The Road to Serfdom

“The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.”[p.171]

Berit’s comment: Ponder that statement. It helps explain the significance of universal service-learning. Like socialist youth in Nazi (National Socialism) and Communist countries, all must embrace the new ideology. Those who don’t — the intolerable dissenters — must be silenced. The next section elaborates:

“Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants. If the feeling of oppression in totalitarian countries is in general much less acute than most people in liberal countries imagine, this is because the totalitarian governments succeed to a high degree in making people think as they want them to.”[p.171]

The strategies that accomplish this mental change include numerous subtle and obvious forms of propaganda. Schools, the media, children- and youth-service teams, corporations, etc…. every source of propaganda must share the same vision. Though totalitarian, it will be designed to sound noble, compassionate and fair to all. Yet the result with be the exact opposite. Ponder this warning from Dr. Thomas Sowell‘s review of Road to Serfdom:   “At the heart of the socialist vision is the notion that a compassionate society can create more humane living conditions for all through government ‘planning’ and control of the economy….   “The rule of law, on which freedom itself ultimately depends, is inherently incompatible with socialism. People who are free to do as they wish will not do as the economic planners wish. Differences in values and priories are enough to ensure that. These differences must be ironed out by propaganda or power, if socialism is to be socialism. Indoctrination must be part of the program, not because socialist want to be brainwashers, but because socialism requires brainwashing.   “Idealist socialist create systems in which idealist are almost certain to lose and be superseded by those whose drive for power, and ruthlessness in achieving it, make them the “fittest” to survive under a system where government power is the ultimate prize.… The issue is not what anyone intends but what consequences are in fact likely to follow.”[39]   In his article, aptly titled “A Road to Hell Paved with Good Intentions,” Sowell points out that “Marxism as an ideal continues to flourish on American college campuses, as perhaps nowhere else in the world.” Collectivist visions appeal to academic idealists and others who ignore the lessons of history.

“….all propaganda serves the same goal—that all the instruments of propaganda are coordinated to influence the individuals in the same direction…. The skillful propagandist then has power to mold their minds in any direction he chooses, and even the most intelligent and independent people cannot entirely escape that influence if they are long isolated from all other sources of information. [p.171-172]

President Obama is now taking control of this change process by transferring workers from the private sector (corporations, private enterprise…) to the government service sector. With the controlled media on his side, the masses are not exposed to contrary facts.

“…even the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality—an authoritarian determination of the status of each individual in the new hierarchical order—and that most of the humanitarian elements of our morals, the respect for human life, for the weak, and for the individual generally, will disappear….

“The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda which we must now consider are, however, of an even more profound kind. They are destructive of all morals because they undermine one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and the respect for truth.

“…in order to induce people to accept the official values, these must be justified, or shown to be connected with the values already held by the people, which usually will involve assertions about causal connections between means and ends.  …people must be brought to agree not only with the ultimate aims but also with the views about the facts and possibilities on which the particular measures are based.[p.172]

Al Gore’s battle against a mythical man-made global warming crisis illustrates this point. Globalist change agents agree that a worldwide crisis is needed to persuade humanity to embrace all the costly restrictions and regulations of government controlled “sustainable development.” So they are willing to ignore facts and embrace myths and pseudo-science in order to reach their goal.

“We have seen that agreement on that complete ethical code, that all-comprehensive system of values which is implicit in an economic plan, does not exist in a free society but would have to be created….

“And while the planning authority will constantly have to decide issues on merits about which there exist no definite moral rules [apart from the Bible], it will have to justify its decisions to the people—or, at least, have somehow to make the people believe that they are the right decisions….

“This process of creating a ‘myth’ to justify his action need not be conscious. …  So [the totalitarian leader] will readily embrace theories which seem to provide a rational justification for the prejudices which he shares with many of his fellows. Thus a pseudoscientific theory becomes part of the official creed which to a greater or lesser degree directs everybody’s action. [p.173]

“The need for such official doctrines… has been clearly foreseen by the various theoreticians of the totalitarian system…. They are all necessarily based on particular views about facts which are thenelaborated into scientific theories in order to justify a preconceived opinion.

“The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they… have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized…. The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new under the pretense that the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are … so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language….

