<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Free-market</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/free-market/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:20:06 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>Andrew Klavan: Is Obamacare Working, Or Are We All Going to Die?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-is-obamacare-working-or-are-we-all-going-to-die/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-klavan-is-obamacare-working-or-are-we-all-going-to-die</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-is-obamacare-working-or-are-we-all-going-to-die/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Oct 2014 04:51:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Affordable Care Act]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew Klavan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Truth Revolt]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244146</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="field-body">
<p><strong>In this special episode, our inquisitive host, Andrew Klavan, ferrets out the truth to the question on everyone&#8217;s mind: Is Obamacare working, or are the death panels that the administration swears don&#8217;t exist already heading to our houses to &#8220;cut costs&#8221; even as we speak?  See the transcript and video below:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/0tKZ0Q5MmeQ" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>TRANSCRIPT:</strong></p>
<p>I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p>Democrats are saying that the Affordable Care Act will not be a major issue in upcoming elections, so it’s safe to say that the Affordable Care Act is going to be a major issue in upcoming elections.  The Affordable Care Act — sometimes nicknamed Obamacare to denote its oppressive incompetence — is the law designed to increase health insurance coverage by allowing you to sign into a computer program so frustrating it’ll give you a heart attack and kill you, making the whole issue moot.</p>
<p>But let’s leave the crappy computer rollout in the past.  Along with the lies the president told us about the law’s effects.  And the dirty deals that were used to bully it through congress.  And the fact that the government death panels we were told would never exist are currently on the way to your house so you might want to get your affairs in order.  The question is:  Is the Affordable Care Act working?</p>
<p>President Obama says yes it is.  So that’s a clue.</p>
<p>Let’s dig deep and find the revolting truth.</p>
<p>Now I know that many of you humdrum ordinary workaday Americans out there think that we here at the Revolting Truth are nothing more than a bunch of frivolous, adolescent clowns cracking sophomoric jokes about deeply important issues without the dignity or intelligence to make a trustworthy examination of the facts.  And okay, that’s true but&#8230;  fortunately, our good friends at the Manhattan Institute are serious people&#8230; who smoke pipes and own bookshelves&#8230;  and they’ve compiled a number of studies into the impact of ACA.</p>
<p>On the Manhattan Institute website, for instance, you can find an interactive map of America that will explain the effect Obamacare has had on premiums in your state in 2014.  You just click on the state&#8230;</p>
<p>[I touch the map, and a sobbing shriek comes out of it:  “For the love of God, help us, we’re dying here, there are no doctors and people are dropping like flies into streets running red with blood!”  This should be cut off mid-way as I press the map again.]</p>
<p>Okay, that’s Iowa&#8230; where Obamacare has sent insurance premiums rising anywhere from 53 to 142%.  Let’s try someplace back east&#8230;</p>
<p>[I press the map and a terrified, weepy voice comes out:  “I just want to apologize to everyone’s Mom, I was naive, and now we’re all going to die because we can’t afford health care and there are no doctors for anyone.”  Again, cut off as I press the map.]</p>
<p>That was either the Blair Witch Project or Connecticut where premiums are up as much as 85%.</p>
<p>[I try again...  and get a happy singing voice:  “Bingo-bongo, bingo-bongo, we going down the crapper and we don’t care.  Bingo-bongo, bingo-bongo, we going down the crapper and we don’t care.” Press the map.]</p>
<p>That’s California.  Their premiums are also up, but the state is filled with gorgeous insecure women who’ll do absolutely anything to get into show business — so who cares about health insurance?</p>
<p>The fact is, under Obamacare, private premiums have risen for some segment of the population in all but five of our states.  And according to MI, Obamacare not only sends insurance premiums skyward, it fails to lower health care spending overall (as was promised) because it shifts many of the costs of health care from individuals to the government so that people no longer need to spend wisely.  That might increase coverage, but coverage is not the same as access to health care.  In fact, the law fails to address the growing shortage of primary care doctors and is even likely to make the shortage worse.</p>
<p>Obama and the democrats and other ineffectual knuckleheads want to make our health care system more like the ones in Britain or Canada where even a poor person has access to the latest in 19th century medical treatment  — and of course rich people can pay to come to America and get cured.</p>
<p>But the left never seems to consider the possibility that a system grounded in the free market might lower costs and increase access more efficiently.  That’s how it works with new televisions, say, that are expensive when they first arrive on the scene but then, through the free market, quickly fall in price so that everyone can afford one and will have something fun to watch while they languish and die because of Obamacare.</p>
<p>I’m Andrew Klavan with the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
