Communism, Fascism, Capitalism

The State of the Union address brought up the issue of government controls over business. In reviewing the linked article, I found the following observation on where Marx went wrong:

Interestingly, almost everywhere Marxism triumphed: Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc., all skipped the capitalist phase Marx thought pivotal. Instead, they slid straight from pre-industrial feudal conditions into communism; which essentially entailed reversion back to feudalism supplanting the traditional aristocracy with party cronyism – before dissolving into corrupted variants of state capitalism economically similar to fascism.

As usual, Marx got it backwards.

It’s also ironic that even as orthodox Marxism collapsed due to economic paralysis, cultural Marxism predicated on race, sex and identity politics thrives in “Capitalist” America. The multiculturalists substituted race where the Soviets and Maoists saw only class. America’s civic crusade has become political correctness, aka cultural Marxism, preoccupied with race. Socialism wheels around again.

The entire article is very interesting. Recommended.

The Truth Is Out There

Bill Whittle's latest video is out. Like "Open Blogger" notes at Ace of Spades:

Have you ever had an incomplete thought rattling around your mind? You can almost put it into words but it remains elusively amorphous? Bill Whittle has the uncanny ability to take that pile of mental toothpicks and glue them into an Eiffel Tower of reason.

The video starts out a little on the feisty side, with an unflattering characterization of Pacifica Radio. But it gets good at about 4 minutes, and he brings the whole thing together by the end of the piece. Wow.

I keep a button tuned to Pacifica Radio, just to check up on what is going on with the Far Left from time to time. Every once in a while, they have something that sounds reasonable on the station. But they also run some really challenging programming, like interviews of representatives of such victim groups as the "National Man-Boy Love Association" or the "Bondage and Discipline Community" (the latter persecuted more through ridicule and misunderstanding than through legal action. Their feelings are hurt.) I wrote down some of the details of programming I caught before and during May Day last year. Whew.

Dennis Prager has observed that (at least in the United States) people who accept the concept of faith in the realm of religion are more likely to look for realism in other areas of life. Those who reject religion in which God is the final authority on morality often accept the irrational easily in many other aspects of life, including politics. Pacifica Radio is a case in point. I don't think your typical Baptist radio station would be likely to run a program claiming that if you get Lyme disease, you should be grateful that Kudzu vine has taken over the South, because it took over so that it could cure you (how is not clear). The belief that we should listen to the "wisdom of plants" rather than turn to Western Medicine (because it is based too much on reason) is "one of many truths" on Pacifica Radio, where they make fun of Baptists.

So, is there anything you could do to help keep people like those who run Pacifica Radio from taking over the country? In 2010, Bill Whittle wrote an interesting piece called The Iceberg which may give you some ideas.

The Norwegian massacre and the Left's addiction to demonization

After the terrible Norwegian massacre, the Mainstream Media and others on the Left were quick to label the assassin as a "fundamentalist Christian". But this designation was apparently wishful thinking on the part of the Left which hates "fundamentalist Christianity". Timothy Dalrymple:

What exactly, then, is Breivik’s “Christianity”? He cares not for Christ or Christianity, but for Christendom. Rod Dreher gave perhaps the best definition I’ve seen so far. Breivik, he says, “sees the faith much as the Nazi leadership did: as a European tribal religion that can be instrumentalized to provide the basis for an ethno-cultural war against the Other.” The Nazis were not fond of what Breivik calls “religious Christianity.” Hitler, rightly, did not believe that “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” would suit his purposes. Personal devotion, a living and breathing relationship with a God who is Love and a Son of God who teaches the love of enemies, does not “instrumentalize” well into the wholesale slaughter of Jews, gypsies, political prisoners and Christian resisters. Neither does it instrumentalize into the murder of 85 innocent children. . . .

Being a Christian can mean many things, Breivik says. It can mean that “you believe in and want to protect Europe’s Christian cultural heritage.” . . . .

Indeed, in his account of the secret meeting that reconstituted the Knights Templar, the largest contingent is “Christian atheist.” . . .

Why the self-appointed guardians of nuance want to ignore these facts — that Breivik was no kind of Christian in the ordinary sense, but more like an agnostic committed to Christian symbols for pragmatic reasons — in their rush to portray Breivik as a “Christian fundamentalist” or “Christianist” (which Andrew Sullivan uses to associate Breivik with conservative American Christians), is a question well worth asking.

Cathy Young presents factual information to counteract the "blame the Jews" theme which has also emerged from the terrorist rampage.  

Clifford May points out the inconsistency of the mainstream media with regard to labeling people as terrorists:

Exploiting atrocities to settle political scores through guilt by association is a nasty game, but if we are going to play it, I’d look elsewhere. I’d start with Reuters or, more precisely, what we might call the Reuters Doctrine. After the attacks of 9/11, there were individuals and groups (emphatically including the policy institute I head) making the case that terrorism should be defined as the use of violence against civilians to further a political cause, and that expressing a grievance by intentionally killing other people’s children is never justified.

We argued that civilized people, of whatever religion or nationality, ought to be able to agree on this principle, and, if they did, then those who target innocents would be seen only as terrorists, unequivocally condemned by the “international community.”

Reuters disagreed. The global news agency took the position that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” This expression of moral relativism was embraced by many in the media, on the far left and far right, in academia, government, and transnational organizations. And that may indeed have paved the way for Breivik — who unquestionably fancies himself a fighter for European freedom — to believe he could use terrorism to focus attention on his grievances without de-legitimizing those grievances. If it works for militant Islamists, why not for a militant Norwegian?

May also includes in his piece a number of helpful notes to young readers concerning the way the mainstream media has changed over the years, as classical liberalism has largely been replaced by leftism (with regard to open-mindedness, the ability to examine one's own positions objectively, support for freedom of speech, etc.) Read the whole thing.

Former SEIU official plans to destabilize the economy again

This guy is more serious about redistribution than Michael Moore.

But don't worry, he's going to give Wall Street's money to YOU. No word on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's money. He plans to start the revolution by focusing the hatred of the people on JP Morgan Chase in early May. (May Day communist celebration, perhaps)?

Big firms such as this make an easy target for hatred after the government bail-outs. But the consolidation of firms into entities which are considered "too big to fail" is, more often than not, favored by complex government regulation.

I think a separation of political power from the ability to amass wealth is critical for long-term prosperity. Corporations which are "too big to fail" become dependent on government to prop them up. This is a sign of decline in both equality before the law and in the firms which are dependent on government for special favors.  Other corporations, especially those without special government connections, don't know how to proceed with their businesses when regulations are fickle.  Fickle regulation was one of the ways FDR's administration inadvertently lengthened the Great Depression.

