"No force in the world since 1848 has been more powerful, more deadly, more pervasive, or more persistent, than nationalistic zeal."

"If you had convened a meeting of the great European thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and asked them what would drive future global politics, not one of them would have put nationalism on the list.
    "The leaders of the Enlightenment anticipated a coming age when reason and universal values would shape the course of events. Marx and his fellow travellers trusted that class struggle and economics oppression would serve as the spire to change. The positivists in the camp of Auguste Comte championed science and progress as the driving force in future history. Social Darwinists postulated evolutionary models; political economists attributed power to Adam Smith's 'invisible hand'; and Neo-scholastics put faith in the hand of God. 

    "Everybody had a theory. But none of the thought leaders anticipated a future when war and bloody carnage would be instigated by chauvinistic impulses and love of country. The illustrious philosophers dismissed those as archaic loyalties, irrational sentiments no longer useful for human society, and destined for the dustbin of human. history.
    "But the theorists were wrong. No force in the world since 1848 has been more powerful, more deadly, more pervasive, or more persistent, than nationalistic zeal."

~ Ted Gioia, from his book Music: A Subversive History

As a master of demagogic technique Marx was a genius; for him all politics was only the continuation of war by other means" #QoTD

 

"As a master of demagogic technique Marx was a genius; this cannot be sufficiently emphasised. He found the propitious historical moment for uniting the masses into a single political movement, and was himself on the spot to lead this movement. For him all politics was only the continuation of war by other means; his political art was always political tactics.

    "The socialist parties which trace their origin back to Marx have kept this up, as have those who have taken the Marxist parties for their model. They have elaborated the technique of agitation, the cadging for votes and for souls, the stirring up of electoral excitement, the street demonstrations, and the terrorism. To learn the technique of these things requires years of hard study. At their party conferences and in their party literature, the Marxians give more attention to questions of organisation and of tactics than to the most important basic problems of politics. In fact, if one wished to be more precise one would have to admit that nothing interests them at all except from the point of view of party tactics and that they have no interest to spare for anything else."

~ Ludwig Von Mises, from the chapter 'Destructionism' in his book Socialism: An Economic & Sociological Analysis

[Hat tip Immaculate Perception] 

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Quote of the Day: Marx

"The less you understand the phenomena Marx purported to explain, the more you admire him."
~ economist Peter Klein

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Why Marxism?

Karl Marx was born two-hundred years ago this week, and since then many millions have been murdered in the name of his disastrous creed, and many millions more were tortured and starved in the slave states he inspired.

His economic credo, that “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” is a myth unsupported by empirical evidence.

And, as Clemson University professor Bradley Thompson explains, Marx's moral credo -- "from each according to his ability; to each according to his need" -- is no less than a call to enslave the able while starving the able and needy equally (the only way in which Marx's slaves are ever made equal). A credo of abject immorality such as this deserves nothing more than to be wiped off the face of the intellectual earth.

So why has Marx's siren song been, and still is, so popular, and not least in today's universities? That's where Thompson begins this commemoration of the millions that credo murdered, asking "Why Marxism? (Evil Laid Bare)"

PS: For those like me who prefer reading to watching videos, a lightly-edited transcript of his talk is here. [Paywall, but worth it.]

PPS: Here's the perfect metaphor ...

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Quote for Mayday: "#Socialism is the opiate of the intellectuals"

"Socialism is the opiate of the intellectuals, apologists for mass murder.
    "Unfortunately, these hallucinating apologists for mass murderers do not suffer their vices alone. They spend their days and years pushing false history and evil ideas on university students, who, by virtue of their youth, have insufficient knowledge with which to counter the lies."
~ Andrew Bernstein, from his article 'The Socialist Holocaust and its American Deniers'
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Quote of the Day: Summing up Marxism

 

“The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects - his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.”

― Henry Hazlitt

Quotes of the day: On education

“A Ph.D in education is 'a valid marker' of left wing ideology in education these
days. Anyone wishing to educate children rather than indoctrinate them and
kibosh their chances in life should steer clear of any state validated educational
qualification as the left has a stranglehold on content and delivery.”
- “Teacher,’ commenting at the Spectator

“What you may be used to, if you attend [a] … university that
is committed to ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity,’ is, it’s been said,
being exposed to the ‘multiculturalism’ of experiencing what it’s like to l
ive in the culture of a totalitarian country—on your own campus!—and
to the ‘diversity’ of being taught by Marxists of all races and subcultures.
That is, an environment in which no views are tolerated but those
deemed to be ‘politically correct’—correct by people who don’t know
the difference between true and false or right and wrong and often
attack the very existence of these concepts, and who are thus the last
people in the world to be in a position to judge the actual correctness of anything.”
- George Reisman, ‘The Future of Liberty’

Quote of the Day: Marxism refuted in one sentence

“A wage is money paid in exchange for the performance
of labour, not for the products of labour.”
- George Reisman,
taken from his “Remarks at the Conferral of His Honorary Doctorate from UFM”

Want to understand how this one sentence undermines the Marxist exploitation meme? Read on.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I am beginning to think that Christianity has a lot in common with Marxist-Leninism..."

"I am beginning to think that Christianity has a lot in common with Marxist-Leninism... God is dialectical materialism; Christ is Karl Marx; the Church is the Party, the elect is the proletariat, and the Second Coming is the Revolution."
"How do heaven and hell fit into that?" I asked.
"Heaven is the socialist millennium, of course. I think hell must be the punishment of the capitalists."

And...

