WEUS and Woodstock Times Spotlight Mitchell Langbert's Blog

This morning Dennis K. Thomas of Altamont Springs/Orlando's WEUS radio (the Internet Boomer Radio station is here --  the WEUS air station is here) interviewed me on his morning Boomer Show.   We discussed the importance of gold and silver ownership in retirement planning, especially in light of the Obama credit debacle.  I had been saying that 50 Bush messes fit into the Obama mess. The number will ultimately be greater.  

Dennis is a great guy.  He was quite complimentary of my resume.  He awarded me the coveted "Boomer of the Week" title, which was a thrill, and he asked me to be on his Social Security board of observers. I'm hoping for return visits.

As well, my friend Paul Smart, Ulster County New York's best left-wing journalist, published an (August 4, 2011, p. 8) article about the upcoming Olive Town meeting in The Woodstock Times. Calling me a right wing gadfly Smart writes about the budding resistance to the authoritarian Agenda 21 with mild sarcasm.  

I like the appellation gadfly, but right wing is inaccurate.  The term right wing comes from the seating on the right in the French Estates General in the 1780s to early 1800s of monarchists whose views are repugnant to me. I am sympathetic to de Jouvenal's concerns about centralization of power (who isn't?), but I believe in Hamiltonian republicanism limited by a Jeffersonian concern for states' rights, including secession.  Wikipedia describes right wing as follows:

In politics, Right, right-wing and rightist are generally used to describe support for preservation or promotion of social order and the legitimacy of social hierarchy in society that is often advocated in the name of tradition.  It involves in varying degrees the rejection of egalitarian objectives ... The terms Right and Left were coined during the French Revolution, referring to seating arrangements in parliament; those who sat on the right supported preserving the institutions of the Ancien Régime (the monarchy, the aristocracy and the established church).Use of the term "Right" became more prominent after the second restoration of the French monarchy in 1815 with the Ultra-royalists.

Right wing doesn't apply to libertarians, and opposition to UN Agenda 21 is an anti-authoritarian hence left-wing position.  This might not be palatable to right wing Progressives, like Smart and The Woodstock Times's readership. Nor does right wing properly apply to most conservatives, although the very appellation conservative is also a throwback. There is no such thing as a real conservative in America because the views called conservative are of more recent, Jacksonian origin than the Hamiltonian, Federalist and Whig views called progressive.  American progressivism is a throwback to mercantilism of the 17th century; American conservatism builds on the late 19th century views of Alfred Marshall and the 20th century views of President William Howard Taft. 

In the meaning of lifestyle and religion, libertarians may or may not be traditionalists. Whether they are or not, libertarians do not believe in the use of state violence or authority to enforce traditional or any other lifestyle.

Libertarians do not reject egalitarianism, which the left almost always voices and almost always ignores.  I have never seen more hierarchical, authoritarian institutions than the left-and-progressive dominated universities in which I work.   An old trick of the left is to claim that they favor democracy and egalitarianism and then create institutions which exclude the majority,  who lack the resources to manipulate institutional levers. Smart's article is even handed for a leftist publication like The Woodstock Times, but one can guess that the pro-freedom reaction to the corrupt, Agenda 21-driven Town plan irritates the authoritarian Woodstock and Olive progressives in Smart's readership. 

To understand how leftist hierarchy and oppression are part and parcel of the left's claim  to "social justice" (a vacuous term that meant murdering millions to Hitler and Stalin) one need only observe the long standing strategy of Progressivism to staunch small operators and individuals through escalation of regulatory costs.  Kip Viscusi of Harvard and my professor at Columbia, Ann Bartel, documented this pattern with respect to OSHA, and I documented it with respect to ERISA.  Complex regulation makes it difficult for small operators to do business. The cost of regulation falls less heavily on large organizations that can spread costs across a wider range of units of output.  

Wealthier home owners are in an analogous position to larger firms.  They can more easily absorb costs that drive away lower-income homeowners whose houses wealthy left-wingers can purchase at a discount.  Agenda 21's costly environmental regulation can be borne by people making over $100,000 but not by people earning less. Median homeowners are ground under progressives' regulatory Gucci heels to the rich progressives' direct benefit, both environmental and economic. The only thing more right wing than someone who opposes equality is someone who says that they favor equality and uses government violence in the name of equality to enforce an inequality that benefits themselves. That is PROGRESSIVISM.