It would be better if we had more financial firms which were big enough to be stable, but not so big that they were "too big to fail". I believe that it is better for such firms to go bankrupt if they are mismanaged  than for the government to rashly set aside the rule of law and property rights in the process of "saving" them.  And it didn't help that these firms were forced by the government and "community activists" to make loans to people who would be unlikely to pay the loans back.

I believe that a separation of political power from the ability to amass wealth is critical for long-term survival of our culture.

Lerner said that unions and community organizations are, for all intents and purposes, dead. The only way to achieve their goals, therefore--the redistribution of wealth and the return of "$17 trillion" stolen from the middle class by Wall Street--is to "destabilize the country."

Lerner's plan is to organize a mass, coordinated "strike" on mortgage, student loan, and local government debt payments--thus bringing the banks to the edge of insolvency and forcing them to renegotiate the terms of the loans. This destabilization and turmoil, Lerner hopes, will also crash the stock market, isolating the banking class and allowing for a transfer of power.

What I can never figure out is why people like this are so obsessed with the concentration of money, but seem totally fine with a concentration of political power. Maybe because they believe that THEY wiill have the power. And this variant on the old "Cloward-Pivens Strategy" still seems predictably short on details concerning what happens between the "destabilization" and the utopian new egalitarianism which the "destabilization" will bring about. BUT WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

Well, right off the bat, it would likely devastate the 401k retirements of most older Americans. When George Soros set out to destabilize the Bank of England, he made many British widows and widowers very poor.

And has Lerner ever heard of "hyperinflation"? Would he care if hyperinflation stole money from everyone? What about a deflation which would make debts unpayable? Which way would the destabilization go? Either way, it would cause grave problems in the lives of ordinary people. Would his dream of a utopian egalitarian society be worth the suffering he would cause?

Business Insider notes Lerner was forced out of SEIU last year for spending millions pursuing some kind of plan that looked a lot like this.

But you know who's scary? The Tea Party, man.

The age of white guilt and the disappearance of the black individual

An amazing 1999 essay by Shelby Steele, a man born to a white mother and a black father, like the President. He's older than the President, and his family was on the forefront of the Civil Rights movement. He believes that today's institutionalized white guilt leads to blacks donning a "mask" of group identity rather than adding strength to their group by developing as individuals. Every phrase in this essay seems well-placed, and I believe it is worth careful study. It is quite long for today's short attention spans, and therefore makes a useful subject for study by students wishing to expand their capacities to follow a line of argument.

One day back in the late fifties, when I was ten or eleven years old, there was a moment when I experienced myself as an individual--as a separate consciousness--for the first time.

He draws several distinctions between life for blacks before and after 1965, and discusses shifts in "black identity" over time.  He discusses his personal experiences with the "corrupting influences" of institutionalized white guilt.

This essay helps to explain a lot of things, like:

• How "liberalism" abandoned classical liberalism to conservatives and libertarians
• Why black activists beat up conservative blacks and set fire to their vehicles
* Why "black leaders" waged a vicious campaign to get Larry Elder kicked off the air
• Why TODAY'S liberals (actually, leftists) demonize the people who disagree with them
• Why Thomas Sowell so resented Francis Fox Pivens' theories
• Why Francis Fox Pivens fought so hard against Thomas Sowell's concerns for personal freedom
• Why so many former participants in the Civil Rights Movement have turned against the Left

Near the end of the essay, Steele writes about a black author who left America during the Age of Racism, returned to America during the Civil Rights Era then returned to Europe again.  I have emphasized points which seem important to me:

James Baldwin once wrote: "What Europe still gives an American is the sanction, if one can accept it, to become oneself." If America now gives this sanction to most citizens, its institutions still fiercely deny it to blacks. And this society will never sanction blacks in this way until it drops all the mechanisms by which it tries to appease white guilt. Guilt can be a very civilizing force, but only when it is simply carried as a kind of knowledge. Efforts to appease or dispel it will only engage the society in new patterns of dehumanization against the same people who inspired guilt in the first place. This will always be true.

Restraint should be the watchword in racial matters. We should help people who need help. There are, in fact, no races that need help; only individuals, citizens.

This essay also shows a little of how Steele's thinking about the future President Obama developed.  He believed that Candidate Obama would become trapped by the need to present different "masks" to his black and white audiences. He hoped that Obama would eventually be able to rise above the "masks" to express his individuality. The two "masks" could be characterized as the "Jesse Jackson model" - demanding compensation from whites who felt guilty - vs. the "Oprah Winfrey model" - offering redemption to whites who felt guilty.   Steele puts it more elegantly, of course. The President surprised Steele by winning the election. But that was not the last of the President's struggles.

The president always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol.

The President now often seems more comfortable with the symbolism of being President than with the duties of office. He even suggested recently that it would be easier to be President of China.  People are starting to seem him more as an individual than they did during his campaign, and to treat him like "The President" rather than as a symbol.

Hat tips: I tracked down this article via Mickey Kaus, who was writing about consolidation of affirmative action and civil rights bureaucracies. He linked to John Rosenberg, who also wrote an interesting piece on "Diversity" as Tribalism. His latest post links the remarkable Shelby Steele essay discussed above.

If by now you haven’t thought of Shelby Steele and his soul-searching writing about white guilt, you should have. . .

Today whiteness is stigmatized by liberals like Yglesias in much the same fashion that blackness has been stigmatized by white racists. . .

Update: Ideas like affirmative action, quotas, etc. may not have started as as result of the black civil rights movement in the U.S.: "Former NY mayor Ed Koch reveals new evidence of genuine anti-Semitism on the part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt:"

The transcript of those discussions, which Dr. Medoff cites, reveals what FDR said about the status of the 330,000 Jews living in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia: “The number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population. . . The President stated that his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany, were Jews.”

Of course, among the Jews of Europe and the Middle East who had traditionally faced limitations on their rights to hold property, etc., education was one way of surviving (and their religion encouraged education, too).

Why liberals can't communicate with conservatives

Well, this is just one of the reasons, actually. Nobel Prize Winning Economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman said today with an expression of superiority that he usually didn't follow conservative sites. Kind of funny.

Crooked Timber is the most liberal site to which I keep a live link in my sidebar. Smart people there, and they usually don't get violent or obscene in their discussions. So I have something in common with Paul Krugman. Heh. Once in a while, I even join a comment thread. Anything I write has to be airtight or I am ripped to shreds (intellectually).

