Responding to Olive's Socialists

Our local penny saver, the Olive Press (see pages 32-33 before and after my letter), features two letters this week attacking me, one from Brooklynite Gus Murphy and one from Guido Giuliani who accuses me of being a Klansman and hating Italians.  My response to editor Paul Smart:


Dear Editor:


I appreciate Guido Giuliani's and Gus Murphy's August 26 responses to my Olive Press letter.  Mr. Murphy makes an interesting point with respect to the centralizing parties being urban, and this, if true, would confirm that they were the parties of the wealthy as well. The concentration of wealth associated with the rise of cities also saw advocacy of Federalist, Whig and Republican philosophies.  But Federalists, Whigs and Republicans were not necessarily urban.  The Federalists included wealthy planters, the Whigs included rural leaders like Abraham Lincoln, and after the Civil War the Democrats were the urban party in the North.  But these successive parties did in part reflect the ideas of the urban industrial rich.  The Democrats were associated with the agrarian orientation of southern planters as well as urban workers.  Federalism collapsed when the public realized that the centralizing party was also suppressive, as the Alien and Sedition Acts showed.  Today's Democrats and Republicans with their Patriot Acts and Fairness Doctrines are authoritarian and extremist in the Federalist tradition.  The Whigs elected several presidents, including William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor and arguably John Quincy Adams.   The Republicans subsequently dominated national-level politics even though the urban party was the Democratic, which dominated local politics. 

The Democrats today advocate the Federalist-Whig-Republican philosophy of the rich, of Theodore Roosevelt, George Soros and the teacher of the rich, Paul Krugman (who teaches at Princeton and is paid from its endowment, which depends on subsidy via the Keynesian, pro-bank policies that he and Guido Giuliani support).  The triumph of the Democrats was to convince the public that the pro-banking Keynesian policies they advocate help the poor.  This was done by crippling Americans educationally.  I appreciate that Democrats like Jill Paperno feel that the Republicans are the party of big corporations, but they seem to forget that Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Larry Paige and Paul and Nancy Pelosi are all Democrats.  Moreover, the wealthiest Republicans such as David Rockefeller and Michael Bloomberg have views that are indistinguishable from the Democrats'.  Hence, the claim that Democrats represent the poor is a lie.

As far as Theodore Roosevelt's (TR's) being a socialist (and my point is emphatically that the Democrats and Republicans are both socialist parties of the rich) the best source is Martin J. Sklar's Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism. Dave Nalle, head of the Liberty Republican Caucus took issue with my same assertion about TR as Mr. Murphy has.  However, I sent him home to read Sklar and I suggest the same antidote for Mr. Murphy. Sklar provides meticulous detail about TR's adoption of socialism, specifically his advocacy of licensure and control of big business's pricing policy. Sklar, like other of the historians I have been quoting such as Gabriel Kolko and William Appleman WIlliams, have a New Left perspective.  As well, a review of TR's speeches during and after his presidency will convince you that his ideas had certainly by 1912 (when he ran as the Progressive Party presidential candidate) become socialist.

Prior to Taft and Roosevelt the meanings of conservative and liberal were opposite of what they are today.  Liberal meant a believer in freedom from state control.  Conservative meant an advocate of the state control characteristic of Europe.  In marketing their philosophy of the rich to the public, the Progressives developed the tactic of calling socialism "liberal" and liberalism "conservative."  Previously conservatives had been people who believed in monarchy, for instance the kind who all cry out for a monarch to bring "change" in a monolithic voice. "Change!" "Sieg heil!"  "Change!" "Sieg heil!"  The words were not used in their current form until Roosevelt and Taft. Grover Cleveland, president until 1896, was not called "conservative."

The term "Progressive" originated with a group of political writers between 1890 and 1920.  Their magazine, the New Republic, is still published today and remains a bulwark of what is incorrectly called "liberalism," more accurate names being Federalism, Whiggery, Republicanism or national socialism.  The writers were Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann. Their books are harder to read than Howard Zinn's but you will learn more, Zinn's communism being a rehash of the Onteora Central School district's elementary school curriculum.   The meaning of the word "Progressivism" has changed only slightly since then.  A good follow up book is left-wing Peter Levine's "New Progressive Era" in which he outlines the continuity between the Progressivism of Croly and Roosevelt and today's "progressives".  But the Progressives (who have dominated the Republican Party since Roosevelt) and the progressives (who now dominate the Democratic Party) are both marionettes of big business: David Rockefeller on the Republican side, George Soros on the Democratic side. The left-wing Onteora elementary school curriculum reflects the needs of Rockefeller and Soros.