“The worst sufferer in this respect is, of course, the word ‘liberty.’ It is a word used as freely in totalitarian states as elsewhere…. Dr. Karl Mannheim… warns us that ‘a conception of freedom modeled on the preceding age is an obstacle to any real understanding of the problem. But his use of the word freedom is as misleading it is in the mouth of totalitarian politicians. Like their freedom, the ‘collective freedom‘ he offers us is not the freedom of the members of society but the unlimited freedom of the planner to do with society what he pleases….[pps.174-175]

“In this particular case the perversion of the meaning of the word has, of course, been well prepared …. by many of the theoreticians of socialism. But ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ are by no means the only words whose meaning has been changed into their opposites to make them serve as instruments of totalitarian propaganda. We have already seen how the same happens to ‘justice’ and “law,’ ‘right’ and ‘equality.’ The list could be extended until it includes almost all moral and political terms in general use.

“… the confusion becomes worse because this change of meaning of the words describing political ideals is not a single event but a continuous process, a technique employed consciously or unconsciously to direct the people….

“It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced. … Since many parts of this code will never be explicitly stated… every act of the government, must become sacrosanct and exempt from criticism. If the people are to support the common effort without hesitation, they must be convinced that not only the end aimed at but also the means chosen are the right ones.”[p.175]

“Facts and theories must thus become no less the object of an official doctrine than views about values. And the whole apparatus for spreading knowledge—the schools and the press, radio and motion picture—will be used exclusively of to spread those views which, whether true or false, will strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority; and all information that might cause doubt or hesitation will be withheld.”[p.176]

Stanford University Professor Steven Schneider illustrates it well. He said, “On the one hand, as scientists, we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but–which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. “To do that, we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” (See endnote #38 in Saving the Earth)

This applies even to fields apparently most remote from any political interests and particularly to all the sciences, even the most abstract. That in the disciplines dealing directly with human affairs and therefore most immediately affecting political views, such as history, law or economics, the disinterested search for truth cannot be allowed…. These disciplines have, indeed, in all totalitarian countries become the most fertile factories of the official myths which the rulers use to guide the minds and wills of their subjects….” [p.176]

n “Government religion in the United States,” Erica Carle wrote: “The separation of church and state argument for removing all traces of Biblical teaching from public life and public land is a gigantic fraud. Why? Because there is no separation of church and state. Government religion is a fact in the United States. What is wanted by the government religion adherents is not separation of church and state, but exclusive rights for their religion.”What is the government religion? Auguste Comte (1798-1857), its French founder, called it the Religion of Humanity. The doctrines of the Positive Religion are now taught in the schools as a science which Comte called sociology. Sociology was to be the ruler science over all the other sciences and also the science of managing the world…. In a country that is supposed to be free, its citizens are being subjected to sociological management, its scientists and elected officials to sociological control, and its youth to sociological education.

“…we must yet be on our a guard not to dismiss .[these aberrations] as mere accidental by-products which have nothing to do with the essential character of a planned or totalitarian system….They are a direct result of that same desire to see everything directed by a ‘unitary conception of the whole.’…

 

“Once science has to serve, not truth, but the interests of a class, a community or a state…. As the Nazi minister of justice has explained, the question which every new scientific theory must ask itself is: ‘Do I serve National Socialism for the greatest benefit of all?’
“The word ‘truth’ itself ceases to have its old meaning.  …it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.
“The general intellectual climate which this produces, the spirit of complete cynicism as regards truth which it engenders, the loss of the sense of even the meaning of truth, the disappearance of the spirit of independent inquiry…. Perhaps the most alarming fact is that contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established but one which can be found everywhere among intellectuals who have embraced a collectivist faith and who are acclaimed as intellectual leaders even in countries still under a liberal regime.

 

“Not only is even the worst oppression condoned if it is committed in the name of socialism, and the creation of a totalitarian system openly advocated by people who pretend to speak for the scientists of liberal countries; intolerance, too, is openly extolled….” [p.178]

“This view is, of course, practically indistinguishable from the views which led the Nazis to the persecution of men of science, the burning of scientific books, and the systematic eradication of the intelligentsia of the subjected people.

“The desire to force upon the people a creed which is regarded as salutary for them is, of course, not a thing that is new or peculiar to our time. New, however, is the argument by which many of our intellectuals try to justify such attempts.” [p.179]
The tragedy of collectivist thought is that, while it starts out to make reason supreme, it ends by destroying reason….”[p.180]

 

US Socialism

For the American left, 2016 proved to be a year with a cruel twist ending. In the first few months, a self-
described democratic socialist by the name of Bernie Sanders mounted a surprisingly successful primary challenge to the Democratic Party’s presumed and eventual presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. By the end of 2016, however, not only had Sanders lost the primary race, but Clinton had been defeated in the general election by a billionaire who dressed his xenophobic and plutocratic ambitions in the garb of class resentment.

