How Progressivism Destroyed Utica

 Below is a picture of the population trend in Utica, NY from 1850 to the present. Unlike Buffalo, whose population peaked in 1950, right after passage of the urban renewal act, the population of Utica peaked in the 1930s, about 15 years before urban renewal and about 20 years after an expansion of workplace legislation in 1911 to 1913, during New York's Progressive era.

The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York City had led to the passage of dozens of labor laws in the mid 1910s. According to Wikipedia's entry on Al Smith (who was the speaker of the New York State Assembly and a member of the New York State Factory Investigating Commission, which proposed the laws):

 
New laws mandated better building access and egress, fireproofing requirements, the availability of fire extinguishers, the installation of alarm systems and automatic sprinklers, better eating and toilet facilities for workers, and limited the number of hours that women and children could work. In the years from 1911 to 1913, sixty of the sixty-four new laws recommended by the Commission were legislated with the support of Governor William Sulzer.

Other sources say that there were 36 laws, but whatever the precise number, there was a lot of new regulation.

The stagnation in the Utica population began about six or seven years after Smith's State Assembly (and Robert Wagner's State Senate) passed the Progressive-era laws, and the decline in the Utica population began about 15 years after.

According to Wikipedia, "Utica's economy centered around the manufacture of furniture, heavy machinery, textiles, and lumber." All of these are subject to factory regulation, which in effect raises wages. Employers contemplate the cost of regulation in their relocation decisions.

As well, the 1913 founding of the Federal Reserve Bank, also in the Progressive period, led to increased availability of credit. Easy credit meant reduced costs of relocation. There may have been early relocations of plants away from the city of Utica into surrounding suburban areas and into the South.


The combination of easing credit and increasing workplace and other regulation--the policy mix of both parties, but especially the Democrats--has been deadly to American manufacturing.


Instead of thinking about underlying causes of Trump's popularity, the American media has fixated on ad hominem attacks and shrill rhetoric.


Wikipedia's entry on Utica says that suburbanization began occurring in earnest in Utica in the 1940s, but there may have been an earlier trend as credit became available. The suburbanization of the pre- and post-war eras anticipated the broader globalization that followed the easing of credit and further expansion of regulation before and after the abolition of the international gold standard in 1971.


The post-1971 world has been brutal for those who create value. Those who live off the state as commercial or investment bankers, government contractors, government employees, and welfare recipients have fared well.


Unlike Syracuse, Utica does not have a nationally ranked university. Hence, it has not as easily participated in the state-subsidized education industry. Unlike Albany, it isn't a seat of an ever-expanding state bureaucracy. Unlike New York, the city that has benefited most from expanding credit, it is not a seat of global finance and bailout funding.


Utica actually produced goods of value like furniture. It was not a center of financial or political power, which produce nothing. Such production has been  punished in the credit-based economy, which supports a limited degree of innovation and instead favors low-risk investments such as plant relocations.

Historical Population of Utica, NY

  

The Racism of John R. Commons--And What It Says about Columbus Day

Two guys on Facebook , Jeremy Horpedahl of the University of Central Arkansas and Phillip W. Magness of Berry College, sent me material that documents the racism of John R. Commons. Commons was the chief founder of institutional economics in the United States.

Commons can be fairly called the creator or conceptualizer of the current American industrial relations system and the innovator of much of the New Deal.

Hence, if we are to tear down statutes of Columbus, Jefferson, and Lee because they were racists, so should be consider tearing down the New Deal, which also was the product of racists, conceptualized by racists, and put into place by racists.  Commons, for instance, designed the first workmen's compensation law, in Wisconsin, and discussed social insurance reforms and unionization.

Just how racist was John R. Commons? 

In his "Racial Composition of the American People: The Negro" Commons writes of the western coast of Africa:

The torrid heat and the excessive humidity...produce a race indolent, improvident, and contented...Sexual purity is unknown...Formerly cannibalism prevailed, but it has now been largely stamped out by European governments...The people are unstable, indifferent to suffering, and  easily aroused to ferocity by the sight of blood or under great fear...They exhibit in Africa certain qualities  which are associated with their descendants in this country, namely, aversion to silence and solitude, love of rhythm, excitability, and lack of reserve.  All travelers speak of their impulsiveness, strong sexual passion, and lack of will power.

Donald Trump is fairly criticized for calling African countries "crappy," but what are we to make of an American New Deal, social insurance and welfare system designed by people who made similar remarks?

Commons adds:

slavery tended to transform the savage by eliminating those those who were self-willed, ambitious, and possessed of individual initiative...Other races of immigrants, by contact with our institutions, have been civilized--the Negro has been only domesticated...The very qualities of intelligence and manliness which are essential for citizenship in a democracy were systematically expunged from the Negro race through two hundred years of slavery.

Commons goes on to call "the war of emancipation" one of "dogmatism" and "partizanship" [sic] because equality and inalienable rights took the place of education and slow evolution of moral character. 

He adds: "Self-government means intelligence, self-control, and capacity for cooperation.  If these are lacking, the ballot only makes way for the 'boss,' the corruptionist, and the oligarchy under the cloak of democracy."

In discussing how African Americans can be educated in order to be "prepared" for "citizenship" Commons claims that African Americans lack the ability to be trained to use steam cleaners or to paint ceilings.

He says that the majority of African American mechanics are "careless, slovenly, and ill trained." As well, he adds:

the improvidence of the Negro is notorious. His neglect of his horse, his mule, his machinery, his eagerness to spend his earnings on finery, his reckless purchase of watermelons...these and other incidents of improvidence expalin the constant dependence of the Negro upon his employer and his creditot.

When African Americans did become wealthy due to property ownership, Commons attributes this to "unearned increment" rather than intelligent investing.  He adds, "Negro bosses and foremen are more despotic than white bosses." As well, "the Negro trade unionist has not as yet shown the organizing capacity of other races,"  and "when the Negro demands the same wages as white men, his industrial inferiority leads the employer to take white men in his place."

In response to the list of ways that African Americans were supposedly inferior to whites, Commons proposes "an honest educational test" for voting "enforced on both whites and blacks."

In a closing fit of racism, Commons attributes higher death rates among African Americans to moral rather than environmental and social causes.

In New York City, Mayor de Blasio and his left-wing supporters  have proposed to tear down statues of Columbus and Theodore Roosevelt. Why shouldn't the New Deal, a legal system designed by a racist, should be treated the same way?

Long Live the Electoral College

I favor the Electoral College. Direct democracy was a failure in Athens; it is a failure in the US. The American people are easily manipulated by special interests and hardcore, tyrannical socialists like Bernie Sanders.

American politics has become a debate between two self-interested, elite interest groups: the Democratic Party, including academics, professional interests like psychologists, schoolteachers, and lawyers, and some investment banks; and the Republican Party, including economic special interests like pharmaceutical companies, natural resource interests, agribusiness, and some investment banks.

Direct democracy represents one or the other of the corrupt special interest constellations, so it has failed. Big government is incompatible with direct democracy. The delusion of direct democracy is one of the principle methods that the Democrats use to manipulate the public into imagining that the Democrats' corrupt special interests somehow represent the public,

The public has done much worse since the establishment of the current presidential primary system and the ending of the republican principle by the 16th, 17th, and 18th Amendments.

The founders saw the need for a republican form of government, one that combines majority and aristocratic rule. Overt aristocratic rule by the Senate led to the best American statesmanship, a point that De Tocqueville explicitly observes in Democracy in America.

American workers fared much better before the Progressive era than they do today. There was more freedom; wages increased every year; savings rates were at 30%. The use of eminent domain to steal private property was comparatively rare. There was more income equality (less income inequality) under the republican system than under the Progressive and post-New Deal systems.

One of the safeguards the founders put in place was to limit the power of urban areas. Urban areas are prone to totalitarian, extremist impulses, and we witness that today with Mayor de Blasio's Red Guard-like lynching of history and his eagerness to smash statutes of Christopher Columbus and Theodore Roosevelt.