It's easier for liberals to stay in an "echo chamber" than it is for conservatives, because conservatives are exposed to liberal thought through the media all the time. To hear conservative stuff, you have to CHOOSE it.

Krugman recently presented statistics to back up his position that in "low-tax, low-spending" Texas the educational system was so inept as to be immoral. Iowahawk, working outside his normal specialty, ripped Krugman's statistics to bits in half an hour, with an even more devastating follow-up piece.

Pride cometh before the fall, Professor Krugman. Even one of the people he admires at Crooked Timber wondered why Krugman was so sloppy when I brought up Iowahawk's first piece in a comment thread. Maybe Krugman should stick to economics if he's going to keep his mind closed except to people who already agree with him and can say what he thinks in a different way.

National Public Radio doesn't want federal funding anymore.

Ron Schiller, the outgoing head of NPR's nonprofit foundation and senior vice president for development, wants to end federal funding of NPR. Too restrictive. The linked video shows him angling at acceptance of funding from people representing themselves as dedicated to spreading the acceptance of Sharia Law. Claire Berlinsky, who has lived in Turkey for 5 years and encourages Western outreach to moderate muslims, is very upset.

The video was produced by one group of a small, new contingent of conservative and/or libertarian activists who have decided to use some of the Left's own tactics against it. In this case, their tactics have something of a Borat/Michael Moore vibe. These tactics make many on the Right uncomfortable. There is argument about whether "we need to be better than the Left" or whether the tactics more typical of the Left give the Left a dangerous advantage. But you can't say that the output of these new activists is not enlightening.

This video comes at a very bad time for NPR (which is probably why the group who did the video released it now).  NPR puts out some good music and scientific programming.  I like the Thomas Jefferson Hour, too.  Used to really like Prairie Home Companion until Garrison Keillor became to bitter to listen to.  I think it's a good place to find out how the Left is thinking -- you get calm, reasonable voices rather than what you find at many openly lefty sites.   But maybe it's time to stop public funding so supporters can choose the programming they prefer.   It would certainly end a lot of controversy.   

Some of the words of the NPR VP are pretty astonishing. Crime novelist, Hollywood screenwriter and former supporter of leftist radicals Roger Simon  comments. He also links an unedited version of the video.  

What this video reveals is a festival of projection. . . .

“The Tea Party is fanatically involved in people’s personal lives and very fundamental Christian — I wouldn’t even call it Christian. It’s this weird evangelical kind of move.”

“Tea Party people” aren’t “just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.”

As someone who supports many Tea Party views and is a former civil rights worker and also the next thing to an atheist, I had to laugh at that one. But that’s nothing compared to this:

“I think what we all believe is if we don’t have Muslim voices in our schools, on the air … it’s the same thing we faced as a nation when we didn’t have female voices.”

Holy Moly! It’s hard to imagine Betsey Lily sat there without comment, considering Sharia law — supported on their website by the people in front of her — has the some of the most Draconian provisions against women in recorded history. . . . .

. . . . I will suggest another explanation: They are stupid. Lost in a delusional world of political correctness, the elders of NPR have forfeited the ability to think critically. They simply can’t see the facts anymore — or don’t care to. It’s too threatening to their limited weltanschauung. Hence, you get idiotic projections such as Schiller’s statement of how dumb Republicans are and how what America needs is more educated elites. . . .

Whew.  Why don't you tell us what you REALLY think, Roger?

I don't listen to the political coverage on NPR much, but I have heard some quite balanced news commentary on occasion. They have conservative commentators on some shows concerning domestic politics. Of course, most of their politically-connected coverage is slanted way to the liberal side. As demonstrated in the video, many people who work there think that liberal thought is more-or-less synonymous with intellectual thought.

I was struck by one bit of apparently unconscious bigotry on NPR not long ago when on a news program, three people were discussing a new aide appointed by President Obama who had a reputation for outreach to "the other side". One commentator assured the other two that the appointee had solid liberal credentials, clearly demonstrated by the fact that he was deeply involved with a private organization which helped third world children. But conservatives give far more to private charities, on average, than liberals do. Conservatives also volunteer more hours and give more blood.

Liberals tend, on average, to favor compassion administered through government (there are a lot of exceptions, particularly among famous liberals who become spokespersons for charities or who start foundations). But the commentators just seemed to assume that no conservative would do even private charity work for children in the third world, so this appointee's involvement "proved" he was a liberal. The indoctrination runs deep in the liberal elite echo chamber.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey has another interesting point about this statement by the NPR exec:

Schiller goes on to describe liberals as more intelligent and informed than conservatives. “In my personal opinion, liberals today might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives,” he said.

Like those liberals gathered in Madison that kept comparing Scott Walker to Hitler, Mussolini, and Mubarak, and who accused Walker of “exterminating” union members? Well, to be fair, Schiller may never have heard about those. After all, he probably gets his news from NPR. . . .

I wonder if the NPR Exec thinks of Sharia Law as "fair and balanced"? Or is he being condescending, with the attitude that while "The West" has a responsibility to be fair and balanced, he would never be so crass as to expect a reciprocal sense of fairness from the people to whom he is speaking?

Housing or Homes?

From a man who has lived among the poorest of the poor, my pick for today's Thought Piece.

What happens when a dream goes wrong? Alexander von Hoffman of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University described the various postmortems of something that was unquestionably dead: the Pruitt-Igoe Housing project.

Read the whole thing. Watch the video at the end.

Then you might want to scan the comments. Lots of fascinating life experiences are represented in these comments, from several different countries. There are lots of politically incorrect thoughts in there, some better than others. There are several observations about why high-density housing works in places like Singapore, but not in places like Pruitt-Igoe.   Plus some thoughts on the "social-engineering" architects like Le Corbusier, ("Le Corbusier adopted his pseudonym in the 1920s. . . in the absence of a first name, it suggests a physical force as much as a human being." whose goals in designing buildings included weakening bonds between people.   It would all be so efficient and well-planned.   Lots of people in lots of countries thought he was a genius.

Le Corbusier does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism. . .  Clearly, he was not alone; he was both a creator and a symptom of the zeitgeist. . . 

Below are a few comments I thought were interesting.  But there are others.

#10. Demolition video from YouTube, by an Austrian guy.

