‘categories’ and ‘forms of perception’) which impose their own design on his perception of the external world and make him incapable of perceiving it in any manner other than the one in which he does perceive it.” (Rand, Ayn, For The New Intellectual, Signet, 1963; http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/kant,_immanuel.html)

In practice, the ideas people hold become a “matter of opinion”, without any correspondence to reality under this viewpoint. But, in reality, ideas have consequences, including this one.

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What ideas have been dominant in Europe and its various “offshoot” civilizations, like the Americas and Australia? “Western civilization” is the term used to distinguish this civilization from others in both time and place. What Ideas underlie Western Civilization?

Its origins lie in Ancient Greece:

The Greeks, as the founders of Western civilization, drew freely upon the older civilizations of the Middle East. Especially through their contacts (chiefly commercial) with the Persian Empire, they absorbed much of the cultural heritage of both Mesopotamia and Egypt.”  (“A Brief History of Western Man”,  3d Ed., Greer, Thomas, 1977 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., Chapter 2: “The Greek Beginnings of Western Civilization”, Pg. 41)

What was this Greek way? How did it differ from the oriental way? The cardinal distinction lay in the Greek view of the individual. In the ancient cultures of the Middle East, ordinary people were of small account. The ruler of Egypt, the pharaoh, owned and regulated the land and its inhabitants through divine right. Guided by priests and working through an army of agents and bureaucrats, he ordered the pattern of existence for everyone. The idea of personal liberty had little meaning to the mass of his subjects, and no one in authority regarded them as capable of governing themselves.

            The Greeks would be slaves to no person and to no state. They believed in law and in an orderly society protected by the gods, but they generally insisted on a substantial measure of freedom and political participation (for adult males)….the Hellenes believed, all free and intelligent Greeks were capable of enjoying this good life. They did not take the view, more characteristic of the Orient, that individuals must resign themselves to a fate beyond their control. In a qualified way, the Greeks were optimistic about the world and about what a man could do on his own -if he did not presume too far. During the Golden Age, at least, they showed tremendous zest for living. The struggle, the contest, the game -even when lost- seemed exciting and challenging.”  (“A Brief History of Western Man”,  3d Ed., Greer, Thomas, 1977 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., Chapter 2: “The Greek Beginnings of Western Civilization”, Pg. 52, emphasis added.)

The Ancient Greeks developed systems and methods of thinking that resulted in modern, Western societies:

Aristotle accepted Plato’s general notion of the existence of Ideas (Forms), but he held that physical matter also is a part of reality and not to be despised. Matter, he thought, constitutes the ‘stuff’ of reality, through its shapes and purposes come from the Forms that Plato had postulated. By logical thinking, men can gain knowledge of the purposes of things and of their interrelations, knowledge that will give meaning and guidance to their lives…To Aristotle, logic is the indispensable key to truth and happiness. For this reason, he worked out precise and systematic rules for logical thinking, rules that have been respected for centuries.” (“A Brief History of Western Man”,  3d Ed., Greer, Thomas, 1977 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., Chapter 2: “The Greek Beginnings of Western Civilization”, Pg. 60, emphasis added.)

The Romans took Greek systems of thought and implemented them, and spread Ancient Greek civilization throughout the Mediterranean world.  (“A Brief History of Western Man”,  3d Ed., Greer, Thomas, 1977 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., Chapter 3: “The Roman Triumph and Fall”, Pg. 79)

Roman civilization flourished until the Dark Ages, when Western Civilization turned away from the Ancient Greek emphasis on this world and towards the afterlife. This state of affairs lasted for about a thousand years until the Renaissance in the 1300’s. Eventually the rediscovery of Ancient Greek ideas led to further innovations in thinking, which reflected the Enlightenment, and the start of what can be considered “modern” Western Civilization:

In philosophy, modernism’s essentials are located in the formative figures of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Rene Descartes (1596-1650), for their influence upon epistemology, and more comprehensively in John Locke (1632-1704), for his influence upon all aspects of philosophy.” (Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Focault, Hicks, Stephen R.C., Chapter 1: “What Postmodernism Is”, Pg. 7, ISBN 978-0-9832584-0-7)

In essence, “Western” or “Modern” Civilization reflects the following ideas:

(1) Ideas ultimately come from observation, and reasoning is the method of expanding our awareness beyond what is immediately perceived. (2) The individual has primacy. Society is merely a number of individuals who live in society because it is beneficial to their own, personal lives. Life is for the living, and not for the service of some other-worldly authority. There is no reason men should live for others.

Three historic events resulted from these ideas: (1) The Renaissance, which was a movement away from a church-ordered society, and a “rebirth” of Ancient Greek ideas, including a focus on man’s life in the here and now; (2) the Enlightenment, which led to scientific, systematic methods of thinking aimed at comprehending reality; and (3) the Industrial Revolution, which was the material product of the previous two events.

Today, “Western Civilization” is somewhat of a misnomer, since it is no longer exclusively “Western” in geographic scope. The Japanese are a traditionally non-Western people that seem to have successfully integrated our culture into their own. A study of Japanese history since the mid-1800’s reveals a people who made a very conscious effort to adopt Western Civilization:

“…the new government [of Japan] carried out policies to unify the monetary and tax systems, with the agricultural tax reform of 1873 providing its primary source of revenue. Another reform was the introduction in 1872 of universal education in the country, which initially put emphasis on Western learning.” (https://www.britannica.com/event/Meiji-Restoration)

Japan’s leaders in that era [the late 1800’s] held up the West in general, and the United States in particular, as examples to be emulated. Western technology was imported and Japanese students were sent to study in the West. The English language began to be taught in Japanese schools and there was even a suggestion at one point that English be made the national language…” (Black Rednecks & White Liberals, Sowell, Thomas Pg. 259.)

The level of Japanese dedication to Western ideas and ways in the period of the late 1800’s is like no other. The nation went from a fairly backwards, feudalistic system of government and economy to a world power in less than a hundred years, despite the fact that the Japanese started out from systems of thinking and ways of life that were radically different.

Japan is a success today because the ideas the Japanese chose to implement corresponded more closely to realty than the ideas that they discarded or modified to fit with Western Culture:

“…the Japanese recognized their own initial backwardness and were determined to overcome it. They began by learning all that they could from the West and emulating the West until they reached the point when they had amassed the knowledge, skill, and experience to take their own independent direction.” (Black Rednecks & White Liberals, Sowell, Thomas Pg. 260.)

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Western culture is not entirely consistent. There are other strands of thought running through it besides reason, egoism/individualism, and free market capitalism. The Middle and Dark Ages reflected the more Platonic and religious elements of Western Civilization. Those elements still exist today. Additionally, since about the mid-1700’s, another set of ideas has become dominant. These ideas start with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who ushered in a sort of “counter-Enlightenment” with the express goal of denying “…knowledge in order to make room for faith.” (See Second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant.)

Starting with Kant, our culture has increasingly moved from “modern” to what is commonly described as “postmodern”:

The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality -or is it not? Is our rational faculty a cognitive function, taking its material from reality…or is it not? This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti- reason camps…the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason.” (Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Focault, Hicks, Stephen R.C., ISBN 978-0-9832584-0-7, Pg. 28)

Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality -real, noumenal reality- is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products….Limited to knowledge of phenomena that it has itself constructed according to its own design, reason cannot know anything outside itself.” (Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Focault, Hicks, Stephen R.C., ISBN 978-0-9832584-0-7, Pg. 29)

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What has been the result of this “postmodern” turn from objectivity and individualism in modern times? The early weeks of June 2020 have revealed just how far the culture has devolved. The rioters have revealed an intellectual rot that I didn’t think existed just a couple of months ago. Throughout the Obama administration, there was rioting centered around allegations of police brutality. (The merits of these allegations of widespread misbehavior by the police, I question, but that can be a debate for another time.) There have also been past debates about the extent to which various statues of Confederate leaders should be taken down, or moved, especially in large Southern cities, which tend to be controlled by black leaders, and to be Democratic.

It wasn’t particularly surprising when Confederate statues in Richmond were vandalized or destroyed. (https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876124924/in-richmond-va-protestors-transform-a-confederate-statue) What caught me by surprise with the recent unrest was the speed with which the rioters turned from destroying Confederate statues to destroying and vandalizing statues of past leaders who had nothing to do with the Southern Confederacy. I’ve been aware of the irrational hatred of the college-educated for Christopher Columbus for some time. When a statue of that historical figure was destroyed in Boston, it was expected. (https://www.nbc12.com/2020/06/09/christopher-columbus-statue-torn-down-thrown-lake-by-protesters/)  But, the rioters managed to surprise even me when they went after a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the General who led the Union army against the Confederacy:

Several videos surfaced on social media Friday of statues of St. Junípero Serra, Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key being torn down in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.” https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/demonstrators-topple-statues-in-san-franciscos-golden-gate-park/2312839/

Now, there are calls to take down statues of Abraham Lincoln for “racial insensitivity”:

Some UW-Madison students of color want the university to remove one of its most iconic landmarks, a statue of Abraham Lincoln, because of what they see as the former president’s anti-Indigenous and anti-Black history despite Lincoln’s legacy of ending slavery in the U.S.”

https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/university/uw-madison-students-call-for-removal-of-abraham-lincoln-statue-on-bascom-hill/article_b12c83c9-38a1-5e68-9964-beabe4046d02.html

“…a rally at the base of the Emancipation Monument in Lincoln Park, calling for the removal of the statue….Marcus Goodwin, a D.C. native and candidate for an at-large seat on the D.C. Council, started an online petition, saying the statue stirred up a lot of thoughts and emotion about racial inequality in America and imagery that depicts African Americans as inferior to others.”

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/emancipation-statue-removal-called-for-in-lincoln-park-protest/65-33bb9f8a-ee02-4b0e-a244-f45fe8aab2bb

The destruction of statues, burning down buildings, and the looting wasn’t even the worst of it. Early on, rioters in Atlanta, Georgia turned on the press, specifically, the CNN building:

CNN Center, the cable network’s Atlanta headquarters, came under attack Friday night during protests over police brutality…CNN correspondent Nick Valencia began reporting on the frightening scene from a stairway inside the building, behind a phalanx of SWAT officers in the lobby, with an angry mob standing on the other side of the broken and missing plate glass. ‘I have a daughter and wife I want to get home to tonight,’ Valencia told anchor Chris Cuomo….Protesters lobbed objects at the windows and into the lobby, and at least one officer was struck. What appeared to be a flash-bang device landed in front of police and large gusts of smoke went up into the air.”

(https://www.thedailybeast.com/furious-demonstrators-swarm-cnn-center-in-atlanta-during-protest-of-george-floyds-death)

The majority of the news media, and certainly CNN, was on the side of the protestors, but this wasn’t good enough. The attack on the CNN building was an assault on a core Western value. This freedom is the key distinction between a free society and a totalitarian state. The rioters and their cheerleaders in academia aren’t just opposed to a few statues of Confederate Generals they consider to be “insensitive”. Their attack on journalism exhibits an intent to destroy a fundamental tenant of modern, Western Civilization: the freedom of speech.

Prior to the rioting and the attacks on the media, there had been a “prequel” of things to come in New York and New Jersey. In December of 2019, members of the “Black Hebrew Israelite” movement, a black racial collectivist group that hates Jews and whites murdered three people in a Kosher market in New Jersey. (https://nypost.com/2019/12/11/jersey-city-shooting-suspects-were-lovers-who-lived-in-a-van/ ) This was followed by other attacks on Jews in the New York area, mostly by blacks, although you wouldn’t know that from reading the papers. (https://www.nbcboston.com/news/national-international/were-going-to-win-this-african-americans-jews-in-brooklyn-reject-return-to-1990s-tensions/2064425/ ) These represented another attack on a foundational aspect of modern, Western Civilization: respect for the rights of others, regardless of their viewpoint or origin. When objectivity is rejected as illusory, men can have no recourse to reason and the facts. The Kantian/Marxist rejection of the concept of objectivity means a rejection of persuasion in favor of feelings, and the naked use of force.