The states signed on to a Constitution (a) that was limited to delegated powers and (b) that weighted voting power to limit the authority of the totalitarian-tending masses in urban areas. One of the ways it did this was the Electoral College.

The principle of delegated powers was overthrown by authoritarian, urban elites (in the person of Hamilton and the party of the Federalists) almost as soon as the Constitution was passed; the principle in the Declaration that government exists by the consent of the governed was overturned in the Civil War; the republican principle was overturned by the Progressives in the 16th, 17th, 18th Amendments. All of these centralizing policies were mistakes, but only the 18th Amendment, Prohibition, was repealed.

The people of rural America would be fools to favor ending the Electoral College.

Walter Weyl and the Escalation of American Mental Uniformity

In the late nineteenth century the standardization of parts contributed to American competitiveness. That idea was taken further by the Progressives, who incorrectly assumed that increasing scale and centralizing management would improve efficiency. The assumption of the historian Alfred Chandler (in his books The Visible Hand and Strategy and Structure) that increased scale means increased efficiency is not a rule at all. Toyota showed that nimble management technique can easily overcome inefficient manufacturers of the largest scale.

The current trend toward conformity of thought, standardization of consumption, and media-induced mass hysteria continues the incorrect, 130-year-old theory of the Progressives that standardization and scale are the most important sources of efficiency.

Centralized financial control via the Fed is central to this process. I wrote a piece that hasn't been published about how a similar process applied to higher education. You see the same thing with K-12 education. The Dept. of Education was a first step toward national centralization, but the process began in the first half of the 19th century with Horace Mann's advocacy of public education. Widespread adoption of teacher education in the mid-twentieth century standardized the ideological framework that infuses K-12. Diane Ravitch's Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform focuses on teaching methodology and progressive education, but there was ideological content affiliated with progressive education theory.

The result of a century of increasingly standardized training is increased standardization of thinking. The now-declining centralized mass media has also played an important role, and I suspect that the debate about Internet regulation is linked to the need to think strategically about homogenizing content by regulators in the Progressive tradition.

The argument for obtaining ever more education in the name of supposed higher wages of graduates is a tacit argument for uniformity of thinking. Relatively few grads study science or technology. The bulk study business, education, and psychology. They often learn little, but their behavior and thinking are standardized. (Christopher Loss discusses the emphasis on human resource management as an aim of higher education in the first chapter of his important book Between Citizen and State.)

The Progressives were the ones who instituted today's educational system. Horace Mann was the first advocate of public education, but the current approach with high school, elementary school, and college admission based on standardized testing was the creation of the early 1900s.

What we are witnessing is a playing out of the Progressive ideology of someone like Progressive ideologue Walter Weyl. (Weyl cofounded the New Republic magazine with two other central Progressive thinkers, Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly.) Weyl saw Progressivism as leading to socialism, and in this he was prescient. He did not anticipate the continued vibrancy of the free market economy, and its ability to innovate.

For instance, Weyl thought that Progressivism would lead to a perfectly planned national train system; he didn't realize that air travel would replace trains. Progressivism has no place for the kind of rapid innovation that took place under laissez faire capitalism. It requires a slow, limited rate of innovation, and it incorrectly assumes that scale and standardization increase efficiency and wealth. 

De Tocqueville on Progressivism and Presidential Power

I have been rereading Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America; the translation is by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop.  It isn't light reading, but it is accessible, and every American should read it.  Following his 1831 visit to the United States, de Tocqueville published it in two volumes, which appeared in 1835 and 1840.  Many of de Tocqueville's insights about America are accurate today, often eerily so.

On page 128 de Tocqueville questions whether the framers of the US Constitution were right or wrong to permit the president to be reelected. This is a fascinating question because I can think of a number of abuses that have occurred in connection with presidential reelection during my lifetime, especially during the administration of President Richard Nixon. Indeed, statistics show that the stock market routinely rises during presidential election years, for the party in power manipulates the Federal Reserve Bank in its favor.  De Tocqueville points out that a president who seeks reelection views laws and negotiations as electoral schemes that redound to his or her, rather than to the nation's, benefit. "The principle of reelection therefore renders the corrupting influence of elective governments more extensive and more dangerous. It tends to degrade the political morality of the people and to replace patriotism with cleverness." 

De Tocqueville adds that all forms of government are associated with a natural vice, and laws that enhance the vice are undesirable.  The founding fathers limited the whims of the majority by state governments' electing senators and the electoral college's electing the president.  De Tocqueville notes, "In introducing the principle of reelection [of the president], they destroyed their work in part. They granted a great power to the president and took away from him the will to make use of it."

Progressivism worsened this result because the Seventeenth Amendment, a 1912 product of Progressivism, made the election of senators direct. Moreover, the replacement of party conventions with primaries and the diminution of the influence of the electoral college have made the president ever more likely to be tempted to manipulate public policy to gain reelection.

De Tocqueville writes:

Each [form of] government brings with it a natural vice...the genius of the legislator consists in discerning it well...[E]very law whose effect is to develop this seed of death cannot fail in the long term to become fatal, although its bad effects may not be immediately perceived.

The effect of Progressivism was to pass a series of such laws that enhanced the majoritarian principle without concern for checks and balances.  The power of banks and the Federal Reserve Bank interact with the tendency of the president to manipulate public opinion in his--and the banks'--short-term favor.  The result has been misallocation of credit and other resources and resultant economic instability that, in turn, has resulted in increasing cries for government intervention and socialism.  The public is unable to perceive that their economic insecurity is the direct result of governmental manipulation of credit to the short-term advantage of politicians and banking, real estate, business, and investment interests.

My thought is that the United States would be better with a president elected for one six-year or even four-year term rather than for two four-year terms.  

Ivy League Schools and Progressivism

William Deresiewicz critiques the performance of Ivy League colleges in The New Republic.   Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann founded The New Republic as a cornerstone of the early twentieth century's Progressive movement, and it has long advocated policies that impose hierarchy, expand government, and gut the economy on behalf of economic elites. The policies include the higher education system. Unsurprisingly, Deresiewicz's critique of the higher education system retains Progressive assumptions and ultimately serves to reinforce them.

Progressive policies have included the monopolization of credit by large, money center banks through their banking cartel, the Federal Reserve Bank; the income tax, which inhibits saving that facilitates capital formation among blue collar and lower-income workers; the inheritance tax, which by depriving later generations of capital forces them to seek corporate jobs that depend on the banking cartel; and a wide range of economic regulations that deter entrepreneurship and self-actualization.  Regulation disadvantages entrepreneurial, smaller firms by raising costs per unit and increasing economies of scale.

In the controlled, hierarchical, high-income inequality, militaristic, and centralized American economy that Progressivism has created, higher education plays an important part.  Deresiewicz makes valid criticisms.  At the same time, his criticisms are couched in his assumption that higher education is an independent variable, capable of manipulation, and that the forces that deter broad education are merely limited to universities.

Deresiewicz, who was on the admissions board at Yale and is a leading academic, notes that Ivy League schools manufacture students who have little intellectual curiosity, lack passion about ideas, avoid risk, and have not been taught to think.  Such students are conformist and concerned with fitting into the highest rungs of American society.  The great advances in America's economy have never come from its elite, though. America's elite has always concentrated on banking, law, and power. The great American inventions such as the assembly line, scientific management,  and AC electricity had little do with such elites.

Colleges cannot teach one how to think. They can demand that one thinks; provide material about what to think; and offer models, heuristics, algorithms, and solutions that illustrate thinking processes.  Thinking, though, is a natural reflex that a person must cultivate on his own.  The best thinkers, such as Einstein, Tesla, and Gauss, and the best leaders, such as Jefferson and Lincoln, received minimal schooling, most of which was unrelated to their intellectual achievements.  Wikipedia quotes Des Cartes, who had attended a Jesuit school through his ninth grade:

I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it. 

Deresiewicz is surrounded by the hierachical, suppressive cult of Ivy League universities, and his solution to the poor quality of education is to attend universities lower in the cult's assigned hierarchical ranking. It doesn't occur to him that the lower-ranked schools and professors are also cult members.

