The Danger of Emergency Powers: A History Lesson

Below is the second of three reposts in this election season on politics. (The third repost will be on November 1.) The present essay was posted on October 7, 2020, six months after the beginning of what I subsequently labelled covid totalitarianism. I used the terms in seven essays posted in 2021 and ’22.
 
 
Emergency powers, as we have learned in the past six months, are dangerous. Any little tyrant in our local mayoral or gubernatorial office can suspend individual rights at the drop of a hat—or virus—in the name of the emergency.
 
In 1933 Adolf Hitler became dictator of Germany through “emergency powers.” Let’s briefly review how that happened.
 
In 1932 in a round of parliamentary voting, the Nazi Party lost to Paul von Hindenburg, World War I hero and president of the Weimar Republic since 1925. The Nazis, however, won a strong second place. After Hitler withdrew support for Hindenburg a third round of voting in November gave the Nazi Party the largest Reichstag share at 33%. Two prominent politicians and a “letter signed by 22 important representatives of industry” urged Hindenburg (1, 2) to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Hitler immediately gave Hermann Göring a cabinet position in charge of the police, which soon became the State Secret Police, or Gestapo.
 
Emergency powers soon followed. In February 1933 the Reichstag (parliament) building burned, blamed by Göring on the communists, but some historians insist it was started by the Nazis. Hitler then persuaded Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree that eliminated many civil rights, including freedom of speech, press, and assembly, banned the communist party, and allowed detention without trial. (Hindenburg at the time was 85 and said by some to be senile.)
 
In one fell swoop, Hitler acquired dictatorial power. In March, with dissenters surrounded and intimidated by Nazi brownshirts (SA) and protection squad (SS), the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act to give Hitler “temporary” power to rule by emergency decree.
 
For the next sixteen or so months, which included book burnings, purges, and other forms of rioting and “cancel culture,” Hitler remained deferential in public to Hindenburg. After the latter died in August 1934, the chancellor eliminated the presidency, solidifying his dictatorship through the 1934 referendum, achieved similarly to the Reichstag vote with “widespread intimidation.”
 
It was in this manner that Adolf Hitler was elected dictator of Germany.
 
In our present cultural and political atmosphere, news commentator Bill O’Reilly recently wrote that the current Democratic presidential candidate [Joe Biden] “is Paul von Hindenburg in 1932 Germany. An old guy who is malleable.” In 1933 and ’34, Hindenburg’s shaper readily persuaded him to grant emergency powers, paving the way to full dictatorship.
 
Are we there yet? Are we heading down that path?
 
Emergency powers are dangerous and no one, least of all our political leaders, should have them. Individual rights are inviolate and absolute. They should never be suspended, whether the excuse is a pandemic or an insurrection or invasion. There is and can be no justification. This includes the suspension of habeas corpus, which unfortunately is allowed in the US Constitution.
 
In a free society no one has the right to force you to stay home during a pandemic or to force you to wear a hazmat suit (or mask) if you go out into public places. If you are so afraid of getting infected, you should stay home and avoid other people. If we had a society with a sound and stable legal system and you are infected knowingly and willfully by someone, you will likely have legal standing to sue or press charges—and with such a system you can expect most other people, lest they be sued or have charges pressed against them, to mind their manners when sick. A free society means you are free to choose and exercise in action your best judgment. We are all fully capable of doing just that. We ain’t stupid.
 
Emergency powers, even if, or especially when, they are declared to be “temporary,” lead inevitably to expansion of those powers. As in the case of Hitler, there seldom is a retraction or reduction of powers.*
 
Associated sometimes with emergency powers is the notion of martial law. Alan Dershowitz points out that the US Constitution says nothing about either, though, he writes, both were prevalent at the time of the country’s founding. Martial law, he says, is a contradiction in terms, because if the military is brought in, “then it is not law. It is power.” Other definitions have said martial law means the substitution of military for civil law.
 
No form of martial law, however, in a truly free society is ever appropriate. And I don’t believe it has been used in the United States. Whenever the national guard or military has been called out, their use has been to assist the police, to detain the violators of rights who are attacking person and property. In the process their purpose is to restore peace and order. Once the criminal violators are detained, the police can hold them for prosecution and incarceration.
 
Curfew? Aside from being a violation of rights, why? As a practical matter, you capture the law breakers, thereby making the streets safe again.
 
The use of emergency powers, martial law, and curfew are all confessions by politicians that they cannot maintain law and order with their own police.
 
Or, they are smokescreens for the expansion of power to establish a more authoritarian government. As did Hitler!
 
Can it happen here? Are the parallels sound? One-party rule, censorship, big business support and encouragement of dictatorial powers??
 
 
* See Jeffrey Tucker on “Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism.” Some true believers are already salivating over the pandemic lockdowns as dress rehearsal for total state control to enforce “climate change” decrees. Tucker, pointing out that the essence of “lockdownism” is puritanism, quotes none other than Anthony Fauci on the future of pandemic totalitarianism: “Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior.” This simple statement is a double whammy: we in solidarity with the rabidly radical and toxic environmentalists apparently will be expected to sacrifice ourselves to trees and rocks and we must in addition transform ourselves into the utopian New Man (of Karl Marx, though the notion predates Marx).

On the Separation of Church, Science, Education, and Business from the State: Avoiding Repressive Fascism

A suggested revision of the First Amendment of the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, scientific research, education, or business activity, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

When the state meddles, bad things happen—besides violating our rights.
 
The origin of the notion of a dividing line between church and state, or more correctly, “a theory of two powers,” as Britannica.com writes, goes back to Mark 12:13-17 when Jesus replied to questioning by the Pharisees who were attempting to trap him in a dilemma: either offend his followers by saying taxes should be paid to Rome or be arrested for treason for telling them not to pay.
 
Jesus replied: “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God” (Mark 12:17, New Living Translation).
 
Prior to this statement, church and state were inseparable. Throughout the early Middle Ages, the Church continued to dominate life, though by the tenth century numerous secular rulers had arisen to compete with and manipulate the Church. Over the centuries, conflict between church and state, as well as conflicts between the newly founded religious sects, led to many bloody wars. In the eighteenth century the notion of individual rights and separation of religion and state became expressed in the US’s First Amendment.
 
Classical liberals of today understand the separation as complete, as in “leave us (the citizens) alone” to pursue religion or not and in the manner we choose. The state should stay totally out of religious life.
 
As writer Collin Killick put it: “Laws that establish religion in government, even if created with the most benign intent, could put our nation on a path toward repressive theocracy” (emphasis added).
 