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What were the motives of most of the rioters? Were they aware of the ideas of Kant or Marx? Probably not explicitly. These ideas are simply picked up from their parents, the schools, movies, and on TV. (Today, the Internet.) The ideas of the intellectuals ultimately “trickle down” to the masses, where they are often adopted uncritically without much thought:

In the brain of an anti-conceptual person, the process of integration is largely replaced by a process of association. What his subconscious stores and automatizes is not ideas, but an indiscriminate accumulation of sundry concretes, random facts, and unidentified feelings, piled into unlabeled mental file folders.” (Rand, Ayn, Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, “The Age of Envy”, Penguin Group, 1999, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/anti-conceptual_mentality.html )

In that sense, the rioters are just unwitting cogs serving postmodern intellectuals. They are less guilty. The intellectuals, on the other hand, have provided cover and rationalization for the rioters because it is consistent with what they believe:

“…looting is a lashing-out against capitalism, the police, and other forces that are seen as perpetuating racism…. Others, meanwhile, see looting as a form of empowerment—a way to reclaim dignity after decades of abuse at the hands of police and other authorities…. as soon as the CVS burned in Baltimore, the whole world watched.” (The Atlantic, “Why People Loot”, Olga Khazan, June 2, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/why-people-loot/612577/ )

Democratic politicians made it clear they’re with the rioters, too:

“‘Yes, America is burning. But that’s how forests grow,’…” (https://commonwealthmagazine.org/criminal-justice/healey-america-is-burning-but-thats-how-forests-grow/ ; https://www.politico.com/newsletters/massachusetts-playbook/2020/06/03/massachusetts-playbook-489410 ; https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/george-floyd-democrats-police-deroy-murdock )

’Young people, they have a whole new definition for ‘looting,’’ the 81-year-old congresswoman said. ‘They say ‘looting’ is predatory lending in, you know, minority neighborhoods, where they’re paying 300 and 400 percent on loans by these payday lenders. … You know, on and on and on. They have a different definition for it.’”

https://www.westernjournal.com/maxine-waters-scorched-claiming-real-looting-predatory-lending/http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0620/murdock060820.php3 ; https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/george-floyd-democrats-police-deroy-murdock )

’Colleagues, I hope we’re all saying we understand why that destruction happened and we understand why people are upset.’” (https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/george-floyd-democrats-police-deroy-murdock )

Despite the attack on journalists, they were some of the rioter’s biggest supporters:

“So what do you do when you’re fed up with an unjust system? When the boiling point has reached Fahrenheit levels that don’t even exist? You use that heat to burn it all down.” (Burn It All Down, Essence Magazine, By Yesha Callahan May 28, 2020 https://www.essence.com/op-ed/burn-it-all-down-minneapolis-riots/, emphasis added. )

“’Riots are, at their core, a choice made by those in power, not people who participate in them,’ The Atlantic’s Amanda Mull said via Twitter. ‘If you build a society that exhausts and abuses people and privilege [sic] capital over human life, I’m not sure which other imaginary ‘civil’ options you expect people to exercise.’” (https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/george-floyd-democrats-police-deroy-murdock)

Even CNN seemed to believe it got what it deserved, in a stunning display of masochism:

“Please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful…”

(https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/06/04/cnns_chris_cuomo_who_says_protests_are_supposed.html ; https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/federal-judge-says-new-york-officials-were-wrong-to-limit-worship-services-while-condoning-protests )

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If historical events are ultimately driven by ideas, what ideas have many of the intellectuals accepted that lead them to support the violence?

I’ll provide you with an example of two of the postmodern intellectuals that I believe have been driving many of the ideas that brought us to the riots of 2020. These are just two, and I’m sure there are many, many more. Unfortunately, they are a very representative sample of college liberal arts departments. These two are no better or worse than many college professors. My intent here is not to single them out, but to give the reader a “flavor” of contemporary academia.

First is Cheryl Harris,  currently a law professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. ( https://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/cheryl-i-harris#! )

In 1993 Professor Harris wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review called: “Whiteness as Property” According to this article:

The origins of property rights in the United States are rooted in racial domination.”  (“Whiteness as Property”, Harris, Cheryl I., Harvard Law Review, Volume 106 June 1993, Number 8, https://sph.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/Harris_Whiteness%20as%20Property_106HarvLRev-1.pdf)

In the article, she analyzed a 1978 case called “Regents of the University of California v. Allan Bakee, 438 US 265, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/438/265 )  In Bakee, the plaintiff,  a white person, sued a California public medical school, because he was denied admission over less-qualified minority applicants, based on the Medical College Admissions Test. (MCAT) Every year, there were 100 slots for the medical school, but 16 of the slots were reserved for members of racial minority groups, although minorities could compete for any of the other 84 slots as well. Bakee said this violated his right to equal protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. He eventually won after an appeal to the US Supreme Court.

Professor  Harris’ analysis of Bakee rests in the postmodern rejection of objectivity:

Bakke had a specific right to be admitted to medical school based on a ‘universal’ definition of merit. This reductive assessment of merit obscures the reality that merit is a constructed idea, not an objective fact… Nor is it certain that this standard was neutral or colorblind; commentators have claimed that the MCAT and other standardized tests are biased against racial minorities, and that the tests were deployed to ensure white dominance and privilege…” (“Whiteness as Property”, Harris, Cheryl I., Harvard Law Review, Volume 106 June 1993, Number 8, emphasis added.)

By Professor Harris’ reasoning whites cannot assert or expect any legal rights in the face of minority violence because of their “white privilege”. During her analysis of Bakee, Professor Harris criticized the decision because it demanded equal protection of the law for whites. Why? Because there are whites whose ancestors owned slaves. This history, supposedly, gives whites living today “privilege” that should be destroyed by denying whites the equal protection of the law:

Expectations of privilege based on past and present wrongs, however, are illegitimate and are therefore not immune from interference.” (“Whiteness as Property”, Harris, Cheryl I., Harvard Law Review, Volume 106 June 1993, Number 8.)

The fact that presently living whites are innocent of long-past wrongs is irrelevant to Professor Harris. When talking about another affirmative action court challenge, City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469 (1989), she says it is a “questionable normative premise” that whites living today cannot be punished for past slavery:

In the majority’s view, whites cannot be burdened with rectifying inequities that are the product of history. But even if one accepts this questionable normative premise…” (“Whiteness as Property”, Harris, Cheryl I., Harvard Law Review, Volume 106 June 1993, Number 8, emphasis added.)

In other words, to her, it’s “questionable” that individual, presently living white people deserve justice or are entitled to have their rights respected. She goes on to say that:

The inability to see affirmative action as more than a search for the ‘blameworthy’ among ‘innocent’ individuals is tied to the inability to see the property interest in whiteness.” (“Whiteness as Property”, Harris, Cheryl I., Harvard Law Review, Volume 106 June 1993, Number 8.)

In other words, to Professor Harris and her intellectual cohorts, all white people are to blame due to their “white privilege”, and individual whites can be treated unjustly. Whites that are not initiating physical force against blacks can still be made to suffer because of their “privilege”, and they have no basis for complaint. It would appear that to Professor Harris, when the rioters come and burn down your business or home, or attack you because you’re white, you have no right to legal protection from the police. Insisting on such protection would be “white privilege”. Do you think this is an exaggeration?

This is precisely what a Democratic City Council Member in Minneapolis said. Democratic politicians and left-wing intellectuals around the country have been calling for “dismantling the police”. The obvious question has been: who will protect us from criminals without police? In response to this question, Lisa Bender of the Minneapolis City Council had the following exchange with a CNN reporter:

What if in the middle of the night my home is broken into. Who do I call?” CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota asked Bender after the city council president laid out her vision for a post-police city.

‘I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors, and I know — and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege,’ Bender responded.”  ( “Minneapolis City Council President Claims Fear of Dismantling Police ‘Comes From A Place of Privilege” Zachary Evans, National Review•June 8, 2020    https://news.yahoo.com/minneapolis-city-council-president-claims-145054422.html  , emphasis added)

White people who desire not to be robbed, raped, and murdered are “speaking from a place of privilege” according to Democrats, who got such notions from people like Professor Cheryl I Harris of UCLA College of Law.

Why do postmodernist law professors go on and on about “white privilege”? Because they don’t believe in such “Euro-centric” concepts as “justice” and “individual rights”. They believe that your “material circumstances” or your “racial circumstances” determine the content of your mind. They do not believe concepts have any actual connection to reality, which, per Immanuel Kant, is not really knowable. “Truth” is a “white male prejudice”.  Like Marx, they believe governmental functions like the police and the courts are really just an exercise of raw power by the white majority, and must be done away with, no matter how many whites get killed in the process.

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Another postmodern intellectual that is usually on the tip of every college student protestor’s tongue is Robin DiAngelo. In a recent interview, DiAngelo had the following to say:

We don’t understand that objectivity and individuality are privileges. These are not granted to everybody.”( https://www.wktv.com/content/news/571084272.html )

“Justice” is objectivity applied to the appraisal of human beings in order to live your life:

What fact of reality gave rise to the concept ‘justice’? The fact that man must draw conclusions about the things, people and events around him, i.e., must judge and evaluate them. Is his judgment automatically right? No. What causes his judgment to be wrong? The lack of sufficient evidence, or his evasion of the evidence, or his inclusion of considerations other than the facts of the case. How, then, is he to arrive at the right judgment? By basing it exclusively on the factual evidence and by considering all the relevant evidence available. But isn’t this a description of ‘objectivity’? Yes, ‘objective judgment’ is one of the wider categories to which the concept ‘justice’ belongs.” (Rand, Ayn, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, “Definitions”, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/justice.html )

Objectivity means the correspondence of an idea to reality. Some concepts, like “ghosts” or “witches” have less correspondence to reality than others, such as “atoms” or “men”. By being “objective”, that is, conforming the content of your ideas to reality, you improve your chances of survival and flourishing as a living organism. People who believed in atoms develop life-saving drugs. People who believed in witches burned other people at the stake in Salem.

DiAngelo, on the other hand, is certain that the concept of objectivity is false and a lie:

In theories of discourse, language is not conceptualized as a “pure” or neutral transmitter of a universal reality or truth (Allen, 1996). Rather, language is conceptualized as the historically and culturally situated means by which we construct reality or truth and thus is dependent on the historical and social moment in which it is expressed.” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm , emphasis added.)

DiAngelo sees concepts like “truth” and “objectivity” as nothing but weapons of the “ruling classes”:

Discourse, because it constructs social relations and social positioning, is infused with relations of unequal power. As Allen (1996) states, language and discourse are not “theory neutral ‘descriptors’ but theory-laden constructs inseparable from systems of injustice”” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm )

Discourses that become dominant do so because they serve the interests of those in power.” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm , emphasisa added. )

Who is the “ruling class” according to DiAngelo? White people, of course:

Whites are taught to see their perspectives as objective and representative of reality (McIntosh, 1988). The belief in objectivity, coupled with positioning white people as outside of culture (and thus the norm for humanity), allows whites to view themselves as universal humans who can represent all of human experience.” (“White Fragiltiy”, DiAngelo, Robin, The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, Vol 3, No 3 (2011), http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249/116 , emphasis added.)