Part of the problem with Mr. Giuliani's letter is his reliance on ad hominem insults, which do not contribute.  He may be interested to know that my brother-in-law hails from Sicily and perhaps I do hate Italians in this sense.  My nieces and nephew never call, and I just hate that.  Mr. Giuliani shows scant regard for factual evidence in this regard as in his other points, a vice which he attributes to me. Besides being a Jew whose relatives were killed in the holocaust, my last name, Langbert, is a Germanicizataion of the Italian Langobardi, which means long beard.  Hence, I  have little in common with the KKK and do not hate Italians.  If Mr. Giuliani had read what I said, I was describing a firm based in Milan, an Italian-based firm, not a firm run by Italian-Americans.  But the left, like the rest of America, is educationally crippled and lacks reading skills.

Mr. Guiliani questions my ability to teach, which is the kind of suppressive, ignorant insult which indicates that the left's totalitarian nature has not changed one bit. .  When in office, the left will certainly deprive people like me of the ability to earn a living, just as the academic left has excluded conservative and libertarian thinkers. Let me clue you in as to how I got to teach, Mr. Giuliani.  Perhaps you can try it yourself.  Get admitted to the doctoral program at the Columbia Business School; pass the doctoral economics, statistics and field courses; convince a faculty committee that your dissertation makes sense; publish twenty articles in peer reviewed journals; and get tenure. 

As far as Mr. Giuliani's other points, I understand that, like the left in general, Giuliani lacks the education that Tea Partiers have and therefore has trouble with understanding factual evidence, but saying that something is factual because Howard Zinn or Paul Krugman say so does not make it so. We liberals-in- the-19th-century-sense believe in thinking for ourselves, not appealing to half baked experts whose ideas, like Krugman's, fail, fail and then fail again. With respect to Marx, whom Mr. Giuliani superstitiously reveres, you can add a dozen "fails."  With respect to Mr. Giuliani's confusion about taxes, he conflates total (per capita and inflation adjusted) tax receipts with marginal tax rates.  I gave the numbers in an earlier letter and readers can refer to them.  In fact, total per capita, inflation adjusted tax receipts have nearly tripled since 1950.  Marginal tax rates were reduced, but there were many loopholes in the 1950s and earlier.  Marginal rates are on paper.  Real per capita receipts, which the public really pays, have tripled.  As far as unemployment, after Obama's spending upwards of a trillion dollars at Krugman's behest, unemployment as of July was 9.5%.  In March 2009 it was 8.5%.  Paul Krugman and Barack Obama have advocated spending trillions of dollars to bail out their supervisors at Goldman Sachs, another trillion on stimulus, and unemployment has gone from 8.5% to 9.5%. Let's keep taking their advice, give another trillion to GM, Goldman and Morgan Stanley, and watch unemployment go to 10.5%.  Plus, the trillions in debt will further impoverish future generations, just so Obama and Krugman can subsidize Wall Street.  Future generations are looking forward to impoverishment thanks to the pro-banker economics of the Obama, Bush, Krugman and Giuliani and the voters whom the Democrats have duped.

As far as Mr. Giuliani's arguments about Adam Smith and Alan Greenspan, I appreciate that Mr. Giuliani lacks the education to evaluate the role of either, but that is because of the ideological bias of the education system, which fails to discuss the more important and successful of the two thinkers: Smith.  Adam Smith's ideas have not been refuted. Marx's have.  A century of economic and bloody civil failure of Marxist socialism has coated Mr. Giuliani's and his fellow socialists' hands thick with blood, whether the failure be of the Soviet socialism of Stalin and the Soviet gulag, which butchered 65 million people; the Maoist socialism of China which butchered 25 million people; or the Pol Pot socialism of Cambodia which butchered 1.5 million people and which holocaust deniers like Noam Chomsky claim did not occur.  Having butchered more people than the Nazis, one might think that the left might reconsider its religious commitment to Marx, but apparently it hasn't.  One can see the extremism in the Democratic Party when Obama supporters like Mr. Giuliani continue to argue for communism. 

Nor has socialism worked in the "third way" countries.  Riots in Greece; economic breakdown in Spain; the ongoing failure of the "third way" here in America (such as the breakdown in Social Security which will only be cured with the Baby Boomers's being unable to retire) suggest that Hayek and von Mises were right and Croly was wrong. I very much doubt that Mr. Giuliani has ever read Smith, von Mises or Hayek (or Croly for that matter, limiting himself to the cartoons of Zinn and the the sixth grade-level New York Times) and so has nothing of any use to say on the subject.  