And “repressive” is how the state has been relating to science and business.
 
Former Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorf, though not fully calling for laissez-faire of science by the state, is calling for the decentralization of scientific research. Kulldorf challenges the domination of government string-pulling in science because the government, especially in public health as controlled by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, dispenses most of the research money, deciding who gets it and which problem will be studied. Two-thirds of research money comes from federal, state, and local government sources, with well over half from the US government.
 
The gatekeeping, not to mention censorship, by the government on scientific research became apparent throughout our recent past two years of covid totalitarianism, as I have described the ordeal.
 
Kulldorf’s coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, Sunetra Gupta, calls the science-controllers cartels: government agencies, journal editors, and peer reviewers, all of whom determine promotion, tenure, and research in academia.*
 
“Repressive scientism,” using F. A. Hayek’s term for a “pretense at science,” is what we seem to have been given. The disastrous effect of logical positivism on science today cannot be overstated. Quoting from the description of Hayek’s book, The Counter Revolution of Science, at Mises.org:

There was once such a thing as the human sciences of which economics was part. The goal was to discover and elucidate the exact laws that govern the interaction of people with the material world. It had its own methods and own recommendations.

Throughout the twentieth century, however,

the economy and people began to be regarded as a collective entity to be examined as if whole societies should be studied as we study planets or other non-volitional beings.

As molecules, in other words, or billiard balls and other inanimate objects. “Science had turned from being a friend of freedom into being employed as its enemy.” From a methodological individualism, where the individual entity or person was the unit of analysis, to a methodological collectivism—the group, or collective, as the unit.
 
The new, repressive method now applies to all sciences. And that is the collectivization and herd conformity (or groupthink) of science that we have today with the government in charge.
 
What we are left with is a narrow range of conventional research, sometimes flawed (or even fraudulent), and neglect or repression of creative thinking and disagreement with the establishment.
 
Decentralize all research to the university level, says Kulldorf. Let universities distribute the money and publish their own scientists’ findings through open (not blind) peer review. The process would speed up research and publication and perhaps lead to innovative findings.
 
The best solution, of course, would be to separate education completely from the state, but that would mean making universities businesses, which they are, as are churches. They just are not profit-making businesses, which they should be. (See Applying Principles, pp. 187-90.)
 
The fundamental issue is to completely separate business and state. Paraphrasing Killick, “Laws that regulate and control businesses could put our nation on a path toward repressive . . . fascism.”
 
Which is what fascism in its essence is. Socialism owns everything and everyone; fascism, a variant of socialism (perhaps we should call it the “Omicron” of socialism??) leaves some property private, but only in a nominal sense. It still controls everything and everyone at the governmental level.
 
It is the total, airtight control we have endured over the past two years.
 
 
* See my discussion of academic research, the peer review process, and its effects on science in Applying Principles, pp. 123-32, 140-42.

How Not to Jump to Conclusions When Judging Business People and Situations

Over the years, I have written a few posts discussing the issue of judging other people (1, 2, 3).

Applying ethical principles to make moral judgments in business is particularly challenging, requiring much research and sorting before making a decision. Taking time to process the acquired data is necessary to avoid making unsound decisions.

There are three overlapping steps in the process: gathering all relevant facts before making a judgment, identifying and separating moral values from optional ones, and, most difficult, identifying and sorting out the role and influence of government in our modern mixed (or worse) economies.

Let us take these overlapping steps one at a time.

Facts. As I would always tell my students, “Dig, dig, dig for the facts. Do you have all of them?” One new fact can overturn a previous conclusion. Calling a person inconsiderate when cutting in line, for example, should change when you realize the cut was inadvertent.

Options. In one of my previous posts, I encouraged readers “to get beneath surface appearances and not be swayed by looks, words, or demeanor.” In other words, style. I emphasized the abstractness and universality of moral values and virtues, cautioning readers not to elevate concretes and optional tastes to the status of moral judgment, such as eating red meat or drinking water out of plastic bottles.

And the use of hyperbole and BS usually does not make another person immoral. Learning the other person’s psychology is prerequisite to making moral judgments. The hyperbole and BS may be the result of years of entrenched defensive habits, often learned from parents. (It’s also called “sellers’ puff” in the law and is ineffective as a marketing technique.)

Competence in business is an expression of the moral value of productive work, but level of competence usually does not entail anything immoral, though it may mean management should work harder to find the appropriate slot for someone who is less competent in the current job.

Personality is our distinctive way of thinking and acting and does include character, but most interaction with other people involves sharing and working with their concrete values and morally optionally tastes and preferences. So-called personality conflicts usually have nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with options—looks, words, demeanor, style.

The importance of getting to know partners was impressed upon me in my six-plus years working for the same company in New York City. The company was founded by two men ten years before I arrived. While there, I did notice that the partners’ offices were at opposite ends of the building, but did not think anything of it at the time. Friction between the owners was mentioned by some co-workers and once I did see what must have been a serious or unpleasant disagreement between them, but in the entire time I worked at the company I never observed a dishonesty (and I don’t think there ever was any). About ten years later, after I had left the company to attend graduate school, I read that the company had closed and the two men were suing each other.*

Moral of the story? Business partnerships (and I include mergers, joint ventures, and acquisitions) are marriages with over half ending either in divorce or with the stronger partner taking over the business.

Taking time to get to know a future partner, including the partner’s judgment of others, is crucial. There does not have to be immoral behavior to cause a breakup in the relationship; most values that we hold are concrete and optional and accepting and enjoying many of the same ones are required for cooperative success.

Government. Identifying and sorting the components of a more general situation in business, such as opinions, personality, and, especially, government intervention are required before judging. This last is not always easy to find, since most today do not think about how government can affect a moral evaluation, nor does the press report such interventions. More digging in search engines to read several articles presenting alternative viewpoints is required.

A 2002 academic paper of mine demonstrates the sorting I am talking about. It untangles many issues surrounding bribery, including its common law definition and the frequent conflating of it with several other terms—perk, grease payment, extortion, broker’s fee, and even candy or money offered to a child to clean his or her room. (Yes, it’s called bribing the child! Should mom be put in the slammer?? No, it’s metaphor, not ethics or law.)

Regulatory agencies, to elaborate further, are major initiators of physical force against businesses, through their nonobjective law, arbitrary rule-making, and catering to favored lobbyists at the expense of those who do not lobby or cannot afford to lobby. Violations of regulatory rules by the people or companies being regulated should not be taken as immoral action. The agencies themselves, not necessarily the regulators (bureaucrats) running them, are the ones that are immoral and unconstitutional, as they combine the legislative, judicial, and executive into one bureau (1, 2).