The denial of objectivity is nothing new. DiAngelo is taking the “postmodern party line” when it comes to “concepts”, “truth”, and “objectivity”, which is that they are not possible. “Concepts” are a result of your class, race, or nation, and have nothing to do with whether they conform to reality or not to the Postmodern. Words are just one more tool to be used, actually misused, in the quest to destroy the hated “privileged”:

For the postmodernist, language cannot be cognitive because it does not connect to reality, whether to an external nature or an underlying self. Language is not about being aware of the world, or about distinguishing the true from the false, or even about argument in the traditional sense of validity, soundness, and probability. Accordingly, postmodernism recasts the nature of rhetoric: Rhetoric is persuasion in the absence of cognition…Most other postmodernists, however, see the conflicts between groups as more brutal and our prospects for empathy as more severely limited than does Rorty. [A “moderate” postmodernist.] Using language as a tool of conflict resolution is therefore not on their horizon. In a conflict that cannot reach a peaceful resolution, the kind of tool that one wants is a weapon. And so given the conflict models of social relations that dominate postmodern discourse, it makes perfect sense that to most postmodernists language is primarily a weapon.

            This explains the harsh nature of much postmodern rhetoric. The regular deployments of ad hominem, the setting up of straw men, and the regular attempts to silence opposing voices are all logical consequences of the postmodern epistemology of language. Stanly Fish, as noted in Chapter Four, calls all opponents of racial prefernces bigots and lumps them in with the Ku Klux Klan….With such rhetoric, truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language’s effectiveness.”  (Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Focault, Hicks, Stephen R.C., Chapter 6: “Postmodern Strategy”, Pg. 176-178, ISBN 978-0-9832584-0-7)

In her 2011 article “White Fragility”, DiAngelo says that white people hold certain belief systems that make them incapable of recognizing that they are collectively guilty. One of these is their insistence on individualism and on seeing everyone as a human being:

“…whites are taught to see their interests and perspectives as universal, they are also taught to value the individual and to see themselves as individuals rather than as part of a racially socialized group. Individualism erases history and hides the ways in which wealth has been distributed and accumulated over generations to benefit whites today. It allows whites to view themselves as unique and original, outside of socialization and unaffected by the relentless racial messages in the culture…Given the ideology of individualism, whites often respond defensively when linked to other whites as a group or “accused” of collectively benefiting from racism…” (“White Fragiltiy”, DiAngelo, Robin, The International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, Vol 3, No 3 (2011), http://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/view/249/116 ,emphasis added. )

DiAngelo sees “…relentless racial messages in the culture…” because she is a racial polylogist. Like all postmoderns, she rejects objectivity. This, in turn, means she rejects justice, which is the objective judgment of people based on their chosen character. From there, she rejects individualism. If a person is not the author of his or her own soul, then they are clearly attached to some collective group, which, for DiAngelo, is their race. She is a racial collectivist, who happens to think the majority race should sacrifice itself to the minority race. America’s ideology of individualism must therefore be destroyed:

In my years as a white person co-facilitating anti-racism courses for primarily white audiences in a range of academic, corporate, and government institutions across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, I have come to believe that the Discourse of Individualism is one of the primary barriers preventing well-meaning (and other) white people from understanding racism.” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm , emphasis added.)

DiAngelo also sees white people as “privileged” by enormous benefits that come from being white. She is never very specific about what these “privileges” are. In one article she says:

“…only whites have the collective group power to benefit from their racial prejudices in ways that privilege all members of their racial group regardless of intentions (McIntosh, 2004;…” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm )

DiAngelo cites to Peggy McIntosh, a professor of Women’s Studies at Wellesley College, who appears to be one of the originators of this idea. ( https://www.wcwonline.org/Active-Researchers/peggy-mcintosh-phd )

In her article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, McIntosh gives twenty-six examples of “white privilege”. Most of these “privileges” break down into what I see as three categories: “Economic Privilege”, “Self-Esteem Privilege”, and “Immunity From Bad Acts of Others Privilege”. (These categorizations and labels are my own characterization.) For instance, McIntosh believes that:

I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.” (“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, McIntosh, Peggy, Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August 1989, https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf )

I take this as an “economic privilege” of white people, since a black person could easily arrange to be in the company of only other black people, if he or she wanted to. Just move to Detroit. I think, implicitly, what McIntosh is saying here is: If you are a black person who wants to have any sort of economic opportunity in life, you will have to associate with a lot of white people, because too many black people are too poor and lacking in fundamental life skills to form a functioning social and economic order.

Another example of a more “clear-cut” “economic privilege” from McIntosh’s article might be:

If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I want to live.” (“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, McIntosh, Peggy, Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August 1989, https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf )

But, how this is an example of “white privilege”, as opposed to just having wealth, she doesn’t expressly say. She implies that black people are, on average, poorer than whites, which is true, but she doesn’t tie that fact in to some sort of animus against black people. It could just as easily be a result of average IQ’s amongst black people being lower for genetic reasons, or due to the cultural differences between the two groups. (Or both.)

About eight of McIntosh’s examples of white privilege are what could be characterized as “self-esteem gained from race solidarity”. For instance:

I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.” (“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, McIntosh, Peggy, Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August 1989, https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf )

In these instances, white people supposedly get a big “mental boost” or “good feelings” from being in the racial majority. Once again, black people in a free society could all choose to live together in one area, and only associate with each other, if they chose. The fact that they don’t suggests that they get some benefit in associating with white people. Additionally, I doubt that the average white American ties their self-esteem to the fact that they can see other white people. It’s precisely because white Americans tend to be individualists that this is going to be irrelevant to them. I think most whites derive their self-esteem from individual accomplishment, and improving their own character, not from seeing a lot of other whites.

The third category of “white privilege” that McIntosh seems to be describing is what I would call, “immunity from the bad acts of others privilege”. For instance, she says that when she moves to a new location:

I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.” (“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, McIntosh, Peggy, Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August 1989, https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf )

In other words, McIntosh thinks there are large numbers of white people out there in America who will be “unpleasant” to black people or at least not be “neutral” towards them when they move into their neighborhood. Since the majority of Americans passed laws outlawing housing discrimination, her premise of large numbers of “unpleasant” white neighbors with respect to blacks is faulty to begin with. Otherwise, those laws couldn’t have had the broad societal support needed to become law. However, assuming that is the case for a second, note how she wants to place the blame of “unpleasant neighbors” onto people who would not be “unpleasant” towards blacks. In other words, innocent white people should take the blame for the bad acts of other white people. They are somehow responsible for the actions of others.

What I think McIntosh is actually referring to in this example is the phenomena of “white flight”.

This occurs when a neighborhood reaches a certain “tipping point” of the ratio of blacks to whites living there. In essence, when too many blacks move in, whites have a tendency to move out.

First, I think “white flight” is probably rational. The whites may not be leaving primarily due to the skin color of the people coming into the neighborhood, but due to different cultural values that tend to come with that skin color. Those different cultural values lead to reductions in property values. Black residents, on average, don’t take care of their houses as well. The schools start to fail as more black children come in, because they are not raised with the same study-habits and work-ethics as the average white child. Blacks, on average, commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. In some years, blacks commit close to 50% of all murders, despite being only 13% of the population. “White flight” can also be as simple as wanting to associate with people who have the same “middle class” values that whites are more likely to have.

I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a majority-black area for these reasons. Even if there are individual blacks I encounter who are perfectly fine to deal with, when I am amongst a large number of blacks, the probabilities of my becoming a crime victim goes up. Short of being at a convention of black accountants or engineers, it’s not in my rational self-interest to be in a majority-black area. But, the issue of “white flight” for me is primarily cultural, not racial. Blacks, due to a different history, tend to have different values and attitudes, and therefore behave differently.

McIntosh also doesn’t address why a disproportionate number of blacks are poorer. She assumes “racism” is the answer, and then says white flight is just more of the same “racism”. Fundamentally, this is because McIntosh and DiAngelo are “multiculturalists”. If they were not, then they would see that there may be a small grain of truth in what they are saying, even though they are not recognizing the essence of the problem.

The fundamental problem for blacks is internal, having to do with the content of the minds of many black people. It is the common methods of thinking, habits, and attitudes that tend to predominate within that racial group that is their fundamental problem.

The common methods  of thinking, habits, and attitudes of a given group of people constitutes their “culture”. A culture can have bad ideas. In the past, ancient physicians believed that people were made up of four substances: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. They saw sickness as an imbalance of these things, and they’d try to “rebalance” the body by draining “excess blood”. This was known as “bleeding”. ( https://www.bcmj.org/premise/history-bloodletting  )

Bloodletting for this reason was a bad idea. In most contexts, it is likely to kill a patient, not make them better. Bloodletting was a bad idea because it was usually not consistent with the requirements of human life, which is the standard by which ideas should be judged. Ideas that enhance and promote human life are good. Those that do not are bad. (And, reality is what it is, so some ideas correspond to it, and are therefore life-enhancing.)

In addition to explicit practices like bloodletting, a culture can have certain mental attitudes and habits that can either help it succeed, or fail. One of the best academics I have found on the role of culture in social progress and failure is Thomas Sowell:

Each group trails the long shadow of its own history and culture, which influence its habits, priorities, and social patterns, which in turn affect its fate.” (Black Rednecks & White Liberals, Sowell, Thomas Pg. 264.)

In his book, “Black Rednecks & White Liberals”, Sowell presents the thesis that what is considered “urban” or “ghetto culture” within a certain subsegment of the black population in America today is actually a reflection of a Scotts-Irish heritage that white Southerners brought with them before the Scottish were a fully civilized people. This culture was then “transferred” to Southern blacks through interaction with white Southerners. White southerners largely abandoned this culture, but it remained alive in the urban ghetto.

Regardless of whether one agrees with Sowell’s thesis, the underlying point he makes in this and other books is that culture matters to the success or failure of a people because ideas matter to success or failure.

This is where there may be a “grain of truth” in what postmodern academics like McIntosh and DiAngelo are getting at when they speak of things like the white “invisible knapsack”. The “invisible knapsack” is a better set of ideas that represent a superior culture.

It’s even possible that the culture adopted by the majority of American blacks today is a product of slavery. Perhaps the mental habits, ideas, and work-ethic of a significant segment of the American black population is a result of the way their ancestors lived on the plantations. I think it’s also possible they carry part of the culture from Africa. American black ancestors came from significantly more primitive civilizations than the Europeans. It’s also could be a combination of both. (It’s possible Thomas Sowell is right. He certainly makes a compelling argument.) What is important to see is that ideas, beliefs, and attitudes tend to determine an individual’s success or failure in life, and most individuals adopt the attitudes, ideas, and beliefs of their elders by “default”. The solution is to change minds, and to educate and persuade them with better ideas.

But, DiAngelo and her ilk will not accept this solution because they are “multiculturalists”. DiAngelo even comes close to acknowledging that better education of black children could change things in one of her articles:

Consider for example the ways in which schools are funded through the property tax base of the community they are situated in. Given that due to systematic and historical racism, youth of color disproportionately live in poor communities and their families rent rather than own, youth of color are penalized through this policy, which ensures that poor communities will have inferior schools.” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm , emphasis added.)

Education, when done right, involves instilling the right set of ideas in children. Schools provide them with the knowledge and mental skillsets to succeed as adults. Certain ideas are taught because they advance human life. By complaining about inadequate school funding for black children, DiAngelo is implicitly acknowledging that objectivity matters -that some ideas are true, and others are false. She is implicitly saying we need schools to teach black children the right ideas. However, DiAngelo is also a multiculturalist, so she follows the above paragraph with this:

Other examples of institutional racism that reinforce the ways that schools reproduce inequality include: mandatory culturally biased testing; “ability” tracking; a primarily white teaching force with the power to determine which students belong in which tracks; cultural definitions of intelligence, what constitutes it, and how it is measured; and standards of good behavior that reflect dominant white norms…” (InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 6(1), “Why Can’t We All Just Be Individuals?: Countering the Discourse of Individualism in Antiracist Education”, DiAngelo, Robin J, Publication Date: 2010-01-25, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5fm4h8wm , emphasis added.)