As far as Mr. Giuliani's claim that Greenspan's association with Ayn Rand in the early 1960s proves that Adam Smith's ideas don't work, the claim is funny as it is ignorant, and if  Giuliani had learned some Smith in school he would know that Greenspan's policies were completely irrelevant to Smith.  We liberals oppose the existence of the Fed. Hayek has outlined an easily adopted alternative: reintroduce competition into the money supply such as existed in the nineteenth century.  Greenspan jumped ship years before and he is dead to libertarians.  In the 1970s he worked in the same building that I did, One New York Plaza. He once rode up the elevator with me and saw a copy of "Atlas Shrugged" in my hand.  He turned to his colleage at Townsend Greenspan and said to him "he's young, very young."     

There are numerous other issues in the two letters.  Mr. Murphy's points about Social Security, the failed boondoggle (failed for anyone born after 1940, that is), require a lengthy response in themselves and I will respond at some future point. 

Sincerely, 

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

To Socialists, the World Is a Classroom

Schools are mostly government-run operations and reflect government values.  Few institutions in American life have failed as badly as the education system.  My claim is that socialism is modeled after the classroom.  The teacher, Professor Obama, stands before the classroom. Any students who disobey the Professor's instructions are disciplined.  The school board, US Congress, concocts ever more elaborate and stricter rules.  If a student does not learn, does not obey, he or she must serve detention.  Those who obsequiously learn the professor's lessons most studiously, the socialists, consider themselves smarter than everyone else.  Because they lack the legitimation of a state diploma, those who would rather not comply with the Professor are intimidated.  But they are productive and competent. The socialist lesson plan is that the state is all knowing; that those who obey are intelligent; that subservience to government is morality; that the Professor and the school board know best.

Black Republicans Just Say "No" To Socialism

I just received the following from Frances Rice of the National Black Republican Association:

In a moment that will live in infamy, President Barack Hussein Obama fostered upon America a gigantic Socialist Stimulus Bill that will plunge America deeply into the failed Euro-socialist psychosis.

Obama conjured up images of the Great Depression to intimidate the US Congress into voting for his $787 billion pork-laden stimulus bill that was crafted in the dead of night by liberal Democrats and read by no member of Congress before they voted the next day. Now, economists are revealing that Obama's Depression analogy is historically false and fearmongering at its worse. History shows that FDR's New Deal blocked recovery and plunged our nation into a deeper recession. What really got us out of the Great Depression was World War Two.

Click below to read the article "The Real Lessons of the Great Depression" by Michael Barone.
http://townhall.com/columnists/MichaelBarone/2009/02/14/the_real_lessons_of_the_great_depression

Click below to read the article "Obama's Rhetoric Is the Real 'Catastrophe'" by Bradley R. Schiller.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123457303244386495.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

When Democrats voted for that bloated stimulus bill to reward their special interests and fund every kooky item on their socialist agenda, they sold out America for a bag full of our tax dollars -- their 30 pieces of silver. No Republican in the US House of Representatives voted for that bill. In the US Senate, only three moderate Republicans voted with the Democrats to saddle our future generations with a massive budget deficit.

Obama's cruelest slap was on the face of black Americans. Buried in the bowels of that big government spending bill is a poison pill that kills welfare reform. Welfare money will no longer be used for job training, child care or transportation. Instead, the money will now, once again, be just a government handout that keeps black children trapped in generational poverty. Uncle Sam has replaced the father in the homes of poor blacks because you cannot get a welfare check if there is a man in the house. Democrats have been running black communities for the past 40 years. The socialist polices of the Democrats have created a culture of dependency on government handouts and turned black communities into economic and social wastelands. Socialism is a moral and economic cancer that destroys families, communities and nations.

Hidden deeply in the stimulus package is funding for social engineering programs that can become the seeds for Obama to become our first American dictator. An Obama supporter put up a sign that says: "One Nation Under Obama". That sign is a chilling look into the world of Obama where America is no longer "One Nation Under God".

For the 233 years of our nation's existence, our rights came from God, not man. The Declaration of Independence signed on July 4, 1776 declares: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

In the year 2009, we find ourselves faced with a serious question. Will we, the people of the United States of America, consent to having Obama as our god and leave it to him to dictate what rights we will have?