What I have concluded about judging others is that it takes time getting to know them personally before declaring, for example, a dishonesty. The adage “haste makes waste,” though trite, is relevant here. It should mean: don’t hop into bed after one or two dates or sign a business partnership after one meeting. Personalities and business situations are complex.

The most complex and challenging moral issue in business ethics is what I have called marketing to morally questionable countries. The problem is, what exactly is a morally questionable country—can there be one or are we talking about particular people, such as the leaders of the country who are morally questionable? And which moral values and principles are relevant to be applied?

Full, airtight dictatorship, especially of the giant post-office type of Lenin’s socialism where private enterprise did not exist, is often cited as an immoral country that one should not have traded with. The government owned and controlled everything, including you, so the system was totalitarian. The fascist Nazi Germany, although it had nominally private businesses, was also totalitarian; it controlled everything and everyone. In an airtight dictatorship, everyone is prisoner and slave and all external trade must be conducted with the party bureaucrats, the slave masters.**

In today’s world, countries without private-sector workforces are rare. China may have over 70% of its employment in private enterprises and even Cuba may now have over 20% of its workers in the private sector.

Justice is the relevant principle in judging the morality of international trade. As Ayn Rand stated, “the principle of justice…is the principle of trade,” and includes not treating other people as “masters or slaves, but as independent equals.” The prisoners of airtight dictatorships were slaves and the bureaucrats were their masters, but private enterprisers in many countries today enjoy a modicum of freedom and independence.

Doing business in China can illustrate the complexity of ethics in the international arena.

Ethnic Chinese in particular are known to be entrepreneurial and hard-working, whether at home on the mainland or as a minority in other Asian countries. On the mainland their economy has shown the fruits of their efforts. (Less than 7% of the Chinese population are members of the Communist Party, leaving a large number of people to trade with.)


Economic reform in China under Deng Xiaoping (1978-89) was indeed impressive: de-collectivization of farms, acceptance of foreign investment, allowing citizens to own businesses, privatization of state-owned businesses, and the elimination of price controls and other regulations. Unfortunately, subsequent leaders have sought to limit this reform, though the economy still thrives in all areas of the country.

Also, recent accusations of Chinese genocide should be made more precise. There is no evidence of mass extermination, the correct definition of genocide, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. There is forced labor and forced sterilization, actions the United States was guilty of in the twentieth century with the military draft and the progressives’ eugenic goal of keeping the “feeble minded” from procreating.

But mixing forced labor and forced sterilization with execution to call China’s actions genocide is tantamount to calling the slums of Harlem and Watts ghettos; slums are not ethnic prisons. The definition of genocide being used today comes from the United Nations, which is more broad, going beyond killing, allowing lesser crimes into the definition. The UN itself, incidentally, is a massive governmental organization (hostile to the US) and not exactly an expert on concept formation and definition.

Attempted destruction of an ethnic minority’s culture? This is an accurate description of the actions of a large number of Chinese leaders and bureaucrats, but there is a difference between physical destruction of a group—think Jews, Armenians, Cambodians, and Tutsis—and forcing that group to integrate culturally into the majority. Still horrible, but not genocide.

Free trade is said to be the primary foreign policy of free societies; therefore, trade with private parties, not bureaucrats, should be the corollary. And the line attributed to Frederic Bastiat—“if goods don’t cross borders, armies will”—is also relevant here, but that would take us into economics and away from ethics.

Doing business in authoritarian countries poses additional questions and challenges. Are you really dealing with, and selling your products to, private citizens or with the jailers and killers? How do you know whether your products are made by (semi-) free citizens or by forced labor? Analogous questions can be asked about doing business in (semi-) free countries, such as the United States: how do you know your products are not being bought by criminals and the Mafia?

Facts do matter—a lot of them—especially when trying to decide whether doing business in certain countries is moral.

And judging other people is not an easy task, as the above examples indicate. Digging for facts is the first and persistently enduring action throughout the process required before making moral judgments in business. Time is your friend. Don’t jump to immediate conclusions.


* In contrast, I observed two brothers who owned their company; their desks were up against each other’s in an open office. They seemed to get along well.

** “Airtight” was the working title of Ayn Rand’s first novel We the Living. The background of the novel is life in the early years of the Soviet Union. Rand’s heroine shouts at her communist antagonist (p. 385): “You've driven us all into an iron cellar and you've closed all doors, and you've locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst!” I’ve written before about our recent covid totalitarianism as a taste of airtightness.

But, again, it is necessary to understand the complexity of judging: there are bureaucrats who have their critics cancelled, jailed, or shot and others who may even help some of the slaves to escape. Bureaucracy is a huge continuum from evil to decent. (And yours truly was a “super bureaucrat” for thirty years in two government-run universities; he thinks he was on the decent end of the continuum!)

The Communist-Fascist-Leftist Democratic-Socialist-Progressive Totalitarians: A Glossary of Dictatorship

This post can be thought of as a kind of compendium of dictatorship, with many links to previous posts where I have touched on the notions.

All terms in the title represent people who desire to, or do, exercise absolute authority or power over the citizenry. Differences between the terms and the people who espouse them are negligible. The consequences of such absolute power are not pretty.

Let me start with the totalitarians. They are the ones who want to and do use total coercive, governmental control to tell us what we can and cannot do in our personal and professional lives. Like, you know in recent times, to leave our homes, travel, sit down in a restaurant, run our businesses, etc., and perhaps even talk to our neighbors. In other words, covid totalitarianism.

The “left,” as in the left-right continuum, refers to the degree of government intrusion in and control of our personal and professional lives. The “far left” wants to control all, which means they are totalitarians. The right limits the government to self-defensive coercion against those who initiate physical force.

The left is Leninist socialism (there is no other type). It is Lenin’s giant post office that we all work for (government ownership of the means of production), protected by an armed proletariat (or other such “protectors”). The right is laissez-faire capitalism.*

The left wants to and does use physical force to establish and control everyone through a dictatorship. The right wants to and does establish the protection of individual rights, including especially property rights, political freedom, and equality before the (rationally defined, objective) law.
 
The middle ranges of the continuum are varying mixtures of freedom and dictatorship (or freedom and controls, as some say). The societies are also called mixed economies. “Moderates,” so called, fall within these ranges. They apparently like to distinguish themselves from the “extremists” on both ends of the continuum.

The freer countries of today’s world, including the United States, are mixed societies of freedom and dictatorship, the dictatorial control coming from the deep states’ and their governments’ overabundance of overly broad, vague laws and administrative rules (Applying Principles, pp. 81-83).