The solution is not to partake of lower-ranked participants in the same failed cult but to reinvent it.  There is no need for undergraduates to attend research universities, and there is no reason for science, the main achievement of the Progressive university, to be done in undergraduate institutions. It can be better done in research institutes that serve graduate but not undergraduate students, a claim that Robert Maynard Hutchins cogently made 70 years ago.  Too many students attend college, employers place too much emphasis on college attendance, and Americans take college degrees too seriously.   Americans did not make the latter mistake before The New Republic was founded.

As well,  American society can be transformed so that widespread wealth can be accumulated and so that independent thinkers don't need to depend on the corporate hierarchy for which places like Yale and Princeton as well as Minnesota and LA City College,  prepare their students.

No Consent of the Governed

In early January we're about six months from July 4th, but recall Jefferson's and the Continental Congress's words written 236 years ago in the Declaration of Independence:


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, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...

 The Declaration of Independence claims that to be just government must derive its powers from the consent of the governed. Is this the case in the United States?  In 1860 the southern states said that they did not consent to the US government; the US government proved that its power is not derived from any sort of consent.  It invaded the South, and the death toll amounted to 600,000 to 800,000.  There were  a million injuries and massive property destruction.  Far from being a government that derives its powers from the governed, the US government is as authoritarian as Hitler's or Stalin's. It is based on the power of a ruling cabal, nothing more.  The cabal is more benign than Hitler's or Stalin's was, but it is not qualitatively different.  There is no more moral grounding to the US government than there is to the Mafia.  There is little reason to feel secure here, and there is no reason to assume that out-and-out tyranny is not around the corner. 

Progressives are not troubled by the Civil War death toll, and I have never heard a suggestion that the victims' descendents are entitled to reparations.   However, I have heard repeated complaints about Pinochet's killing 3,000 leftists in Chile.  That is wrong, and it is a significant crime, but it is tiny compared to what the US government did.


I decided to assign part of Thomas J. DiLorenzo's book Lincoln Unmasked as well as part of his Hamilton's Curse in a new course I have developed called Government and Business.  Usually Government and Business courses are textbook-based, cliche-ridden Progressive propaganda.  CUNY's new free institutions program gave me released time last year, and I have developed the Business and Government course from a libertarian, free market, and anti-statist persepective.

Most historical accounts of the Civil War are told from the northern point of view; they emphasize the role of slavery, which is fair to a point.  It is also true that there had been a southern secessionist movement in the late 1820s that had zero to do with slavery.  It had to do with a tariff, the so-called Tariff of Abominations.  There was much tariff talk in 1859 and 1860, and to say that secession had nothing to do with tariffs smacks of the kind of propanda that makes Pinochet the world's greatest criminal and Stalin an omelet maker.  The low quality of historical research in general becomes embarrassing whenever economic issues are relevant, as DiLorenzo points out.  An historian who claims that tariffs made the US wealthy, for instance, is a fool, not a formidable intellect as Americans often believe.

In 1828 John Calhoun published a tract entitled "The South Carolina Exposition and Protest" in which he argued for South Carolina's nullification of the 1828 tariff.  Jefferson, who had died two years earlier, would have approved.  Tariffs helped northern manufacturers but directly harmed southern agricultural interests. This is what Wikipedia says about Lincoln's position on the tariff:
 
The Republican party included a strong pro-tariff plank in its 1860 platform. They also sent prominent tariff advocates such as Morrill and Sherman to campaign in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where the tariff was popular, by touting the Morrill bill. Both Democratic candidates, John C. Breckenridge and Stephen Douglas, opposed all high tariffs and protectionism in general.^[4]
Historian Reinhard H. Luthin documents the importance of the Morrill Tariff to the Republicans in the 1860 presidential election.^[5] Abraham Lincoln's record as a protectionist and support for the Morrill Tariff bill, he notes, helped him to secure support in the important electoral college state of Pennsylvania, as well as neighboring New Jersey. Lincoln carried Pennsylvania handily in November, as part of his sweep of the North...On February 14, 1861, President-elect Lincoln told an audience in Pittsburgh that he would make a new tariff his priority in the next session if the bill did not pass by inauguration day on March 4.

Seven of eleven secessionist states had seceded by March 1861, and the Republicans took control of the Senate. The Morrill Tariff then passed.  It was signed by Democratic President James Buchanan. Buchanan was from Pennsylvania, and he voted for the tariff despite his Democratic affiliation.  He had bankrupted the US government, and a tariff was needed in part to cover the financial mess.  It cannot be said that the South seceded because of the Morrill Tariff because seven of the eleven states that seceded had seceded before the Morrill Tariff was passed, and the tariff likely would not have passed without the southerners' seceding.  At the same time, Lincoln's strong support for protectionism contributed to southerners' concerns about his election.

DiLorenzo is a clear writer, but he needs to tone it down;  in rhetoric less is typically more. Otherwise, his books are great.  His point that Lincoln was a racist who preferred to keep the territories all white to avoiding the Civil War is intriguing (see David Gordon's review on the von Mises site).  He follows through on an idea I have thought of for some time: there is an arc of statism that stretches from Hamilton, through Lincoln, through the Progressives, through the New Deal on to Bush, the bailout, and Obama.

One of the interesting points DiLorenzo makes in his two excellent books is that Hitler was an admirer of Lincoln. DiLorenzo quotes Hitler in Mein Kampf (p. 566, 579 Houghton Mifflin 1999 edition) as supporting the Lincoln position on secession:

 [T]he individual states of the American Union . . . could not have possessed any state sovereignty of their own. For it was not these states that formed the Union, on the contrary it was the Union which formed a great part of such so-called states...Certainly all the states in the world are moving toward a certain unification in their inner organization. And in this Germany will be no exception. Today it is an absurdity to speak of a ‘state sovereignty' of individual provinces.

Hitler would have been a supporter of today's European Union as well.  DiLorenzo makes the point that pro-Lincoln propagandists, who are quick to brand anyone who questions Lincoln's cult of centralization a racist, are in full agreement with Hitler.  If you have a bad argument like centralization, violent suppression of the governed, and totalitarianism, as do Lincoln's supporters, then it is necessary to divert the argument by calling those who disagree with you racists or advocates of slavery.  

The Enemy is Progressivism, Not Obama: Dinesh D'Souza's 2016

I just saw 2016: Obama.  Dinesh D'Souza is right: Obama is a traitor.  Nevertheless, the film's lack of historical perspective is troubling. D'Souza's ignoring history allows him to exaggerate Obama's importance.  Moreover, D'Souza colors his facts wrong.  For example, indebtedness that has arisen during Obama's administration is not new.  The president who threw the U.S. into a pattern of heavy indebtedness was D'Souza's former boss, Ronald Reagan.  Moreover, the bigger financial problem is the Republican-and-Democratic-supported bailout.

D'Souza claims that Obama is using debt to bankrupt us. He forgets that Reagan's supply-side economics was just a variation of Keynesian economics. D'Souza forgets that it was Nixon who took us off the gold standard and so permitted the past 40 years of Fed plundering; he forgets that it was George W. Bush, supported by both McCain and Obama, who initiated $29 trillion--more than twice the American economy--in Federal Reserve subsidies to banks. Obama's indebtedness is tiny in comparison to the Fed's 2008 and 2009 bailouts, which the Republicans as well as Obama conceptualized and continue to support.   

Traitors linked to Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations have been running America for a century. The Republicans have plenty to answer for, such as Prescott Bush's and other Brown Brothers Harriman associates' funding of Stalin and Hitler as Anthony Sutton outlines in his history of Skull and Bones.  Sutton describes how David Rockefeller met on a regular basis to trade ideas with a Soviet ambassador at a time when it was illegal to do business with the Soviets. The CFR favored trade with and subsidies to the Soviet Union at a time when billions were being spent to build defenses against them, and more than  50,000 Americans died in Vietnam.