She doesn’t want more funding so that black students can be instilled with a better set of ideas. To her, all ideas, no matter how damaging they are to the lives of blacks, are equal. There is no such thing as objectivity to DiAngelo. She claims that tests are “biased” against blacks, that intelligence is just a “cultural definition”, and that standards of good behavior “reflect dominant white norms”. True to her “postmodern roots”, DiAngelo believes that one can never know “true reality”. The mind “filters” reality through its cognitive processes, and the black mind “filters” reality in a different way.  No ideas are better than any other ideas because there is no such thing as objectivity. If a lot of white people are succeeding while a lot of black people are failing, it’s because the whites “exploited” or “cheated” black people. To DiAngelo, white people have somehow managed to “rig reality” such that their culture, their set of ideas, is dominant, and they have stolen all the wealth.

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The rejection of objectivity by DiAngelo, Harris, and other postmodern intellectuals also explains why they spend such an enormous amount of time focused on past wrongs like slavery in Western Civilization, but pass over, almost without comment, slavery when it occurred in non-Western, and non-white civilizations. Thomas Sowell has noted this phenomena:

None of this means that the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade should be ignored, downplayed, or excused. Nor have they been. A vast literature has detailed the vile conditions under which slaves from Africa lived—and died—during their voyages to the Western Hemisphere. But the much less publicized slave trade to the Islamic countries had even higher mortality rates en route, as well as involving larger numbers of people over the centuries, even though the Atlantic slave trade had higher peaks while it lasted. By a variety of accounts, most of the slaves who were marched across the Sahara toward the Mediterranean died on the way.” (Black Rednecks & White Liberals, Sowell, Thomas Pg. 125-126, emphasis added.)

The “postmodern civil rights advocates” obsessively focus on the past wrongs of whites because to them, that is evidence of why whites are ahead of blacks. They view slavery and “colonialism” as the causal factor for why whites are ahead of blacks. Whereas, I say the superior methods of thinking of the average white, as embodied in Western Civilization’s commitment to objectivity, science, individualism, free markets, and individual rights, is why whites are ahead. White people, along with some Asian countries like Japan, have embraced a better culture. (At least better until the postmodern intellectuals came along.)

To the postmoderns, all ideas are ‘equal’ because of their Kantian view of concepts. This view holds that you are not gaining information about actual reality when you reason. For example, to a postmodern intellectual, faith healing is equally as valid as modern medicine. If one leads to health and one doesn’t, it’s because the group practicing modern medicine is exploiting or cheating the other group. Then, if any member of the group practicing modern medicine ever happens to do anything bad to someone in the group practicing faith healing, it is the postmodern’s “proof” for why the group practicing modern medicine is living longer. It’s not about better ideas, because, to the postmodern multiculturalist, there is no such thing as a better idea. That would imply an objectivity they reject.

The postmodern will find some past injustice committed by the “oppressor group” and assert that as the causal factor for why they are ahead, when, in reality, that past injustice, although an injustice, has nothing or very little to do with why the “oppressor group” is ahead. You can see this by looking at some of the trivial examples of “white privilege” that Professor McIntosh gives in her article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”:

“…I can sear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race….

I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race….

I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group…

I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion….”

(“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”, McIntosh, Peggy, Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August 1989, https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-1989.pdf )

These are supposedly some of the causal factors for why black people are, on average, poorer than white people. The first three are, at worst, examples of slight “borishness”. (The fourth sounds more like a problem that is “internal” to black people, who expect each-other to know something about Africa, and Africans.)

Examples like these are considered causal by McIntosh for why blacks are economically behind whites, not the methods of thinking of black people. The real causal factor are methods of thinking that are not fully in line with Western Civilization. For instance, there are academic articles studying the “conspiratorial thinking” of large segments of the black population, and how it causes them not to seek medical care or to practice safe sex:

“… medical mistrust increases risk for HIV. Among Black men, research has linked HIV conspiracy beliefs with negative attitudes towards condoms, which in turn are associated with lower likelihood of using condoms consistently (Bogart & Thorburn, 2005). Conspiracy beliefs may relate to mistrust of information from public health officials regarding HIV, including how to reduce risk of transmission.” ( Earnshaw, Valerie A et al. “Stigma and racial/ethnic HIV disparities: moving toward resilience.” The American psychologist vol. 68,4 (2013): 225-36. doi:10.1037/a0032705 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3740715/ , emphasis added.)

In other words, significant segments of the black population believe that doctors encouraging condom use are part of a conspiracy to cause them harm.

The authors of the above-quoted article will likely call these attitudes on condom use “internalized racism”, but really, what they mean is blacks have a culture of mistrusting doctors and medical science that is causing them to avoid using condoms. The lack of condom use amongst blacks due to “conspiracy beliefs” is but one small example of massive cultural differences between the average black and the average white that are causing blacks to be, on average, poorer. What black people need is a better understanding of the concept of objectivity, and its application to their lives, which means better, more “Eurocentric” education. But, DiAngelo and McIntosh repudiate this as “cultural bias” or “racism”, which has real consequences for blacks that get HIV and die.

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In the end, all ideas have consequences, because reality is what it is. Postmoderns can say all ideas are equally valid, but they cannot make it so.

The behavior of the rioters in the inner cities in North America and Europe is not new. It has been going on since at least the late 1960’s. My concern is with the level of appeasement I see in the media, and amongst our cultural and political “leaders”. They’ve been “softened up” by intellectual snake-oil salesmen like Robin DiAngelo and Cheryl Harris.

You might wonder if Robin DiAngelo “actually believes” what she’s saying, or if it’s just a cynical confidence game. This misses the point entirely. She expressly rejects objectivity. To her, there is no difference between a con-artist, and a college professor. She’s got the “mental tools” to evade the question in her own mind, altogether. Those of us who want to live cannot afford to do the same. We must squarely address the root of the problem when it comes to disproportionate amounts of black crime and black poverty. The cause lies in a different set of ideas and methods of thinking. It lies in cultural patterns that must be rejected by more black Americans, if living and prospering is important to them.

The destruction of businesses and property doesn’t matter to the rioters or UCLA law professor Cheryl I Harris because justice for individuals doesn’t matter, just racial aggregates. Every white person is guilty because of their “privilege”, and they have no right to expect that their property or lives will be protected. The police will be defunded to stamp out “privilege”, no matter how many law-abiding people are slaughtered by criminals.

The rioters started with Confederate statues and moved on to destroying statues of leaders of the Union Army. If Grant and Abraham Lincoln don’t “make the cut”, then nothing will. I’ve often wondered where they would “draw the line” when it came to what statues they would let stand. Now I see all will be razed, if things continue down this path. The rioters have been taught by postmodern intellectuals that objectivity is a myth. For them, the idea of even “drawing a line” smacks of “Eurocentrism”.

Recent events have the feel of crossing a cultural Rubicon. I hope I’m wrong. Maybe there is still a “silent majority” of North Americans, Australians, and Western Europeans out there who are at least capable of recognizing that the ideas many on the political left, in academia, and in the media are pushing will result in our cultural and political suicide -in the destruction of what freedom, representative government, capitalism, prosperity, and legal rights we have left. At root, the rioters and their “intellectual cheerleaders” aim at the destruction of fundamental concepts found in Western Civilization that account for its success. Statue-destruction by rioters is almost metaphorical: They can’t raise individuals up. Each of us must do that for ourselves.  All they can do is tear the rest of us down.

May 12, 2020 Special Election In US House District 25 (California)

The May 12, 2020 special election in California’s US House District 25 was unusual. For the first time in many years, a Congressional District in California went from Democratic to Republican. What was the underlying cause for this? I think it had to be dissatisfaction with the way Governor Newsom, and mayors of major cities there, handled the COVID-19 crisis.

If you look at the differences between the polling that occurred in the March 3, 2020 election, which was open to multiple candidates, and the runoff between the top two on May 12, there was a significant disparity in the number of people voting Republican in the later election.

Assuming these polling results from Wikipedia are accurate, if you add up the percentage of the votes for all Democrats versus the percentage of the votes for all Republicans in the March 3, 2020 election, it was roughly a tie between people voting Democratic and people voting Republican. (About 50% voted Republican, and about 50% voted Democratic.) If you look at the results on May 12, the Republican won by about 9%. That is significant.

The only difference between March 3, 2020 and May 12, 2020 was COVID-19, and the California shelter-in-place orders, which started around the middle of March. This is about as close as you can get to a “laboratory experiment” on discerning the desires of the voters from an election.

Now, this was not a “true blue” Democratic District. Up until 2018. it had been Republican. Additionally, it’s possible some faction of the Democratic party disliked the Democratic candidate so much on May 12 that they stayed home. Also, how that translates to the rest of the state, especially now that the government has eased up on the shelter in place orders, I don’t know. (I’m not holding my breath on California “turning Red”, but one can hope.) I think it is very possible this was a rebuke against Governor Newsom and the Democratic restrictions on liberty over COVID-19. There’s hope for a America yet.

The COVID-19 Crisis, Collectivism, and Capitalism

The military, police, and medical professions often train for emergency situations.  (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/choke/201005/want-success-under-stress-close-the-gap-between-practice-and-competition)   First responders and military try to create a system of steps that are to be taken in situations that are not likely to occur on a daily basis. It’s widely recognized that high stress is going to make thinking harder, not easier. Success in an emergency situations depends on thinking ahead of time about what steps need to be taken, and then training before the emergency occurs.

I suspect emergency responders train because the human mind needs a set of guiding principles to deal with the overwhelming sensory information that is presented to it. A person often does not have the time to sit down and evaluate each situation individually and determine what the best course of action is. Action is called for, especially in an emergency.

Concepts are a means of categorizing sensory-perceptual data in a systematic manner to improve one’s chances of living a successful and happy life. (How We Know: Epistemology on An Objectivist Foundation”, Binswanger,2014, TOF Publications, pg. 135; see, also, “The Virtue of Selfishness: The Objectivist Ethics”, Rand,Man’s actions and survival require the guidance of conceptual values derived from conceptual knowledge.”)

A “principle” is a sort of aphorism or mental statement, made up of simpler concepts. It describes a particular cause-and-effect relationship one must implement to increase the chances of living. (How We Know: Epistemology on An Objectivist Foundation”, Binswanger,2014, TOF Publications, Pg 306.) For instance, a person might adopt the principle of: “When dealing with others, treat them fairly, and in a win-win manner.” This is a principle guiding how one deals with other people socially and in business. This principle of justice is a recognition that just as you want to live, so too, do most other people want to live. You must provide them with a benefit to keep them dealing with you. It is a recognition of a particular cause -giving positive incentives for other people- that will bring about a particular effect -the benefits of trade.  A boss pays his workers, the cause, in exchange for their labor, an effect, that he wants. A person listens to his friend describe his fantastic new job, and congratulates him, because he wants his friend to offer him positive reinforcement when something good happens in his own life. Husbands don’t cheat on their wives (the cause), because their wives agree to live with them and have sex only with them (the effect).

Problems can arise from the human mind’s need for principles to live in at least two way: (1) Some principles adopted by people are either false, or are false in a particular context; and (2) Not everyone agrees that the purpose of principles is to improve your life and well-being. Dogma is an example of “principles” that are aimed at some purpose other than living. (For instance, a religious instruction that tells people not to eat certain foods, not because of any health reasons, but simply because it is forbidden by some sort of supernatural authority.)

A feature of the human mind is a tendency to “fall to the level of your training” rather than “rise to the occasion” during a national emergency. People are going to tend to take whatever pre-existing ideas they may have about human nature, society, and the good life, and apply them. If they haven’t thought too deeply about the implications of these ideas, then there can be negative consequences.