But the apparent strength of the left wasn’t entirely an illusion. Even as late as November, the Sanders campaign had racked up a set of important victories. The Cold War had helped to entrench the idea of socialism as antithetical to the American political tradition, and Sanders had gone a long way toward smashing that ideological consensus. By identifying himself explicitly as a democratic socialist from the outset of his campaign, he helped give renewed meaning and salience to it as a political identity firmly rooted in the American tradition.

In addition to helping end the stigma around socialism, the Sanders campaign provided a blueprint for a new generation of leftists and progressives. By running in the Democratic primary and showing that he could draw large crowds, Sanders revealed an emerging left-leaning constituency. It seemed in those early autumn months that even in defeat, Sanders had opened up the path for a more progressive Democratic Party: “Sanders Democrats” could continue to work within the party and not only protest outside it. The way forward seemed clear: After Clinton won the general election, a strengthened social-democratic left could work toward the universal provision of various social services and push for criminal-justice reforms and other key priorities.

But now, instead of holding a strengthened position within a troubled but relatively secure Democratic Party, the left appears to be simultaneously invigorated and institutionally irrelevant. The ambitious ideas and goals that have blossomed in recent years—single-payer health care, debt-free higher education, a $15-dollar-an-hour national minimum wage, paid leave, criminal-justice reform—seem to belong to a political world that no longer exists. The left is now primarily on the defensive: Rather than seeking to push the welfare state toward completion, it must defend against its dissolution. Rather than ensuring fair access to public goods like health care, education, and housing, the task of the left is now to prevent the wholesale pillage of the commons. And rather than merely restraining the hawks in the Democratic Party, the left must worry about global devastation, whether through nuclear action or climate inaction.

Sanders helped give renewed meaning and salience to democratic socialism as a political identity.

 

So what remains of 2016’s hoped-for “political revolution”? Two books by Sanders, Outsider in the White House and Our Revolution, and two volumes of essays by some of this new left’s leading voices, The ABCs of Socialism and The Future We Want, offer us some clues. While written with different conditions in mind, these books still serve as important references for thinking through how to move forward.

Sanders’s emergence as the de facto spokesman and moral conscience of the American left was nearly impossible to anticipate. In spite of having risen to the highest elected position of any socialist in US history, Sanders wasn’t viewed by many leftists as central to their projects and organizing efforts, most of which, in the early 2000s, were directed toward non-electoral goals and communities in urban areas. But the themes that Sanders struck—reducing economic inequality, fighting climate change and the corrosive influence of money in our politics—­were well-chosen for our moment of economic upheaval and drew progressively larger crowds.

A careful account of Sanders’s story, and why he emerged so suddenly, will be the work of future historians. But he has written two campaign autobiographies that provide a reasonable first draft. Outsider in the White House was produced relatively quickly and published in 2015. Other than a new preface by Sanders and an afterword by The Nation’s John Nichols, it is essentially a retitled version of Outsider in the House, his 1997 book. Our Revolution, published in the days after Trump’s election, recapitulates the candidate’s biography but also gives us an account of his primary campaign against Clinton and concludes with a detailed policy agenda.

Both books provide similar accounts of Sanders’s life, but the earlier book offers a more complete portrait of his youth and political formation. Sanders was born into a lower-middle-class Jewish household in Brooklyn. The son of a paint salesman, 
he didn’t grow up in poverty but was conscious throughout childhood of the family’s lack of money. He attended Brooklyn College for his freshman year and then transferred to the University of Chicago, where he felt isolated among the children of businesspeople and professionals. By his own admission, Sanders wasn’t an especially good student, instead dedicating much of his time to activism with the university’s chapters of the Young People’s Socialist League and the Congress of Racial Equality.

The left appears to be simultaneously invigorated and institutionally irrelevant.

The civil-rights movement was an important factor in Sanders’s politicization in the early 1960s. He participated in protests against the segregated housing owned by the University of Chicago, for which he was arrested, and in 1963 he made the long bus trip to Washington, DC, to attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. made his “I Have a Dream” speech. Sanders also joined the Student Peace Union and became involved in the antiwar movement. After college, he moved to Vermont and lived in rustic conditions. After joining the antiwar Liberty Union Party, a statewide socialist party founded in 1970, Sanders ran for the US Senate in 1972, winning just 2 percent of the vote. Four years later, he ran for governor, winning all of 6 percent.