"The medieval Church and the Communist state share four basic dictums. Firts and foremost comes the instruction to seek the life of the spirit: seek pure Marxism. Don't waste your efforts on other trivial things. Gain is avarice, love is lust, beauty is vanity.
"Two: Communists are urged to give service to the state, as Christians must give it to the Church--in a spirit of humility and devotion, not in order to  serve themselves  or to become a success. Ambition is bad; it is the result of sinful pride...
"Three: both Church and Marx renounce money. Investment and interest payments are singled out as the worst of evils.
"Four, and this is the most iportant similarity, there is the way in which the Christian faithful are urged to deny themselves all the pleasures of this world to get their reward in paradise after they die."
"And Communists?" she asked.
"If they work hard and deny themselves the pleasures of this world, then after they die their children will grow up in paradise..."
"You missed out number five," I said... "Victory over the flesh. Both Church and Communist state preach that."

- Excerpted from Len Deighton's novel 'London Match.'
Views are expressed by a defecting Communist.

The 2 biggest obstacles to economic recovery . . . [update]

I an article I linked to yesterday, George Reisman explained how falling prices, far from being deflation, are actually the antidote to deflation. They are the antidote, he explained,

because they enable the reduced amount of spending that deflation entails to buy as much as did the previously larger amount of spending that took place in the economic system prior to the deflation.
    Despite the fact that the freedom of prices and wages to fall is the simple and obvious way to achieve economic recovery, two fundamental obstacles stand in the way. One is the exploitation theory of Karl Marx. The other is the doctrine of unemployment equilibrium, which was propounded by Lord Keynes.

Both bad ideas have been embraced by the world’s politicians and economic advisors. Read on here to see both briefly explained, and resources offered to have them thoroughly debunked: The Fundamental Obstacles to Economic Recovery: Marxism and Keynesianism.

UPDATE: “Keynesians are witchdoctors,” says Peter Schiff.

Beer O’Clock: In praise of the eloquent insult

We have twin goals here at here at NOT PC Towers on a Friday afternoon. 

While raising our glasses we also wish to raise the standard of what’s in those glasses - and the quality of insults we hear while drinking from them.  Not for us the simple four-word epithet, not at least when a more silver-tongued sally could prove more devastatingly effective.

That, at least, is our goal.

To this end, why not shake up your martini and peruse the following.

The famous exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison." He said, "If you were my wife, I should drink it."

Lord Sandwich to John Wilkes: "You sir, will either die on the gallows or of the pox." "That must depend, Sir," said Wilkes, "whether I embrace your lordship’s principles or your mistress."

“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” – Tom Waits on wowsers

"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr on an actor

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill

“The trouble with the world is that everyone is two drinks behind.” – Humphrey Bogart

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas

“A triumph of modern science – to find the only part of Randolph that wasn’t malignant and remove it.” – Evelyn Waugh on Randolph Churchill

“A difficulty for every solution.” – Herbert Samuel on the civil service

“I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.” Mark Twain on Cecil Rhodes

“Do you pray for the senators, Dr Hale?”  “No, I look at the senators and I pray for the country.” – Edward Everett Hale

“Like being savaged by a dead sheep.” - Denis Healey of a verbal attack on him by Geoffrey Howe

“Is there no beginning to your talents?” - Clive Anderson to Jeffrey Archer

“Mr Speaker, I said the honourable member was a liar it is true and I am sorry for it. The honourable member may place the punctuation where he pleases.” - Richard Brinsley Sheridan, MP

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend.... if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one." - Winston Churchill, in response.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating

"In order to avoid the scandal of coquetry, Mme de Genlis always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" - Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."  - Mae West

“When they circumcised Herbert Samuels they threw away the wrong bit.” - David Lloyd George (attrib.)

“You were born with your legs apart.  And they’ll send you to the grave in a Y-shaped coffin.” – Joe Orton in What the Butler Saw

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"You have Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder to Cliff Osmond

“Five bowls of muesli looking for a spoon.” NME magazine on prog-rock group Yes

“Her voice sounded like an eagle being goosed.” – Ralph Novak on Yoko Ono

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx

And finally, George Bernard Shaw who, when asked by the conductor of a restaurant orchestra if he would like to request the orchestra to play anything in particular, replied, “Dominoes.”

DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Hail to the Chief!

Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath looks at the coronation of the Messiah …

I write this on the eve of the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States, having earlier this weekend watched a movie based on the life of another American politician, populist demagogue Huey Pierce Long, whose ride could have taken him, as it has with Barack Obama, all the way to the White House.

The movie, All the King’s Men, follows the rise and fall of fictional politician Willie Stark, who becomes governor of Louisiana and narrowly survives impeachment before being gunned down by a medical doctor. Huey Long was governor of Louisiana (and then its U.S. Senator), who narrowly survived impeachment in the state legislature before being gunned down by a medical doctor.

The character of Willie Stark is played by Sean Penn who, as far as I can ascertain is no relation to Robert Penn Warren, the author of the novel on which the film is based. Sean Penn is well known as a left-wing activist who has cuddled up to despots such as Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro. In hindsight, Sean Penn would probably have admired much of what Huey Long stood for and achieved.  

The saga of Huey Long bears fuller examination in the light of the change about to occur at the top of U.S. politics. Barack Obama is possibly the most left-leaning American president ever, and appears eager to deliver his own version of the New Deal – which was the programme of economic mismanagement perpetrated by Franklin Roosevelt that prolonged the 1930s depression, and was the cause of a second one in 1937. President-elect Obama, like Huey Long, promises job creation and redistribution of wealth. Eventually, of course, the socialist house of cards will fall over and there will be spectacular collapse. (The collapse is already underway, reflecting the failed fiscal management and profligate spending of the Bush administration and continued interference in the banking system by the Federal Reserve. )

Huey Long, like Willie Stark and Sean Penn both, was essentially socialist in outlook, even though he couldn’t see it. One of nine children, and too poor to buy text books at university despite winning a scholarship, Long started as a salesman, then went to law school for a year before passing the bar exam at age 22. Most of his legal career was spent in conflict with large businesses such as oil companies and utilities. After several years in elected roles on the Louisiana Public Service Commission, he won on the second attempt, at age 35, governership of the state. His slogan for the campaign was “Every Man A King”, and he depicted the wealthy as parasites who grabbed more than their “fair share” of the wealth pie. He is said to have replaced the traditional north-south division within Louisiana based on religion with class-based differences he could continue to exploit.