Less intelligent Progressives may actually believe that oppressive regulation that sends lower-wage homeowners into concentrated urban developments serves humanity, but smart Democratic operators like George Soros and Warren Buffett are well aware that the costly regulation that they advocate drives out smaller competitors, creating an open playing field for them.  Thus, billionaire Democrats like the Town of Olive's Bruce Ratner can sit back and snap up properties that have been forcibly vacated by progressive regulation like Agenda 21.  Though incapable of intelligent thinking about her actions, Linda Burkhardt well serves the opportunism of the rich.  Progressivism is a passive-aggressive ideology that Agenda 21 reflects. It claims to be helping humanity as it sends low-income homeowners to concentration camps like the LEED project Birchez, from which I was ejected by City of Kingston police acting as the Democratic Party's muscle men and out of their jurisdiction while claiming to be Town of Ulster police. 

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.

Hinchey's Land Grab

Paul Smart, editor of the Olive Press, our local penny saver, printed my letter this month attacking Progressivism.  I have had a multi-month debate in the letters section with Gus Murphy of Brooklyn (why a guy from Brooklyn reads the Olive Press I'm still trying to grasp) but this month I wrote on a different topic, Congressman Hinchey's insane federal parks proposal. Have the people of Ulster County lost their minds to elect someone like Hinchey?

Dear Mr. Smart:

Congressman Maurice Hinchey has proposed to turn the Hudson Valley into a federal park. Mr. Hinchey has a long history of advocating extremist environmental policies that bestow dictatorial powers on government administrators. Repeatedly, he has painted such proposals as moderate. He did this with respect to a 1990s bill that he proposed when he was chair of the State Assembly's Environmental Conservation Committee. The bill that would have set up Soviet-style planning boards that would have limited if not ended construction. He managed to convince the previously skeptical Adirondack Daily Enterprise that this idea was moderate.
Around the same time Hinchey said that he would like to restrain economic growth in the Hudson Valley. His plan involved setting up environmental regulations known as the "greenway". He and his fellow Democrats succeeded in their goal of deliberately restricting economic growth. Employment in Ulster County has grown at one fifth the national rate since 1992 when Mr. Hinchey assumed his Congressional seat (and by under two percent since 1990, less than one ninth the national rate of employment growth). Now, Mr. Hinchey aims to further destroy Ulster County's economy by eliminating the rule of law through a federal park that would serve as a Trojan Horse to introduce federal control of the region.

The notion of the rule of law is apparently unfamiliar to Mr. Hinchey's supporters in the Democratic media, which serves as a Hinchey-for-Congress publicity service. To refresh your memory, please allow me to explain how a federal park will eliminate the rule of law.

The concept of the rule of law is that law must be predictable and subject to change only through the gradual process of judicial decision making called stare decisis (judges' use of precedents to maintain a stable set of legal rules) or legislation. In America, the founders established a Constitution to establish but limit federal power. The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 to clarify the limits. This was also done through the separation of powers across the branches of the federal government and federalism, the division of power between the states and the federal government.  Under the Tenth Amendment, rights not delegated to the federal government are retained by the states and the people.

Establishing a federal park would hand dictatorial powers to a park adminsitrator and abolish the division of power between federal and local control. It might also eliminate the separation of powers between the legislative and the executive branch in the sense that a parks administrator potentially would have unlimited power to make rules. Although the law might initially restrain such arbitrary power, the US Congress, in which Ulster County residents have scant voice, could change the law at will.  

More importantly, a park would eliminate state level rule of law, handing all decisions to a federal bureaucracy, in crucial areas like construction, land ownership, well digging, septic construction, fishing, hunting, wood burning, driving, smoking, eating, agriculture, establishing a business, building a camp, and virtually any other activity with any imaginable environmental impact. The park administrator could arbitrarily change the law. Even if that is not true in the beginning, Congress could endow the park administrator with new powers  over residents' protests.   That is precisely what Congressman Hinchey has repeatedly tried to do with respect to the hapless residents of the Adirondacks and Utah (he has repeatedly proposed a bill that would end development in 20% of the state of Utah) . Now he aims to do it to Ulster County.  Take a drive up to the Adirondacks and notice the poverty of the local residents there, courtesy of Congressman Hinchey, the Democratic Party and Mr. Hinchey's boosters in the Democratic Party media. 

Given Mr. Hinchey's recidivism in advocating radical environmental restrictions elsewhere there is no reason to believe that he has become an enviornmental moderate now. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that the parks proposal is a Trojan Horse.  During Mr. Hinchey's 18 years in Congress employment in Ulster County has grown at one fifth the national rate. You might ask yourself whether your economic welfare is of concern to him or to the radical environmentalists who motivate the parks proposal. 