In other words, the disloyal, internationalist pattern started with Woodrow Wilson, JP Morgan, and Bernard Baruch, and continued through David Rockefeller and the investment bankers of today.  Obama is a symptom of Federal Reserve-based capitalism, but D'Souza paints him as a radical new cause.  It was George H. W. Bush's administration that signed the anti-American, anti-colonialist UN Agenda 21. If anti-colonialism is new to the highest levels of American policy making, as D'Souza claims, why did Bush sign Agenda 21?   It is true that Obama is aggressively implementing Agenda 21, but if the Republicans oppose it, why did Bush adopt it? What did Bush mean by new world order, a phrase taken out of the history of Progressivism and Skull and Bones, and does Bush's new world order differ from Obama's in more than a few details?   

Since the beginning of Progressivism in the late 19th century, the Progressives have posed false dichotomies, aiming for a synthesis that differs from both thesis and anti-thesis. The roots of Progressivism were in the nineteenth century German universities where the first American Progressives, such as Daniel Coit Gilman, creator of the modern American university, were educated.  Left versus right, liberal versus conservative,  and Republican versus Democratic  serve to divert attention from the synthesis:  massive rents paid to special interests and Wall Street via the Fed's counterfeiting mechanism.  Both Democrats and Republicans have consistently excelled in paying them.  The political synthesis that will result from totalitarians like Obama and Romney is totalitarianism, but the way to fight it is to step outside the conflict and destroy its pretended universality, not to demonize Obama.  The kind of false dichotomy that D'Souza offers is part of the totalitarian trend.

The points that stick in my throat are Obama's apparent anti-Zionism, hostility to Israel, and hostility to the British.  An America that transfers tens of trillions of dollars to banks will not be of much help to Israel in any case.

Mercatus Institute Finds that New York Is the Least-Free State

Dan Elmendorf of Redeemer Broadcasting sent me this video from the Mercatus Institute.  Prof. Will Ruger of Texas State University, San Marcos and Prof. Jason Sorens of SUNY Buffalo used a detailed procedure to rank the 50 states as to their degrees of freedom.  The lowest is New York and the highest are New Hampshire and South Dakota.  The video below provides some additional information about the study. 

There is an interesting parallel.  Recall the television miniseries, John Adams. It's fun to re-watch it on Independence Day (see below).   According to its account of the Continental Congress's signing of the Delcaration of Independence 236 years ago, New York was the only state to abstain on the initial vote, while the first state to vote for it was New Hampshire.  Let us also recall New York's contribution to national politics.  Alexander Hamilton, the inventor of big government, lived in New York City for most of his life.  Theodore Roosevelt, the inventor of Progressivism, lived and worked in New York for most of his life. The inventor of the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt, also came from the Hudson Valley.

In my lifetime the State of New York has been in contnual decline. I live here for family reasons.

A Short History of Progressivism

The Progressives claimed that they could expand government, but freedom's improvement in the standard of living and lessening of income inequality would continue.  The improvement in the standard of living stopped and income inequality increased, but the Progressives said that it wasn't due to Progressivism; it was, they said, due to freedom.

Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts Unschooled on Race and Conservatives

Leonard Pitts, Jr. writes a spin piece in today's Seattle Times (h/t Adam Schmidt on Facebook).  Pitts  argues that African Americans would be insane to support conservatives because conservatives have always been anti-Black. 

Pitts illustrates the historical ignorance that characterizes the American left and its pitiful media. Social conservatives in New England were the leaders of the abolitionist movement.  For example, John Brown's father was associated with Oberlin College, where Charles Finney, leader of the Second Great Awakening, was president. Oberlin, a Calvinist Presbyterian School, was the first college to admit African Americans in 1835.  Wikipedia writes of Charles Finney:

In addition to becoming a popular Christian evangelist, Finney was involved with the abolitionist movement and frequently denounced slavery from the pulpit. In 1835, he moved to Ohio where he became a professor and later president of Oberlin College from 1851 to 1866. Oberlin became active early in the movement to end slavery and was among the first American colleges to co-educate blacks and women with white men.^[8]

<sup>Pitts is also wrong because, later in the 19th century, the Mugwumps, who tended to support laissez faire as well as reforms such as the Pendleton Act, tended not to be anti-Black. They were the post-bellum Republican elitists during the period of carpetbaggers and Reconstruction.  During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan's first victims were African American Republicans.  George Wallace, the leader of 1960s racism, was a Democrat and a supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

As Pitts points out, the worst racists were Democrats. Although Pitts calls them conservatives, the racist Democrats voted for Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt just as the northerners did. Pitts's argument is circular:  racism is conservative, therefore, conservatives are racists.  But the advocates of limited government were not necessarily more racist than the supporters of big government and big business--the GOP.  On the one hand, it is true that Andrew Jackson, the founder of today's Democratic Party, was a racist and that his Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney was responsible for the Dred Scott decision.  But the New York labor unions were probably more anti-African American than Jackson was.  That The Miami Herald's syndicated columnist Pitts is apparently unfamiliar with the Draft Riots and organized labor's sympathy for the South during the Civil War is an embarrassment to the pathetic legacy of American journalism.</sup> 

Pitts's argument is tautological:  racists are conservative, therefore conservatives never stood up for blacks.  In fact, the first “conservatives” might be said to have been the pro-laissez faire Mugwumps, who favored the gold standard, opposed tariffs, and favored limited government.   The founder of The Nation, EL Godkin, was not overly supportive of African Americans, but he was no racist.  The Republican Party in the late 19^th century was a big government, pro business party, and mostly laissez faire (at least in words).  

At the same time, the Progressives, especially Woodrow Wilson, were frequently overt racists.  Eugenics was a significant facet of Progressivism, and as C. Vann Woodward points out in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Jim Crow exploded during the Progressive era, not the Gilded Age, which was characterized by policies and leadership that conservatives support today. 

One source of Pitts's confusion (besides being due to an ideologically extremist university and educational system that indoctrinates in left wing groupthink rather than educates, leaving people like Pitts ignorant) is that popular lingo confuses laissez faire with conservatism and social democracy or socialism with liberalism. Thus, the Wikipedia article calls Charles Finney "progressive," but he would be considered a social conservative today. 

On the one hand, the first big government socialist president in American politics was Theodore Roosevelt, and he was not a racist. On the other hand, the first president who was a conservative (defined in opposition to the first "liberal," Roosevelt) was William Howard Taft, and he wasn’t a racist either.  Roosevelt backed Taft before he learned that Taft would not support regulatory solutions to the trust issue—that he would instead support a litigated settlement in the Standard Oil case.  The Taft Supreme Court (Taft was the only president to later become Chief Justice) was  conservative.  Roosevelt ran against Taft in 1912, electing racist-cum-Progressive Woodrow Wilson in Taft’s place.  Wilson began the American socialist project by pushing through the income tax and the Federal Reserve Bank the following year, 1913.  He also implemented Jim Crow in Washington, DC.

Princeton, of which Wilson had been president, has been well known as the most anti-Semitic of the Ivy League universities.   Here is what Wikipedia says about Taft:

Taft met with and publicly endorsed Booker T. Washington's program for uplifting the black race, advising them to stay out of politics at the time and emphasize education and entrepreneurship. A supporter of free immigration, Taft vetoed a law passed by Congress and supported by labor unions that would have restricted unskilled laborers by imposing a literacy test.^[63]

Moreover, the Southern Democrats, the racists,  repeatedly supported left-wing Democrats. They voted for Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson.  It was not until the 1960s that racism and the Republican Party crossed paths.  By then, both parties had become advocates of Progressivism and supporters of the Roosevelt/Rockefeller agenda. In 1944, the entire Jim Crow South voted for the paragon of American socialism, Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Alabama, for example, the state remembered for Rosa Parks and the Montgomery boycott of the 1950s, voted 81% for FDR.  In 1952 and 1956, the most social democratic candidate between FDR and BHO was Adlai Stevenson.  In 1956, the ONLY states in which Stevenson won were the Jim Crow states:   Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.