Huey Long advocated taxing and redistributing wealth and assets, without regard for how the wealth was created or who actually owned it. He proposed federal money be spent on public works programmes, education and roading, whether or not this spending was authorized in the U.S. Constitution. As governor, he ruled the state of Louisiana as a dictator, ruthlessly persecuting political opponents, often using his political influence to ensure that his enemies and their families lost their jobs and businesses.

Corruption ensured that Huey Long maintained an iron grip on power. The governor’s office continued, under his leadership, to fill vacancies in the state bureaucracy with his favoured appointees. And of course all state employees were expected to pay a tithe into Long’s political war fund.

Long’s legislative programme met some opposition from Americans who had some inkling of what their Constitution actually meant. One school attempted to block the receipt of taxpayer funded textbooks, saying they would not accept charity from the state. The governor, in turn, blocked authorization for development of an air base near the town in question until the school aceepted the books. When things were not going well for Long in the state legislature, it is alleged he would cut the power supply to the building so that alterations could be made in Long’s favour, under cover of darkness, to the official record of representatives’ votes. After winning a U.S. Senate seat, Long installed his puppet in the governor’s mansion and actually used his old office to direct operations when the Senate was in recess.

Despite his public opposition to the commercial activities of big oil companies, Huey Long and an independent oilman formed a company that obtained leases on state-owned land and then secretly subleased the mineral rights to – you guessed it – the major oil companies. He also authorised a plain clothes police force answerable only to him. Little wonder that an armed insurrection backed by two former state governors reared its head in January 1935 – Long’s response was to declare martial law, ban gatherings of more than one person(!) and outlaw criticism of state officials. Eight months later he was shot dead by the son of a judge who had been gerrymandered out of his job after coming out against Long when he was governor.

Huey Long was a complex and rather inconsistent man. There were a few things to admire about his political legacy. He opposed unemployment and welfare payments. He slashed property taxes, and repealed the poll tax. He proposed making the first million dollars of income (1930s dollars, remember) tax-free. The first five million dollars of income would have only attracted $150,000 in tax – makes the Libertarianz Party’s ‘First $50k tax-free’ pledge in the 2008 election campaign seem a bit wimpish, doesn’t it! And he opposed the Federal Reserve Bank on the quite legitimate grounds that it exercised monopoly powers over the monetary system for the benefit of a few private stockholders.

But the very occasional bright spots in Huey Long’s political career were eclipsed by the monstrous erosions in civil liberties and corruption that were a hallmark of his tenure in office, and his support for statism on a massive scale. He opposed Franklin Roosevelt after initially supporting his rise to the presidency, on the grounds that the New Deal did not go far enough and was a sellout to Big Business(!). Yet Long denied that his political programme was socialistic, declared his inspiration came not from Karl Marx but from the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, and saw his policies as a bulwark against communism. Roosevelt, in turn, regarded Long as a political threat (rightly so, as Long planned to oust Roosevelt by running against him in 1936 and splitting the Democrat vote), and had him investigated by America’s legalized bloodsuckers, the Daywalkers known as the Internal Revenue Service. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out.

Barack Obama’s background has been extensively researched by investigators such as Trevor Loudon. His dealings in the past with extremist organizations such as the Weather Underground, and with various fronts for Marxist communism, are now a matter of public record. Obama has said and done very little to dispel fears that the political barometer United States will shortly undergo a violent shift to the left, with inevitable economic destitution and equal poverty for all. Like Huey Long, Obama is a charismatic demagogue with plans to seize the assets of the haves and hand them to the have-nots, notwithstanding the Bill of Rights and other constitutional measures which the founding fathers of America set up to protect individuals from this sort of predation by their own government.

The next U.S. president has been described as the most “loyal Democrat” by one source, and “most liberal” Senator by another. Scary stuff. I foresee hard times ahead for the vast majority of Americans, even those Obama claims he wants to help. How long will it take before the benign smiling face of Obama becomes tense and drawn, when his policies fail to deliver prosperity to Americans? How soon will “change you can believe in” become “change you will accept – or else”?

* * Read Dr McGrath’s column every week here at NOT PC * *

The dictatorship of the middle class

While unreconstructed leftists like the losers at The Double-Standard talk blithely about "trickle down economics,"  they appear blithely unaware that perhaps the best example of "trickle down" currently in operation is Labour's Welfare for Working Families -- the govt takes money taken from you by force, clips the ticket and gives a small portion back, in return for you showing your gratitude in the appropriate way: in the voting booth.

They're also unaware that their American hero Barack Obama -- who Oprah Winfrey calles "The One" and John McCain calls "that one" -- has now moved on to something new: Trickle Up Economics.  Michael Hurd explains:

      Sen. Barack Obama's philosophy of wealth creation should be called "trickle-up" economics. He believes, and states over and over again, that the worker - and the middle-class employee - is the central unit of economic activity. Karl Marx had a name for this idea. It was called the labor theory of value.
Marxists and Obama liberals believe that the little guy creates wealth and that the rich (i.e., those making more than $200,000 a year) steal that wealth from the little guy. Obama liberals see their mission as one of returning that wealth to the little guy. Incredibly, they not only see this as morally just; they see it as economically feasible and desirable. They actually believe this is the way to create and expand wealth.
The next time you hear Mr. Obama say, "Let's spread the wealth around," this is what he means. It means he ignores the indispensable contribution of the innovator, the risk-taking entrepreneur and the capitalist. You ignore them at your peril because these are the originators of wealth. Without them, there will be less and less wealth for Mr. Obama to redistribute.

The politicians don't care if there's less wealth around. But you should.