#20: - written by a guy who once ran a homeless shelter

Pat Moynihan told LBJ he would destroy Black families with his new welfare program. The old sociologist was right. Most families then – including Black ones – had 2 married parents living at home. Not now, thanks largely to Welfare. Now over 80% of the poor are never-married moms and their children – and very dysfunctional too. These families are the major source of poverty in the U.S. Also the major source of violent young criminals, 70% of whom are fatherless. . .

....the key to slums and dangerous housing is not architecture, nor government programs. It is the 2-parent family. As you noted Blert, boys need a father badly, especially when they get bigger. (Girls do too, although for somewhat different reasons.)

That is where we need to focus. If the stable, 2-parent, enduring family built on marriage can somehow be restored, the slums will lose most of their horror.

Otherwise, each new generation of fatherless kids becomes a civilization-destroying onslaught of new Barbarians.

When the number of fatherless children becomes too large, a family or society cannot provide enough acceptable male role models. During the Great Depression, a period of low crime in spite of widespread poverty, the marriage rate among Blacks was higher than among Whites.

#23: It's not just big projects which have problems

On the connection between Section 8 housing and high crime rates, below is a link to an article titled “American Murder Mystery,” from the July/August 2008 Atlantic. It discusses the findings of a criminologist and housing expert (a married couple) studying changing crime patterns in Memphis. . .

#69. Wretchard pipes in on his own thread:  What all this means for us today:

. . . . Maybe housing isn’t about housing at all. Back in the Tondo Days, we had people negotiating with the Marcos administration who wanted to demolish the Foreshore and relocate everyone to Sapang Palay, Bulacan, where there wasn’t a hope in hell of employment.

The people who lived in Tondo were there because they found a niche in the ecosystem as ragpickers, small tradesmen, day-laborers in nearby factories, or in service industries like home laundry and domestic service. That whole ecosystem would be bulldozed over and its human contents sent off to a rural area.

It was a recipe for disaster, but you couldn’t convince the planners, who had degrees from pretty good universities, to see that. Later, they relented and decided to reclaim some more land from the Bay and turn it into the Dagat-dagatan estate, which at least would be nearby. . .

But if housing is not about homes, then what? PR has already been mentioned. Other objects come to mind. Housing could be about votes. It is almost always about money and the subprime crisis is in some way the perfect confluence of PR, money and votes. It was the perfect vehicle to achieve all these non-homing goals. Here was an “affordable housing” project, which was good PR, for which people were to be eternally grateful through votes. And it made a pile of money too — for a while — and for some.

And then, like some terrible, virtual Pruitt-Igoe the whole subprime thing imploded and its ruin is still upon us. The fragments are still raining down. So maybe Barney Frank is right: housing has lasting value, at least for his own political faction. See he’s still in office. Yet Dionne Warwick may have been right too. “A House is not a Home”. In fact, homes have been broken up to fit people into housing. You have whole communities of single-parent, unemployed, poor people where once you might have had communities of relatively familial, employed poor people. Homes for housing is a poor trade.

But at least the machine has the votes. And of course, for the connected, there is also the money. “The poor we will always have with us.” So the only question is how to make a buck off of them.

#90. Wretchard gets REALLY politically incorrect. Beginning with an Australian example this time.

Update: #105: "Car 54 Where Are You?" Herman Munster before he was Herman Munster.

Dad warned me about professors in the social sciences

Instapundit picked up an article from the New York Times about a social scientist who identified a new "outgroup" - conservatives.  About time:

He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded . . .

Heh.  This just cracks me up.  Hundreds of highly-educated people who study patterns of discrimination professionally are shocked to discover what most everyone else already knew -- that THEY are currently  discriminating against an "outgroup".  Many of them really do live in a little intellectual bubble.  Makes you wonder where else their limited focus blinds them to understanding what is going on in the world.  Tigerhawk has further observations:

Er, have any of you ever met a social psychologist? They are an intimidating bunch. . .

Reason #42 why the "academic freedom" justification for tenure is a crock, by the way.

Anyway, the relevant professional society debated and but ultimately rejected an affirmative action program for conservatives, for which I suppose we should all be grateful.   The last thing conservatives need is to sully their ranks with social psychologists.

I left a comment. Wonder if I'll get flamed?  Tigerhawk gets some traffic:

My Dad taught at a college with a more conservative faculty and staff than most colleges. He observed during the early 70s that the sociology professors were reliably the rudest people at any faculty function - talking loudly during speeches, leaving en masse during speeches or at other inappropriate times while projecting a sense of boredom and derision, etc.

Maybe social scientists are still stuck in the 60s and 70s with regard to their prejudices against conservatives.   Daniel Henninger recently suggested that the irrational belief among the liberal elite that the Right is inherently violent can be traced back to an essay written in 1964. I think the backlash to the media's delusional focus on the Tea Party after the Arizona shootings was kind of a surprise to some of the people who deeply believe that the Right is dangerous.

Stevie Wonder:

When you believe in things that you don't understand, then you suffer.
Superstition ain't the way.
Hey, hey, hey.

Take a little break to listen to the video linked above. It's from Sesame Street. Two drummers, great bass guitar and brass, kids on percussion.  Everything comes together.  The music was definitely better than men's fashion back then.

UPDATE:  Dad did not warn me about economics professors:  STEPHEN DUBNER ON POLITICAL BIAS IN ACADEMIA:

“It is interesting — and sobering — that two fields, psychology and economics, that we rely upon to describe and amend bias in the world are themselves so susceptible to bias within the ranks of their practitioners.”

It also may lead many people, reasonably, to dismiss much of their work as politically tainted and untrustworthy.

Hollywood, Howard Zinn and the Fellowship of the Ring

Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky deconstruct The Fellowship of the Ring. "I’m pretty sure this is a parody, but, really, how can you tell the difference?" Heh.

Radical historian Howard Zinn died a year ago today. But his influence is still very strong.  It would be fine to have the viewpoint of a radical historian broadly considered in America if so many people did not consider it to be the ONLY VALID viewpoint.

Recommended as companion reading to Zinn's signature book: Paul Johnson's A History of the American People.

Former radical Ron Radosh wrote a piece in Minding the Campus the day after Zinn died:

Howard Zinn's death yesterday affords us the opportunity to evaluate the remarkable influence he has had on the American public's understanding of our nation's past. His book A People's History of the United States, published in 1980 with a first printing of 5000 copies, went on to sell over two million. To this day some 128,000 new copies are sold each year. That alone made Zinn perhaps the single most influential historian whose works have reached multitudes of Americans. Indeed, Zinn found that his book was regularly adopted as a text in high schools and most surprisingly, in many colleges and universities. . .