</div>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-is-obamacare-working-or-are-we-all-going-to-die/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>5</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>What Is Income Redistribution?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/what-is-income-redistribution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-is-income-redistribution</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/what-is-income-redistribution/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 14 Aug 2014 04:56:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew Klavan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[income redistribution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Thomas Piketty]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238592</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/LUuDw6-sUes" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In which our host explains the leftist fantasy that is income redistribution to himself.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<blockquote><p>I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p>Thomas Picketty’s new book Capital in the 21st Century has excited leftists with its call for more income redistribution.  The Financial Times and others say the books’ data are suspiciously skewed but the New York Times’ columnist Paul Krugman says he’s received confirmation of Picketty’s numbers on an interplanetary communication device that you can make yourself out of ordinary tinfoil you find at home.</p>
<p>Today, to clarify the underlying issues, the Revolting Truth presents this helpful Q&amp;A.</p>
<p>Q: What is income redistribution?</p>
<p>A: Income redistribution is when you go to work or start a business or make an investment — and earn money — and the government takes the money away from you and gives it to someone else.</p>
<p>Q: So you mean it’s stealing?</p>
<p>A:  No, it’s income redistribution.</p>
<p>Q:  But what if I won’t give them my money?</p>
<p>A:  Then armed men come to your house and take it.</p>
<p>Q: So then it’s armed robbery?</p>
<p>A:  No, it’s income redistribution.</p>
<p>Q:  Well, when the men try to take my money at gunpoint, what if I call the police?</p>
<p>A:  The men are the police.</p>
<p>Q:  The police are robbing me at gunpoint???</p>
<p>A:  It’s income redistribution!</p>
<p>Q:  What if I have a gun too?</p>
<p>A:  That would be wrong.</p>
<p>Q:  If they’re robbing me at gunpoint, why is it wrong for me to defend myself with a gun?</p>
<p>A:  Huh?</p>
<p>Q: Look, instead of taking my money away to give to other people, why not just give those other people jobs?</p>
<p>A:  It’s because there aren’t enough jobs to go around.</p>
<p>Q: Why not?</p>
<p>A:  Because people aren’t spending enough or creating enough businesses or investing enough.</p>
<p>Q:  But that’s because you took their money away!</p>
<p>A:  Right!  That’s income redistribution!</p>
<p>Q:  Let me get this straight.  We need more income redistribution because there’s too much income redistribution?</p>
<p>A:  Congratulations.  Now you’re smarter than Thomas Picketty.</p>
<p>Q:  That’s it.  I’m buying a gun.</p>
<p>A:  But it’s income redistribution!</p>
<p>Q:  Pound sand, you Communist thug.</p>
<p>Well, I hope this handy guide has been helpful in understanding Capital in the 21st Century.</p>
<p>Q:  Come near me again and I’ll blow your head off!</p>
<p>I’m Andrew Klavan with the Revolting Truth.</p></blockquote>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/what-is-income-redistribution/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>21</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>What of America&#8217;s Future?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/what-of-americas-future/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-of-americas-future</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/what-of-americas-future/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2014 04:45:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[California]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[future]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rights]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223001</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Distinguished authors discuss the coming collapse of Big Government and how conservatives should respond. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript of the panel <em>What of America&#8217;s Future?</em> at the Freedom Center’s West Coast Retreat, held at the Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, California from March 21-23, 2014:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/90698156" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So we have a very, two very distinguished authors today, and we have a continuing conversation, which is essentially about what is the future of America, and so I thought we would start by having a few opening remarks from both Michael and Charles and then we&#8217;ll do a little bit of discussion here and then we&#8217;ll open up to the floor with questions.  So Michael how &#8217;bout we start with you and you give your thoughts.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sure the book is called &#8220;America 3.0&#8243; and of course there must be a 1.0 and a 2.0, right?  We, my coauthor and I have been for many, many years conservatives, libertarians, and tryin&#8217; to figure out what&#8217;s going to happen.  Is this current, very serious situation we&#8217;re in sort of the beginning of the end of the United States, or is some period we are going to survive and get through and reach new broad sunlit uplands?  And we decided that the second scenario is more likely; that there are fundamental strengths to the United States that are underappreciated and my coauthor is an anthropologist by training, and so we bring in a somewhat unusual set of analysis to this.  There is a French anthropologist – and I&#8217;ll say that speaking to a room full of conservatives in a sentence that begins there is a French anthropologist isn&#8217;t likely to have a happy ending, but this does. </span></p>