The world's shortest philosophy books

Researchers at Mississipi University have uncovered some largely unknown 'shorter classics' of the world's best-known philosophers (in fact, shortest classics) that might challenge the view that they're largely humourless. They include:

• Coping with Change by Parmenides
• Watch Your Waistline by Peter Abelard
• How We Can Make this a Better World by Gottfried Leibniz
  
• The Wit and Humor of Immanuel Kant
  
• What I Learned from the Noumena by Immanuel Kant
• Nietzsche's Logic
  
• What Next for Capitalism? by Karl Marx
  
• Our Natural Rights by Jeremy Bentham
  
• Things I Haven't Reconsidered by Bertrand Russell
• Ethical Theory by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Things to Say about Whereof One Cannot Speak by Ludwig Wittgenstein
• What I Really Meant by Jacques Derrida, and
• Our Duties to Others by Ayn Rand

If you need to, ask a passing philosopher to explain the jokes.  [Hat tip Stephen Hicks]

Trotsky beset by blog "fascists"

Not content with starting small blog wars to get his new blog noticed, Chris Trotter is now going wider. After listening to "a fascinating interview" on Radio NZ -- an interview between a blowhard and a blonde "about the blogosphere’s malign influence on the quality of public discourse" -- Trotter now declares war on the whole blogosphere. "There is indeed a 'fascist' quality to the blogosphere," he says.

Certainly we find the same levels of misogyny, anti-intellectualism, and aggression. And, even more worryingly, what I would call “ideological exterminism” -- the notion that your opponents' ideas should not simply be refuted, but annihilated.
Thomas Mann’s famous observation about burning books leading to burning bodies springs to mind.
We live in worrying times.

Worrying times indeed, when the country's most quoted leftist critic is unable to distinguish between the annihilation of ideas and the annihilation of human lives -- between a dagger thrust through a syllogism and an ice pick thrust into a human heart -- and is willing to talk airily of "virtual fascism" just because a large number of bloggers think he talks bollocks.

Has he seen the books heaped up under his window? Can we just ascribe it to the nonsense new bloggers say just to get noticed? Or is he now feeling the chill wind of a new oppression -- of a culture in which corruption can be "courageous," and where principle has given way to the flexing of political power?

Here's Christy Moore with 'Burning Times.'

NB: For the record, 'fascism' is nothing to joke about, or to devalue through over-use of the term. The word "fascism" comes from the Italian fascismo, from fascio, meaning "group." Rather than being the opposite of communism, fascism is simply another vicious variant of the same ideal of collectivism; where the Marxist bases his collective on "class," the fascist's grouping is one of race, or of nation. Where Marxism is a totalitarian philosophy of government that glorifies "class war" and assigns to the state control over every aspect of private life, fascism is a totalitarian philosophy of government that glorifies the state and nation and assigns to the state control over every aspect of national life.

The result is the same: one neck, ready for one noose.

As Ayn Rand observed, the so called opposition of communism and fascism is a malodorous myth -- they are simply two jackals hoping to fight over the same corpse. "For many decades, the leftists [ propagated] the false dichotomy that the choice confronting the world is only: communism or fascism—a dictatorship of the left or of an alleged right—with the possibility of a free society, of capitalism, dismissed and obliterated, as if it had never existed."

It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of “Freedom or dictatorship?” into “Which kind of dictatorship?”—thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice—according to the proponents of that fraud—is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism).

Essentially, it's a choice between a dictatorship that nationalises factories, and one that nationalises people.

The effect is the same -- human destruction. Only the slogans are different.

UPDATE: Owen McShane disagrees ever so slightly:

There remains much confusion between communism and fascism. They are quite distinct philosophies.
Socialism is the dark side of the Enlightenment Tradition. (If science helps you design a bridge then science helps you design society.)
Fascism is the dark side of the Romantic tradition. (Reason is trumped by feelings. Primitive people have greater wisdom than intellectuals.)
Socialism is econocentric. Fascism is not.
Communism combines the two by drawing on the "charismatic leader" of fascism.
Go to "The Rise of the Urban Romantics" here.

I heartily endorse Owen's excellent and thought-provoking article (go read it here), but respectfully suggest however that while agreeing that the two political ideologies have differing origins -- and on this I think Owen makes his case brilliantly -- the source of their power is the same, that is, the overarching philosophy of collectivism that was endemic in the Europe of the nineteenth century; it's no accident that both the communist Marx and the proto-fascist Fichte owed intellectual allegiance to GWF Hegel (whose idea of the authoritarian state as the "divine idea on earth" is one of those "big ideas" one wished had perished with the arsehole who devised it), and nor is it a surprise therefore that the ultimate result of both sick systems is essentially the same: dictatorship in the name of a collective.

It should be clear, then, that the antidote to both these variants of collectivism is their polar opposite: a good healthy dose of individualism.

Change you can *really* believe in -- and help make happen

There are two elections this year -- one in America, one in New Zealand -- neither of which will have the slightest effect either in arresting the cultural decline of either country, or in pointing the way to the fundamental cultural reform that is an urgent necessity in both.

Reason, individualism and capitalism have been under attack now for decades in the U.S., in N.Z. and all around the the world, yet the fundamental philosophical ideas behind those attacks are now themselves in retreat, leaving an intellectual vacuum as shallow as the leading candidates in both elections. 

The fundamental emptiness of candidates and campaign is itself a reflection of that intellectual vacuum.

We all know something is wrong with the world, but just getting angry won't do a thing to arrest the decay.  We have to get smart.

One of those most responsible for the intellectual decay had this to say about the point of philosophy:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it.

The philosopher who said that was Karl Marx.  His philosophical system is as false has hell, which is the only word to describe the places created by his enthusiastic followers, but for a century-and-a-half the followers of Karl Marx and his ilk have succeeded in changing the world for the worse.