So Mr. Pitts, you're a doody head.

Progressivism as a Religion

People often raise the question as to why progressives support failed ideas.  As well, many conservative non-Jews are aghast that left-wing Jews continue to support progressives like Barack Obama, who has been threatening the Jewish state. 

The answer is that progressives are neither Jew nor Christian nor any other religion save one. They are Progressives. In his tour de force Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology* Wolf Lepenies outlines the rise of sociology as an attack on literature, but from the beginning sociology was posited not just as a science, but as a religion. Progressivism perpetuates the sociological tradition.

Central to Lepenies's thesis are the sociologies of Auguste Comte and Beatrice Webb. Comte was the author of the terms sociology and positivism.  His early work was an attempt to locate a social physics or sociology at the apex of the sciences.  To do so Comte traces the development and relationships among the sciences.  In his later work Comte attempts to structure a religion based on science.  In the case of Comte the aim is explicit: science not only displaces religion but becomes the basis for a new religion.

Lepenies argues that a parallel development occurs in the work of the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb.  Sidney and Beatrice Webb began as advocates of  a gradually evolving socialism.  But they discarded their Fabian approach with the advent of Soviet communism.  Toward the end of their lives in the 1930s the Webbs became advocates of Soviet communism just as Stalin was butchering millions.The reason the Webbs adopted communism is clear from an excerpt from Beatrice Webb's diary that Lepenies quotes (p. 136):

In the Soviet Union the Communist Party had become a religious order:

It has its Holy Writ, its prophets and its canonized saints; it has its Pope, yesterday Lenin and today Stalin; it has its code of conduct and its discipline; it has its creed and its inquisition.  As yet it has no rites or modes of worship.  Will it develop ritual as did the followers of Auguste Comte?

The same may be asked of American progressivism.  It too has its saints, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, its pope, Barack Obama, its prophets and its bible, The New York Times. Despite progressivism's failure, its adherents remain committed as would the faithful of any religion.

















*Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Progressivism, Narcissism and Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte was the founder of sociology. At least, he coined the terms sociology and social physics. Comte's life's work began in his adolescence and ended with his death at age 59. It is remarkable that Comte envisioned his life's work at age 13 or so and then pursued it for over 45 years. His work was divided into two parts. In the first, he created the notion of positivism, that science is based on laws, that there is a hierarchy of sciences, and, most importantly, that there have been three stages of human development. The three stages are the theological, the metaphysical and the positivist.

Comte believed that society must be united around a single vision and aimed to re-institute the theological order of the Middle Ages based on scientific grounds. It was possible to unite society in a theological setting, but the metaphysical period, which began with Aquinas and carried forward through the Enlightenment and into Comte's day (he died in 1857), was conflictual and so ought to be brought to an end by Positivism. That is, Comte argued that a new religion was necessary to unite all of society in a single faith: Positivism. In other words, he claimed that science ought to be the universal religion. He devoted the second part of his career to arguing in favor of his new Positivist religion.

One of the important points in Lucien Levy Bruhl's Philosophy of Auguste Comte is Levy Bruhl's remark that Comte did not see scientific laws as absolute. Rather, Comte had a modern view of science, which sees its laws as local and subject to reinvention. I was interested to learn how far Thomas Kuhn's ideas in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions rely on Comte's insights. Kuhn sees science as occurring under a paradigm, but the paradigms inevitably reach dead ends and self-contradictions, which lead to scientific revolutions.

If Comte wishes Positivism to be a religion, and science is ultimately based on the limits of human understanding, then Comte's Positivist religion is narcissistic. It is a religion devoted to worshiping scientists' impermanent insights. Dictionary.com defines narcissism simply as "inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity" or, in psychoanalysis, the "erotic gratification derived from admiration of one's own physical or mental attributes, being a normal condition at the infantile level of personality development."

The worship of the scientific insights of humanity, advocated by a social scientist, constitutes this infantile pattern. Carried forward a few decades, there is a link between the ideas of Progressivism and positivism. Positivism argues that sociology can apply the methods of science to morality. Comte believed that scientific methods could be so applied, so that society could be re-engineered along a line that unites all of society in the faith in optimal, scientific approaches to re-engineering society. This is the essence of the message of Progressivism advocated by Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt.

This sheds light on the refusal of Progressives to be pragmatic, and to insist on government solutions even when they repeatedly fail. Although Progressives never went so far to claim that Progressivism ought to be a religion, the same aim was adopted by several strains of Protestantism in the form of the Social Gospel, and has been carried forward in Liberation Theology and Reformed Judaism. It is only a short step from saying that religion ought to be concerned with the well being of society to saying that the well being of society is religion's ultimate end, and given that the ultimate end is found through science, that the insights of sociology are Gospel. Thus, Progressives react to questioning of the claims of The New York Times much as a fundamentalist preacher reacts to disputing the claims of the Bible.

The narcissistic fanaticism with which left wingers, Progressive liberals, and Obama supporters have resented all dissent derives from Comte's Positivism. The debate between Progressivism and libertarianism is a debate about the limits of human reason. In turn, faith in God depends in part on the recognition that our own capacities are limited. Faith in God is logically inconsistent with the unlimited Positivism to which the mainstream of American liberals adhere.

Comte's philosophy can be viewed as a prototype of today's Progressivism, and Comte can be viewed as a prophet of Progressivism. He saw that the worship of scientific insight can replace traditional religion. Although it was too jarring to be achieved in his lifetime, religion itself has served to supply the moral justification for Comte's narcissism.

Progressives believe in science; they consider the pretense of science and Gospel of the New York Times to be sacred. Even when scientists are accused of fraud, as occurred with respect to the climate change researchers last year, Progressives retain their faith in the revealed positivist scripture and defend the sacred from the profane accusation that science is subject to the same cognitive and moral limitations as all other human endeavors.

Sustainability Is a Conservative Ideology

The totalitarian left has long disingenuously misapplied words such as liberal, progressive, democratic and rights.  Liberal means a supporter of freedom, but the left uses it to mean a supporter of authoritarian state control.  Progressive means support for progress, but the left uses it to mean advocacy of policies that squelch progress. Democratic means popular power but the left uses it to mean elite power, especially its own.  Rights imply legal protection from violence, but the left uses it to mean the violent attainment of ends of which it approves.

The latest term that the the totalitarian left has corrupted is sustainability.  Dictionary.com, defines to sustain as to support or bear the weight of; to keep from giving way; to keep up or keep going, as an action or process; and in a number of other ways.  The notion of to keep up or keep going means the same as conserving, which is defined as preventing decay, waste or loss and using natural resources wisely, preserving or saving, as in conserving the woodlands.

The earliest version of environmentalism was called conservation, a term linked to sustainability.  Only fools would fail to conserve resources but to make such conservation or sustainability the main point is niggardly.  The main point is liberty, on which American culture is based. Liberty may imply conservation or conservatism but more often it has implied improvement, change and progress.  Most Americans have come to enjoy the fruit of the experimentation to which liberty has led. Experimentation led to material and spiritual progress, not to conservativsm, reaction and sustainability.

At its heart, the left has always been a conservative movement. It aims to reinstate the tribalism of ancient times and, in the context of today's global society, to do so through  re-institution of the medieval world:  a global secular church, the United Nations; a federal Empire; a banking aristocracy;  and an academic priesthood.  The left's reactionary faith is not humanism but sustainability.  Human beings are the problem and their eradication, their murder, is its ultimate goal.  

Liberty and experimentation lead to discovery.   The innovation of new technology permits humanity to improve its standard of living as it uses resources.  Discovery permits humanity to make use of new resources in new ways.  Human beings do not need to fear scarcity so long as they are free to improve their lives, especially in the context of markets that allocate resources so that they are distributed among their best uses.  But if liberty is curtailed, as has occurred here since 1908, experimentation is reduced and progress stalls.