Perhaps it was Vermont’s isolation from the civil-rights movement and other struggles of the era that made Sanders incline toward electoral politics rather than other forms of activism. Or perhaps it was simply that the Liberty Union Party’s leadership could fit into a living room, and he happened to be the one who volunteered for a Senate run. But at a time when New York–based socialists like Michael Harrington were forming the predecessors of today’s Democratic Socialists of America to push the Democratic Party to the “left wing of the possible,” Sanders was instead gaining experience in presenting socialist ideas as part of electoral campaigns. If many on the left had reconciled themselves to the task of trying to reform the Democratic Party from within in the 1970s, Sanders had decided to carry on the tradition of electoral socialism inherited from his idol, Eugene Debs.

Sanders’s first political success came in 1981, when—to nearly everyone’s surprise—­he was elected as mayor of Bur­lington by a margin of 14 votes. But it wasn’t his own election that prompted him to first use his signature phrase “political revolution.” Elected on a platform that included protecting the environment and halting property-tax increases, Sanders soon found that Burlington’s board of aldermen was unwilling to work with him. So he decided that he needed to lead a “political revolution” in order to win more elections: this time to take aldermanic seats as well as the mayor’s office. In the following election, his Progressive Coalition ran candidates in every ward, an effort that found them knocking on nearly every door in the city. The Sanders forces won several of these races, and while they didn’t have a majority, they had enough seats to veto any Democratic or Republican initiative, forcing the traditional parties to work with them. “If the mayoral victory one year before had been regarded by some as a fluke,” Sanders writes, “there could be no mistaking what was happening now. A political revolution had occurred in Burlington.”

In Sanders’s time as mayor, Burlington became a small-town echo of the municipal socialism of the 1920s. He halted the property-tax increases, as promised, and raised revenue through a room-and-meal tax. A community land trust was set up to create affordable housing for low-income residents. There was also lakefront beautification and cultural renewal, with free blues, jazz, reggae, and country-music festivals, and events featuring left-wing luminaries like Studs Terkel and Noam Chomsky. Sanders also gave the city something of a foreign policy, traveling to Managua for the anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution, to the Soviet Union on his honeymoon in 1988, and to Cuba in 1989.

Sanders’s emergence as the moral conscience of the American left was nearly impossible to anticipate.

 

The question remained whether San­ders’s form of “political revolution”—the idea that mass organizing and local electoral victories could help push American politics to the left—could work on a scale larger than the municipal one. In 1990, Sanders ran successfully for the House of Representatives, where he served eight terms; in 2007, he was elected to the Senate, where he caucused, sometimes uneasily, with Democrats. He became the highest-ranking American politician to describe himself as a socialist.

Sanders remained out of step with the centrist politics of the Democratic Leadership Council, which dominated the party in those years. He was willing to endorse Bill Clinton for president in 1996 as preferable to Republican rule, but he did so without enthusiasm. He thought mainstream Democrats had abandoned the language of class, and he opposed DLC-championed trade deals like NAFTA, which served to place American workers in direct competition with the lower wages and regulatory standards outside the United States.

Once he arrived in the House of Representatives in 1991, Sanders helped set up the Progressive Caucus with Democratic allies like Peter DeFazio of Oregon, Lane Evans of Illinois, and Maxine Waters and Ron Dellums of California. He worked on adding progressive components to existing bills, and he wondered, as he watched the 1996 Republican National Convention produce a huge bounce in the polls, “What could happen, what would happen, in this country if progressives were allowed to have four or five nights of prime-time television and front-page newspaper coverage? What would happen if we could present a point of view that most Americans are unfamiliar with? Would we suddenly become the dominant political force in America? No. Would millions of Americans develop a much more sympathetic attitude toward democratic socialism? Yes.”

But it would be impossible to test his theory of political revolution from the confines of Congress. It required far more public attention, and a galvanizing campaign that would raise money and consciousness and inspire volunteers to put in work across the country. That could happen with a presidential campaign, the only realistic way to test his theory on a much larger scale. In 2015 and 2016, Sanders discovered—one suspects much to his own surprise—just how far he might be able to take this tactic.

If Sanders had won the presidency, he would have encountered, just as he had in Burlington in the early 1980s, a legislature consisting of Republicans and many Democrats who would have been unwilling to work with him or accept his victory as more than a fluke. The real test would have come in the 2018 midterms—­analogous to those aldermanic elections—with pro-Sanders candidates running across the country, competing for every House seat and the contested Senate ones. But perhaps the most important aspect of Sanders’s run in the Democratic primary was cultural rather than electoral: He gave renewed vigor to the egalitarian ideals of socialism and, along the way, revealed a growing base of young voters who shared his enthusiasm for them.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Sanders’s run in the Democratic primary was cultural rather than electoral.