It's time for fundamental philosophical change for the better.  That means, in a phrase, change you can really believe in. That's the point of the three lectures about which this post is based, all of them now online. If you take ideas seriously, then I urge you to make the time to watch them.

Yaron Brook and his colleagues at the Ayn Rand Institute have a twenty-year plan to make the culture over -- a plan on which they've already embarked with some success,  a plan which they outline in the third lecture.  You might describe it as "doing a Gramsci," only in reverse.

The first two lectures examine the influence of three important forces on the culture of the west for good and ill -- free market economics, environmentalism, and religion.  Then in the third lecture he uses those examples to make predictions about the future, and extracts lessons for those who seek to inject reason into the culture.

Our eventual goal should be a "culture of reason", one in which intellectual leaders have a deep respect for reason, the world is full of energetic rational producers, great and beautiful art abounds, and material prosperity is valued as moral. Not everyone in this culture will be an Objectivist, but the principles of Objectivist philosophy would be infused throughout this culture. It's hard to imagine such a culture now, but this can and should be our goal...
As a realistic goal in 20 years, we could see a culture in which Ayn Rand's ideas are in wide circulation.  Not everyone will agree with those ideas, but at least ideas such as "egoism", "rational self-interest," and "capitalism" (as we Objectivists understand them) are all part of the mainstream culture, being actively discussed and debated as a serious alternatives to the status quo.
    So how do we get there?  What can we do?

The bulk of this lecture outlines what's being done to make this a culture of reason, and what you can do to help bring this about.

If you don't take ideas seriously, or if reason is not for you, then neither are these lectures.  But if you do and it is, then I recommend tuning in and 'turning on' to what is offered here.  There's no reason that with sufficient financial backing a group of committed activists couldn't effect the same programme outlined by Yaron for American cultural change here in New Zealand -- and no reason we shouldn't start next year, or the minute the election is over.  I invite you to digest the lectures and think about where you might fit in to such a campaign of cultural change.

As Paul Hsieh from Noodle Food comments (and I've relied on his summary for some of the above):

    This was an alarming yet inspiring set of lectures.
    It was alarming in that Yaron Brook and his colleague Onkar Ghate concretized in chilling detail the magnitude and urgency of the threats facing us. But it was also inspiring in that they offered a vision of a positive future that I want to live to see, as well as giving enormously valuable theoretical and practical advice on how we can effectively fight for that future.
  If we make the cultural turnaround that needs to take place in the next 20 years, then future historians will someday look back on this set of lectures as a seminal event in American history. Given that it is likely that many of us will be alive in 20 years (and possibly even in 40 years), then many of us will directly experience the fruits of our action (or lack thereof).
   I for one want to live in that future "culture of reason". I think we have a legitimate shot at getting there, but I also recognize that it is by no means certain. I also know that if we sit back and do nothing, then we *definitely* won't get there.     All I've ever wanted in life is a fighting chance at achieving my goals, and we have one here. And even if I eventually lose, I want to go down swinging, and swinging *hard*. I sure as hell don't want the bad guys to win by default simply because I didn't choose to act to achieve my values.

As someone once said, the world won't change itself.  If you want to live in that future culture of reason, then take responsibility now for helping to make it happen.

For ten years now, the Ayn Rand Institute has been undertaking a concrete programme to make American culture safe for reason once again.  If you'd like to help make New Zealand safe for rational life-affirming values, following the same concrete programme adopted in America, I urge you once again to digest the lectures and think about where you might fit in to such a campaign of cultural change.

You can find the three lectures online at the front page of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights website.  Each lecture is in three parts, and is totally free. (You can navigate to the various parts via the scrolling list that's just below the video box.)

Lecture 1 - Yaron Brook - Introduction; free market economists; environmentalism.
Lecture 2 - Onkar Ghate - Religion in politics and culture.
Lecture 3 - Yaron Brook - The future of our culture; why and how Objectivists can engage in cultural activism.

PS: I know there are a lot of you out there in New Zealand who know what I'm on about.  I know that not just because of the numbers who visit this blog, and who I've met over the years, but because the fourth-highest number of visitors to the Ayn Rand Institute's new website comes from ... New Zealand (see the Alexa rankings here).  There's a lot of us about.  If we can each take effective coordinated action, then I know we can make the change that's needed.  Think about the New Zealand you want to see in twenty years time, and let's start making it happen.

Why I'm a leftie - Trotter

Fresh from his "people I hate" diatribe in last week's Sunday Star, in which "creators of wealth" and "makers of jobs" come in for particular opprobrium, local leftie Christopher Trotter now offers up as an antidote to that 'hate speech' a "things I believe in" column.

It's not because he's a Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist/Trotskyite that he's a leftie -- 'I rejected that credo' long ago, he insists -- it's all about need, you see. Here's the heart of it:

I believe [says Christopher] that human societies arise out of need. The need for food and shelter, the need for intimacy, the need for nurturing, and the need for protection – both from natural dangers, and the aggression of our own species. To secure these needs, human beings must work, individually or collectively, but always with the ultimate goal of keeping strong those innumerable threads that bind our communities in a functioning wholeness.

Did you see the sleight of hand? From whence emerged this "ultimate goal" of "keeping strong those innumerable threads that bind our communities in a functioning wholeness"? How does he jump from individual needs for things like food and shelter to the "ultimate goal" of the "binding" of communities? Of answer, there is none, and never can be.

And from whence, in the world of our Christopher, emerges the food, shelter and "protection from natural dangers" that all individuals seek? How do these things get here? Who produces them, and why? This is the economic rock upon which all the ships of Trotter's statist longings founder -- indeed, it is the economic rock upon which all of Marxism/Leninism founders: explaining how the goods got here. Sheer need alone will not produce them, and no amount of verbal sleight of hand or "I believe" longings can conjure them out of thin air.