With the fawning media refusing to hold Obama accountable, Congress in control of Democrats and Obama poised to appoint extreme left-wingers to the US Supreme Court, there will be no check on Obama's power – except we, the people.

While telling us to be "civil", Obama uses fear and intimidation to silence his critics and seize unprecedented power over our lives and every aspect of our entire economy – our banks, automotive industry, airlines, food, drugs, education system, public health, energy production, science, and media broadcasts. Obama wants to plant our nation's feet so firmly in the concrete of dead-end socialism that America will never recover and never again be the land of the free.

Will we fight for our freedom, using the non-violent means of Republican Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or will we cower like cowards out of fear of being called "racist" or "divisive" and allow our country to be turned into a failed socialist nation?

Will we follow the courageous example of civil rights heroine Rosa Parks who refused to sit on the back of the segregated bus, or will we sit like sheep with our heads bowed on the back of Obama's socialist bus?

We, as American citizens, have three powerful tools we can use o fight against Obama's socialism – our money, our time and our vote.

Money Talks. We can cancel our subscriptions to liberal newspapers and magazines. We can make our lives a "TARP FREE ZONE" by refusing to put our money in banks or buy products from manufacturers that take TARP Two money. We can donate to Republican candidates and Republican organizations. Be creative in deciding how to use your money to fight for the soul of America.

Time Chalks. We can participate in "No To Socialism" protest rallies in our cities and our nation's capitol. We can write letters of protest to President Obama and our members of Congress. We can chalk up time as volunteers with our local Republican Party organizations.

Voters Walk. We can refuse to vote for any Democrat running for Congress in 2010 because doing so keeps liberal Democrats in control of Congress. In 2012, we can refuse to vote for a Democrat to be our president.

Wake up America. Fight for what is right. Just say NO to Socialism!

Click here for more information about the National Black Republican Association

Montesquieu on the Democrats

From Book VIII, section 2 of The Spirit of Laws:

"The people fall into this misfortune, when those in whom they confide, desirous of concealing their own corruption, endeavor to corrupt them. To disguise their own ambition, they speak to them only of the grandeur of the state; to conceal their own avarice, they incessantly flatter theirs.

"The corruption will increase among the corruptors, and likewise among those who are already corrupted. The people will divide the public money among themselves, and, having added the administration of affairs to their indolence, will be for blending their poverty with the amusements of luxury. But with their indolence and luxury, nothing but the public treasure will be able to satisfy their demands.

"We must not be surprised to see their suffrages given for money. It is impossible to make great largesses to the people without great extortion: and to compass this, the state must be subverted. The greater the advantages they seem to derive from their liberty, the nearer they approach towards the critical moment of losing it. Petty tyrants arise who have all the vices of a single tyrant. The small remains of liberty soon become insupportable; a single tyrant starts up, and the people are stripped of every thing, even of the profits of their corruption.

"Democracy has, therefore, two excesses to avoid--the spirit of inequality, which leads to aristocracy or monarchy, and the spirit of extreme equality, which leads to despotic power, as the latter is completed by conquest."

Barack and Michelle Obama's Socialist Agenda

This video (h/t Nancy Razik) discusses Barack and Michelle Obama's socialist agenda.

The Bush Administration's French-Style Socialism is Impoverishing You

A poster on this blog linked to a Time article arguing that America is becoming more like France, and the article is right. The transformation is nothing new, though. It goes back to 1901 and the assassination of President McKinley. At that point, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican vice-president with an experience base similar to Sarah Palin's, took office. Roosevelt advocated the socialistic ideas of Walter Weyl and Herber Croly, founders of the New Republic. These ideas were largely rooted in European models that had become increasingly attractive to the American elite because a large segment of them had been educated in Europe. Weyl was a first-generation American Jew whose parents had immigrated here from Germany. Weyl was eager to emulate European models only two decades before the holocaust wiped out European Jewry.

Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson made tentative steps toward statism. During World War I, Wilson nationalized much of the economy. This history is well documented in Murray N. Rothbard's and Ronald Radosh's New History of Leviathan. Following the war, Wilson repealed much of his central planning and industry cartel edifice. During the 1920s, Republicans Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge did not oppose the statist edifice that Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had otherwise established such as the Hepburn Act. Most important of these was the Federal Reserve Bank, which provided a means for government's management of credit markets, to include the stock market. Later in the 1920s, one of the most aggressive progressives, Herbert Hoover, took a number of interventionist steps to attempt to manage the economy. These included aggressive public works projects such as the Hoover Dam and intervention in the labor market.