We can do better than sustainability.  Sustainability is for the hunting grounds of kings and princes; the backwaters of pre-industrial and ancient societies; for the frontier of 14th century Europe.  A nation based on freedom thinks in terms of improvement, progress and growth.  It is surely a sign that Progressivism has finally failed that its admitted aim is sustainability and conservation, not progress.

No Tax Compromise and the Demon Democracy

Pamela Odell forwarded this petition to oppose the tax compromise.  The Tea Party's success with the  recent spending bill is a delightful surprise. But it has a long way to go. 

Democracy leads to the increasing power of special interests and so its own implosion. Those adept at manipulating the system, from George Soros to the teachers' unions to commercial banking to the pharmaceutical industry to the auto industry, have economic advantages that ensure their imposition of their ends on the majority of Americans.  Hence, democracy is anti-democratic. Like the demon whiskey, one drink leads to good results but too much leads to a hangover.  As Progressivism has proceeded in excessive indulgence in democracy it has motivated increasing numbers of Americans to join the special interests that dominate society, to participate in the tyrannical minority.  Universities that do not educate; public schools that focus on indoctrination rather than education; an investment community that pockets massive wealth at public expense; a pharmaceutical industry that markets slight variations on snake oil all have a louder voice in a democracy than do "the people."  As a result, pointless government programs and regulations expand; massive amounts of wealth are transferred to Wall Street; the legal system becomes a source of allocating government largess; and America as a nation goes into decline.

When the nation worked on republican principles  it was successful.  Thus, the direct election of senators; the Supreme Court's "living constitution" doctrine; the Federal Reserve Bank; and the erosion of states' rights have contributed to America's decline; to income inequality;  to declining opportunities for America's young people; to the extinguishing of liberty.

There are positive ways to market freedom and republicanism. School vouchers; greater income equality through abolition of the Fed; greater public voice through the "less is more" philosophy of republicanism; and states' rights reformulate failed conservatism.

The Secession Party

The Secession Party

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.*

The United States of America has become too large and needs to be broken in two. As well, New York and other states that have an urban-rural split ought to be split. The nation has become too large to manage, as today’s Congress attests. This would be so even if ideological differences did not divide the nation and the states. The nation should be broken up into a red nation and a blue nation and New York should be broken up into upstate and downstate.

The Secession Party would aim to dissolve the union, undoing the work of Abraham Lincoln and reasserting the aims of the anti-Federalists, who opposed the scope and extent of federal power that came to pass under Washington.

When the United States was established in 1789, there were approximately four million Americans and 65 members of the House of Representatives. That is 60,000 Americans for every Representative. Today the nation’s population is 310 million and there are 435 members of the House of Representatives, 713,000 Americans for every Representative. Only special interests and financial donors have full access to Representatives. Increasing the number of Representatives would be administratively difficult because a House as representative as it was in 1789 would have 4,800 Representatives.

Historical Precedent

One nation in western history has been equal to the United States in terms of its power: Rome. By the late third century Emperor Diocletian established a rule of four, whereby two senior and two junior co-emperors oversaw a quarter of the Roman Empire each. He also began a shift of power from Rome to other cities. Ultimately, Byzantium, later named Constantinople, survived the western Roman Empire by nearly one thousand years. Diocletian could not have anticipated that quartering the Empire would allow part of it to survive. I claim that halving the United States into free and social democratic halves would allow the free half to survive as the social democratic half sinks into a dark age.

American Decentralization

The forces that encouraged Diocletian to think in terms of decentralization are at play here. Management theorists recognize that there are limits to rationality. The way to run a large firm is to break it into operating divisions. Likewise, the Founding Fathers or Federalists, including Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, believed that the federal government needed to be combined with decentralized states. Under the Constitution the states are responsible for much administration. Part of the reason is that the states are better able to represent their citizens. Large scale leads to complexity which makes management and representation difficult from the center. The federal government suffers from centralization without representation.

The Civil War began an assertion of federal power that has escalated past the point of diminishing returns. The Civil War’s cause, prevention of the expansion of the “slave power” was just. But a side effect of the Civil War was squelching of important aspects of states’ authority. It was not and is not clear that states do not have the right to secede or to nullify their participation in the union.

Progressivism a Form of Insanity

Recently, I had a discussion with an attorney who believes that regulation is desirable. I pointed out to him that workers’ compensation does not work. He agreed. I pointed out that the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) has not worked well. He did not know much about it, but he was willing to agree. I pointed out that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which was meant to limit monopoly, has had the effect of expanding the size and power of big business. I pointed out that the Federal Reserve Bank has massively subsidized the wealthy at the expense of the poor. I pointed out that Social Security turned out to be a wealth transfer vehicle from the 21st century’s workers to the 20th century’s retirees. He offered no meaningful counter-arguments, only to say that the sub-prime crisis was due to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. But he could not explain how, after 75 years of securities regulation Wall Street is more destructive than it was in the 1920s.

Despite the long list of regulatory failures, the left-wing attorney believes that regulation must be increased. He suffers from a religious mania with which it is impossible to argue.

A recent study found that about two or three percent of government agencies are ever terminated. In contrast, 80 percent of businesses fail within their first five years. People who believe that government programs, no matter how destructive, cannot be terminated are incapable of rational discussion.

Since there is no common ground between those of us who believe in freedom and those who believe in socialism, there is no longer common ground required for a single nation. The United States was founded on a belief in freedom. But half the nation believes in the slavery of social democracy, in tyranny of the majority. The union is no longer tenable.

Large Scale Has Advantages

Large scale has advantages. These include the ability to support a strong military and to permit large scale economic activity. However, there are limits to these kinds of advantages, and there is no reason why independent units cannot permit large scale economic activity across borders.

The advantages of large scale have limits as do the advantages of small scale. There needs to be balance. But under the influence of New Deal Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans the nation has discarded the notion that small scale offers any advantages. When government employees are paid 40 percent more than private sector employees, it is just in the centralizers’ opinions. When private sector firms innovate, it is greed and must be regulated. No degree of centralization is sufficient for America’s big government mono-maniacs.

Party System Committed to Large Scale

Left-wing Democrats and the Rockefeller Republicans claim to hate each other. But both favor large scale. The Democrats have ritualized regulation. The Republicans have ritualized big business. The fact is that big business would not exist without big government, and vice-versa. Just as regulation has repeatedly failed even as the Democrats mindlessly chant its mantra, so has big business repeatedly failed as the Republicans chant its mantra.

Need for a Pro-Secession Party

The election of Barack H. Obama has proven that American democracy no longer functions. The nation is too large to represent its citizens. Smaller units are needed now. The two party system is too corrupt to permit the decentralizing impulse. A new, pro-secession movement needs to energize America.

*Mitchell Langbert is associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. He blogs at http://www.mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com/.

Reflections on the BP Oil Disaster

The issue before the nation is the BP oil disaster.  I do not watch television news but obtain snippets while in public places like my gym.  I suspect the key issue behind the spill and its handling has not been discussed. That is BP's incompetence, which reflects the Progressive economic system's decline.  BP is not a free market, competitive institution.  Rather, it is a product of government subsidy and protection.  The government subsidization that has given power to an incompetent management like BP's arises from Progressivism's regulation and subsidization of big business; its emphasis on interpersonal skills and looks in employee selection; its emphasis on the ability to "get along" rather than to get the job done; and its emphasis on paper credentials like college degrees rather than performance. 

There is a competency gap in American society.  It originates from the lack of competitiveness of American business, that in turn arises from the protections government affords business in a variety of ways but especially through the Federal Reserve Bank's subsidization of interest rates and the imposition of regulation and income tax on small producers. The succor that the state provides to big businesses inhibits the innovation that characterized the gold standard-based capitalist economy of the post-bellum nineteenth century.  Progressivism, a radical form of Whig elitism, claimed that it was establishing government as a stabilizer of the economy and a countervailing power to favor justice.  In fact, the economy has become less stable and less just following Progressivism's advent in the 1890s.  The economic policies of Progressivism created racially divided inner cities.  It smashed the competitive spirit of small business.  It served to transfer wealth to university-supplied economic elites. 