The Marxist's answer to how they're produced? Somehow! They observe only that the goods exist, and put their minds only to the job of taking them from those who somehow produced them -- or to dreaming up sophisms to justify the theft.

This, to a Marxist (or a pseudo-non-Marxist like Trotter), is considered 'economic thinking' : It concerns itself not with how wealth is actually produced, a process which to them remains a mystery, but only with how it is to be 'redistributed.' From Christopher, as from every lapdog Marxist, there is no sign he even understands or wants to understand how production happens. To him the question is insignificant. "Individuals and groups by superior strength or simple good fortune are endowed with wealth and influence" ... they were just standing in line at the right time ... "the possession by a fortunate few of social, political and economic privileges serves the community [are] ... privileges granted to them by the majority" ... they are granted by the majority, you see ... "As a social-democrat I look to the state ... to secure for all citizens a healthy and abundant life" ... all hail the state, the great expropriator ... "As a social-democrat I cannot countenance the arbitrary dispersal of the people’s resources..."

The people's resources, you say, Chris? 'What the hell did indolent fat cretins like him have to do with producing any bloody resources?' This is the question you might want to ask yourself as you read on.

According to the Trotter mantra, the likes of food, shelter, wealth, influence and resources are not produced by individual effort, or entrepreneurial ability, or the application of reason to existence -- they arrive by "good fortune," they are granted as "privileges" by the majority -- they fall, in other words, like manna from heaven, to be redistributed as one pleases. These are the sort of sophisms of which I spoke above.

To people like Labour candidate Jordan Carter, trade is immoral. To people like Labour cheerleader Christopher Trotter, production is irrelevant. To both of them, and to all their great social-democratic 'luminaries,' the State is simply a great engine of expropriation, a beneficent behemoth from which all good things apparently flow. "Those charged with governing our country," the Trotter confides, "hold in trust the resources – both natural and social – that are the common property of all our people."

What makes this property "common"? How do these resources come into the possession of the apparatchiks of the state? What right did they have to take them from those who produced them? Of answer to these questions there is none, but neither is there in all the pages of Marx, or Lenin, or Stalin -- or of any of Trotter's present 'social democratic' heroes. The expectation is that need will inexorably arise, and just as inexorably expropriations will rise up to meet them.

Communities simply have rights to goods, according to the Marxist/social democrat, which the state must meet by expropriating them from those who (somehow) have been able to produce them.

What could be more ingenious? A whole social edifice based upon theft!

Thus we see how one man's need becomes the justification for theft by the state, how economic illiteracy becomes a justification for a morality of sacrifice and expropriation, and how the moral cannibalism of altruism underlies the engine of destruction that is the all-enveloping welfare state. To repeat, according to Trotter: "Those charged with governing our country, hold in trust the resources – both natural and social – that are the common property of all our people." When you understand that, in Trotter's view, those who (somehow) possess this magical ability to produce must be considered a resource, you can understand both why they must be enslaved - "they are the common property of all our people" -- and why he hates, as he demonstrated in his revealing diatribe last week, these productive few who have been mysteriously endowed with an ability beyond his own.

And thus we come to the inevitable Marxist conclusion of Trotter's 'I believe,' the linking of ability to need through the enforced sacrifice of the welfare state -- in the words of Karl Marx: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."

Trotter may resile from calling himself a Marxist these days, but it doesn't take too much poking around under the new veneer to see what's hidden beneath the easy sophisms, and that the same blood red flag is still flying.

UPDATE: Ironically, blogger David Farrar, who on Facebook calls himself a "libertarian" , has this to say on the most crucial part of Trotter's sophistry:

Those charged with governing our country, hold in trust the resources – both natural and social – that are the common property of all our people.

Can’t disagree with that.

Dear Galt! He then bewails when Trotter "seems to say the minority have no rights, unless the majority grant them," yet the connection between the two escapes him!

Another example of how to disarm oneself by a lack of sufficient philosophical acumen.

On activism

I've just discovered an astonishing essay from 1953, and from the unlikely pen of an economist:  it attacks those who sniff that any proposed policy or proposal that might alter the status quo, no matter how slight, the change, is "too radical" or unrealistic."

As Clarence Philbrook points out (yes, his name is as unlikely as his profession),

the only thoroughgoing escape from the charge of impracticality is never to advocate any change whatever in existing conditions.  But to take this approach is to abandon human reason, and to drift in animal- or plant-like manner with the tide of events.

He might have been talking about John Key, mightn't he?

As Philbrook commentator Daniel Klein points out,

    The "realism" philosophy must, therefore, come down to a set of beliefs about which policy reforms are politically viable and which are not. It must rest on a set of beliefs about the probabilities associated with various reform proposals. Free banking, for example, however desirable it may be thought to be, is regarded to have such a small probability of realization that it is foolish to even discuss it, and hence is dismissed as "unrealistic." ...
    The probability that free banking, for example, will be realized depends on how many other economist-advisors advocate the reform. "If all, however, follow the 'probability' principle, no one can commit himself until many others (nearly all?) have committed themselves." If making their choices simultaneously, economists' advice will "be the product of infinite involutions of guesses by each about what others are guessing about what he is guessing about what they will advocate."

It's like talking to a row of zeroes, isn't it.  One almost expect to find the word "consensus" -- and one almost does.

    Philbrook is pointing out that if science is what scientists say it is, and scientists are those who practice science, then scientists are playing a coordination game with bad equilibria. One equilibrium in particular stands out for its focal properties. Philbrook (p. 858) writes of the "mutual anticipation ending only in universal support of the status quo."
    The focal power of the status quo shapes the evolution of professional ("scientific") norms. The profession suffers from what path-dependence theorists call "lock-in." Philbrook (p. 847) remarks: "There has grown a widespread practice of cooperation with 'things as they are,' without explicit criticism of them, which is bound to have the effect of active approval regardless of whether such is intended."