Putting the word “democratic” in front of socialism does not make it a kinder, gentler Garden of Eden in which the lion lies down beside the lamb, nor does it make socialism more peaceful than Marx’s violent revolution. It just means democrats want to use the vote and discussion to abolish private property and establish Lenin’s post office, in increments by gradually moving the mixed economy to total control. In recent times, note how less gradual and more quickly this move seems to be occurring.

The problem with democratic socialism, as F. A. Hayek (chap. 10) and George Reisman (part I) have pointed out, is that the democrats’ policies require coercion to enforce. And because the policies violate some citizens’ rights for the favor and privilege of others, sooner or later the citizens whose rights are being violated start thinking about rebelling. Eventually they disobey the dictatorial edicts. To maintain control, the “lions” in the government will gladly sacrifice the lambs to their favor and privilege.

The worst in moral character, as Hayek demonstrated, rise to the top of government leadership because democrats lose their nerve to enforce coercive policies. Reisman, putting it more bluntly, says that armed robbery and murder become necessary to overcome the citizens’ armed resistance to coercive policies. The worst who have risen to the top gladly comply with this requirement. (Motivation? Envy and hatred.)

This is the time when society becomes rather inelegant or unpretty, you know, as in one-party rule, political imprisonment and executions, expropriation of property, and censorship—and often is followed up with gulags and concentration camps.

Democracy (Applying Principles, pp. 101-05) means unlimited majority rule, which is a form of dictatorship. A modest search of the US’s founding fathers will reveal a frequent use of the word “tyranny” in conjunction with democracy. That’s why they called our new nation a constitutional republic, the constitutional part including a bill of rights that restrains the majority. “Democracy” and “free society” only go together if the words “classical liberal” are its modifiers, as in classically liberal democracy.

The significance of the vote in modern history, as identified by Ludwig von Mises (sec. 8, chap. 1), is its use in the transition of leadership, i.e., the vote in place of guns, which means the avoidance of civil war.

The progressives are socialists through and through, though divided into two eras of American history. The early progressives (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), from 1880s to about 1930, were educated by German professors who were democratic socialists. Back in the US, the progressives’ goal was to replace classical liberalism with the so-called social variety (social liberalism, Applying Principles, pp. 36-39) by establishing an administrative state, i.e., a large bureaucracy of “experts” voting in new laws and establishing regulatory rules to tame the alleged “capitalist beast.” In other words, to establish a mixed economy that would move steadily toward socialism.

The modern version of progressivism, from 1930 to the present, was initially explicit communism or socialism, at least until the mid 1950s. It was Nikita Khruschev’s leaked secret speech about Stalin that caused the leftists to hide behind the banner of progressivism, often dressed up as democracy. (A “soviet is an elected governmental council in a Communist country.”)

Communism and fascism, the final terms to mention, are both forms of socialism, and both decidedly leftist. Marx, Engels, and Lenin all considered communism a synonym of socialism. Fascism (Mussolini’s term) and Nazism (Hitler’s version) were systems that inherited industrial economies with large private sectors. The essence of fascism, as identified by Mises, is a nominal—in name only—private ownership of the means of production, with severe or total control and regulation by the government. Mises’ essentialization (chap. 7) makes it clear that fascism, as “socialism of the German pattern,” belongs on the left in the left-right continuum. It is only the manner of control that differs.

This means today’s mixed economies that have private property and private ownership of the means of production and are controlled and regulated by the government are fascistic. This includes present-day United States. The amount and severity of control pushes the country closer and closer to a de facto socialism.

Other issues associated with fascism, such as racism, militarism, intimidation of voters, concentration camps, and declarations of emergency powers, are either nonessential to the meaning of fascism or are shared with socialism. Not all fascist countries were racist, for one thing, and Hitler learned his tactics from Lenin and Stalin.

Where does this put the United States today? No matter what you call it, we are headed toward a communist-fascist-leftist democratic-socialist-progressive totalitarianism.

Keep in mind, as David Horowitz says (quoted in his website’s masthead), “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”

And as Ludwig von Mises (p. 52) put it, “Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. What he plans is to deprive all other men of all their rights, and to establish his own and his friends’ unrestricted omnipotence.”


* The “right,” traditionally, has been said to be the home of fascistic, military dictatorships, and the notion can be traced to what is called right-Hegelianism and to the French Revolution. This designation is often meant to denigrate capitalism as fascistic and the accusation comes from the communist-socialist leftists.

Profits over People or Primacy of Profits?

The favorite refrain—ad nauseam, actually—of the communist-fascist left is that capitalism and its representatives, entrepreneurs, care nothing for people.* Profits are all that capitalists seek, exploiting both workers and customers.

In response to such Marxist blather, let me just say that profits are sales minus costs and the only way to earn a profit under true capitalism is to create and deliver a product (a good or service) to customers at a price that exceeds its cost. To do so, the created value must meet a need (a requirement for the improvement of the customer’s life) or want (an optional value that a market segment likes and wants, though not everyone has to like or want it) of the entrepreneur’s prospective customers.

Contrary to “profits over people,” this is the meaning of profits through customer satisfaction. Everyone in the company from CEO (the market entrepreneur) to lowly stock person must first consider the customer’s needs and wants before making any decision or taking any action. Most small businesses, as examples of this practice, face significant competition because they suffer fewer government regulations and enjoy fewer favors than their larger counterparts.

In today’s non-capitalistic mixed economy of government privileges and punishments for the favored and unfavored, the paperwork of bureaucratic management requires that entrepreneurial attention be turned away from customers to the government in order to comply with the imposed rules and regulations and for the profits the (political) entrepreneurs can acquire (not earn) through government-granted privileges.

This is one source and meaning of profits over people, because, in a government-by-lobby mixed economy, (usually big) businesses vie with one another for government favors. Customers, as a result, may be thrown an occasional crumb, maybe even a product improvement if it will keep the government happy, the taxpayer money flowing, and the competition at bay. Think in particular of the many occupational licensing monopolies (ranging from hair stylists to hospitals and insurance companies), public utilities and schools, and all broadcast, cable, and social media.** Today’s big businesses in general.

The more serious issue, however, when talking about profits is whether or not profits are a deduction from worker wages. Both Adam Smith and Karl Marx say they are. This primacy-of-wages doctrine led Marx to develop his exploitation theory asserting that capitalists—for the sake of profit—reduce workers to subsistence living. Hence, the major source of modern blather from the many historically and economically ignorant who mouth the slogan “profits over people.”