Political systems and social systems tend to operate on a sort of “inertia”, in which our cultural institutions are based on long-standing ideas and traditions. As a result, our political systems may last longer than the ideas that created them. In the past hundred and fifty years, the ideas that created American culture and institutions have largely been discarded by academics and intellectuals in exchange for other notions. Our institutions and social mores have changed more slowly, because of “cultural inertia”. Our court systems, political institutions, and some social customs, are based in a better era. They exemplify the “pursuit of happiness” expounded by Enlightenment philosophers, like John Locke and Aristotle. Academics have long since rejected those ideas in favor of the collectivism of Marx and the duty of Kant. (See “Explaining Post Modernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucault”, Hicks, 2018)

I am not a historian, but what I think happens in a national emergency or social crisis is that the old institutions need adjustment to the current context, but since academics, lawyers, politicians, and other cultural elites don’t really understand or accept the ideas on which those old institutions were formed, they are unable to offer any sort of adjustment or modification of those institutions. All they have available in their conceptual “toolbox” are the newer ideas, which have never been fully implemented, due to the “cultural inertia” I discussed. As a result, during a social crisis, there is a strong possibility of a sudden overthrow of the old institutions in favor of contrary, newer ideas. The contradiction between the new ideas and the old institutions suddenly becomes unsustainable, and there is a quick shift.

The tendency of old institutions to be overthrown in favor of a new system, representing current ideas, during a crisis is not necessarily bad. It depends on what those newer ideas are, and what the new system consists of. It’s possible the new ideas are better than the ideas that formed the basis of the old regime. It is theorized by some historians that the Black Death in Europe, between 1348 and 1350, helped shatter the old Feudal order:

What’s often missing from this story, however, is the wider context and the lasting impact of the Black Death. This is a story not only of unfathomable tragedy, but also of transformation and rebirth. The plague, in combination with a host of other related and overlapping crises, delivered a death blow to Medieval Europe, ushering in a new age — the Renaissance and the rise of so-called agrarian capitalism — and ultimately setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution and the modern world.” (“The Black Death led to the demise of feudalism. Could this pandemic have a similar effect?”, Adam McBride, in April 26, 2020 ed. of “Salon”, emphasis added, online at:  https://www.salon.com/2020/04/26/the-black-death-led-to-the-demise-of-feudalism-could-this-pandemic-have-a-similar-effect/ )

(Note: I do not agree with the proposed political and policy solutions in the last several paragraphs of this article, but I do agree with the historical account of the Black Death as an immediate cause of the end of the Middle Ages.)

The reason the Black Death could be socially and politically transformative, giving rise to the Renaissance, is because there were underlying ideas that had been circulating in the European culture for some time. The Renaissance was a “rebirth” of Ancient Greek ideas:

The argument [amongst medieval scholastics] paralleled the classical one between Plato and the Sophists. Plato believed that Ideas (Forms) had a perfect and independent existence, while the Sophists thought that only particular things existed. In the Middle Ages, those who held that ‘universals’ were real were called ‘realists’; those who declared that they were just names (nomina) were called ‘nominalists’. The argument was (and is) of critical importance to one’s philosophical outlook. The extreme realists attached little importance to individual things and sought through sheer logic or divine revelation to approach the universals. The extreme nominalists, by contrast, perceived only discrete objects and refused to admit the existence of unifying relationships among the infinitude of particulars. The realists tended to ignore the observed world; the nominalists could scarcely comprehend it. Most schoolmen took a middle position on this question. Among the moderates, [Peter] Abelard…held that only particular things have an existence in and of themselves. The universals, however, are more than mere names. They exist as concepts in individual minds -keys to an understanding of the interrelatedness of things…By means of many such concepts, inferred from individual observations, we can make the world (to a degree) comprehensible, manageable, and predictable…Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the scholastic philosophers, was a moderate realist…Following the lead of…Abelard…Aquinas set a high value on the faculty of reason. By this time the full impact of Aristotle and the new learning from the East had struck the schools and universities of Europe, and Christian dogmas were being challenged by pagan, Muslim, and Jewish logicians…Aquinas adopted Aristotelian logic and turned it to the defense of his faith….Both faith and reason, he argued, were created by God, and it is illogical to hold that God could contradict himself.” (“A Brief History of Western Man”,  3d Ed., Greer, Thomas, 1977 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., Chapter 6: “The Flowering of Medieval Culture, Pg. 214-215)

Thomas Aquinas had brought Aristotelian thought back to Europe, in the sense of giving those ideas institutional respectability in the Catholic church. Most cultural and academic elites of that time were in the Church. By adopting Aristotle to fit with Church doctrine, at least for a while, Aquinas lay the groundwork for the Renaissance. He predated the Black Death, with published works between the 1240’s and the 1280’s. ( https://www.britannica.com/topic/Christianity/Aristotle-and-Aquinas )  A reemergence of the ideas of Aristotle took the focus of intellectuals away from a hard, “Platonic realism”, which focused on alleged revelations from another word. Aristotelianism moved European thinking towards greater observation of particulars in the world of our senses, which is essential to scientific and modern thinking.

This history of the Black Death, the reemergence of Aristotelianism in the late Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, suggests a theory concerning how historical change occurs: A crisis can accelerate what is already occurring in a society. Newer ideas that have been circulating in the culture for some time can quickly and drastically transform social and political institutions during a crisis. Those transformations can be for better or worse, depending on the underlying ideas driving the transformation.

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COVID-19 is our current national crisis. People are approaching it with a lifetime of ideas they have gathered up and accepted, either expressly, or by default, because they didn’t examine the ideas around them too closely. What ideas have a significant segment of the American population accepted? What ideas have the majority of academics, journalists, lawyers, and politicians accepted? In a crisis, there is very little time to act. Immediate action is called for. Just like soldiers will “fall to the level of their training” rather than “rise to the occasion” in an emergency, so too will politicians fall to the level of their “training” from college. What did they learn at the universities? For the most part, their professors taught them to embrace collectivism, and to reject individual rights. This collectivism has taken the form of many slogans over the years, and now, the serpent’s egg is hatching.

I’ll start by defining some of my key terms:

(1) What are individual rights?

A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” (The Virtue of Selfishness, “Man’s Rights”, Ayn Rand)

(2) What is the purpose of individual rights?

Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational.” (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand)

(3) What is collectivism?

Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group—whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ‘the common good.’”  (Ayn Rand, “The Only Path to Tomorrow,” Reader’s Digest, Jan, 1944, 8., http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/collectivism.html)

Our society and legal system are a combination of egoism and individual rights on the one hand and collectivism and “the common good” on the other. The former are older ideas that are based in the likes of Aristotle and John Locke, while the later are based in the ideas of Marx, Hegel, and other 18th Century philosophers. (See “Explaining Post Modernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucault”, Hicks, 2018; see, also, The Ominous Parallels, Leonard Peikoff.)

The expression: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is inaccurate. The road to hell is paved by what one considers to be the good, but is, in fact, the opposite. The road to hell is paved by collectivist intentions. Several commonly held collectivist ideas have resulted in what are logical, albeit unforeseen, consequences of the government’s reaction to the present COVID-19 epidemic. What are some of these collectivist ideas driving the current governmental response to COVID-19?

(1) The Collectivist Idea that “Healthcare Is A Right”

One of the first acts of many state governors in the face of the COVID-19 crisis was to force “non-essential” healthcare workers off the job. Counties and states banned “elective” medical care. https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/dallas-county-enacts-shelter-in-place-effective-sunday-night-to-combat-covid-19-pandemic/

Apparently, politicians thought of doctors and healthcare workers as having “fungible” skill-sets. If they banned “elective” procedures, then they believed this would leave more healthcare “resources” for others. However, just because a doctor can perform a rhinoplasty or a breast-enhancement surgery, doesn’t mean he has sufficient knowledge to treat a person suffering from a viral respiratory illness. A dermatologist can’t perform heart surgery:

“…thousands of health care workers across the nation who have been laid off, furloughed or are working reduced hours as their services are deemed nonessential…The workers range from dentists and general surgeons to medical assistants and nurses, from allergists and dermatologists to primary care physicians and pediatricians.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/02/coronavirus-pandemic-jobs-us-health-care-workers-furloughed-laid-off/5102320002/

People were told by politicians not to be selfish, and forego “elective” medical procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Who decides what is an important health care matter and what is merely “elective”? When health care is viewed as a right, it’s not you and your doctor. The government owns your doctor’s life. (And your life.) Politicians and bureaucrats, viewing healthcare as a “right” are essentially saying:

“That spot on your arm? Probably nothing, probably not melanoma. That toothache? Probably nothing probably not a life-threatening tooth abscess. That debilitating knee pain? How selfish of you to want to be out of pain when there are people dying. You think you have a life-threatening peanut allergy, and need to see your allergist? Suck it up, and quit complaining, buttercup.”

What was the consequence of government forbidding “elective medicine”? Doctors and hospitals can no longer make a profit, which means, in the long run, they’ll go out of business and there will be less healthcare, not more:

Government-mandated cutbacks on elective procedures and routine check-ups have forced independent medical practices to temporarily close their doors. The loss of revenue may soon force some practices to furlough staff, and in the worst-case scenarios to go out of business, causing significant access-to-care disruptions once the pandemic subsides.”  https://triblive.com/opinion/dr-lawrence-john-covid-19-could-devastate-medical-practices/

Thinking of “health care as a right” has also led to a massive conflict between different groups in our society. One group doesn’t need to go out to work, either because they can work from home, or because they are wealthy enough to avoid work. Another group, needs to work, and cannot do so from home. Their jobs and businesses have been largely shut down due to local and state “stay at home orders”. This reflects the phenomena of “rights inflation”.

A collectivist tyranny dare not enslave a country by an outright confiscation of its values, material or moral. It has to be done by a process of internal corruption. Just as in the material realm the plundering of a country’s wealth is accomplished by inflating the currency—so today one may witness the process of inflation being applied to the realm of rights. The process entails such a growth of newly promulgated ‘rights’ that people do not notice the fact that the meaning of the concept is being reversed. Just as bad money drives out good money, so these ‘printing-press rights’ negate authentic rights….The ‘gimmick’ was the switch of the concept of rights from the political to the economic realm. The Democratic Party platform of 1960 summarizes the switch boldly and explicitly….The right to a useful and remunerative job…The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health….If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.” (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “Man’s Rights”, Ayn Rand https://courses.aynrand.org/works/mans-rights/ , emphasis added.)

If “health care is a right”, then “health is a right” – and it will conflict with other people being able to earn a living with shelter in place orders. The wealthy, who don’t need to work, will tend to see “health as a right” that trumps the right to earn a living by people of lesser means. White-collar workers, who can work from home, will tend to focus on “the right to health”, while service industry people in the restaurant and “non-essential” retail businesses will want to leave home. Who do you think has more influence in Washington and the State Capitals? The wealthy/white collar types, or the poor and service-industry employees?

The retired elderly, who are more susceptible to COVID-19, will also tend to see “health as a right”, that overrides the need of younger adults to earn a living, and of children to obtain an education . Who do you think has more political influence in Washington and at the State and local level? The politicians know senior citizens vote, while the young do not.

Right now, the US has enough wealth that it can manage without people actually starving. Not so in other areas of the world. The lock-downs in Africa are causing people to go without food:

Four weeks into a 35-day lockdown poor communities are facing food shortages as incomes for mostly informal workers have dried up.”

https://news.yahoo.com/violence-looting-point-food-crisis-africa-lockdown-112929125.html

The wealthy of Africa don’t care. They have plenty of food, so they will choose to reduce their health risk, and they’ll impose that choice on the poor.

Years of thinking of “health care as a right”, without considering the context of who is to pay for it and who is to provide it, has resulted in the present conflict between those who can afford the lock-down (the elderly, the wealthy, and white collar workers), and those who cannot afford it (the young, service industry workers, and the working poor.) “Rights inflation” has destroyed real, individual rights to life, liberty, and property. It has lead to “pressure group warfare” in the legislature and government as different interest groups try to ensure their group’s interests are advanced at the expense of other groups. (What I call a “cold civil war”.)