Sanders defines democratic socialism in an idiosyncratic way: It is, above all else, fundamentally Rooseveltian—especially the Roosevelt of the never-implemented Second Bill of Rights in 1944. For Sanders, certain social goods—housing, education, and health care—deserve to be understood as rights rather than as commodities sold for profit. To achieve these ends, he sees the need to fight the power of concentrated wealth, which distorts both markets and politics in favor of the wealthy. But Sanders has another critique that is equally powerful and just as salient to our moment. His frequent invocation of the 1 percent and its undeserved share of the national wealth is not only an argument about economic inequality; it is also an argument about political inequality. One cannot be an equal member of a polity if those with wealth have far more say and far more power in the political system. A political democracy requires an economic democracy—or, as Sanders writes in Our Revolution, “today’s tyrannical aristocracy is no longer a foreign power. It’s an American billionaire class that has unprecedented economic and political influence over all of our lives.”

Sanders’s success with young voters reveals a bimodal distribution of socialist enthusiasm. The old guard that came of age in the 1960s, like San­ders, has now been met by a growing influx of organizers from the ranks of those born after 1980, people who have entered the workforce during years marked by varying degrees of capitalist crisis. The ABCs of Socialism, edited by Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara, and The Future We Want, edited by Sunkara and The Nation’s Sarah Leonard, offer us some insights into the ways in which this new generation is attempting to redefine the socialist tradition for the 21st century.

The two books have much in common, sharing an editor and several authors. The ABCs of Socialism is a direct response to the surge of interest in socialism generated by the Sanders campaign. During his candidacy, subscriptions to Jacobin increased by the hundreds each week, and basic definitional and historical questions poured in. The ABCs of Socialism offers selections from the magazine, in the form of questions and relatively brief answers, to provide a useful history of the socialist ideal.

Enthusiastic though they were about the Sanders campaign, Jacobin’s writers are explicitly rooted in Marxism in a way that Sanders is not. For the authors in The ABCs, socialism means something more than his vision of a Rooseveltian social democ­racy. In their analysis, socialism cannot be achieved through progressive taxation and a more robust system of rights that decommodifies certain social goods; this would bend, but not break, the power of capital. And capital will always fight back, just as it has for the last 40-plus years, starting with the crises of the early 1970s, which created opportunities for businesspeople and their political allies (like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher) to fight the power of unions and the welfare state.

For Sanders, the problem is Wall Street and the billionaire class, which have captured the government and shaped the market to their advantage at the expense of ordinary workers. For Jacobin’s socialists, the problem is more acute: It is capitalism itself. In Our Revolution, Sanders defends the idea of capping the size of major banks and briefly discusses having the government support worker-owned businesses. But as Sunkara, going far beyond Sanders, puts it in his essay for The ABCs, the socialist vision remains “abolishing private ownership of the things we all need and use—factories, banks, offices, natural resources, utilities, communication and transportation infrastructure—and replacing it with social ownership, thereby undercutting the power of elites to hoard wealth and power.” That doesn’t mean the state will seize your “Kenny Loggins records,” Sunkara puckishly adds: Socialism requires the abolition of private property, not personal property.

For Sanders, the problem is Wall Street… For Jacobin’s socialists, the problem is capitalism itself.

One of socialism’s problems in the 20th century was that its existing examples—at least the ones claiming to have gone beyond social democracy—were always politically repressive single-party states. The new socialists neither deny this fact nor dwell on it. Instead, they focus on the ethical appeal of socialism. For Jacobin’s writers, so long as capitalism remains—even in the modified form of social democracy—
injuries to human flourishing can be stanched, but not cured. It isn’t enough simply to expand the purview of the state if it leaves private property intact. But although the essays in TheABCs occasionally offer a Marxist critique of Sanders, they mostly articulate a view of socialism’s purpose that is similar to his own. As Sunkara puts it, the desired goal is “a world where people don’t try to control others for personal gain, but instead cooperate so that everyone can flourish.” Jacobin, which sometimes seems to take pride in being part of an unreconstructed left, more closely resembles the tradition of Marxist humanism that cropped up in the mid- to late 20th century, when actually existing socialism in the Soviet bloc too often proved to work against human flourishing. The point, after all, is to improve things.

If The ABCs seeks to establish a socialist ideal upon which to ground the left, The Future We Want is less theoretical and more focused on outlining the kinds of policies that might help to realize this ideal in our present moment. Collectively, the essays of The Future We Want think through how high-quality universal services, in an egalitarian context, would change human life.