Economist George Reisman takes this issue head on and provides a strikingly clear and revolutionary identification of profits as the original and primary form of income, disagreeing with both Smith and Marx. Reisman writes (p. 19***):

Capitalists do not create profit and subtract it from wages. On the contrary, they create wages and the other costs which are subtracted from sales revenues, and thus the capitalists reduce the proportion of sales revenues that is profit.

Profits exist prior to capitalists. Reisman cites Adam Smith’s example of poor people who collect Scotch Pebbles on the shore of Scotland, then sell them to stone cutters. All receipts, states Reisman, are profits, because the collectors have no costs. Sales revenue of the pebbles is all income, not wages as Smith contends (p. 15; Smith, p. 33).

Sole proprietors of retail stores who work the stores entirely by themselves do have costs (rent, cost of goods) and the difference between sales and costs is the their profit. When the proprietors hire helpers, they pay a wage, which further reduces their profit. This is how profit and wages come into existence, both made possible by the capitalists.

Since wages are payments made in exchange for the performance of labor, “capitalists do not impoverish wage earners, but make it possible for people to be wage earners” (p. 19, Reisman’s italics). Reisman supports this statement by quoting F. A. Hayek’s Capitalism and the Historians where Hayek writes that the so-called proletariat created by capitalism “was an additional population which was enabled to grow up by the new opportunities for employment which capitalism provided” (Hayek, p. 16, my italics).

Thus, Reisman concludes that “between wage earners and capitalist there is in fact the closest possible harmony of interests,” not exploitation (p. 21). And by extension, since workers are also customers, we can conclude that there is not a clash but the “closest possible harmony of interests” between capitalists and customers.

Adam Smith observed that the rate of profit is lower in wealthier countries (Smith, p. 159). Reisman points out that this is because a greater percentage of total national income is spent on research and development, buildings and land, parts and materials—and wages—than in poorer countries. Workers, as consequence, should lobby for a greater, not lesser, degree of capitalism. The greater the degree of capitalism, the wealthier the country, which means higher wages and standard of living for everyone (pp. 20-21).

Capitalism brings into existence not just a proletariat that did not exist before, but an entire middle class that did not exist at all before the rise of capitalism.

Far from seeking “profits over people,” capitalists put labor and customers front and center. Capitalism, as Reisman argues, is run for the sake of the masses.

How does the communist-fascist left, i.e., socialism and its variants, view the people? Socialism, says Reisman, “is run for the benefit of the ruling elite at the cost of starvation wages” (p. 55). The socialist totalitarian state is a giant monopoly akin to the post office, as Lenin envisioned, which means only one employer in the economy and no competition for labor. Thus, the incentive for the elite is to keep the citizenry—the masses—alive, barely, at minimum subsistence. The only exceptions often are for those who help maintain the elite’s power, such as the secret police and its intelligence services, the military, and perhaps star athletes, dancers, and actors who bump up the dictators’ frail egos.

Capitalists, one might say, to borrow a word from the Marxists, are in the vanguard of progress!

The elite of the communist-fascist left, in contrast, are the ones who put dachas and several million dollar chateaus over the people.


* In an earlier post, I wrote that the designation communist-fascist left “works because differences between the two systems are superficial and Marx, Engels, and Lenin considered communism and socialism to be synonyms. ‘Left’ on the political spectrum means total control of life and economy.” Thus, the word “totalitarian” is redundant when speaking of the totalitarian left, though perhaps “totalitarian” should be used interchangeably with “communist-fascist.” Both communism and fascism are consequence and goal of progressive ideology.

** For the distinction between market and political entrepreneurs, see last month’s post and Burton Folsom’s The Myth of the Robber Barons.

*** All subsequent free-standing page references are to Reisman’s 114-page monograph Marxism/Socialism, A Sociopathic Philosophy Conceived in Gross Error and Ignorance, Culminating in Economic Chaos, Enslavement, Terror, and Mass Murder: A Contribution to Its Death. This work easily could and should be used as a text or supplement in high school and college economics classes. For a fuller treatment of this issue, see Professor Reisman’s magnum opus Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, especially pp. 473-85 and throughout chap. 11. For a summary presentation of his theory of aggregate profit, see my article “Reisman’s Net Consumption, Net Investment Theory of Aggregate Profit” in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, July 2004 (available here).
 

All It Takes Is Guts

A president from the American past stated this about his previous four years:

During this course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levelled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare.

No, this is not a statement of our most recent former president. The words are from Thomas Jefferson’s second inaugural on March 4, 1805, in which Jefferson endorses and praises the American experiment in a free press. He continues:

The experiment is noted, to prove that, since truth and reason have maintained their ground against false opinions in league with false facts, the press, confined to truth, needs no other legal restraint; the public judgment will correct false reasonings and opinions, on a full hearing of all parties; and no other definite line can be drawn between the inestimable liberty of the press and its demoralizing licentiousness. If there be still improprieties which this rule would not restrain, its supplement must be sought in the censorship of public opinion.

“Censorship of public opinion,” does not mean government censorship. As Jefferson clarifies, it means “punishment in the public indignation.” He continues, “Truth and reason” will prevail, as “facts are piercing through the veil drawn over them.”

Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, so he trusted all voters to exercise their reasoning capacity to speak up against the falsehoods of a “licentious” press. Do voters today do so? And will they in the future?

Edmund Burke, another man of the Enlightenment, supposedly said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” These words, though, do not appear in his writings. Ayn Rand, however, did write that evil is impotent and succeeds only from the sanction of its victims, that is, the victims’ willingness, due to ignorance or choice, to suffer silently, for example, through today’s covid totalitarianism.

Our culture’s intelligentsia, which includes the corrupt press, has eagerly promoted, and continues to promote, this total control of our personal and professional lives.

The solution, as it is with any bully, is to stand up to the communist-fascist left that is attempting to destroy civilization. “Stand up” means to speak out and write against the Goebbelsian propaganda (1, 2), to name names and never back down, especially if and when the “cancel culture” comes after you. This means, as I wrote in a previous post, no compromise of principle, no collaboration with the left, no concessions to them.

“All it takes is guts,” said Walter Williams in the title of his 1987 book of newspaper columns. “I have no shame in admitting my uncompromising bias for the sanctity of personal freedom,” he said in his preface, “and freely admit that as economist qua columnist I try to sell Americans on the moral superiority of individual freedom” (second emphasis added).

Conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh displayed a similar intestinal fortitude with many courageous examples of standing up to the cancel crowd. Normally, Rush ignored whatever the intelligentsia, especially the “drive-by” media as he called them, threw his way. The following incident, however, required a major offensive.