In reality, there is no “right to health care” or “right to food”. There is a right to take the actions necessary to maintain your life, while leaving others free to do the same, by not using physical force against them to deprive them of their values. All law must hold this principle as its touchstone. You have a right not to be robbed. You have a right not to be murdered. You don’t have a right to get together a big enough gang of lobbyists in Washington DC or at the Dallas County Commissioners Court, and then “legally rob” other people through taxes and regulations -or force them to remain in their house and off their job.

(2) The Collectivist Idea of “Prophylactic”, or “Preventative” Law.

“Preventative law”, or “prophylactic rules”, is not aimed at prohibiting the violation of individual rights. It is law aimed at preventing certain actions that could potentially lead to the violation of individual rights. It arises because legislators do not fully understand or comprehend what the purpose of government and law is in the first place: To allow men to live their lives in a social environment, free from the initiation of physical force.

“Gun control” laws are an example of preventative law the left loves. The left wants to stop people who might kill with a gun by banning them for everyone. But, if government officials are entitled to initiate physical force against those who merely choose to own a gun, then there is nothing, in principle to stop them from initiating physical force against anyone deemed a “potential threat”.

Another example are most “environmental regulations”. These laws prohibit certain economic activity not because someone has actually been injured by another person’s pollution coming onto their property, but merely because a business *might* injure someone with its activities.

Another, more relevant, example with regard to the current COVID-19 crisis would be a curfew law. Such a law is enacted to prevent all persons from going outside after a certain hour, because there is a small number of criminals who commit armed robbery at night. This was the example provided by Ayn Rand on a discussion of the concept of law, recorded in the 1960’s. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-works/objective-law.html. -Starting at about 14 minutes in, Miss Rand discusses this issue for preventative law, and gives the example of curfew laws. She says a small number of people might engage in “night hold ups”, what we’d call a mugging today, but she did not believe it is justification for holding the best in society to the level of the worst in society.)

Preventative law is very common in the laws regulating businesses, and has been for about a hundred years now:

“…’protective’ legislation falls in the category of preventive law. Businessmen are being subjected to governmental coercion prior to the commission of any crime. In a free economy, the government may step in only when a fraud has been perpetrated, or a demonstrable damage has been done to a consumer; in such cases the only protection required is that of criminal law.” (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “The Assault on Integrity” Alan Greenspan.)

The effect of preventative law is to make it difficult to maintain your life. Second Amendment advocates will say something like “when guns are outlawed, only the outlaws have guns”. This is said, in part, because “gun control” makes it impossible to legally use a gun for self-defense. A law-abiding person is being held to the level of a criminal when it comes to “gun control”, even though there is no evidence he would commit a crime with a gun.  In the case of the COVID-19 emergency, those who want to earn a living are being legally prevented from doing so, even though there is no evidence they are sick.

Similar to “gun control” laws and “environmental laws”, with COVID-19, the left wants to stop the vast majority of people from living their lives, with zero due process, and zero evidence that they are sick or contagious.

(3) The Collectivists Hold a “Platonic Guardian” View of Science, and a Distrust of the “Common Man”

The father of collectivism in Western Civilization is Plato. He divides his collectivist “Republic” into three classes: the producers, the auxiliaries, and the guardians:

“The guardians are responsible for ruling the city. They are chosen from among the ranks of the auxiliaries, and are also known as philosopher-kings.”  https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/republic/characters/

Today’s leftists view themselves as our society’s philosopher-kings. Their attitude is: “Don’t bother explaining the science to the people. Don’t try to obtain voluntary consent. The people are too stupid to understand. Force is necessary. Force is the only method that is efficacious.”

The hallmark of collectivists is their deep-rooted distrust of freedom and of the free-market processes; but it is their advocacy of so-called ‘consumer protection’ that exposes the nature of their basic premises with particular clarity. By preferring force and fear to incentive and reward as a means of human motivation, they confess their view of man as a mindless brute functioning on the range of the moment…” (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, “The Assault on Integrity” Ayn Rand.)

This attitude of the elite philosopher-king who will rule over the rest of us is seen in a common argument amongst environmentalist politicians, which is something along the lines of: “97% of scientist agree that human beings are causing average global temperatures to go up.”  https://www.forbes.com/sites/uhenergy/2016/12/14/fact-checking-the-97-consensus-on-anthropogenic-climate-change/#45e4f5b71157

This is not an argument based in evidence or logical argument. It’s a sort of “argument from authority’” (At one time, the majority of authorities thought the Earth was the center of the universe.) What matters is the evidence, which can be communicated to anyone with a normal brain. If there is evidence, then show the evidence. Don’t just belittle people and tell them there is a scientific consensus, but they’re too stupid to understand the science.  (This argument is probably being used because most of the reporters and politicians who think average global temperatures are going up due to human activity don’t understand the science themselves.)

If you went to the doctor’s office, and he said: “You need immediate surgery, but I’m not going to tell you where or why -just trust my authority as a doctor,” you’d likely want more of an explanation. To the philosopher-king left, no such explanation is necessary or useful during the present COVID-19 crisis. Just obey them because they know better. These decisions are often being made by state governors and mayors, using ill-defined “natural disaster statutes”, with little or no input from legislatures or courts. The actions of California Governor Gavin Newsom, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer reflect the two-thousand-year-old ideas of Plato. Our “Philosopher-king” governors and mayors will rule over us, the “unwashed masses”. We’re too stupid to make our own decisions.

In Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, a major character is a government scientist who sets himself up as a sort of “philosopher-king”, who wants state funded science because he thinks the people are too stupid to make their own decisions, or to understand science. This is the story of Dr. Robert Stadler. He was a brilliant scientist, disgusted by the profit motive and the need to earn a living. He viewed science as something that should be pursued, not to serve human life, but as a “pure intellectual pursuit”. For Dr. Stadler, “reason” wasn’t “man’s means of survival”. It was a sort of Platonic “end in itself”.

Prior to the start of the novel’s main plot line, Dr. Stadler had used his reputation as a scientist to obtain governmental funding for a “State Science Institute”, so that he could pursue “science without a profit motive”. In the end, all that the “State Science Institute” produced was a weapon of mass destruction aimed at the subjugation of the American population. (A fictional version of the atomic bomb.)

The last scene involving Dr. Stadler is him physically wrestling for control of the weapon with Cuffy Meigs, a “two-bit” “mafia type”, who has risen to power in the corrupt government of a dystopian near-future America. Cuffy Meigs has no respect for science or reason. His only interest is gaining power through the use of physical force, and he’s better at it than Dr. Stadler.  I think what Rand was trying to say here is: Beware all you men of science who think the masses are too stupid to understand your ideas, so you want to substitute force for voluntary persuasion. If you try to set yourself up as a philosopher-king who rules by the use of force, you’ll ultimately loose to the criminal thugs of the world, who are better at violence than you’ll ever be. The criminals who will come to power will care little for science or reason.

If reason is discarded in favor of force, then the winner won’t be the person with the most logical argument. It’ll be the person with the biggest gun, and who is most willing to use it.  The most brutal will come to power, not the men of reason. It’s the thugs like Stalin and Mao Zedong who will be in the political driver’s seat, not a Newton or Galileo.

When individual rights are outlawed, only the criminals will have guns.

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If it’s collectivism that is driving current governmental policy when it comes to COVID-19, someone might ask what is my alternative? It’s fine and good to talk about individual rights, but how would a more capitalist society, committed to the respect of rights to life, liberty, and property, deal with the problem of a pandemic? This is a fair question.

Part of the problem is the average American has a difficult time even imagining what a truly capitalist society would look like. They make assumptions that are collectivist, often just by “default” because “that’s just how it is done” in their minds. Non-academic Americans value individualism and the egoistic “right to pursue happiness”, but they cannot always translate that into practice when it comes to our legal system and institutions. This is not a failing of the American people at large. It’s a failure of intellectuals, college professors, newspaper reporters, economists, lawyers, and politicians to present and explain such ideas. The majority of the intellectual elites are hostile towards individualism, and don’t believe people should pursue their own happiness. “Selfishness” is a dirty word for most of the elites in our society.

How would a government under capitalism deal with a viral pandemic? 1

I want to briefly address another set of ideas circulating in our society. These ideas tend to fall under the term “conservatism”, although, like “liberalism”, that is a poorly-defined term. “Conservatism” tends to reject collectivism, but one strand of that school of thought wants to replace it with religion and faith. In other words, it wants to replace the Enlightenment ideas of John Locke and Isaac Newton with those of the early Middle Ages. The early Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, were characterized by the fall of the Roman Empire, ignorance, the destruction of trade, reduced standard of living, “…frequent warfare and a virtual disappearance of urban life.” https://www.britannica.com/event/Dark-Ages

Today, cultures dominated by religious faith are mostly found in the Muslim world. Religious theocracies like Iran are characterized by violence and the violation of individual rights in order to prepare people for the afterlife. It’s beyond the scope of what I’m writing here, but,  I’ve read a compelling argument for the possibility that a large crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to a rejection of modernism in favor of some version of religion. It would probably take the form of a Christian theocracy in Europe and North America. In other words, it’s possible that religious faith, which still exists to some greater or lesser degree in the minds of Western men, could come to the surface, especially if Westerners widely viewed science and modernism as having failed them during a major crisis. (I refer the reader to “The DIM Hypothesis” by Leonard Peikoff for more on that.) This would largely be the fault of academics and philosophers as well, since they’ve spent the last hundred and fifty years attacking reason. (See “Explaining Post Modernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucault”, Hicks, 2018; see, also, The Ominous Parallels, Leonard Peikoff.)

(1) Privatized Cities

First, it must be understood that cities would be private under capitalism. Every square inch of a city would be owned by some particular person, or group of people. There would be no “public property” at all. Force is not used to fund a private city, and all standards of behavior and business safety are established by voluntary contract. (With contracts being enforced by the court system.)

Even today, there already are “quasi-private” cities to some degree.  You see this, at least partially, with “planned communities”. A developer will build an entire city grid with streets, neighborhoods, schools, parks, and business districts. Then, anyone who wants to move there, must agree to the conditions of the developer. There is a preexisting agreement not to build a commercial warehouse right next to a neighborhood with families in it. Bars are located in one section of the town, while schools and families are in another, etc. An example of an almost entirely private city may be Celebration, Florida, which was created from scratch by the Walt Disney Corporation.

Major cities are seeing the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco have been hit hard. These are all “port” cities, with a large flow of people and goods into, and out of the country. Additionally, they are “high density” populations, so the virus can easily spread once it comes into one of these cities.

People living in high-density, high-immigration cities like New York, are, in a sense, imposing the likelihood of pandemic on the rest of the nation. It’s an example of what economists call a “negative externality”.  People who might become sick due to risky behavior, but are asymptomatic carriers, are wanting to move about and earn a living. When some of them become sick, they then infect other people, who develop more serious symptoms or even die. The people who get sick, but are asymptomatic, are unwittingly imposing the cost of their more-risky behavior on those who do not want the risk:

The spread of COVID-19 is a great example of an externality, which is an economic term for a cost or benefit incurred or received by a third party. The best example of a negative externality is air pollution, such as when a factory emits air pollution that imposes a cost on neighbors.” https://www.cato.org/blog/less-costly-ways-reduce-harm-covid-19-without-travel-immigration-bans

Negative externalities arise because private property rights in a particular sphere are non-existent, or not well-defined. The solution is to define private property rights, and distribute “public property” to private owners. (Through a public auction, or through some sort of distribution to taxpayers.)

