A few years ago there was a public discussion about the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education's (NCATE's) requirement that education schools provide "social justice" training. Several students have been expelled from education and social work schools because they lack "social justice dispositions". NCATE eliminated its social justice disposition requirement in response to pressure from Steve Balch and the National Association of Scholars, but many education schools still require that students demonstrate "social justice dispositions". However, such a requirement is illegal if it involves ideological indoctrination. Last fall, as I was reading Herbert Croly's Progressive Democracy, I realized that the concept of "social justice disposition" is directly taken from the ideology of the Progressives, to include Croly and likely John Dewey. Walter Weyl in his Progressive classic New Democracy writes about social rights in his chapter entitled "The New Social Spirit". Note that the concept of "social rights" is fundamental to Weyl's ideology and he links it directly to socialism and opposes it to individualism. "Progressive education" has a long history and is intimately linked to John Dewey's philosophy. Dewey, like all thinkers of the early twentieth century, was well aware of Weyl's and Croly's work (pp.161-5):
"The inner soul of our new democracy is not the unalienable rights, negatively and individualistically interpreted, but those same rights, 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,' extended and given a social interpretation.
"It is this social interpretation of rights which characterizes the democracy coming into being, and makes it different in kind from the so-called individualistic democracy of Jefferson and Jackson. It is this social concept which is the common feature of many widely divergent democratic policies...
"To-day, no democracy is possible in America except a socialized democracy, which conceives of society as a whole and not as a more or less adventitious assemblage of myriads of individuals. The old individualistic system pictured the individual freely bargaining with the state...The individualist point of view halts social development at every point...'Government should rest upon the consent of the governed' is a great political truth, if by the 'governed' is meant the whole people or an effective majority of the people; but if each individual governed retains the right at all times to withhold his consent, government and social union itself become impossible...
"...the engine of taxation, like all other social engines, will be used to accomplish great social ends, among which will be the more equal distribution of wealth and income...The government of the nation, in the hands of the people will establish its unquestioned sovereignty over the industry of the nation..."
"In the future we shall enormously increase the extent of regulation. Not only can we pursue an active social policy by means of the regulation of industry, but we can also so direct and restrain and guide the strong economic impulses of society as to make the product of industry not only larger, but more widely and more fairly distributed."
In the chapter "The Social Problem of the Democracy" Weyl adds:
"Our future education must exalt social obligations above mere competitive egoisms....It must be an education which will aid society in the conservation of the life and the health of the citizen and in their progressive development."
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Phil Orenstein on Fahad Hashmi
Phil Orenstein's trenchant article "No Terrorist Left Behind" appears in the current issue of Frontpagemag. Orenstein traces the pro-terrorist atmosphere among leftists in universities. Orenstein writes that:
"According to the indictment filed in Manhattan federal court, he (Fahad Hashmi) was charged with providing and conspiring to send money, material support and military gear including night-vision goggles to associated al Qaeda fighters in South Waziristan, Pakistan to use against United States forces in Afghanistan. The charges carry a maximum prison sentence of 50 years. Due to a violent outburst attacking arresting officers at Heathrow Airport, and shouting that he hoped they would be killed, bail was denied at a hearing and he was placed under secure lockdown."
Yet, oddly, over 500 academics have signed a petition protesting Hashmi's arrest and treatment. These same academics include a swathe of those who supported Ward Churchill's statement that the 9/11 victims were "Little Eichmanns" and many spread nonsensical lies such as the claim that the United States and George Bush perpetrated the 9/11 disaster.
Orenstein notes that:
"According to the NYPD intelligence report (2007), Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, Hashmi became radicalized while he was a student... Those who knew him described him as a quiet, bright, and caring young man who was passionate about Islam but not overzealous. However, Hashmi as well as many young Muslims in New York City struggling with their identity, often fall victim to extremist Islamic ideologies."
As well, university 9/11-deniers have attacked the distinguished Professor Sharad Karkhanis when he attempted to bring this and similar abuses to light. Professor Karkhanis has been subjected to a frivolous, $2 million law suit. The named plaintiff, Susan O'Malley, has publicly stated her case against Karkhanis is "silly", yet she has forced him to incur legal fees to defend himself against the Professional Staff Congress, the CUNY faculty union's, surreptitious suppression of free speech.
Phil Orenstein does a public service by bringing these often secretive academic abuses to full public view.