Zinn was aided in getting his book attention by two youthful neighbors, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. When both became movie stars, they used their celebrity to popularize Zinn's work and to help bring it to a wide audience. As Damon told the press recently, Zinn's message showed that what our ancestors rebelled "against oftentimes are exactly the same things we're up against now." Zinn himself added a few weeks ago that his hope was that his work will spread new rebellion, and "lead into a larger movement for economic justice."

So, Matt Damon ---  from the ultra-rich, insulated, shark-filled artificial world of Hollywood  (a world rife with nepotism,  cronyism and people who believe themselves to be very important)  --- imagines himself to be one of the common folk within   Zinn's "continuous rebellion of the masses against oppression" narrative.  Figures.  Sort of reminds me of the French aristocracy play-acting as shepherds and milkmaids to escape the intrigues of the Court.

From Zinn's perspective, history should not be told from the standpoints of generals or presidents, but through that of people who struggle for their rights, who engage in strikes, boycotts, slave rebellions and the like. Its purpose should be to encourage similar behavior today. Indeed, Zinn candidly said that history was not about "understanding the past," but rather, about "changing the future." That statement alone should have disqualified anyone from referring to him as a historian.

Zinn did not exempt President Barack Obama who he thought was both "a mediocre" and "dangerous president" from his criticism. In the last article he wrote, that appeared in The Nation last week, Zinn argued that Obama's foreign policy was "no different from a Republican," that he was "nationalist, expansionist, imperial and warlike." As for his proposed domestic programs, he found them "limited" and "cautious." He also did not approve of the apparent decision to try those responsible for 9/11, and referred to them as "suspected terrorists," who "have not been found guilty."

Zinn was certainly entitled to his perspective, widely held by many in the academy, but its danger lies in the favorable reception he often got from those who know little. As one of his proteges, Dave Zirin, writes on The Huffington Post: "With his death, we lose a man who did nothing less than rewrite the narrative of the United States." That, precisely, is the problem.

Back in the day when there was still a difference between "liberal" and "leftist", Zinn was investigated by the FBI, like many of the Hollywood Left. They were later successful in demonizing those who questioned their communist affiliations, and the dominant Hollywood culture still endlessly brings up the blacklisting of those years -- while they blacklist others who don't agree with their ideology.

Orson Bean is old enough to have been blacklisted once in Hollywood for being a communist ("kind of cool, except for losing your career") and again for becoming more conservative. He describes the second blacklisting as much more difficult.  Bean's difficult experiences helped lead his son-in-law, Andrew Breitbart, to rebel against the Hollywood Left and become a libertarian/conservative activist.  Funny how these things are connected.

Negotiating childhood disabilities

Movie review of "The King's Speech" with a link to an interview of the leading actor:

I grew out of a stutter when I was a kid so long ago that I had almost forgotten it, but watching "The King's Speech" over the holidays brought back some painful memories. The "King's Speech" is a wonderful movie, the kind that just about the whole family can enjoy together without embarrassment and that audiences spontaneously applaud when the credits start rolling (as the one we were in did).

Also at Powerline, Thomas Sowell (now 80) wrote a book about fighting through the special education establishment in dealing with his son's disability.  Recommended by parents.

Perry Mason could teach today's reporters a few things

Too many reporters in the big national news organzations today take a very superficial, predictable approach to their stories. They shape their stories to fit a pre-determined template, usually based (wittingly or unwittingly) in their political ideology and consistent with stories by their colleagues.

Similarly, in the Perry Mason mysteries on TV, we usually first saw a "Designated Villain" story line, typically set up by the real villain or an accomplice.  This story line was usually reinforced by biased witnesses and  (unintentionally) accepted by unbiased witnesses and the prosecution.   If Perry Mason had not challenged the "Designated Villain" story line in the TV dramas, ALL of his clients would have lost in court.

In the fictional world of Perry Mason, the police and prosecution were usually honorable even if they didn't dig deep enough during their investigations.  Unfortunately, in the real world, not all police or prosecutors are this unbiased and honorable as the ones in these TV dramas. And Perry Mason (like professor K.C. Johnson) would have faced additional challenges in the real world.

We would hope that reporters would act fairly and honorably in gathering and reporting as much pertinent information on their stories as possible - just as we would hope that prosecutors would look into all the evidence fairly before charging a suspect.  Assuming honorable intentions and adherence to established ethical standards, if the prosecution had used some of the investigative techniques used by Perry Mason in the TV stories, there would be fewer people falsely accused of murder in these TV dramas.  Similarly, if reporters in the mainstream media (and their editorial support) did a little more investigation and/or reported fairly on what they found, there would more truth in their reporting and less drama when their reports are challenged by the NEW MEDIA, readers or viewers.

So, how do we spot bias or falsehoods in news stories?

Perry Mason is not conducting classes for incurious or biased reporters (or for their readers or viewers). And most reporters don't have a Della Street or Paul Drake to do research for them, even if they wanted to present a fair and accurate story. So I guess we'll have to turn to attorney Gabriel Malor for a detailed explanation of how bias and false conclusions are introduced into a story.

Malor demonstrates how a (probably idealistic) reporter for CNN reinforced his desired narrative to present a story which would "make a difference", by focusing on a designated villain and reinforcing his case that this villain was a genuine villain without presenting any facts whatsoever to support this designation.  Read the whole thing.  The CNN report came AFTER the initial flurry of national media reports blaming the Tea Party and Sarah Palin for the Arizona shootings had been shot down.  There was no excuse for this desperate  attempt to keep "The Narrative" alive: 

This type of slime job relies on several techniques common to bad fiction, but the central trope is the Designated Villain.

The Designated Villain, like its counterpart the Designated Hero -- about which I wrote here in relation to the President -- occurs when an author violates the "Show, Don't Tell" rule. A character is treated by the author and the other characters as the villain of the work even though the character hasn't actually done anything to justify this treatment. Quite simply since the protagonists oppose him, he must be the bad guy, even if all his evil occurs off screen and is barely mentioned. The villainy has to be assumed by the reader.