Rush’s primary rule, according to his spokesman and strategist, Brian Glicklich, was “no faux apologies for fake transgressions.” A letter signed by 40-plus Democratic senators, sent to Rush’s syndicator, demanded an apology from Rush for a discussion he had with a listener. The subject of the discussion was “phony soldiers,” fraudulent people who claimed to have served heroically in the military, but did not. The letter claimed that Rush was denigrating these “heroes.”

Not only did Rush not apologize, nor would the apology have been accepted by the Democrats (as Glicklich points out), Rush sold the letter for $2.1 million, matching the sum from his own checkbook, and donated all of it “to scholarships for the children of fallen service members and police officers.”

Rush’s sponsors were then viciously attacked in the usual leftist manner of what looked like thousands of people sending thousands of emails threatening to stop patronizing the sponsors’ businesses. Rush did not just not back down; he provided research showing his sponsors “that 80% or more of all online boycott messages came from a group of people so small as to ‘fit into the elevator we used to come to your office for this meeting.’”

Finally, Rush realized that the handful of aggressors against his sponsors preferred to remain anonymous and unaccountable, so he named them on his website. Like all bullies, they ran.

Not apologizing, compromising, or backing down, Rush instead went on the offensive. “The Limbaugh doctrine against the suppression of speech,” as Glicklich put it, “was to offer more speech.” Rush often aggressively “fished for liberals’ outrage” and tweaked it, doing so with glee, or rather, in his words, “with half his brain tied behind his back, just to keep it fair.”

Rush Limbaugh, as did our previous president, taught many of us how to have guts and to display that intestinal fortitude.

Alan Dershowitz, a moderate Democrat, is an uncompromising First Amendment lawyer who, as victim of the cancel culture himself, has courageously and aggressively stood his ground. When falsely accused of sexual misconduct, he offered mounds of evidence in his defense, filed a defamation lawsuit, and wrote the book Guilt by Accusation.

More recently, Dershowitz wrote Cancel Culture: the Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process, in which he exposes the Stalinist and McCarthyite origins of such suppression of free speech. He also produced a video podcast “Cancel Culture Must Be Canceled.”

Dershowitz is very much aware of the need for more people to speak up. In an earlier video podcast he asked “Where are the libertarian Democrats?” The two words together likely mean Bill-of-Rights moderate Democrats, often called “liberals,” who have been far too silent over the past several years.*

In our postmodern age of the “Un-Enlightenment,” an age of untruth and unreason, will there be enough Jeffersonians to courageously counter the Goebbelsian propaganda that is spewed ceaselessly and ubiquitously?

As Rush said, to counter the suppression of free speech, more speech is needed—spoken and written without compromise or concession.

It just takes guts!


* Moderate Democrats, such as Dershowitz, are mixed-economy-Democrats who see some role for the government to regulate business. Far left or leftist Democrats today want the government to control every aspect of our lives, social and economic, which makes them totalitarians, whether of the communist, socialist, or fascist variety. The usual meaning of libertarian is classical liberalism or laissez-faire capitalism.
 

The Danger of Emergency Powers: A History Lesson

Emergency powers, as we have learned in the past six months, are dangerous. Any little tyrant in our local mayoral or gubernatorial office can suspend individual rights at the drop of a hat—or virus—in the name of the emergency.

In 1933 Adolf Hitler became dictator of Germany through “emergency powers.” Let’s briefly review how that happened.

In 1932 in a round of parliamentary voting, the Nazi Party lost to Paul von Hindenburg, World War I hero and president of the Weimar Republic since 1925. The Nazis, however, won a strong second place. After Hitler withdrew support for Hindenburg a third round of voting in November gave the Nazi Party the largest Reichstag share at 33%. Two prominent politicians and a “letter signed by 22 important representatives of industry” urged Hindenburg (1, 2) to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Hitler immediately gave Hermann Göring a cabinet position in charge of the police, which soon became the State Secret Police, or Gestapo.

Emergency powers soon followed. In February 1933 the Reichstag (parliament) building burned, blamed by Göring on the communists, but some historians insist it was started by the Nazis. Hitler then persuaded Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree that eliminated many civil rights, including freedom of speech, press, and assembly, banned the communist party, and allowed detention without trial. (Hindenburg at the time was 85 and said by some to be senile.)

In one fell swoop, Hitler acquired dictatorial power. In March, with dissenters surrounded and intimidated by Nazi brownshirts (SA) and protection squad (SS), the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act to give Hitler “temporary” power to rule by emergency decree.

For the next sixteen or so months, which included book burnings, purges, and other forms of rioting and "cancel culture," Hitler remained deferential in public to Hindenburg. After the latter died in August 1934, the chancellor eliminated the presidency, solidifying his dictatorship through the 1934 referendum, achieved similarly to the Reichstag vote with “widespread intimidation.”

It was in this manner that Adolf Hitler was elected dictator of Germany.

In our present cultural and political atmosphere, news commentator Bill O’Reilly recently wrote that the current Democratic presidential candidate “is Paul von Hindenburg in 1932 Germany. An old guy who is malleable.” In 1933 and ’34, Hindenburg’s shaper readily persuaded him to grant emergency powers, paving the way to full dictatorship.

Are we there yet? Are we heading down that path?

Emergency powers are dangerous and no one, least of all our political leaders, should have them. Individual rights are inviolate and absolute. They should never be suspended, whether the excuse is a pandemic or an insurrection or invasion. There is and can be no justification. This includes the suspension of habeas corpus, which unfortunately is allowed in the US Constitution.

In a free society no one has the right to force you to stay home during a pandemic or to force you to wear a hazmat suit (or mask) if you go out into public places. If you are so afraid of getting infected, you should stay home and avoid other people. If we had a society with a sound and stable legal system and you are infected knowingly and willfully by someone, you will likely have legal standing to sue or press charges—and with such a system you can expect most other people, lest they be sued or have charges pressed against them, to mind their manners when sick. A free society means you are free to choose and exercise in action your best judgment. We are all fully capable of doing just that. We ain’t stupid.

Emergency powers, even if, or especially when, they are declared to be “temporary,” lead inevitably to expansion of those powers. As in the case of Hitler, there seldom is a retraction or reduction of powers.*

Associated sometimes with emergency powers is the notion of martial law. Alan Dershowitz points out that the US Constitution says nothing about either, though, he writes, both were prevalent at the time of the country’s founding. Martial law, he says, is a contradiction in terms, because if the military is brought in, “then it is not law. It is power.” Other definitions have said martial law means the substitution of military for civil law.