As Marx would say in support, the point of philosophy is not just to understand the world, but to change it.  But the status quo merchants aren't just relying on an endless row of zeroes for their judgement; they're not just hung up on belonging and fitting in; they're also scared of real change -- which is why they talk up the bogus change represented by a Key or an Obama.

But the honest man doesn't just seek to fit in and preserve the status quo.  The honest thinker wants to make the world a better place.  Another Philbrook fan, Murray Rothbard concludes (well, I've quoted Marx in support, so why not Rothbard):

    We must make clear our policy convictions not on the basis of what others believe [or say they believe] the best course to be and then try to convince others of this goal, and not include within our policy conclusions estimates of what other people may find acceptable.
    For someone must propagate the truth in society, as opposed to what is politically expedient.
    If scholars and intellectuals fail to do so, if they fail to expound their convictions of what they believe the correct course to be, they are abandoning truth, and therefore abandoning their very raison d'être.
    All hope of social progress would then be gone, for no new ideas would ever be advanced not effort expended to convince others of their validity.

And then the grey ones will have won.

What if?

ONE OF THE FASCINATING things to do when studying history is to speculate about "What if?" questions.

Studying history with Scott Powell offers ample opportunity to speculate.  Scott's current course on the Middle East alone (which you can still join in) offers ample opportunity for speculation.

• What if Britain hadn't nearly bankrupted itself in two centuries of Middle Eastern military adventures in a bid to protect its Indian colony?  What shape would the Middle East's maps be in today if Britain's flawed mercantilist thinking hadn't entangled it in so many misadventures in which it had no need to participate?
• What if Harry Truman hadn't entangled America in the Middle East in a flawed bid to restrain communism?  What use would the bankrupt Soviet Union have been able to make of the Mid-East even if Truman had left the sphere alone? (And what threat would it have been if Franklin Roosevelt and Klaus Fuchs hadn't both in their own way helped to arm the Soviets?)
• What if Dwight Eisenhower hadn't pulled the pin on Britain, France and Israel's recovery of the Suez Canal after Nasser's nationalisation of it?  Would Eisenhower's support for the already successful recovery have helped to nip the incipient Mid-Eastern nationalism in the bud?
• What if Britain and the US hadn't stood back when the oil fields and refineries owned, established and built up by British and American investors were nationalised by tribal leaders and would be nationalist heroes?  Would this have sent a signal to all potential plundererers of American and British property that property rights would always be upheld by American and British governments, and given a valuable lesson in the importance of property rights?

Perhaps the greatest tragedy thrown up by these 'what-ifs' is a real failure of ideas. I've already mentioned the flawed mercantilist thinking that empowered Britain's military misadventures -- an entanglement that cost Britain in both wealth and manpower, without any real gain. 

Perhaps the most important thing demonstrated by the whole tragedy of the Middle East  -- and the Mid-East's failure to ever really lift off is certainly a tragedy -- is the failure to properly communicate the ideas that underpin the freedom and prosperity of the west.   This is the real failure of the west with respect to the non-west.

YOU SEE, ALL THE countries of the Middle East at one time or another were confronted with the need to to shake off their superstitious pasts and to modernise their bad selves (to use the words of educator Maria Montessori, they developed a 'sensitive period' for learning about what made the west great); when confronted with the obvious military and economic superiority of the west all of them looked westward for inspiration  -- but what countries like Turkey and Egypt and eventually even Afghanistan saw when they realised their own backwardness and looked westward for inspiration was not the ideas of the likes of John Locke or Thomas Jefferson or Adam Smith -- the ideas that had underpinned the west's freedom and prosperity -- but instead the intellectual pygmies who then crawled across the intellectual wastelands of the late-nineteenth century who were then doing all they could to undercut freedom and prosperity altogether.

Instead of Carl Menger, Turkey's Kemal Atatutk picked up Karl Marx.  Instead of Frederic Bastiat, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser picked up Frederick Engels.   It's a powerful example of the necessity for good intellectual hygiene and of the power of even bad ideas -- that ideas can as easily destroy as make prosperous, depending on the particular ideas one picks up.  

Each Middle Eastern country modernised at a different time, each picking up the intellectual current of that time -- and unfortunately by the latter half of the nineteenth century when most were modernising, the intellectual current of the west was already fast dwindling to become a cesspool*.  The results in large part can still be seen today, with the secular shibboleths of collectivism and nationalism fighting the secular battle against the superstitious backwardness of Islam, and losing.

You see, the game of 'Historical What-If?'  is endlessly fascinating, and what I've said here has only just scratched the surface: I've only posed questions arising from the first few lectures of Scott Powell's Islamist Entanglement course. 

It's fascinating to speculate for example about what the whole Middle East would be like, hell, what  the whole world be like, if it had never been infected with the stinking collectivism of Marx and the nasty nationalism of the likes of Hegel and the German 'ethnic nationalists': if all the many millions slaughtered by the dictators of the twentieth century had been allowed to live, and if all the billions enslaved by totalitarian ideology had been allowed to live free.

JUST IMAGINE IF THE world hadn't been intellectually empowered to give power to those killers, "those depraved individuals who would rather kill than live, who would rather inflict pain and death than experience pleasure, whose pleasure comes from the infliction of pain and death. Unfortunately," observes George Reisman in his book Capitalism, "there is no lack of such individuals...

[and no shortage of] philosophical justification for [their] murders, such as the security of the State, the will of God, the achievement of Lebensraum,or the establishment of communism and a future classless society. Each of these alleged values supposedly justified the murder of living human beings. As the Communists were so fond of saying, “The end justifies the means.”

And with enablers like Hegel and Marx to  state the ends -- which amount to making one neck for one noose -- the killers were given power and the means by which to carry out their atrocities.  But "just imagine," as Reisman invites ...