One of Progressivism's most important effects was the replacement of inner-directedness or individualism by other-directedness or stylish conformity and "keeping up with the Joneses". This effect took place in several stages.  It was not an effect that the Progressives or their New Deal successors anticipated.  It occurred as follows. Progressivism created protections for business. It also advocated increasing efficiency for business and for a time encouraged implementation of efficiency through the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose book Principles of Scientific Management  outlines one, not the only one but one, approach to managing work well.  But Taylor's and other management theories, such as Elton Mayo's 1930s human relations school and, in the 1950s, Frederick Herzberg's two factor theory of motivation (the idea that you motivate workers through opportunity for achievement), were never widely adopted.  Nor have the chief insights of human resource management that also arose in the Progressive era been adopted as widely as they should.  Thus, the scale of business increased while the competency of business did not keep pace.   For example, General Motors was a dynamo of innovation beginning in the early 20th century, just following the introduction of Progressivism.  As Progressive ideas circulated, GM became a bastion of conformity; of yes-man-ism; of groupthink.  It blamed its organizational problems on labor unions.  Meanwhile, Toyota implemented lean manufacturing and total quality management concepts in the 1950s. It literally took GM fifty years to catch up, if it has caught up.

In the 1950s, books advocating other-directed interpersonal skills like How to Win Friends and Influence People became staples of business success.  The emphasis was not on how to make work more efficient, which was Frederick Winslow Taylor's interest, but in how to get along; how to make people like you; how to fit in.  This reflected the sociologist David Reisman's observation that other-directedness was replacing  inner-directedness in urban centers dominated by university graduates.

Not that achievement orientation had ever completely disappeared.  But in the centrally planned, Federal Reserve-subsidized sectors of the economy, the world of large corporations and Wall Street, conformity became paramount, as did paper credentials.  In New York City parents began to vie to get their children into the best nursery schools so that they could get into the best private schools and then into the best Ivy League colleges so that they would present a good package to Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, and in turn prove that they were the most eligible for public bailing out.  The idea that the most competent employee ought to rise to the top had died long before.  All that mattered was conformity to elite norms.  American business was no longer the powerhouse of innovation it had been until 1950.

This brings us to BP.  I can picture the management of BP: educated at elite schools; tall in height; masculine or feminine; good looking; well dressed; capable of holding their own with the best groomed elite of Wall Street.  Have these men and women been selected because they are the best engineers; the best managers; or the best planners?  Or have they been selected because they conform to the social standards of the economic elite; they fit in, are physically attractive and so ought, in the vision of Wall Street's analysts, to run businesses.

Progressivism has destroyed America's future.  Now, its incompetence is destroying the environment.   A just economy would require all firms to bear the costs of the externalities that they generate.

Polisphilia: A Modern Mental Disorder

"Polisphilia" means love of the state.  During the age of Pericles in fifth century (BC) Athens, the new governmental form of democracy gave birth to political leaders who had to persuade others. Sophists were the first teachers of legal and interpersonal skills necessary to the task of political success. Among their students were the first polisphiliacs, individuals obsessed with love of the Athenian state.

The modern obsession with the state grew out of German historicism.  Hegel thought so highly of the German state that he saw it as the end of history.  Marx hated the freedom and progress associated with laissez faire capitalism and yearned for a return to manorial servility, which would only be possible through the totalitarian restructuring of society.  He fantasized a statist dictatorship of the proletariat that would supplant liberty and suppress all who might disagree with his ideas.  Hitler, as well, saw the Third Reich as an object of veneration that would return Germany and the world to a romantic feudal order ruled by a barbaric master race through a totalitarian state that paralleled Stalin's ("socialism in one country") Soviet state and was embodied in Hitler's persona.

Polisphilia arrived in America from related sources.  Americans had been trained to distrust the state and to limit its powers.  But during the Gilded Age after the Civil War more than 10,000 Americans went to German graduate schools. They returned to found the American research universities at Johns Hopkins and Clark University and to reinvent Harvard.  As well, Richard T. Ely founded the American Economics Association, which initially was aimed to encourage institutionalist or historicist economics.

The Americans who returned from Germany educated others, and the leading Progressives of the 20th century such as John R. Commons, Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl advocated ideas that closely followed the historicist model.  This model considered the state to be the paramount human achievement.

Besides the large number of Americans educated in Germany after the Civil War, Americans were susceptible to the Progressive message because they had become suspicious of big business and hoped for a means of addressing the threat that they believed big business posed. The solution that the Progressives offered was big government.  But big government was not and could not be instituted without the succor of big business.  In fact, what the public objected to about big business was its ability to corrupt government.  The Progressives'  solution to the power of big business was to make government bigger. As polisphiliacs, the Progressives did not anticipate that the size of government would not change the motivations of government officials. To a polisphiliac, the state can do no wrong, and has a supernatural ability to solve all problems.  The Progressives could not believe that the bureaucrats and politicians employed in a larger government might be just as or even more corrupt than those employed in a smaller government.  There is no conceivable reason why the size of government should change human motivation.  But Progressive polisphiliacs beat the drum of big government relentlessly, regardless of its prospects.  Hence, from the beginning there was an element of irrational fanaticism in polisphilia.

Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican from New York, was the most important Progressive politician. He established the Federal Trade Commission (which aimed to be the first step toward socialist control of the economy through price controls) and his successor-cum-opponent William Howard Taft aimed to prosecute trusts under the Sherman Anti-trust Act.  But Roosevelt and Taft did not aim to attack all trusts, only "bad" trusts that might violate common law principles. Part of the reason was that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act never aimed at doing anything other than apply common law principles at the federal level.  Due to a surprise decision led by Justice John Marshall Harlan in the late 1890s, large companies, even if compliant with common law principles, were held to violate the Sherman Anti-trust.  The year of Harlan's death, 1911, the Supreme Court reversed this and held that large companies did not necessarily violate the anti-trust law merely because they were big.  However, the Sherman Anti-trust Act is clear that collusion among small companies violates the anti-trust law. So the ultimate effect of Roosevelt's and Taft's anti-trust project was to encourage the merger of companies and to harm smaller businesses which could no longer stabilize prices through collusive agreement.  The end result was, of course, increasing concentration of business, quite in the interest of large firms.   

Despite the dismal history that Progressive polisphiliacs had on offer, polisphiliacs demonstrated an obsessive unwillingness to revise their unflagging faith in government.  The reason is that in the late nineteenth century a doctrine called the Social Gospel transformed Christian faith into a social movement. Jane Addams and other Progressives were directly influenced by the Social Gospel.  The Social Gospel remains influential in the mainline Protestant churches.  It is a small step from saying that social action has a religious justification to saying that the state, as an instrument of such social action, is the object of religious veneration.  Thus, the advocates of the Social Gospel have a tendency to worship the state rather than God.

Not to be outdone, left-wing Catholics have since the 1970s advocated "liberation theology".  Outside of the Orthodox Jewish faith, Social Gospel Judaism is the dominant faith among American Jews.  Like their mainline Protestant and Liberation Theology brethren, Social Gospel Jews worship the state rather than God. This admixture of religious fervor and Progressivism results in the mental disorder known as polisphilia.

The fixation on the state as an object of worship likely has grounds in the anxiety that people feel in the face of freedom.  Being free to make one's own decisions, to make mistakes, to suffer the humiliation and financial loss of a failed business, is threatening to the self-concept.  Moreover, many who follow the Social Gospel faith rely on the state for their sustenance, as academics, school teachers, attorneys, bureaucrats, Wall Street bankers who receive ongoing subsidies from the Federal Reserve Bank, corporate executives who rely on government for contracts, support and protection, and the like.  These recipients of government welfare need to displace the guilt that they feel at (1) being wealthier than most taxpayers and (2) exploiting government and those poorer than themselves to further their own personal gain.  The response to such guilt is to claim that government is necessary to help humanity and that they are interested in expanding government primarily to help the poor, not themselves. 