But even if Mr. Hinchey is sincere that the legal effects would be minimal (which seems to be a contradiction in terms, for why else would he go through the trouble of establishing a park? To make up for the 15% of employment that he has destroyed since 1992?), the bill would effectively abolish the Constitution, federalism, stare decisis and local control of the land. Should Mr. Hinchey retire and environmental radicals lobby for strict restrictions on parks, the Hudson Valley Park could become a footnote to a major national environmental debate. Park regulations, laws, rules and dictatorial authority could be imposed without regard for Constitutional protections to which most Olive residents are so used that they cannot imagine life without them.

I have students who grew up in the Soviet Union and Communist China. If you want to learn about life where there is no rule of law, you can ask them. Or ask Mr. Hinchey's radical supporters in the environmental movement who likely have quite a few ideas about how to wreck your property's economic value and turn you into a serf. Just ask the long time residents in the Adirondacks (as opposed to the environmental radicals who have moved there in recent decades) about how wonderful Mr. Hinchey's parks proposals are.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

New York Times, Huffington Post Are Turkey Farms

I was just doing a little web surfing.  I Googled the words "tea party" and "racism".  There was an article on Huffington Post recently calling the Tea Partiers ignorant racists. As well, the New York Times had an article about Confederate History Month and someone commented on the Times's  blog about the Woodstock Times article, specifically alluding to my statement on this blog that I am a Confederate. Of course, that has nothing to do with race or slavery. It is an allusion to the 10th Amendment and decentralization.  I conclude from looking at the articles and posters on both the Huffington Post blog and at the New York Times that both are turkey farms. Their readers are turkeys.  And that goes for the so-called journalists as well. And it goes for whoever wrote that dull-witted post.

I celebrated with a letter to Brian Hollander, editor of the Woodstock Times:

----- Original Message -----

From: Mitchell Langbert

To: woodstocktimes@ulsterpublishing.com

Sent: Monday, April 19, 2010 5:28 AM

Subject: Fw: Corrected: American Breakfast Tea

Dear Editor Hollander: 

Thank you and Paul Smart for the coverage of our nascent Tea Party group ("American Breakfast Tea", April 8).  However, a point of clarification regarding Mr. Smart's reference to my belief in the Confederacy, John Calhoun and Andrew Jackson is in order.  I write in part because one of the Woodstock Times's  readers quoted the article and libelously alluded to it on a New York Times blog.  Please note that my reference to the Confederacy, John C. Calhoun and Andrew Jackson had nothing at all to do with slavery or race. This is a common libel concerning the Tea Party among the benighted social democratic press.  It is false that the Tea Party has to do with racism.

If you read my blog regularly you know that Mr. Smart took my point out of context.  My chief interest is in decentralization of government. John C. Calhoun and Andrew Jackson were two of the most important advocates of decentralization. This is closely related to modern management theories of Alfred Chandler and Oliver Williamson. 

Moreover, I am surprised that any of your readers are unaware that the primary issue over which the Civil War was fought was not slavery but states' rights and decentralization. This appears to be one more application of the rule that the more leftists and "progressives" preen themselves about their supposed superior intellects, the more limited their educations turn out to be.  In addition, your reader quoted Mr. Smart's quotation from my blog, which was deliberately selected to be incendiary (we love you anyway, Paul), without having taken the trouble to read it. If your readers wish to read my blog rather than draw libelous conclusions without having done so, it is located at http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

American Breakfast Tea

Paul Smart, editor of the Olive Press and Phoenicia Times published an article about Glenda McGee's, Chris Johansen's and my forming the Woodstock-Shandaken-Olive Tea Party in the Woodstock Times this week. The article begins:

"We're drinking lattes and regular bold coffees in the back of the Kingston Starbucks, talking about the starting up of a new Olive/Shandaken/Woodstock offshoot of the year-old Kingston Tea Party group that meets monthly at the Ulster Town Hall. Mitchell Langbert and Glenda McGee are noting how they wished their friend Chris Johansen had been able to make it, since he was the one working the organizational details involving who'd be joining, when and where meetings would be occurring, and how the new local Tea Party effort would operate."


Read the whole article here.

Johansen Calls Olive Reporting The Pits

I just received this e-mail from Town of Olive Conservative Party chairman Chris Johansen. Paul Smart is the editor of the Town penny saver, the Olive Press.

>Dear Paul:

I was not real happy with the results of this last election but I think we accomplished something and I had a lot of fun. One thing that I wasn't at all happy with was the complete lack of reporting on town meetings. I don't know why a town paper can't have a reporter covering town meetings especially budget meetings. I don't think Gary will report a meeting unless something of personal interest to him is on the agenda.

Paul if you cant get someone to regularly cover our town meetings a couple of us are going to start a town newspaper at least for now on the Internet. I am interested in your thoughts on this please get back to me.

Chris.