Megan Erickson, in her essay “Imagining Socialist Education,” looks at our school system and argues that socialists must fight for universal access to the kind of liberating, decommodified education that members of the elite receive. In “Sex Class,” Sarah Leonard describes the importance of universal child care for socialist feminism—because otherwise the best that liberal feminism can offer will only be available to those who can pay. In “How to Make Black Lives Really, Truly Matter,” Jesse Myerson and Mychal Denzel Smith argue that overcoming the legacy of racism can only happen by closing the wealth gap between black and white Americans. To this end, they propose job guarantees and baby bonds that mature at 18 for all those born to families below the median net wealth.

Several of the book’s contributors mention the prospect of a universal basic income to cope with technological and social changes here and on the horizon, and to help manage the transition toward less work—the decommodification of life itself, and thus the weakening of the power of capital. But overall, the imagined interlocutor of these essays is neither on the left nor the right; it’s the sort of liberal who also seeks to reduce inequality, but would do so by increasing opportunity rather than reducing economic disparities. By highlighting the inequalities born out of liberal policies, the writers and editors of The Future We Want assert that the kind of goals that liberals and socialists share—greater formal equality, more egalitarian representation, a political system that doesn’t solely benefit elites—can only be realized through socialist means.

As we are no longer in a moment in which well-intentioned liberals are in power, these arguments will have to be repurposed. Donald Trump’s election has been a radicalizing experience for many: Subscriptions to the left’s magazines and membership in the Democratic Socialists of America increased throughout the Sanders campaign and jumped again after Election Day. But in 
spite of its energy and vigor, the left now needs to rethink some of its strategies and ideas. Total control of the government by the Republican Party, joined with Trump’s executive power, means that even massive mobilizations will produce defensive victories at best. Those victories are real and clearly worth the fight—not least because they produce solidarity—but the losses will still pile up. We are no longer debating a slower or longer path to social democracy; we are defending against the racist, misogynistic, and kleptocratic practices of a man committed to dismantling the New Deal.

In spite of its energy and vigor, the left now needs to rethink some of its strategies and ideas.

But the left cannot sustain itself on defense alone. Other than doing what it can to stop Trump’s worst abuses, the left must develop a theory of change for a moment when the Democratic Party doesn’t control any branch of government. For a time, Sanders seemed to have shown us how to pull the Democratic Party to the left. Yet the vulnerability of his strategy was that it required the party’s more centrist wing to win the presidential election—which, as events have proved, isn’t something we can take for granted. Despite this defeat, the energy to resist—and to build—is there. If the Democrats are still afraid to speak of class, they will have to be taught. Those who cannot or will not stand up to Trump need to face primary challenges from the left. And even if the party’s next presidential candidate isn’t a progressive, the left needs to make clear in the intervening years that he or she will have to win over a sizable number of young voters who are.

Trump’s enormous unpopularity means that, assuming the continued existence of small-D democracy, the Democratic Party will win major elections in the future. The left’s job is to make sure that when it does, it will be a more egalitarian and progressive force. Until then, the broad left should focus on the common ground: civil rights, economic equality, universal services, and real democracy for all. Whatever Trump succeeds in dismantling, we must have the ideas at hand to rebuild it stronger and better once he’s gone. In short: What do we need to do next? Everything.

 

The ‘Jobs Guarantee’ and MMT

First of all, I haven’t posted the entire article, but to read the entire article simply go here.

In this paper, I consider several distinct functions of government: 1) government as an income provider, 2) as an employer, and 3) as a buyer of goods and services.

Government as an income provider is the first and most significant error. Government does not earn any income. It coerces through force, income from tax revenues. Government produces nothing, save bureaucracy, which is non-productive. Thus government cannot provide income, as it creates no income to provide.

Government as an employer, is once again, totally reliant upon the coercion of tax revenues to pay salaries/wages as an employer. Debt can only be incurred from the financial markets if those providing the credit believe that the tax revenues can support interest and principal repayments.

Government as a buyer of goods and services, runs into exactly the same problem. The MMT dimwits seem categorically to fail in their understanding that government creates nothing. That government is an enormous parasite feeding off of the productive element of the economy.

Until they can show, absent of coercive force, what a government earns, their arguments are meaningless and nonsense on stilts.

 

The a priori of monopoly

Monopoly as an analytic a priori proposition: monopoly is an entity [institution] that exists in the absence of any market competition.