"According to the indictment filed in Manhattan federal court, he (Fahad Hashmi) was charged with providing and conspiring to send money, material support and military gear including night-vision goggles to associated al Qaeda fighters in South Waziristan, Pakistan to use against United States forces in Afghanistan. The charges carry a maximum prison sentence of 50 years. Due to a violent outburst attacking arresting officers at Heathrow Airport, and shouting that he hoped they would be killed, bail was denied at a hearing and he was placed under secure lockdown."
Yet, oddly, over 500 academics have signed a petition protesting Hashmi's arrest and treatment. These same academics include a swathe of those who supported Ward Churchill's statement that the 9/11 victims were "Little Eichmanns" and many spread nonsensical lies such as the claim that the United States and George Bush perpetrated the 9/11 disaster.
Orenstein notes that:
"According to the NYPD intelligence report (2007), Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, Hashmi became radicalized while he was a student... Those who knew him described him as a quiet, bright, and caring young man who was passionate about Islam but not overzealous. However, Hashmi as well as many young Muslims in New York City struggling with their identity, often fall victim to extremist Islamic ideologies."
As well, university 9/11-deniers have attacked the distinguished Professor Sharad Karkhanis when he attempted to bring this and similar abuses to light. Professor Karkhanis has been subjected to a frivolous, $2 million law suit. The named plaintiff, Susan O'Malley, has publicly stated her case against Karkhanis is "silly", yet she has forced him to incur legal fees to defend himself against the Professional Staff Congress, the CUNY faculty union's, surreptitious suppression of free speech.
Phil Orenstein does a public service by bringing these often secretive academic abuses to full public view.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
The Bush Administration's French-Style Socialism is Impoverishing You
A poster on this blog linked to a Time article arguing that America is becoming more like France, and the article is right. The transformation is nothing new, though. It goes back to 1901 and the assassination of President McKinley. At that point, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican vice-president with an experience base similar to Sarah Palin's, took office. Roosevelt advocated the socialistic ideas of Walter Weyl and Herber Croly, founders of the New Republic. These ideas were largely rooted in European models that had become increasingly attractive to the American elite because a large segment of them had been educated in Europe. Weyl was a first-generation American Jew whose parents had immigrated here from Germany. Weyl was eager to emulate European models only two decades before the holocaust wiped out European Jewry.
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson made tentative steps toward statism. During World War I, Wilson nationalized much of the economy. This history is well documented in Murray N. Rothbard's and Ronald Radosh's New History of Leviathan. Following the war, Wilson repealed much of his central planning and industry cartel edifice. During the 1920s, Republicans Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge did not oppose the statist edifice that Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had otherwise established such as the Hepburn Act. Most important of these was the Federal Reserve Bank, which provided a means for government's management of credit markets, to include the stock market. Later in the 1920s, one of the most aggressive progressives, Herbert Hoover, took a number of interventionist steps to attempt to manage the economy. These included aggressive public works projects such as the Hoover Dam and intervention in the labor market.
Thus, when the stock market crashed due to Fed tightening, the Fed did not take counter measures at Hoover's insistence. Moreover, Hoover had "jaw boned" major corporations into not cutting wages. In other words, the European-style interventionism caused the chief crisis in American economic history, the Great Depression.
Subsequent to the failure of Hoover's French-style socialism, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected on a social democratic platform that aimed to somewhat intensify Hooverite Progressivism. The steps that Roosevelt took, namely adoption of social security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, a pretense of securities regulation and an attempt to socialize the American economy (the National Industrial Recovery Act) that was declared unconstitutional, had the effect of intensifying unemployment by raising wages.
The most important of the socialist reforms that FDR implemented, the abolition of the gold standard, had the effect of providing a long term subsidy to Wall Street at the expense of American wage earners. Real wages increased during the depression even though nominal wages were falling. After World War II, however, real wage gains began to flatten.
In 1971 Richard M. Nixon took another step toward French-style socialism that also furthered the aims of big business progressives. He abolished the international gold standard that had been re-established in 1944. Since 1971, with the Fed freed from any constraint as to expanding the money supply, real wages have been declining due to the Federal Reserve. Americans have been in denial, but our standard of living has begun to sink to the level of France's. This has been made less apparent through an orgy of credit expansion that made credit cards and sub-prime mortgages available to the public. This was only possible because of French-style socialism. The French are not so cynical as the Americans, so they do not use credit in this way, but without government intervention the sub-prime crisis and credit card phenomena would not have been possible.
Corporate America has been the chief beneficiary of French-style socialism brought to America, and corporate America's apologists in academia and in the media have been eager to justify the expansion of statism, the virtues of the Federal Reserve System and Keynesian economics.