In eras that are philosophically and culturally better than our own, [these killers] might even pass their entire lives quietly, in modest obscurity, causing harm to no one. In such a better era, Hitler might have passed his days as an obscure paperhanger, Himmler as a chicken farmer, and Eichmann as a factory worker or office clerk. Lenin would probably have been just a disgruntled intellectual,and Stalin perhaps an obscure cleric. But in the conditions of a collapse of rationality, frustrations and feelings of hatred and hostility rapidly multiply, while cool judgment, rational standards, and civilized behavior vanish. Monstrous ideologies appear and monsters in human form emerge alongside them, ready to put them into practice.

In short, the real lesson from even these few 'what-ifs' is the life-saving necessity for good intellectual hygiene.

How's yours? 
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* Thank goodness New Zealand was settled in 1840, when John Locke and Adam Smith were at least remembered, if not still admired.  The Treaty of Waitangi at least pays homage to the shadow of John Locke, which is really its chief and perhaps only boon. (And thank goodness that when Asian tigers like Hong Kong and Taiwan began to take off in the latter half of last century, they chose to ignore the then-fashionable intellectual fads of the west, and go for prosperity instead)

The "long march through the culture," and the need to attack Trevor

Several blogs including The Hive, Quest for Security and Poneke have been all a-giggle about old Trevor Loudon and his predilection, they say, for seeing "communist fronts" everywhere, even in places as unlikely as the NZ-China Friendship Society.

Taking on established bloggers is par for the course for newer blogs like these bidding for attention, but the Hive and Poneke have enough integrity not to get their facts wrong  when they start a blog war, and they're good enough not to have to resort to blog wars to attract readers.  It's sad that they think they have to.

Gigglers like the 'Quest' bloggers are just useful idiots who know no better, but Hive and Poneke are intelligent enough, I would have thought, to know that the use of front organisations has been a pre-eminent strategy by communists for at least the last ninety years in injecting the foul bacillus of communism into the culture, and to know that if that wasn't the case it wouldn't be necessary to have people like Trevor eager to lift up the rocks of these front organisations to see what's crawling around behind the shiny public faces.

The "long march through the culture" that communism has enjoyed over the last ninety years, despite its bloody history over all of those years, was largely the result of 1)the 'moral disarmament' caused by the suffusion of religious morality and its extolling of sacrifice as a moral virtue -- a political blank cheque the communists have been ready, willing and better placed than the religionists to pick up -- and 2)the strategic thinking of (first) Leon Trotsky, and thence of one Antonio Gramsci, the co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, a talented theoretician who, as Lindsay Perigo explains,

put a distinctively modern, relativist stamp on traditional, dogmatist Marxism. He is Marx laced with Machiavelli (a Gramsci pin-up). Marx had implied the existence of truths independent of human perception; Gramsci cleansed Marx of any taint of objectivity and proclaimed that truth was entirely "pragmatic," "praxis"-driven, determined by the interests of the revolution. Marx had preached the historical inevitability of the triumph of socialism, independent of man's will; Gramsci taught that only the wilful, conscious but clandestine subversion of capitalist culture at every level—a "long march through the culture" as he put it—could effect revolution. He was frustrated that the proletariat had not only failed to rise up against capitalism but had seemingly grown enamoured of it! This infernal reactionary ourage he attributed to the bourgeoisie's "cultural hegemony," their domination of churches, schools, the media, the unions, the arts, etc. The bourgeoisie therefore had to be beaten at their own game, their institutions infiltrated by intellectual moles ... and, by a long, silent, subtle process, brought down.

The moles' agenda was not to be "revolution" explicitly, but something unexceptionable on its face, couched in weasel words with which we're all too familiar: "consensus," "mandate," "justice," "pluralism," "community," "democracy," "global [insert marshmallow noun here]," and so on. (Note the names of two of the groups associated with New Zealand's recent "terrorist camp" raids: “Global Peace and Justice Auckland,” spearheaded by communist John Minto, and “Peace Action Wellington”!)

Ever wondered why the church is riddled with atheist priests?
Think Gramsci!
Where "Liberation Theology" (Marxism set to Catholicism) came from?
Think Gramsci!
Why our schools and universities place social consensus above genuine learning and deal in the currency of Marxism disguised as mush?
Think Gramsci!
Why our newspapers and TV networks, now full of graduates from the schools and universities, do the same?
Think Gramsci!
Why "corporates" are universally despised as evil, even by the corporates themselves?
Think Gramsci!
Why the United States, the last semi-repository of bourgeois values, is "The Great Satan" to Muslim and non-Muslim alike all over the globe?
Think Gramsci!
Where the editor of Salient gets this sort of stuff from, "rebutting" my column on Global Warming:
"Go about your business now, keep consuming. The mindless corporations are protecting your interests— believe it—only lefty politicians subvert real science. Rest assured, greed is a good thing."

[For all of these manifestations of nonsense], Think Gramsci! Via Chomsky in this last instance—but remember where Chomsky got it from!

Other contemporary luminaries influenced by Gramsci include the pomowanker Foucault; and unsurprisingly, and, chillingly, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who just couldn't wait to bring his troops home from Iraq. Brown the weasel-worder, who has forbidden public servants to use the words "Muslim" and "terrorist" next to each other!

There's no question that the Left has taken its "long march through the culture" with devastating success. We are assailed by their bromides at every turn, and the Right has been mortally corrupted by them (as well as its own contradictions). Their "long march," with Gramsci at the helm, has dragged the world to the abyss of totalitarian Hell.

Thank goodness then for the likes of Trevor Loudon, who are happy to keep track of the "long march," however surreptitious the marchers, and for the likes of Lindsay Perigo, who unlike so many others knows that it's going to be a long haul back from the pomowankers and the nihilists, and via a very different path.

"We lovers of reason and freedom have to do a Gramsci of our own," says Perigo, but in favour of reason and freedom and capitalism.  This is a long march on which our culture is in desperate need. 

Who's with us?