Like the Designated Hero, the Designated Villain is very much present in modern reporting. Fortunately, unlike fiction in which the reader has no choice but to accept the assumptions made by the author, we do not have to accept the assumptions of reporters. Here are just a few the CNN reporter uses to designate the Tea Party as the villain of both the Tucson shooting and, illogically, racist violence that occurred fifty years ago:

Malor demolishes the assumptions inherent in the CNN smear job, with the help of Google.  Remember as you read his piece that reporters can access Google, too.  Not to mention search engines designed  precisely to help the media present accurate stories.  And the layers of editors and fact-checkers which are supposed to increase our confidence in the Mainstream Media.  An example of information which could have easily been found by CNN if they were really interested in reporting the truth:

Please, please, please click the second link and watch the whole thing to see the Tea Partiers asking Giffords not to treat them like "a mob" and Giffords talking about the Tea Party and swastikas. That's how far from reality the CNN reporter wanders. Rather than shouting her down, the Tea Partiers tried to get her to state her positions and treat them with respect. In return, she slandered them with a Nazi comparison.

 We need to teach the kinds of analytical skills demonstrated in Gabriel Malor's piece to ALL STUDENTS. Particularly in journalism school, if reporters want to restore some trust in the mainstream media.

This is the problem with designating a villain outside of fiction. The assumptions necessary to make it work depend on the reader to be utterly ignorant of reality. In the real world, charged political rhetoric is common and rarely leads to violence. But to liberals, it is a feature of "right-wing" political speech and someone always ends up getting hurt. Evidence? No evidence required. . . 

Fortunately, the "working press" (particularly the local press) did a better job that the elite national press on this overall issue.  And the New Media helped get the truth out, too.

The Establishment

I remember when the Left railed against "The Establishment" in vigorous, and somtimes violent, ways. Shannon Love:

Why is the left hypocritically pushing so hard for “civility” in our political discourse? Why did they try to use the Tuscon shootings to suppress the passionate expression of non-leftists?

I think the answer is simple: Passionate, sometimes even inflammatory, expression is the tool of the revolutionary not the establishment and today, leftists are the establishment.

Plus this interesting observation:

We live today in a looking-glass world in which those who call themselves “progressives” fight for the past and established policies while those who call themselves “conservatives” fight for the future and innovation.

Read the whole thing.

Getting Real about Israel

Melanie Phillips discusses the abandonment of the field of battle in the "information war" to the Left and to those in the UK and in Israel wishing to destroy Israel.

Clarity
Clarity
Clarity

From about the 7 minute point, you may recognize some phenomena which occur in the U.S. as well.

UPDATE: Perhaps someone is taking Phillips seriously. There have been some lucid responses to the American mainstream media's framing of Israel as the "Designated Villain". The devious "Designated Villain" journalistic technique seems to be very popular with our mainstream media's reporters. It's a way to editorialize while seeming to report the news. These smear jobs would be far more acceptable if "designated villain" pieces were included in the opinion pages rather than presented as news reports.  The letter to the editor of TIME magazine by Ron Dermer linked above is an exceptional example of:

Clarity and balance

You might want to follow the links to read responses to various other biased reports by our mainstream media.

The Tea Party is motivated by sex

New theory from the legendary leftist professor of sociology and political science Frances Fox Piven. The audio also reveals a number of additional dopey, bigoted stereotypes about the characteristics of people attracted to the Tea Party. The ONE thing she doesn't mention is the Tea Party's alarm at the aggressive efforts of the 111th Congress and the Obama Administration to take more control and power over large parts of the economy and larger parts of people's incomes, to spend money indiscriminately and to leave the bill for future generations:

That's why they say at their crazy rallies,  "I am angry"  - they have no follow-up line . . .

The disappointing move to the right in the last election was all because of a slight increase in all-white voters over 65 years of age. Meanwhile, in the real world, Shock CBS Poll: 77% of Americans are Extremist Teabaggers, Want to Cut Government Spending.

She is also disappointed in President Obama for not redistributing more wealth.  Wonder if President Obama's former press secretary Robert Gibbs would include her among those in the "professional left" whom he told off?   He thought they were being unrealistic about how far the President could go in imposing their preferred policies, given the makeup of the American electorate.

Don't you feel better knowing that our elite academics are this out of touch with what is really going on? 

 On the other hand, maybe she knows that what she is saying has no basis in fact, but is following the old precepts of "dialectical materialism": only statements which advance the cause of socialism are true.

Her musings on sex and the Tea Party seem to be consistent with the level of careful research which went into some of her  highly practical prescriptions for improving our society:

1. The way to get government to give everyone a guaranteed annual income is to bankrupt the government by intentionally overloading the welfare system. What could go wrong?

2. The unemployed should develop an  angry identity  in the U.S., sort of like the angry people protesting against the insolvency of the governments in Greece and elsewhere in Europe. What could go wrong?

Right now, I'm thinking that taking on tens of thousands of dollars of extra debt to study with the best-known professors in the "soft sciences" may not be such a good idea. Iowahawk had this figured out a long time ago. Classic.

Reducing Social Divisions and Inequality: When Liberal Pundits Fight

Do you increase social cohesion and reduce social inequality by reducing income inequality through taxation,  or by limiting cultural and racial diversity, for example, by limiting immigration?  Follow the Links  to read about some in-fighting among liberals* on this issue.  Starting off, conservative/libertarian Tom Maguire points out that the same data can lead to different conclusions if you haven't accounted for all variables:

Yesterday Nick Kristof delivered a daft column invoking income inequality as a proxy for social inequality and arguing that inequality is stressful and bad. . .

The obvious conclusion, based on the examples presented by Kristof, is that racial diversity creates undesirable social stress. An obvious public policy implication is that immigration should be discouraged. Believe it or not, Kristof did not reach those conclusions, since they don't fit his narrative. Instead, he rode the data to his preconceived destination, which is that we need to tax the rich and spread the wealth. Yeah, yeah - if you aren't going to let the data tell its story, why send it on stage? Or, if the data leads to unacceptable conclusions, maybe the premises are wrong (e.g., maybe social stress is bad but it is a necessary consequence of achieving other goods.)

Well. As if on cue, the Times has a front-pager telling us how they reduce income inequality and maintain social cohesion in laudable Japan - they kick out foreigners, thereby propping up wages. . .

OK, it looks like national suicide to me and it could never work in America (nor should it be attempted at this level, although we need stricter border control and workplace enforcement), but this is a country Nick Kristof is holding up as our goal.

Mickey Kaus notes differences between the famous New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and less famous  liberal (and libertarian/liberal) commentators on the issue of immigration. Some of whom seem to have a tendency toward name-calling.

Somewhat-related Graphs: Median income vs. incomes for the top 1% in America over time.  Update:  Tom Maguire has no mercy.