The left, unable to cognize the economic effects of this system (with exceptions such as William Appleman Williams) celebrates the expansion of the American state.
One of the tragedies of the Francification of the American economy has been the decline in substantive innovation. This tracks events in England. France was never an overly important country economically. In the 19th century, in response to increasing laissez-faire, the British economy became the most innovative in the world, and England became the wealthiest country in the world. This did not, as many historians erroneously believe, occur because of imperialism. It arose because of ongoing productivity gains due to innovation.
By the late nineteenth century, America had become the most laissez-faire country in the world. During this period, real wages increased. More importantly, breakthrough technologies changed the world. These include the telephone, AC electricity, the electric light and the mass produced automobile. The increased productivity was met with hostility despite rising real wages. In response to the public anxiety concerning the creation of large companies and naive interpretations of competition as depending upon the existence of small firms (and lack of understanding of Schumpeterian creative destruction and Hayekian coordination) the Populists and advocates of the Social Gospel as well as a range of other advocates (single taxers, socialists, etc.) pressured for increased government intervention. The Progressives, who took the Populist ideas and molded them into a French and European-style format (Weyl prferred the French Republic as a model) lacked the analytical tools to address this question. In particular, the Progressives believed that the creation of large industrial firms was a static reality; that technological and management innovation had reached its apex; and that coordination could be accomplished through "socialist calculation". All of these assumptions turned out to be untrue. However, the Progressive policies had the effect of squashing innovation. Since World War I, the pace of nineteenth century innovation has been seriously dampened. Moreover, since 1971, the unrestricted ability of the Federal Reserve Bank to expand the money supply has resulted in four things.
1. Wall Street has diverted investment capital into decreasingly productive uses, with the process leading to the sub-prime crisis
2. Inflation has reduced real wages
3. There is less innovation because of the diversion of capital away from optimal uses
4. There is increasing income inequality as workers suffer from inflation due to monetary expansion and the stock and real estate markets have been inflated by low interest rates due to the same process. Since the wealthy own stocks and the poor work, Federal Reserve Policy has been distastefully cruel. Theft is wrong. But to institute an ongoing policy of subsidizing the wealthy at the expense of workers is an especially depraved policy.
The end result of this process is the establishment of a new American feudal socialism along the lines of France's. Like the French, America has become an increasingly stratified society, with an elite that benefits from Wall Street's access to Federal Reserve counterfeit. The average productive worker no longer can hope to save to start an entrepreneurial firm because of bloated home costs and taxes, and entrepreneurship and innovation are squashed by big business's monopolization of credit and its diversion into ill conceived real estate development.
One more note--the level of American political discourse has devolved to the point where there are two Progressive Parties--the pro business socialist Progressives of George Bush and the social democratic Progressives of Barack Obama. Yet, a large percentage of Americans do not agree with either view.
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson made tentative steps toward statism. During World War I, Wilson nationalized much of the economy. This history is well documented in Murray N. Rothbard's and Ronald Radosh's New History of Leviathan. Following the war, Wilson repealed much of his central planning and industry cartel edifice. During the 1920s, Republicans Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge did not oppose the statist edifice that Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had otherwise established such as the Hepburn Act. Most important of these was the Federal Reserve Bank, which provided a means for government's management of credit markets, to include the stock market. Later in the 1920s, one of the most aggressive progressives, Herbert Hoover, took a number of interventionist steps to attempt to manage the economy. These included aggressive public works projects such as the Hoover Dam and intervention in the labor market.
Thus, when the stock market crashed due to Fed tightening, the Fed did not take counter measures at Hoover's insistence. Moreover, Hoover had "jaw boned" major corporations into not cutting wages. In other words, the European-style interventionism caused the chief crisis in American economic history, the Great Depression.
Subsequent to the failure of Hoover's French-style socialism, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected on a social democratic platform that aimed to somewhat intensify Hooverite Progressivism. The steps that Roosevelt took, namely adoption of social security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, a pretense of securities regulation and an attempt to socialize the American economy (the National Industrial Recovery Act) that was declared unconstitutional, had the effect of intensifying unemployment by raising wages.
The most important of the socialist reforms that FDR implemented, the abolition of the gold standard, had the effect of providing a long term subsidy to Wall Street at the expense of American wage earners. Real wages increased during the depression even though nominal wages were falling. After World War II, however, real wage gains began to flatten.