Thus, when the stock market crashed due to Fed tightening, the Fed did not take counter measures at Hoover's insistence. Moreover, Hoover had "jaw boned" major corporations into not cutting wages. In other words, the European-style interventionism caused the chief crisis in American economic history, the Great Depression.

Subsequent to the failure of Hoover's French-style socialism, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected on a social democratic platform that aimed to somewhat intensify Hooverite Progressivism. The steps that Roosevelt took, namely adoption of social security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, a pretense of securities regulation and an attempt to socialize the American economy (the National Industrial Recovery Act) that was declared unconstitutional, had the effect of intensifying unemployment by raising wages.

The most important of the socialist reforms that FDR implemented, the abolition of the gold standard, had the effect of providing a long term subsidy to Wall Street at the expense of American wage earners. Real wages increased during the depression even though nominal wages were falling. After World War II, however, real wage gains began to flatten.

In 1971 Richard M. Nixon took another step toward French-style socialism that also furthered the aims of big business progressives. He abolished the international gold standard that had been re-established in 1944. Since 1971, with the Fed freed from any constraint as to expanding the money supply, real wages have been declining due to the Federal Reserve. Americans have been in denial, but our standard of living has begun to sink to the level of France's. This has been made less apparent through an orgy of credit expansion that made credit cards and sub-prime mortgages available to the public. This was only possible because of French-style socialism. The French are not so cynical as the Americans, so they do not use credit in this way, but without government intervention the sub-prime crisis and credit card phenomena would not have been possible.

Corporate America has been the chief beneficiary of French-style socialism brought to America, and corporate America's apologists in academia and in the media have been eager to justify the expansion of statism, the virtues of the Federal Reserve System and Keynesian economics.

The left, unable to cognize the economic effects of this system (with exceptions such as William Appleman Williams) celebrates the expansion of the American state.

One of the tragedies of the Francification of the American economy has been the decline in substantive innovation. This tracks events in England. France was never an overly important country economically. In the 19th century, in response to increasing laissez-faire, the British economy became the most innovative in the world, and England became the wealthiest country in the world. This did not, as many historians erroneously believe, occur because of imperialism. It arose because of ongoing productivity gains due to innovation.

By the late nineteenth century, America had become the most laissez-faire country in the world. During this period, real wages increased. More importantly, breakthrough technologies changed the world. These include the telephone, AC electricity, the electric light and the mass produced automobile. The increased productivity was met with hostility despite rising real wages. In response to the public anxiety concerning the creation of large companies and naive interpretations of competition as depending upon the existence of small firms (and lack of understanding of Schumpeterian creative destruction and Hayekian coordination) the Populists and advocates of the Social Gospel as well as a range of other advocates (single taxers, socialists, etc.) pressured for increased government intervention. The Progressives, who took the Populist ideas and molded them into a French and European-style format (Weyl prferred the French Republic as a model) lacked the analytical tools to address this question. In particular, the Progressives believed that the creation of large industrial firms was a static reality; that technological and management innovation had reached its apex; and that coordination could be accomplished through "socialist calculation". All of these assumptions turned out to be untrue. However, the Progressive policies had the effect of squashing innovation. Since World War I, the pace of nineteenth century innovation has been seriously dampened. Moreover, since 1971, the unrestricted ability of the Federal Reserve Bank to expand the money supply has resulted in four things.

1. Wall Street has diverted investment capital into decreasingly productive uses, with the process leading to the sub-prime crisis
2. Inflation has reduced real wages
3. There is less innovation because of the diversion of capital away from optimal uses
4. There is increasing income inequality as workers suffer from inflation due to monetary expansion and the stock and real estate markets have been inflated by low interest rates due to the same process. Since the wealthy own stocks and the poor work, Federal Reserve Policy has been distastefully cruel. Theft is wrong. But to institute an ongoing policy of subsidizing the wealthy at the expense of workers is an especially depraved policy.

The end result of this process is the establishment of a new American feudal socialism along the lines of France's. Like the French, America has become an increasingly stratified society, with an elite that benefits from Wall Street's access to Federal Reserve counterfeit. The average productive worker no longer can hope to save to start an entrepreneurial firm because of bloated home costs and taxes, and entrepreneurship and innovation are squashed by big business's monopolization of credit and its diversion into ill conceived real estate development.

One more note--the level of American political discourse has devolved to the point where there are two Progressive Parties--the pro business socialist Progressives of George Bush and the social democratic Progressives of Barack Obama. Yet, a large percentage of Americans do not agree with either view.