The details of how you take an existing city and “privatize” it would take an entire paper of its own, but in principle,  the existing residents of the city, who pay the local taxes, should all be given shares in a corporation that owns all of the previously-public infrastructure. These shareholders then have a right to elect a governing board of directors. Coerced local taxes would be replaced by “user fees”. Shareholders have to pay the user fees, and abide by the rules. The corporation would be free to charge fees for the use of its facilities, such as the roads. The city could also impose health and safety rules as a contractual condition of living there. For instance, a local business would need to abide by health and safety rules in order to have access to the roads in the city. The business would be free not to abide by these rules, but they’d be limited to flying their customers in by helicopter, or some other means that doesn’t involve the use of the roads. Since most businesses couldn’t carry on without access to the roads, they’d all abide by the health and safety rules, or they’d shut down and move somewhere else. Those who don’t like the rules, can move to another city. Competition would then occur between cities to attract residents and customers by offering the best “package” of services, such as roads, utilities, and reasonable health and safety rules, at the lowest cost.

If there are only private cities, then pandemics could be more easily fought. The owners of private city infrastructure have a profit incentive to ensure that pandemics do not spread. Say there are three private cities, and one of them, City A, has a pandemic. Cities B and C can refuse entry from people from City A until the pandemic is over. In other words, instead of the government having to impose a lockdown on City A, all of the other cities will, effectively, “socially distance” at the city-wide level.

There would also only be private highways, and the owners of the private highways could set standards of health for who can travel on them. They would want to protect their customers, so it is even less likely that people from City A would be allowed to travel to City B while the pandemic in City A is going on.

This is a much more “granulated” and precise approach to preventing the spread of disease than at the border of a country, which causes unnecessary disruptions of trade and the flow of healthy people.

(2) Freedom of Immigration Can Increase Healthcare “Resources”

With the exception of short quarantines and refusing entry to terrorists at war with the United States, more immigration would reduce the chances of a viral pandemic spreading and overwhelming the healthcare industry. An example of this could be seen with the fires in Australia in 2019. During that emergency, firemen from around the world traveled to Australia to help put out the conflagration:

Firefighters from across the US have been helping since early December. On Saturday, a group of 20 will deploy and will be followed by another group of 80 on Monday, bringing the total to 175 American firefighters on the ground in Australia.

Canada, and New Zealand are also part of a mutual aid system, helping Australia in its firefighting efforts.https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/more-us-firefighters-heading-to-help-australia-fight-wildfires/ar-BBYBhzS

COVID-19 didn’t spontaneously arise all over the world at one time. It started in a specific city in China. It spread from there to the rest of the world, then it spread to nearby countries like South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.  (With air travel causing it to spread further, faster.)

If COVID-19 had been revealed sooner, it might have been possible to stop it before it started with doctors and healthcare workers coming into the area to treat patients, similar to what firefighters did in Australia. The spread of COVID-19, however, was moved along by the suppression of information by the Chinese government, which does not respect individual rights, like freedom of the press or freedom of movement.

(3) “Socially Distance” Ourselves From Authoritarian and Totalitarian Nations

The existence of “bad actors” like China makes a viral epidemic more likely to spread to freeer, more capitalistic countries like the United States and Western Europe. The suppression of individual rights in countries like China would have to be addressed by specific foreign policy actions of a fully capitalist nation. Open warfare with nations like China may not always be possible, perhaps because they possess nuclear weapons, making it too risky, or simply because it is not in the national interest of the capitalist nation to go to war with them, in terms of cost and lives lost.

How would a capitalist republic deal with bad actors like China, short of open war? By not dealing with them, and encouraging, but not forcing, their citizens not to deal with them.

A capitalist nation would recognize that it is, in a sense, at war with all totalitarian states, even if no shots are being fired. A free society and a totalitarian state are not compatible. Short of open warfare, which might not be feasible, here are some alternative solutions:

a. Economic boycott – Private citizens within the capitalist nation can be urged to voluntarily sign contracts stating that they will not have business dealings with totalitarian states, and the contracts only become enforceable in a court of law when a sufficient number of people have signed the contract. For instance, there could be a contract which would say: “I agree, upon 75% of the rest of US Citizens signing this contract, to boycott all Chinese companies, and have no business dealings with them for X number of years.” People would then be shown the many atrocities committed by nations like China, and persuaded, using reason and evidence, that dealing with such a country is not in their long-term interests.

b. No Enforcement of Contracts with Chinese Businesses and Nationals – United States Courts would have their jurisdiction to enforce contracts with companies or persons from totalitarian states withdrawn by Congress. (This might take a Constitutional Amendment.) If a US business takes delivery of goods from China, and doesn’t pay, the Chinese business has no recourse in US courts. If a Chinese company wants its money before delivering goods, and then that Chinese company doesn’t deliver the goods, a US court wouldn’t have jurisdiction to enforce the contract. Trade with China would be reduced to Chinese nationals bringing goods to the US for cash exchange. This would eliminate a lot of trade between the US and authoritarian and totalitarian nations, because neither side in a trade could rely on the enforcement of contracts.

c. Higher Voluntary Taxes on Businesses Engaged in Trade With China – This gets into how government would be funded under Capitalism. There are several alternatives. Most of them revolve around paying some sort of fee for government services. For instance, in order to have one’s contract enforced in a court, it would be necessary to pay a certain percentage of the value of the contract ahead of time. A contract for the sale of $100 of goods might have a 5% contract enforcement fee, in which $5 must be paid to the government as “insurance” against breach. In recognition of the fact that any US person doing business with Chinese companies and nationals is helping to prop up that regime, the government could impose a higher contract enforcement fee. The higher fee would cover the cost of increased military spending that is necessary to keep the United States safe. So, a person who does business with Chinese nationals, in any given year, might pay a 15% contract enforcement fee, rather than the usual 5%, on all of his contracts with other US citizens in the next year. In that way, US citizens would be highly discouraged from having business dealings with Chinese nationals at all.

Much higher voluntary taxes on Americans doing business with China are justified because they are making America less safe. They are imposing a cost on the rest of us, which can rightfully be recouped, to pay for extra military protection. The companies doing business with China should pay for the “negative externality” they are imposing on other Americans with their risky behavior. They’re free to do so, but not free to impose the cost on the rest of us.

Other laws relating to viral pandemics under capitalism are also possible. Some may even be better than the ones I have proposed here. The point is to show that a free society is not less “efficient” than an authoritarian one at dealing with the problem. The opposite is true. The principle of individual rights won’t guarantee man’s survival, but totalitarianism will make it impossible.

 

 

The Government Against the Economy In the Year of COVID-19

In the coming days, the US Congress will be voting on a massive spending package to give subsidies to various industries and people as part of the Federal Government’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak. This is a $1 trillion dollar bill that will hand out massive subsidies, include loans for businesses, direct deposits that could give an average U.S. family of four $3,000, and up to $4 trillion in liquidity for the U.S. central bank to support the economy. It includes bipartisan agreement on additional unemployment payments for people who have been laid off. https://news.yahoo.com/u-senate-leadership-aims-finalize-141350505.html

It is part of the government’s effort to legislate away a natural disaster. I think the result will be more hardship for Americans, not less.

In the mid-1990’s, I read a book called “The Government Against the Economy”, by George Reisman, an Economics professor who had been a student of the free market economist Ludwig von Mises and associate of Ayn Rand. In that book:

Reisman details how the profit motive and private ownership operate in a free society to produce consequences beneficial to all. He contrasts this with socialism, which destroys the possibility of rational economic activity and maintains control through-compulsion. He demonstrates how housing is provided efficiently in a free market, then examines the chaos of rent controls. He explains why shortages cannot exist in a free economy, then explodes the myths surrounding the energy crisis. “ (https://fee.org/articles/book-review-the-government-against-the-economy-by-george-reisman/)

In the 1970’s the Federal Government, specifically the Nixon administration, imposed price and wage controls. https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/remembering-nixons-wage-price-controls. After the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, this had particularly disastrous consequences on the supply of gasoline and petroleum products.

In discussing the 1970’s gasoline shortage, Reisman made the distinction between “scarcity” on the one hand and “shortage” on the other. As he noted in a later, more comprehensive book:

The concept of a shortage is not the same thing as the concept of a scarcity. An item can be extremely scarce, like diamonds, Rembrandt paintings, and so on, and yet no shortage exist.” (Reisman, George. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics . TJS Books. Kindle Edition. Location 10064.)

Diamonds are very “scarce”, but there is no “shortage” of diamonds. The price of diamonds is determined on a free market. When something is scarce, their price is bid up to a level that will be consistent with that scarcity. So long as price can rise to a level that reflects that scarcity, then there will never be a shortage. People will learn to economize on that good or service. They will learn to do with less, or they will seek substitute goods.

In the production sector, if businesses find that certain inputs they need to operate are increasing in price, they will do the same. They will either learn to do with less, or they will seek substitute goods. For instance, if a factory making leather shoes finds that its cost of leather is going up, then it might switch to imitation leather, or start making canvas shoes.

Additionally, if a business sector is highly profitable because more consumers want its goods and services relative to other business sectors, then that business will have more money to hire more workers and, if the economy is near full employment, then it will be able to pay its workers higher wages, and thereby outbid other businesses that are less profitable.  If, for instance, more people suddenly want more shoes and fewer jackets, then the shoe industry will be making higher profits as consumers are willing to pay more for shoes. This will give the shoe industry greater profits relative to other businesses sectors, and they will be able to offer higher wages and pay more for the inputs that both shoes and jackets use. (Leather, for instance, will go to make leather shoes, and not to make leather jackets.)

But, if the government steps in and interferes with this process by imposing price controls for leather, then shoe companies will not be able to pay more for leather in order to outbid the manufacturers of leather jackets. The government will thwart the shift from making leather jackets to making leather shoes because it has distorted the price system with price controls, and thereby destroyed any incentive that leather makers would have to sell more leather to shoe companies and less to leather jacket manufacturers.

The takeaway from George Reisman’s book, the Government Against the Economy, is that governmental interference in the profit motive leads to shortages, among other problems.

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The plan to increase unemployment insurance benefits and give some Americans (around) $3,000 will lead to shortages in key industries for similar reasons as the price and wage controls of the 1970’s. It will discourage people who have been temporarily displaced from their jobs from seeking alternative sources of employment.

Some of these people could be employed in critical areas of the economy that are going to need to ramp up production. Some of these areas include:

(1) Grocery Stores

Grocery stores need more employees:

https://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/overwhelmed-grocery-stores-looking-to-hire-during-stressful-times/article_25d3c018-6a41-11ea-b4dd-eb1e05a0b641.html

(2) Online order fulfillment at places like Amazon and Walmart centers.

Fulfillment centers at Amazon and Walmart need more employees:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-is-hiring-100000-workers-7-eleven-will-hire-up-to-20000-here-are-the-sectors-adding-jobs-amid-coronavirus-2020-03-20

(3) Restaurants switching to food delivery or increasing their food delivery services.

Restaurants, many of which have been arbitrarily shut down by the government, need delivery services:

U.S. consumer interest in delivery and take-out food service has more than doubled due to the coronavirus pandemic

https://www.ibtimes.com/us-interest-take-out-delivery-food-services-double-during-covid-19-panic-according-2943682

(4) Businesses need extra personnel to clean

All businesses need cleaning people to go through and sanitize their offices and work areas more frequently, if for no other reason than to assure workers and customers that health and safety is a top priority:

Job openings for cleaners are shooting through the roof as the U.S. mobilizes to contain the coronavirus…Many companies, workplaces and transportation systems are trying to assure customers they are safe by sanitizing and deep cleaning their premises. That’s leading to a steep increase in demand for cleaning services…”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/taking-it-to-the-cleaners-coronavirus-spurs-spike-in-demand-for-jobs-to-sanitize-america-2020-03-12

Paying people unemployment insurance, especially when there is enormous need for employment in other sectors of the economy, like there is right now, will reduce the incentive for people to seek employment in these other sectors of the economy.