In 1971 Richard M. Nixon took another step toward French-style socialism that also furthered the aims of big business progressives. He abolished the international gold standard that had been re-established in 1944. Since 1971, with the Fed freed from any constraint as to expanding the money supply, real wages have been declining due to the Federal Reserve. Americans have been in denial, but our standard of living has begun to sink to the level of France's. This has been made less apparent through an orgy of credit expansion that made credit cards and sub-prime mortgages available to the public. This was only possible because of French-style socialism. The French are not so cynical as the Americans, so they do not use credit in this way, but without government intervention the sub-prime crisis and credit card phenomena would not have been possible.
Corporate America has been the chief beneficiary of French-style socialism brought to America, and corporate America's apologists in academia and in the media have been eager to justify the expansion of statism, the virtues of the Federal Reserve System and Keynesian economics.
The left, unable to cognize the economic effects of this system (with exceptions such as William Appleman Williams) celebrates the expansion of the American state.
One of the tragedies of the Francification of the American economy has been the decline in substantive innovation. This tracks events in England. France was never an overly important country economically. In the 19th century, in response to increasing laissez-faire, the British economy became the most innovative in the world, and England became the wealthiest country in the world. This did not, as many historians erroneously believe, occur because of imperialism. It arose because of ongoing productivity gains due to innovation.
By the late nineteenth century, America had become the most laissez-faire country in the world. During this period, real wages increased. More importantly, breakthrough technologies changed the world. These include the telephone, AC electricity, the electric light and the mass produced automobile. The increased productivity was met with hostility despite rising real wages. In response to the public anxiety concerning the creation of large companies and naive interpretations of competition as depending upon the existence of small firms (and lack of understanding of Schumpeterian creative destruction and Hayekian coordination) the Populists and advocates of the Social Gospel as well as a range of other advocates (single taxers, socialists, etc.) pressured for increased government intervention. The Progressives, who took the Populist ideas and molded them into a French and European-style format (Weyl prferred the French Republic as a model) lacked the analytical tools to address this question. In particular, the Progressives believed that the creation of large industrial firms was a static reality; that technological and management innovation had reached its apex; and that coordination could be accomplished through "socialist calculation". All of these assumptions turned out to be untrue. However, the Progressive policies had the effect of squashing innovation. Since World War I, the pace of nineteenth century innovation has been seriously dampened. Moreover, since 1971, the unrestricted ability of the Federal Reserve Bank to expand the money supply has resulted in four things.
1. Wall Street has diverted investment capital into decreasingly productive uses, with the process leading to the sub-prime crisis
2. Inflation has reduced real wages
3. There is less innovation because of the diversion of capital away from optimal uses
4. There is increasing income inequality as workers suffer from inflation due to monetary expansion and the stock and real estate markets have been inflated by low interest rates due to the same process. Since the wealthy own stocks and the poor work, Federal Reserve Policy has been distastefully cruel. Theft is wrong. But to institute an ongoing policy of subsidizing the wealthy at the expense of workers is an especially depraved policy.
The end result of this process is the establishment of a new American feudal socialism along the lines of France's. Like the French, America has become an increasingly stratified society, with an elite that benefits from Wall Street's access to Federal Reserve counterfeit. The average productive worker no longer can hope to save to start an entrepreneurial firm because of bloated home costs and taxes, and entrepreneurship and innovation are squashed by big business's monopolization of credit and its diversion into ill conceived real estate development.
One more note--the level of American political discourse has devolved to the point where there are two Progressive Parties--the pro business socialist Progressives of George Bush and the social democratic Progressives of Barack Obama. Yet, a large percentage of Americans do not agree with either view.
James Q. Wilson at the Manhattan Institute
I attended a luncheon sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based institute, and James Q. Wilson was the speaker. The luncheon was at the New York Yacht Club on 44th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. Professor Wilson described research that attributes political ideology to genetic differences. The research is based on identical twin studies. I am sure that this line of research is rigorously documented but I am not convinced of its importance. I raised this question at the end of the meeting: Did the shift from the Federalist-Democratic/Republican to a single party system in the "era of good feelings" (1800-1830) reflect a genetic shift? Did the introduction of new gene pools in the late nineteenth century cause a shift in the party system or party ideologies? Can't the near 50% votes for Democratic and Republican presidential candidates be explained by rational vote-seeking by two competitive, economically motivated parties? I would add--did the shift in Republican Party ideology from that of laissez-faire in the late nineteenth century to Progressivism in the early twentieth century reflect gene therapy on Theodore Roosevelt? In the end, I do not doubt that, as Jefferson points out somewhere in his letters, ideology is linked to temperament, and temperament is likely genetic, I am not at all convinced that ideology is important to American politics or that any genetic link has any practical importance.
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