* Well, Mickey Kaus is more moderate than the rest - with some libertarian leanings. I sure wish his Democratic primary challenge to Barbara Boxer had been more successful. But he made some good points with very little money.

Southern Europe's Young See Little Benefit in Education

THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTS on a "Doomed Generation" of highly educated young Europeans who can't find work??? Pigs fly.

Young people in Europe start to understand the looming demographic crisis.

With pensioners living longer and young people entering the work force later — and paying less in taxes because their salaries are so low — it is only a matter of time before state coffers run dry.

“What we have is a Ponzi scheme,” said Lawrence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston University and an expert in fiscal policy.

Glenn Reynolds: "Funny how it seems to work out this way everywhere that high-tax, high-regulation schemes are tried, but young people are usually dumb enough not to realize who gets hurt the most. And what happens when a higher education bubble bursts:"

In Italy, Ms. Esposito is finishing her lawyer traineeship at a private firm in Lecce. It pays little but sits better on her conscience than her unpaid work for the government.

“I’m a repentant college graduate,” she said. “If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t go to college and would just start working.”

John Hinderaker:"It seems to me that the Times conflates several rather distinct issues in chronicling the malaise of Europe's young. It is not obvious that accumulating "certificates" is the optimum path to gainful employment. Europe has long tended to prize credentials over actual productivity, but that is probably a secondary issue in the current crisis. . .

That is what happens when government inserts itself into every employment decision and when labor unions are given quasi-official powers and status. The result is economic disaster, a disaster first suffered by the young. What has happened in Europe, especially Southern Europe, is a flashing red alert, warning the United States not to follow the same path of government interventionism and union empowerment"

Instapundit reader concerning the demographic problems discussed in the New York Times article:

Mark Steyn  has been warning about this for years, most notably in his book America Alone. Except when he broaches the subject he’s accused of being a right-wing lunatic.

Reynolds: "Well, yes. As with the Hitler/Stalin pact, one must not only have the right opinions, one must have them at the correct time."

Wretchard has additional thoughts on the Times piece, including the phenomenon of educated Europeans moving to Latin America for job opportunities:

So for some Europeans it is Costa Rica or bust; where one of the virtues, in common with most of the Third World, is that there are almost no rules. The absence of regulation must make the non-Western world something like the frontier, where both disaster and great fortune seem to lurk right around the corner. . . .

The Hard Left's Latest Ideas for Improving Society

Honored professor of sociology and political science Frances Fox Piven, co-author of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, has some timely advice for the unemployed in America. She wants to foster again what they call over at Protein Wisdom the "blind rage of Cloward-Piven":

they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant

You might think of it as encouraging a generalized, emotional sort of covetousness for revolutionary purposes. Ron Radosh:

What she is calling for is nothing less than the chaos and violence engulfing Europe.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy was one part of American history about which I knew very little until a couple of years ago, when people started pointing out that some of its ideas had contributed to the financial meltdown. ACORN's* agitation for home loans for high-risk borrowers helped to  crash the real estate market in the U.S., and very nearly the financial system of much of the West. Of course, they had big assists from brilliant Ivy League computer modelers on Wall Street and their friends in Government, with their slick computer models for the bundling of bad loans with good loans (and all the reckless behavior which accompanied the acceptance of those models).  Of course, you can't discount  government borrowing and fractional lending by banks. (Too bad American banks were not allowed, or even encouraged, to be as realistic as Canadian banks.) 

But the West's financial system is still limping along.  So far, the hoped-for (by Cloward-Piven types) Rise of the Proletariat Masses to build a glorious new world on the ashes after their planned collapse of the structure of Western civilization has failed to materialize. Even if they did succeed in bankrupting New York City back at the height of their influence. I remember news stories about the bankruptcy of New York City and its relationship to high welfare costs. I DON'T remember hearing that there was a deliberate movement to overload the welfare system. I wonder why the press suppressed this bit of information?

Wall Street and Government financial hotshots (in the recent financial crisis) and the Cloward-Piven bunch (in their dreams to change the world) exhibited a remarkable lack of forecasting abilities. This gives one slight pause about revolutionizing the entire world's economy based on Global Warming computer models and utopian plans for redistributing wealth. Apparently the recent Cancun Climate Conference was more about Climate Justice than about reducing greenhouse gasses.  Even though some UN bureaucrats seem to have some doubts about giving all that money to corrupt, brutal African dictators (or perhaps even to common uneducated Africans). And they may have a point, given the irresponsible reactions of Greeks to the money flowing to their government from other European counties. Although poor, Greece was not exactly a third-world country when the money started flowing in without much effort on the part of the populace.  And when the government ran out of money  --  REALLY ran out of money -- the reaction was rage.  Would not even more irresponsibility be expected if third-worlders were suddenly awash in money they didn't earn?

The trouble is that the Hard Left has always been better at taking over and/or destroying existing institutions than at building new ones.

Frances Fox Piven can look to recent models for her dream of an angry identity-formation from Americans who have been hurt financially by the economic crisis. Richard Fernandez (nom de blog: Wretchard) provides some additional education on the  rise of ANARCHY, once again, in Europe.

In fine anarchists are Red Guards of the European Left, a collection of dupes formed inside the vast and creaky infrastructure of Marxism to advance the interests of one faction against another faction. It is impossible to understand the politics of the Left without grasping that it is all about deniable intimidation. The real problem European anarchism solves is how to send bombs without seemingly sending them, or how to trash the Tory party headquarters in London without really doing it.

Just as Mao’s Red Guards were never about themselves, always about Mao, anarchists are about a larger political question: what is the correct political line? Once the Red Guards of China had resolved that in Mao’s favor they were allowed to rampage for a time to bring hatred down upon themselves and subsequently suppressed, hapless tools to the very end.

Read the whole thing. Wretchard was once part of a genuine rebellion himself (in the Philippines)  and he interacted with revolutionaries who had various ideological reasons for participating in the rebellion.  Some of these revolutionaries seemed more threatening to him than the corrupt, autocratic government against which he was rebelling.

Wretchard's commenters often have some interesting ideas, too.  If you make a comment which he thinks brings something important to the conversation, he may comment on it, as well.  Glenn Reynold notes a few clarifying comments from others on various types of anarchists - some more responsible than others.  A "true anarchy" doesn't sound at all appealing.

I wonder how many generations ahead Fox Pivens was thinking when she called for this angry, indignant reaction from the unemployed in America?  Has she ever considered Thomas Sowell's perpetual question to the utopian thinker, "And then what?"