Of course, polisphiliacs suffer from considerable cognitive dissonance or mental conflict. On the one hand they claim to care mainly for the poor. On the other, their standard of living and livelihoods depend on extracting gains from the poor in order to satisfy themselves.  This cognitive dissonance results in obsessive, often extreme degrees of delusional fantasy and at times hallucinations.  To wit:

-Polisphiliacs frequently believe that the public education system, which has rendered American students innumerate, illiterate,historically ignorant and lacking in the most basic of social skills is functioning successfully

-Polisphiliacs have a tendency to fantasize that government does a great job of maintaining streets and highways as well as infrastructure of all kinds

-Polisphiliacs believe that the Post Office is a major success

-Polisphiliacs believe that the New York City subway is a major success and therefore government should run the health system

-Polisphiliacs believe that socialism worked so well in India, the USSR, North Korea, Cuba and China that it should be imported here

-Polisphiliacs believe that the economies of Europe are as creative and innovative as the economy of the Untied States

-Polisphiliacs believe that the reason that 4 out of 5 new businesses fail but less than 3% of government programs fail is that the government programs are better executed and that government bureaucrats are more talented than private sector entrepreneurs

-Polisphiliacs believe that when government provides a service it is necessarily excellent and not to be criticized but that anything that private sector firms do is faulty


Polisphilia as a mental illness is spread via schools and universities.  Because psychologists and psychiatrists themselves are, as frequent beneficiaries of state largess, polisphiliacs, they are unwilling to classify it as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Jewish Socialists Continue to Collaborate with the Holocaust

I recently blogged on Hannah Arendt's discussion of Jews' cooperation with the German National Socialists in their own mass murder through the Judenraten, the Jewish Councils that assisted the Nazis in facilitating an orderly movement of Jews into concentration camps. While Hannah Arendt attributes their cooperation to the moral decline associated with National Socialism, I claim that socialism per se, national socialism, socialism in one country or of any other variety, contributes to obedience to authority that in turn leads to collaboration with tyranny. Glenda McGee recently forwarded my blog to a left wing activist (and published poet) in the Village of Woodstock, NY who briefly responded to my blog and I respond to his comments.

The founding fathers, especially the Anti-Federalists, viewed private ownership of guns and the ability of private citizens to constitute a militia as crucial to defense against tyranny. English history is full of instances of taxation and tax revolts, and as well, other forms of tyranny such as religious suppression. But the founding fathers, although some like Hamilton were in fact socialists, could never have envisioned a system as horrific as the socialism that was conceptualized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nor the mass murders to which socialism led in Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, China, Germany and worst of all, the USSR.

The respondent writes:

>Yes, we (human beings) are almost always complicit, to a greater or lesser degree, in our victimization at the hands of other human beings. This is not news. Native Americans allowed themselves to be used as scouts by the U.S. Army in its brutal campaigns against the Indians in the mid- to late-19th century. Closer to our time and more apropos of the behavior of Jewish councils in World War II, the French notoriously collaborated with the Nazis (the "Resistance" was much, much smaller in number than postwar myth makes it out to be), as did citizens in every country the Nazis invaded (think of Quisling in Norway, whose name has become synonymous with treachery to one's own people). To posit that this very widespread human tendency to save one's own skin at the expense of others has something to do with an ingrained "tribal socialism" is misleading.

>Also, unless I'm mistaken, the Jewish councils were mostly composed of upstanding members of the community — the more well-to-do, the upper class. These people did not have socialist ideals; they had vested interests in maintaining the status quo. And we should note, too, that as far as Hitler was concerned, there was not a lot of difference between socialists (or communists) and Jews; they were all fodder for the ovens.

My response:

>Do upper class American Jews like George Soros and half of Hollywood have socialist or capitalist ideals? Since Soros was a prime backer of Obama, as was Warren Buffett, might we conclude that socialism and upper class socioeconomic status go hand in hand? And why would it have been different in the 1940s?

The leading Jewish Progressives in pre-World War II America included: Walter Lippmann, Walter Weyl, Bernard Baruch and Robert Moses. All were German Jews from upper class backgrounds and all were socialists or bordering on it (Progressive/corporatists like Moses or Baruch). Likewise, the leading WASP socialists of the pre World War I period were often trained in German universities, which were the source of Progressivism in America. The reason that Progressivism grew so rapidly in the US was the large number of upper class US graduate students who went to Germany for graduate school in the post Civil War era, the Gilded Age, at a time when only 5% of the population attended college. The graduates came back advocating the same socialism that upper class Jews of German ancestry like Walter Weyl advocated when he taught at Wharton.

It was the upper class that was most strongly socialist and this was true in the US going back to Alexander Hamilton, who advocated a socialist (government owned) manufacturing industry. The Whigs were the upper class, more socialist party in America between 1830 and 1856. Thereafter, the Republicans were the more socialist/upper class of the two parties (they were basically the same as the Whigs) until 1932, when the Democrats adopted Whig socialism cloaked in Jacksonian rhetoric, which has always been a lie. Of course, the socialism of Hamilton would not have repealed private property rights or fostered tyranny to the degree that the Marxist advocates of socialism in one country or the National Socialists of Germany did.

In America, socialism was advocated most strongly by the patrician Theodore Roosevelt and his advisers, Herbert Croly and George Perkins, president of International Harvester and adviser to JP Morgan before TR's patrician cousin, FDR, picked up the mantle. Socialism by its own nature favors the upper class because they can more flexibly implement their whims when all of the nation is forced to live at their mercy. Hence, the segment of the upper class with strongly developed power needs (Kennedy, Soros) have always been socialist leaders.

As far as Hitler, not only did he not mind socialism, he was an aggressive socialist himself. Prior to Hitler, the Nazi Party had been called the German Worker's Party. Its 25 point program was socialist and included advocacy of expansion of national health insurance. "'The German Workers' Party name was changed by Hitler to include the term National Socialist. Thus the full name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) called for short, Nazi." Note that the terms "national socialist" that Hitler adopted and "socialism in one country" that Stalin adopted are logically equal. As a result, left-wing historians prefer to incorrectly call Hitler "fascist".

Nazism was very much socialist in operation. Hitler's government oversaw and directed industry. Germany's was a socialist, centrally planned economy.

Without socialism the Jews would have been much more able to resist. For instance, if they had owned guns and had private property rights resistance would have been much easier. Who favors gun control today, socialist Jews or the Tea Party? In other words, American Jews continue to advocate the holocaust accomodation that killed the Jews in Germany. They call themselves "progressives" in doing so.

Nazism was financed through the same Keynesian economics that Jewish progressives and neo-conservatives advocate today. Nazism was very much liked by progressive Democrats of the World War II era, such as Joseph Kennedy, who advocated appeasement and lost his job as ambassador to Britain because he said that Germany was the new progressive model and democracy was finished.

As well, the Swedish socialist economist Gunnar Myrdal was an open supporter of Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s. The socialist Swedes were officially neutral but quietly admired and supported Hitler (including his anti-Semitism, according to some) through the war.

It seems evident that the socialist impulse toward belief in collectivism; toward belief in the justice of unlimited majority power; opposition to individual rights such as the right to bear arms and the right of private property; belief in the right of the state to monopolize money and redirect its value into the hands of the military and banking elite all militate toward holocaust risk to this day. Socialists believe that the collective ought to have authority over the individual. Where in socialist ideology is there emphasis on the right of the individual to resist forcible tyranny of the collective? People who trust in the authority of the state are more, not less, likely to trust in the authority of the Nazi state, or of some future tyrannical state.

Even today, the increasing power of the United States is viewed as tyrannical by Jewish libertarians, but viewed with ardor by Jewish socialists. In their eyes, the state can do no wrong. So where would the Jews of Europe have found the intellectual resources to resist the Nazi state? Where in the socialist imagination would such resistance reside?

Milton Friedman made similar arguments in Capitalism and Freedom, and he was right. The Jews have been their own worst enemies. The current positions of the majority of Jews are exactly the same as those that were widespread in Germany between 1880 and 1920 and that are directly linked to the rise of Nazism.