No form of martial law, however, in a truly free society is ever appropriate. And I don’t believe it has been used in the United States. Whenever the national guard or military has been called out, their use has been to assist the police, to detain the violators of rights who are attacking person and property. In the process their purpose is to restore peace and order. Once the criminal violators are detained, the police can hold them for prosecution and incarceration.

Curfew? Aside from being a violation of rights, why? As a practical matter, you capture the law breakers, thereby making the streets safe again.

The use of emergency powers, martial law, and curfew are all confessions by politicians that they cannot maintain law and order with their own police.

Or, they are smokescreens for the expansion of power to establish a more authoritarian government. As did Hitler!

Can it happen here? Are the parallels sound? One-party rule, censorship, big business support and encouragement of dictatorial powers??


* See Jeffrey Tucker on “Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism.” Some true believers are already salivating over the pandemic lockdowns as dress rehearsal for total state control to enforce “climate change” decrees. Tucker, pointing out that the essence of “lockdownism” is puritanism, quotes none other than Anthony Fauci on the future of pandemic totalitarianism: “Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior.” This simple statement is a double whammy: (1) we in solidarity with the rabidly radical and toxic environmentalists apparently will be expected to sacrifice ourselves to trees and rocks and (2) we must in addition transform ourselves into the utopian New Man (of Karl Marx, though the notion predates Marx).
 

On the Path to Dictatorship: Why Our Current President Must be Reelected

Democratic socialists have always paved the way for brutal totalitarian dictators, historically and logically. Our current president is the only person standing between us and such a dictatorship. Here are my reasons why.

Democratic socialists, as Hayek taught us (1, p. 158; 2), don’t have the guts to enforce their coercive policies. Dictators do, with blood. “Armed robbery and murder” is how George Reisman (part I) describes the means of establishing and maintaining a socialist society. This is true historically wherever socialism has been implemented and by logical necessity of the initiated coercion the socialists aim to impose on citizens.

“Progressivism” is the Left’s euphemism for democratic socialism (and sometimes communism). It is a specter, to use Marx’s word, that has haunted American culture and political life since the 1890’s (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13). Today, its coercive policies are nakedly explicit.

Socialism is not just government ownership of the means of production, which the Left certainly is seeking, but it is also, more fundamentally and menacingly, government ownership of you, and all of us, the citizens. Taking our guns, so we can’t defend ourselves, and shutting down free speech, so we can’t criticize the dictators and propose radically different ideas, are just the first steps.

Government ownership of you is what total control means and that is what produces the totalitarian state. (And fascism is a form of socialism that only differs superficially.) Here is Ludwig von Mises on the path to socialism and how its acolytes are treated along the way:

As soon as a socialist deviated an inch from the orthodox creed, Marx and Engels attacked him furiously, ridiculed and insulted him, represented him as a scoundrel and a wicked and corrupt monster. After Engels' death the office of supreme arbiter of what is and what is not correct Marxism devolved upon Karl Kautsky [Marxist philosopher and theoretician].

Sound familiar? Just substitute today’s versions of the post-moderns’ political correctness for Marxism. The goal is the same, to silence dissent. Mises continues:

In 1917 it passed into the hands of Lenin and became a function of the chief of the Soviet government. While Marx, Engels, and Kautsky had to content themselves with assassinating the character of their opponents, Lenin and Stalin could assassinate them physically” (Theory and History, pp. 131-32).

Assassinations and gulags are the end—the dead end—of socialism, that is, unless you happen to be one of the elites who lives well, that is, again, unless you offend the wrong person and end up with a bullet between the eyes.

The list of past and present socialist assassins is lengthy: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Chavez, and Maduro. For 130 years, Progressives have been moving us ever so inexorably closer to that end.

Our current president, and his constituency, seem to know this, at least implicitly, if not in some respects, explicitly. The Left is attacking and eroding the American sense of life. The president and his constituency represent it.

The dishonest blather—and “blather” is too kind a word to describe the babblingly vicious attacks made on our president—whether about his alleged “rude,” “crude, or “mannerless” words and behavior or his alleged dishonesty, are the Left’s projection of what they have done for 130 years and are doing in spades today. Our president may have rough edges and speak bluntly, which makes him transparent, but the Left talks out of both sides of their mouths and holds hearings in basement star chambers.

The Left, however, does rightly feel legitimate fears that the president is out to destroy their fiefdoms. The “good ‘ol boy” networks of lobbyists, the unelected deep state, and corrupt politicians are what he accurately calls “the swamp.” The mixed economy, after all, is a mixture of freedom and dictatorship. Freedom requires dismantling these Machiavellian strongholds.*

It is absurd to say that our current president would establish a dictatorship. That is the Left’s Goebbelsian smear campaign. So what if he sometimes falls back on ad hominem attacks? The Left’s smears are nonstop and far worse, stemming from their updated Marxian polylogism (Applying Principles, pp. 309-10; 2) that celebrates relativism and the collapse of reason, logic, and Enlightenment values.

So what if the president talks nicely to dictators? Seriously? How do you conduct a negotiation by saying to your opposite, “You’re evil! Now, let’s talk.” The essence of good negotiation is sticking to principles, especially the principle of national self-interest, something our president has practiced far more consistently than his predecessors. He refuses to sacrifice himself to others and our nation to other countries.

And so what if the president is not an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism? Seriously again? That is a reason not to vote for him?

He is proud to be an advocate of capitalism as he understands it. He is proudly self-interested—for himself and for both the nation and his constituents. He is proud to be rich and wants everyone else to become rich. He is proudly and vehemently opposed to socialism and any kind of leveling of society to its lowest common denominator.

I did vote libertarian in 2016 because I thought the Republican candidate was “too socialistic” and that my California vote was a useless throwaway, but I immediately changed my mind when I saw the putsch mentality and fervent hatred take over political discussion. I have since written some twenty blog posts touching on political issues and essentially defending our current president. I plan to vote Republican next November!

Would a winning Democratic candidate in 2020 really establish a dictatorship? Probably not, because the American sense of life is still strong enough to provide pushback against the worst trying to rise to the top. But in twenty, forty, or sixty years?

The American sense of life must be articulated explicitly to the electorate. Our current president, with his confident selfishness and equally confident condemnation of the swamp are good starts.


* And then there are the Pravdas and Izvestias that whine and cry when the president describes them as “enemies of the people,” which they are. If they had any guts or integrity, they would be upholding the principles of a free society and writing factual stories about the Left—a Left that would surely shut them down as soon as acquiring power or attach them to the government. On the dead end of an unelected deep state, see my 2016 post, “The Reductio of Bureaucracy” (Applying Principles, pp. 117-21), where I argue that the final product of bureaucratic management is to be found in the gulags of totalitarian dictatorship.