Defining ‘monopoly’ as an institution that can as a producer of goods and services [within its market], raise revenues through the restriction of supply: this is and must be due to an inelastic demand curve.

To gain a monopoly position, all competition must be eliminated. Free market mechanisms cannot succeed, nor be utilised to eliminate competition, as free market mechanisms rely upon ‘out competing’ the competition through ‘lower price, higher quality’ or a combination of the two. With ‘free entry’ to the ‘market’ as ‘profit margins rise’ due to an expansion of market share, or product dominance, competitors are attracted to the high returns available, particularly if the demand curve has areas of inelasticity.

Legal mechanisms can be utilised, as they rely upon an outside agency to provide the coercive power required to exclude all and any competition. Thus the only true monopolies are monopolies that exist under conditions of coercion. These monopolies will only possess monopoly power or advantage in an area where they have the support of the coercive power.

The ‘other’ way that monopoly area of influence, or market share can be gained is through the direct use of coercion, or physical force [or the threat of] against any and all competition. Assuming success, the institution then controls the market or territory that they can defend from other potential or actual monopolists.

We now have an area that supports say 100 monopolists, each with a territory that has an inelastic demand curve for our institutions goods and services, which happen to be quite similar in our 100 firms. As ‘competition’ is prohibited, legal power resides with each individual monopolist, the only method to remaining to drive expansion of territorial control and hence an expansion in revenues is through ‘war’.

Of course this is exactly the situation of the ‘State’ which historically consisted of ‘Kings’ and now are ‘governments’. There are some very important differences between the two forms of the ‘State’ however, as far as ‘government’ expansion is concerned, there are only two ways that they can expand their market share, direct war, or the threat of war, resulting in Imperialism.

Through history the theory of monopoly can be seen to drive the ever shrinking number of ‘States’ into ever larger territorial areas that are exploited by monopoly government. There have been stunning reversals, the Soviet Empire imploded of course, but the historical dialectic has been towards consolidation through war and aggression. The inelastic demand curve is inelastic as of course it is 100% coerced. The revenues generated are called ‘tax’.

Monopoly through coercion has a logical conclusion: one world government. Steps have of course been underway for a long time towards this ‘ideal’ using the fiat currency as the primary weapon. Bretton Woods saw the hegemony of the US. drive the implementation of the US dollar as the ‘world reserve’ currency, much as prior to WWI Britain held the unofficial world reserve currency.

Under a monopoly, the supply of goods and services is reduced, while the cost of said goods and services rises. This fact is starkly apparent across all the Socialist Western governments that seek to expropriate as much of the capitalist systems generated wealth. Their profligacy and incompetence however are gradually killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

 

Washington’s birthday holiday

Somehow I managed to overlook this US holiday, which is always a pain in the arse as I get up at 2am for nothing. Also on this day we have this, which, in today’s America is far more relevant:

February 21, 1848: A new book is published in London by two Germans. The original print run was written in German and the 17,000 word treatise was finally translated into English in 1850. The authors were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their work was entitled The Communist Manifesto. There were several revisions made between 1872 and 1890. The work was translated into Russian in 1882. Various English translations are used and some include modified text.

Think not?

Observe the stats:

 

Really?

“The essence of trade unionism is social uplift. The labor movement has been the haven for the dispossessed, the despised, the neglected, the downtrodden, the poor.” – A. Phillip Randolph

“With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men.” – Clarence Darrow

“You can’t do it unless you organize.” – Samuel Gompers

“We must learn to live together as brothers or we are going to perish together as fools.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Some impressive quotes, too bad it’s all nonsense. I’m not sure that Martin Luther King was actually referring to his brothers on the picket line, somewhat disingenuous slipping him in there!

 

Rights

Today, the supposed threat to free enterprise is a law that’s broader, if less radical, than Medicare: the bill Congress passed this year to create a system of privately run health insurance for everyone. On Monday, a federal judge ruled part of the law to be unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court will probably need to settle the matter in the end.

We’ve lived through a version of this story before, and not just with Medicare. Nearly every time this country has expanded its social safety net or tried to guarantee civil rights, passionate opposition has followed.

The opposition stems from the tension between two competing traditions in the American economy. One is the laissez-faire tradition that celebrates individuality and risk-taking. The other is the progressive tradition that says people have a right to a minimum standard of living — time off from work, education and the like.

I have highlighted the paragraph that has created the Welfare problem worldwide: the right to anything other than property rights.

Property Rights are inherent to being a human: you own your own mind and body. Anything that you produce with your mind and body you own, and therefore have the right to any benefits accruing from said production. You also have the property right to sell, exchange, gift, consume or dispose, in a manner that does not encroach a third party’s property rights, of said production.