BLAST FROM THE PAST (circa 1980), Thomas Sowell takes on Frances Fox Piven in the last part of this 6-minute video. He was really feisty back then. Sowell and Fox Piven don't seem to have persuaded each other much in the intervening years.

Additional reading: Life and Death in Shanghai is the story of a remarkable woman's experiences with the Red Guard and the Maoist government after being identified as an "enemy of the people".

Wretchard  comments on VDH's latest piece comparing the behavior of the Left in Greece and California. Can the Left be brought to understand to the reality of the dire situation they are in?

So Hanson says, why not let them have it but make it clear that the state will have to pay for it? Let them see for themselves where the path leads if they won’t listen to reason. . . . .

Maybe they won’t listen to experience either, just as certain types of people keep trying the same thing while hoping for different results. They will press on despite failure, despite debacles and just press the keys harder. But under no circumstances will “sorry, we won’t loan you anything at any interest rate, so please by all means riot all you wish” get anyone else off the hook. Because other people are permanently on the hook. The whole point of socialism is precisely that it’s built on somebody else’s money. If it were built with their money it would be capitalism.

WH Auden observed that “all sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.” If the Left the world over has reached the point where they have got to have their fix, then neither reason nor experience will be persuasive. . .

The Hard Left aside, even more moderate young Social Democrats of Europe are starting to wake up to the consequences of not asking Sowell's question, "And then what?"   in their social planning. As reported by the NEW YORK TIMES?  Similar education bubble coming to a state near you.  Demographic issues may be a little different.

Video showing the lighter side of Marxism in NYC linked at the bottom of this post.

* Does ACORN really have BILLIONAIRE supporters who need to be informed of their business plans like, maybe, George Soros? Seems odd for a group focused on financial equality.  But then, Soros has justified destroying currencies in his stated quest to create more equitable governments.

UPDATE:  An old Stalinist is also delighted by the world's financial difficulties.   Even Fox-Piven had evolved beyond loving Stalin, I believe.

YouTube University: Milton Friedman Explains Libertarianism

Although currently allied with conservatives, libertarians are not exactly like the typical conservative. The late Milton Friedman explains libertarianism in a 1999 interview with Peter Robinson. You can watch the whole thing a one time, or in shorter segments. You might want to consider where you fall on the continuum between supporting the maximum possible individual liberty on one hand OR mandating equality of outcome as well as providing safety, services, etc. through government action on the other hand.

Peter Robinson looks "inauthentic" on a motorcycle. But in this classic interview he asks Milton Friedman some tough questions about his libertarian positions. A college semester in 25 minutes.

Want shorter classes?

What is a libertarian?

What produced the dark and dirty London of Charles Dickens?

Are regulators like the FDA necessary to safeguard consumers? I could tell some stories to support either a yes or no position.

Should the government mandate that nutritional labels be placed on food packaging?

Of 14 cabinet departments, Milton Friedman says he would only keep a handful.

MORE: The kinds of interviews you don't see on TV anymore (radio interviews sometimes still provide this kind of exchange):

GREED 2 minutes. Kudos to Phil Donahue for asking good questions, then listening.

Federal Reserve and the New Deal, Chrysler bailout in 1979, automobile industry. 10 minutes.

Economics of medical care 9 minutes

Why it isn't necessary to change elected officials in order to change government. One minute.

The four ways to spend money.3 minutes

Local vs. Federal Government Spending, increasing production of goods and services (what the Greens want us to keep to a minimum). 3 minutes

Mao's Great Leap to Famine

Just a reminder that, at one time, Chinese peasants were escaping to North Korea to avoid starvation, rather than the other way around. Aside from the deaths during the revolution, the "cultural revolution", etc.,

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.

Yet more than a decade later, thousands of students at American universities were still reverently carrying around Mao's Little Red Book. And even today, many intellectuals continue to believe that Marxism could work if only the right people were in charge. The New York Times recently ran a puff piece on Marxists pontificating and playing in New York City.

Glenn Reynolds:

Communists are as bad as Nazis, and their defenders and apologists are as bad as Nazis’ defenders, but far more common. When you meet them, show them no respect. They’re evil, stupid, and dishonest. They should not enjoy the consequences of their behavior.

Dennis Prager: "The bigger the government, the more of its citizens' lives it 'owns'."

A small example of what happens when government officials implement their great ideas about how to achieve "progress":

Mao encouraged the establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighborhood. Huge efforts on the part of peasants and other workers were made to produce steel out of scrap metal. To fuel the furnaces the local environment was denuded of trees and wood taken from the doors and furniture of peasants' houses. Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to supply the "scrap" for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met. Many of the male agricultural workers were diverted from the harvest to help the iron production as were the workers at many factories, schools and even hospitals. As could have been predicted by anyone with any experience of steel production or basic knowledge of metallurgy, the output consisted of low quality lumps of pig iron which was of negligible economic worth.

. . . According to his private doctor, Li Zhisui, Mao and his entourage visited traditional steel works in Manchuria in January 1959 where he found out that high quality steel could only be produced in large scale factories using reliable fuel such as coal. However he decided not to order a halt to the backyard steel furnaces so as not to dampen the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses. The program was only quietly abandoned much later that year.

Substantial effort was expended during the Great Leap Forward on large-scale but often poorly planned capital construction projects, such as irrigation works often built without input from trained engineers. . . . .

Despite these harmful agricultural innovations, the weather in 1958 was very favorable and the harvest promised to be good. Unfortunately, the amount of labor diverted to steel production and construction projects meant that much of the harvest was left to rot uncollected in some areas. This problem was exacerbated by a devastating locust swarm, which was caused when their natural predators were killed en masse as part of the Great Sparrow Campaign.

Although actual harvests were reduced, local officials, under tremendous pressure from central authorities to report record harvests in response to the new innovations, competed with each other to announce increasingly exaggerated results. These were used as a basis for determining the amount of grain to be taken by the state to supply the towns and cities, and to export. This left barely enough for the peasants, and in some areas, starvation set in. During 1958-1960, China continued to be a substantial net exporter of grain, despite the widespread famine experienced in the countryside, as Mao sought to maintain "face" and convince the outside world of the success of his plans.

Even more democratic nations can face serious unintended problems due to the sincere efforts of government officials and their favored business allies to implement their good intentions. Especially when the government exempts itself from criticism.

Illustrative Video: GREAT MOMENTS IN UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Note that the tragic dimension of unintended consequences attaches itself like a lamprey to public-sector derring-do rather than quaint lab accidents and kitchen-based discoveries.