Hatred, the Leftist Emotion?

You’re a white racist.

This is one of the lovely epithets being slung around today. If I were on the receiving end of such hostility, I would have to respond by saying that I do not believe in turning the other cheek. Therefore . . .

You’re a totalitarian, postmodern progressive irrationalist, which means you are a communist/socialist/fascist/Nazi polylogist leftist and wannabe dictator whose only method of accomplishing anything is through physical force masked by governmentally initiated coercion and legal plunder called laws and regulations.

Other comments could be added, such as, “you’re a racist against whites, a misandrist, and a heterophobe,” but let’s just say, for short, that you are a communist/fascist leftist.* Your motivation is envy and hatred.

Envy has been covered by Helmet Schoeck and Ayn Rand, though Rand said envy is not the right word. Hatred of the good for being the good is more correct. So, let’s look at the psychology of hatred.

“Hatred of the good” is not envy because bad students who express this emotion do not want to be good students. They want the good students to fail, or at least be dragged down to their level. The same can be said for today’s entitlement poor. They do not want to work hard to become rich like successful business people. They want the rich to suffer (ignoring the history of rags-to-riches stories) and become like them.

Hatred, according to psychologist Edith Packer (Lectures on Psychology, chap. 4), is an emotion that begins with anger and resentment. If unchecked, that is, if underlying evaluations of the emotions are not examined for truth or falsity, and when false, not corrected, anger and resentment can develop into rage, hostility, and aggression.

Underlying anger, says Packer, is the universal evaluation that “an injustice has been done to me,” the word “universal” meaning all instances of anger express the same evaluation. That evaluation in any specific instance, however, may be valid or true, as when someone rudely cuts in front of us in a movie line, or invalid or false when it turns out that the cutter was joining his wife who was holding his place, or the cutting was inadvertent.

Anger expresses an injustice resulting from a specific action. Resentment expresses stored-up anger, stemming from a belief (valid or invalid) of long-term unjust treatment that has been neither confronted nor resolved. This can then lead to hatred.

Hatred says the target of the emotion is totally contemptible, that the person’s character, not just his or her specific action, is despised. To quote Packer, “an individual who feels hatred usually also feels helpless to correct the injustices committed by the person he hates. While hatred can be justified in some rare cases, almost always it is neurotic or pathological”** (pp. 103-04).

Rage, an out-of-control fury deriving from the conviction that somehow I am the cause of this injustice, often follows from hatred and is pathological. As is hostility, although hostility is a defense mechanism that only looks like anger. Deriving from self-doubt that is projected outward at an alleged injustice, the aim of hostility is to make the target suffer. Aggression, finally, is the behavioral manifestation of hostility, verbal or physical actions to deliver the intended injuries.

Hatred of the good that we see today is rage, hostility, and aggression, by way of shouting down speakers or banging on windows to disturb them, blocking street intersections or entrances to venues, and, in the worst cases, hurling rocks and other missiles at the targets and destroying their property.

Such hostile behaviors are criminal, driven by frail egos filled with self-doubt, and are not new.

Recall the decidedly un-civil-disobedient student demonstrations of the 1960s, the seizures of property, kidnappings of college deans . . . and bombings and killings. Or recall 1920s Weimar Germany and its street clashes between red-coated communists and brown-shirted Nazis, not to mention Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch.

The pathological and contemptibly immoral goal in both time periods was to tear down and destroy the accomplishments of capitalism and, ultimately, replace it with some form of totalitarianism. The same is occurring today.

Marx and Engels advocated violent revolution. Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler were just carrying out the communist/fascist founder’s wishes.

Marx’s method of argument was to declare to his opponents, “you’re just a bourgeoisie.” We can’t reason with you, he would say, because you don’t understand proletarian logic. That’s the meaning of “polylogism.”

Today’s Marxists, that is, the postmodern progressive Leninist, Mussolinian, Stalinist, Hitlerian leftists, do not even pretend to offer arguments. They smear opponents—people of prominent positions in universities, business, entertainment, and, especially, the media—by calling them names: “You’re a white racist, misogynist, homophobe.”

And they intimidate and threaten them, by pouring money into campaigns of vilification. If the targets do not toe the politically correct party line, or apologize grovelingly when they cross it, the leftists step up their campaigns to have them removed and their careers destroyed.

If this is not hatred—hatred of the good, the competent, the able—I don’t know what is.

(By the way, communist/fascist leftists, all crimes are hate crimes. That pickpocket who relieves you of your wallet is not doing it out of warm, fuzzy love.)

Postmodernism, and its leftist activists, reject the Enlightenment’s values of objective reality, reason, logic, individual rights, and capitalism. Stephen Hicks, in his book Explaining Postmodernism (1; Applying Principles, pp. 33-36), eloquently dubs postmodernists the Iagos to the Enlightenment’s Othellos. Their goal is to inject doubt into modernity’s values and, as it did with Othello, “let that doubt work like a slow poison” (Hicks, p. 200).

Or, as Hicks elsewhere describes the activists on college campuses (whom he denies the epithets “snowflakes” and “delicate flowers” because their tears, he says, are a tactic): the “grievances are not meant to be resolved. They are meant to fester and be used in the service of power-politics strategy. . . . The protesters’ point is to make unreasonable demands, and their goal is to see how much they can get away with.”

Calculated hate? How can it not be!

The antidote to this festering poison is a rational psychology that the Iagos do not possess, but if they did, it would consist of independence and a commitment to facts and truth.

In particular, it would be a commitment to the Enlightenment’s values that there really is an objective reality “out there,” that we can identify it through reason and logic, that we each individually possess rights deriving from our nature as human beings and applying universally to every person on earth, and that laissez-faire capitalism, or the closest thing we have ever come to it, has cured, and continues to cure, dread diseases, and has abolished, and continues to abolish, poverty in cultures worldwide by providing abundant opportunities for all to rise above their original stations in life.



* I’ve been struggling for some time to come up with an appropriate sobriquet to describe the far leftists. “Communist/fascist” works because differences between the two systems are superficial and Marx, Engels, and Lenin considered communism and socialism to be synonyms. “Left” on the political spectrum means total control of life and economy—this includes fascism—so “totalitarian leftist” becomes redundant.

** A justified emotion of hatred, for example, might be that of a victim of the Holocaust whose hatred is directed at the Nazis and their modern-day sympathizers.