Additionally, making cash payments of $2,000 or more to people below a certain income threshold will likely discourage people who could do the type of work that is needed right now from doing overtime or re-entering the job market. If the government is going to pay a person working in the the office cleaning industry $2,000, then they might decide they’d rather stay home for the next month. This will mean offices and businesses don’t get cleaned.

(I don’t know how much cleaning services actually help stop the spread of COVID-19, but consumers and workers appear to want the psychological reassurance that stores, offices, and factories are clean. So, cleaning them will provide those consumers and workers with the confidence to go back to work, and get the economy moving.)

Reisman described how the profit motive works in a free market for labor  in a later book, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics:

In sum, in a free market there are at least three principles of wage determination at work simultaneously. One is a tendency toward a uniformity of wages for labor of the same degree of ability. A second is a tendency toward unequal wage rates for labor of different degrees of ability—primarily intellectual ability, but also other abilities as well. And a third is a tendency toward the inclusion of discounts and premiums in wages as an offsetting element to the special advantages or disadvantages of the occupations concerned. The combined operation of these three principles helps to explain the full range of the various wage rates we observe in actual life.” (Reisman, George. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics . TJS Books. Kindle Edition. Location 9062)

 “Now, as far as it operates, the principle of the uniformity of wage rates is similar in its consequences to the uniformity-of-profit principle. That is, it serves to keep the various occupations supplied with labor in the proper proportions. Too many people do not rush into carpentering and not enough go into printing, say, because the very effect of such a mistake is to reduce the wages of carpenters and raise those of printers.” ( Reisman, George. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics . TJS Books. Kindle Edition.  Location 9065)

In addition, the operation of this principle gives to consumers the ultimate power to determine the relative size of the various occupations. If, to continue with the same example, the consumers buy more printed matter and fewer products made of wood, then the effect of the change is to cause the demand for printers to rise and that for carpenters to fall. As a result, the wages of printers rise and more young men are induced to become printers, while the wages of carpenters fall and fewer young men become carpenters.

It should be realized, as this example of the printers shows, that in seeking to earn the highest wages, the individual worker is seeking to do the kind of work the consumers most want him to do.” (Reisman, George. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics . TJS Books. Kindle Edition. Location 9070)

“…the enactment of price and wage controls causes shortages and economic chaos, because it destroys the price system.” (Reisman, George. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics . TJS Books. Kindle Edition.  Location 37186)

Paying people in shuttered industries and professions extra unemployment benefits will discourage them from seeking employment in industries where there is suddenly great demand. If someone can get paid, say, $2,000 a month in unemployment benefits, or go work at an Amazon fulfillment center and earn $2,500 per month, they might just decide to forego the extra $500, and sit at home.

(I am assuming someone at an Amazon fulfillment center makes about $15/ hour, working 40 hours per week. https://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Amazon-Fulfillment-Associate-Hourly-Pay-E6036_D_KO7,28.htm and, I’m assuming the average monthly benefit for unemployment insurance is about $500 per week. https://fileunemployment.org/unemployment-benefits/unemployment-benefits-comparison-by-state )

By paying out massive unemployment benefits, it’s like the government is a business that is bidding away people who could go and work at Walmart and in trucking at a time when Walmart and trucking companies are in need of those additional workers. It doesn’t even matter that these people might make more working at Walmart than they would on unemployment, because there is “disutility” associated with working. Most people would prefer to stay at home rather than work, which is why they get paid. If the government pays them something even close to what they can make working, then they’ll just chose not to work.

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The effort to prop up businesses hit by the Coronavirus will have the same effect as giving more unemployment benefits to American workers at this time. It will disincentivize them to switch to the production of more immediately necessary goods and services.

Passenger air traffic has fallen off drastically because no one wants to take a chance of becoming infected on a plane. Commercial airlines and cruise ships could retool their planes and boats to deliver goods and cargo instead of people.  Admittedly, they will take a hit to their profit, since their systems are not set up for cargo delivery, but this could be done with some retooling.  Some airlines are already doing this:

American Airlines will conduct its first cargo-only flights since 1984 on Friday as it looks to offset a massive revenue shortfall amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.” https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/american-airlines-coronavirus-cargo-freight-flights

Perfume and alcoholic-beverage companies have switched to making hand-sanitizers:

“The British Honey Company, which makes honey, gin, rum and other spirits from its base in the Cotswolds, said it would use spare capacity in its distillery in Worminghall, Buckinghamshire, to produce hand sanitiser.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/21/europes-companies-retool-production-to-fight-coronavirus-fallout

Although in the US, alcohol companies had to get “special dispensation” from the FDA to do so, as the FDA restricts the output of hand-sanitizer with regulations: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/20/fda-says-it-wont-take-action-against-manufacturers-that-start-making-hand-sanitizer.html

Now, thanks to government subsidies, these companies have an economic incentive to sit idle. Rather than retool, passenger airlines might decide it’s better just to do nothing, let their planes sit idle, and take their corporate welfare check from the government. It’s exactly the same principle as paying people extra unemployment benefits. The stockholders at the airlines might decide it’s better to just sit idle, and hope for passenger traffic to return.

Since what is needed right now is the movement of cargo like medical supplies, the government is essentially paying companies to remain idle, which will exacerbate the problem, and thereby keep us in the emergency even longer. (This is all assuming that COVOD-19 is truly the health threat that many government officials are claiming it is- which I don’t have enough information to know, one way or the other.)

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If the current plans in Congress to help will actually hurt our response to the COVID-19 natural disaster, is there anything Congress and State governments can do? They can get out of the way. Some possible solutions include the following:

(1) Reduce commercial drivers license regulations.

There are probably a lot of retired truck drivers out there. The government could repeal commercial driver’s license requirements for anyone who has ever had a commercial driver’s license, even if it isn’t active. For instance, in Washington D.C., if a CDL has been expired for more than 60 days, the driver has to retake the tests:

If your CDL has been expired for more than 60 calendar days, you must take and pass BOTH the knowledge and the road skills tests.” https://dmv.dc.gov/service/renew-cdl

State and Federal Government should waive this and allow truckers to drive on expired CDL’s.

(2) Allow doctors from other countries residing here who do not have medical licenses to practice medicine – with patients signing informed consent forms.

There could be thousands of foreign people from other countries in the US right now that could start practicing. The New York Times notes that:

“….No one knows exactly how many immigrant doctors are in the United States and not practicing, but some other data points provide a clue. Each year the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates, a private nonprofit, clears about 8,000 immigrant doctors (not including the American citizens who go to medical school abroad) to apply for the national residency match system. Normally about 3,000 of them successfully match to a residency slot,…” https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/12/business/economy/long-slog-for-foreign-doctors-to-practice-in-us.html

This is significant because foreign doctors can only practice in the US if they can get into one of these residency slots. This means there are about 5,000 foreign doctors in the US every year that cannot practice medicine.

(3) Relax immigration laws for foreign medical personal and their immediate families (spouses and children). Offer permanent US residency if they serve in hospitals here during the crisis.

I suspect that you would have large numbers of foreign doctors flooding into the US very quickly if this offer was made.

Would a doctor rather live and practice medicine in India, or here in the U.S.? If you allow him to bring his wife and children, and give them all permanent U.S. residency, the airlines would suddenly see planeloads of doctors and nurses headed to the US. I predict this would solve a lot of our healthcare problems, very quickly.

(4) Allow doctors and other medical personnel who allowed their licenses to lapse due to retirement, or who no longer have a license for other, non-disciplinary, reasons, to practice medicine, with patients signing consent forms.

In a serious emergency, getting medical care from a doctor with a lapsed license is better than getting no medical care at all.

(5) Eliminate all tariffs on the import of medical products

This appears to be something the Trump administration is getting right, although they initially helped create the problem:

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/trade/488799-trump-administration-seeks-public-comment-on-removing-tariffs-on-medical

(6) Eliminate all environmental regulations associated with drug manufacturing and the manufacture of medical supplies, so that drugs can be made here in the US, instead of in China.

Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine”, discussed the shortage of essential lifesaving drugs in U.S. hospitals on C-SPAN recently. She noted at 00:33:36 that:

“THAT’S A GREAT QUESTION, ONE OF THE REASONS THAT CHINA’S CHEAPER IS NOT JUST BECAUSE OF SUBSIDIES BUT BECAUSE LABOR COSTS ARE LOWER AND ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ARE CERTAINLY NOT WHAT WE HAVE HERE. SO BY OUTSOURCING IT WE HAVE ACTUALLY INCREASED GLOBAL POLLUTION WHICH COMES FROM PHARMACEUTICAL MANUFACTURING. WHAT I HAVE BEEN IMPRESSED WITH COMING BACK TO THIS IS THE NEW CHEMICAL PROCESSES THAT WE HAVE WHICH DRAMATICALLY REDUCES THE ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT. IF WE CAN LEARN TO MAKE OUR MEDICINES DIFFERENTLY AND ADOPT THOSE PRACTICES, WE CAN MITIGATE THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS THAT COME FROM TRADITIONAL WAYS OF MAKING MEDICINE.” (Emphasis added.)  https://www.c-span.org/video/?470077-5/washington-journal-rosemary-gibson-discusses-us-reliance-china-lifesaving-drugs&start=2016

In other words, environmental laws are forcing drug manufacturers over to China, where they can then threaten to restrict our supply of medical drugs, as one Chinese official recently did. https://www.ibtimes.com/china-threatens-restrict-drug-exports-us-amid-coronavirus-pandemic-2941920

(7) Eliminate minimum wage laws for medical manufacturing here in the US.

This is the other major reason we don’t manufacture more goods here in the US. Labor costs are artificially high thanks to unions and minimum wage laws.

(8) Eliminate overtime restrictions, and requirements that employers pay time and a half for jobs at hospitals, medical facilities, grocery stores, food delivery, and food services industries.  Allow the free market to determine what people will be paid, which will probably be more than before, anyway.

The reality here is that most of these industries are going to pay much higher wages precisely because they need to “ramp up” with as many doctors, nurses, truck drivers, and Walmart workers as they can. So, people in these sectors will likely get paid more, not less.

(9) States like California should roll back laws restricting the “gig economy”, especially for thinks like food and package delivery.

Companies like DoorDash, which is an app-based food delivery service, are potentially going to be put out of business by California’s AB 5:

It has many unicorns, including Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Uber worried about their business model scrambling to launch a voter initiative to roll back the effects of AB 5.”  https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/11/californias-new-employment-law-is-starting-to-crush-freelancers.html

California, which is currently forcing all residents to remain in their homes under penalty of law (an injustice in itself), should repeal AB 5.

(10) Prepare government funds to pay Hotels and Motels to use their rooms in an emergency as extra bed space for medical patients.

This is a temporary taking of private property by government, so compensation would have to be paid, although I suspect most hotel and motel companies would gladly donate the space. Hospitals would probably be willing to pay them for the use.

The government should cut funding to non-essential things like public parks, recreation areas, and libraries to pay the just compensation to hotel and motel companies. Alternatively, the government can offer to drastically reduce the taxes that hotel and motel companies pay in order to compensate them. In other words, the government can guarantee lower taxes in the future for hotels and motels, if they agree to make bed space available for medical purposes if things should get too bad. (Essentially offer a massive income tax credit for several years to hotel and motel companies.)

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The social and political reality of the age we live in means I am probably “spitting into the wind” by writing this. What people do in a crisis is largely determined by a lifetime of habit and belief. Perhaps if more people read books by Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and George Reisman going forward, the next national crisis, whatever it is, will lead to positive political and social change, instead of more of the statism and collectivism that has made our culture and society sicker than any virus ever could.