People have no right to a certain standard of living, time off work, education, or any other of the myriad social rights promulgated by politicians.

To provide a certain standard of living, requires production that creates wealth. This wealth belongs via property rights, to the producer. For a third party, to enjoy a standard of living, or education, or time off work, in excess of your own production, requires that a third party’s production be diverted, or redistributed, to you from them: their property rights, unless provided on a voluntary basis, are therefore violated.

Taxes that support the Welfare System, are coercive redistribution. They take my production, and divert it to the third party, who has less or no production. This, unless provided by myself as an act of charity, constitutes theft.

The Welfare State thus redistributes wealth from the producers of wealth, to the consumers of wealth: thus, over time, wealth is consumed and destroyed. A Welfare State can only exist as long as the store of capital. Once the capital is consumed, the Welfare, redistributive State ceases to exist.

 

Government pay

At a time when workers’ pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees’ average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.

Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available.

The federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year.

What the data show:

•Benefits. Federal workers received average benefits worth $41,791 in 2009. Most of this was the government’s contribution to pensions. Employees contributed an additional $10,569.

•Pay. The average federal salary has grown 33% faster than inflation since 2000. USA TODAY reported in March that the federal government pays an average of 20% more than private firms for comparable occupations. The analysis did not consider differences in experience and education.

•Total compensation. Federal compensation has grown 36.9% since 2000 after adjusting for inflation, compared with 8.8% for private workers.

 

Capitalism not to blame

The free market principles increasingly popular around the world over the last 40 years are suddenly less so. “We’re seeing the end of a global free market,” says Ian Bremmer president of the political consulting firm, Eurasia Group. “In the west, it’s indefensible to support the free markets publicly,” says the author of the The End of the Free Market.

Free markets are not being supported publically. Intervention in free markets is not support, it is suppression.

Thanks to the financial crisis, high unemployment and a growing gap between the rich and poor, support for capitalism is waning while renewed populism takes hold. “You can’t support open borders, open trade with 17.2% unemployment in the United States,” he says, citing the recent illegal immigration law in Arizona as an example.

This is the major problem capitalism faces. Capitalism is not, and was not the cause of the current crisis. The cause of the current crisis is and always has been in the past, government interference with the money supply. The illegal expansion of credit, in which they dip their snouts first.

“There is massive anti-incumbency, anti-government sentiment throughout the West,” he notes, pointing to Gordon Brown’s resignation in the U.K., German anger over the Euro bailout and a Japanese populace that voted out the ruling party after 50 years of dominance. “And that comes hand in glove with support for populist economic policies that will hurt growth in the global economy,” he believes.

Gordon Brown was a fool, a thief, a liar and a Socialist.

The alternative, of course, is a Chinese style state controlled economy which may gain popularity among emerging markets. While most of the developed world muddles through China continues to grow at a torrid pace. “The world’s second largest and fastest growing economy, China, is completely committed to a model that at base is fundamentally incompatible with free market capitalism.”

China is inflating along with everyone else. Their bubble will pop as inevitably as everyone else’s. China grew as fast as they did on the back of a massive US inflation. As they [China] started so much lower than the West, their growth was that much faster.

Which model shapes the future? It’s not clear yet, says Bremmer.

Unless the people wake-up, it will tragically, be the total adoption of Socialism, until it collapses again under the weight of it’s own stupidity and theft.

In the meantime, Bremmer thinks the U.S. dollar and gold will continue to appreciate in the face of all this global uncertainty. “The dollar looks great because there’s nothing else.”

Forget the dollar, it is a piece of paper that relies 100% on the trust of the people in the government. Current government is largely composed of thieves and fools. Gold, land, timber, or tangibles are the way to go.

 

Government expenditures

Trying to get a handle on exactly what and where government spends your [tax] money isn’t that easy. With deficits blowing out of control all over the world, and debt reaching unsustainable levels, the word will be austerity.

This is the gross amount of government spending – let’s see if we can break it down somewhat.

Defence, wars, terrorism, consumes circa 10% of government spending. All necessary?

Non-defence spending. No more detail available than this at the moment. I’ll have to do a little digging.

Bailing out State governments.

What about wages, salaries and benefits? These always constitute a large proportion of tax revenues, you know, paying these incompetents to produce nothing, except to enforce regulations to ensure that you can’t either.

What a suprise, benefits are rising.

Wages and Salaries also. Damn but they must be pushing some heavy paper.