<p>There is a gentleman named Emanuel Todd, and Todd has an extraordinarily interesting analysis showing that the political frameworks that exist and the political ideas that exist in societies are highly correlated with the type of family life they live, and we are all speaking English.  Who in here is descended exclusively from people from England?  No one.  Okay.  The English-speaking culture is very powerful, and one of the things that makes it so powerful and enduring is it is what&#8217;s called the absolute nuclear family.  It&#8217;s the most individualist type of family.  People pick their own spouses.  They&#8217;re expected to leave the family home and start their own homes.  They don&#8217;t rely on extended family networks.  They rely on free association and civil society.  I could say more about this, but that&#8217;s the gist of it.  That&#8217;s made the United States and the other English-speaking countries very resilient, also very resistant to totalitarian-type ideologies.  You need to be very sneaky to get a totalitarian-type ideology past the English-speaking people and that&#8217;s what political correctness is and the modern progressivism.  It&#8217;s in the guise and wrapped in the flag of real American values and tryin&#8217; to sneak things in in a clandestine kind of way.</p>
<p>So why is it that things seem so bad right now?  Well what&#8217;s happening is the 20th century legacy economy, the industrial era economy of the United States, that&#8217;s America 2.0.  America 1.0 is the era of the founding, muscle power, animal power, small face-to-face government, the world of the founders.  The second version is falling apart, and the institutional arrangements that were made to accommodate it are also failing, and what happens when a system starts to fail is the people who are incumbents and benefit from it double down and try to be more coercive and to keep it going in that way, and that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re seeing now.</p>
<p>So the question isn&#8217;t whether or not the 20th century legacy state is going to disintegrate.  It&#8217;s a question of how and when and on what terms, and what we wanted to do is start putting on the table proposals for what the next stage is going to look like, and a key feature of this is the technology we have today, and that&#8217;s coming and is improving all the time, plays to the strengths of the individualistic network-type free-associating American character and American mindset.  What did we hear over this weekend?  It&#8217;s just simply amazing.  We hear black conservatives didn&#8217;t know there were any other black conservatives.  They found each other through the net, right?  We heard about counterattacking against attacks on people like ourselves who have our values using social media, right?  So these new tools, both politically and of course on the business side.<br />
I heard a talk the other day from a gentleman who was talking about business back-office functions moving to the cloud, and he was focusing on how programmers are gonna lose their jobs, which people always do, right? But what it means is the sophisticated possible back office computer technology that only big businesses can have now, the person with a one-person business is gonna be able to get virtually for free.  Okay.  So we&#8217;re gonna see fantastic improvements in what&#8217;s available to us to be productive, and so we need to move toward a government model that&#8217;s gonna facilitate that and make individual and startup-type businesses more possible, and I think I probably overstayed my introduction.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Oh, you&#8217;re okay. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Charles?</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is this a question about the future?</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yes.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well, I have written about, a book about liberalism, American liberalism and unlike David Horowitz&#8217;s many books, the library really of books, very excellent books that he has written, David&#8217;s entrée in the subject really came from radicals, from radicalism, and what I am focusing on is mainstream liberalism, the liberalism of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Obama.  And I think it&#8217;s the first book to try to put Obama in the context of his own Democratic Party and his own sort of liberal milieu as a leading Democratic spokesman, and my argument is that he aspires to be the fourth face on the liberal Mount Rushmore beside Wilson and FDR and  –</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which is the cover of the book.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right and LBJ, and that if ObamaCare &#8212; and today is the fourth anniversary of the passage of the Obama Care Bill &#8211; </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">if Obama Care sticks, he&#8217;ll make it.  I mean that will be his sovereign contribution.  That will be a thing he&#8217;s remembered for.  The one sentence that every president gets would be he passed national healthcare, and in his own view that is the only triumph he is going to get I think.  He knows that the House of Representatives is unlikely to switch from the GOP.  The Senate might become Republican in this election year, and so that&#8217;s it, and he&#8217;s got to defend that to the last because his whole legacy is invested in that achievement, and it is from the liberal point of view a great achievement.  It&#8217;s something that liberals have been questing for for 100 years and no one was able to achieve before him, not FDR, not even LBJ.  I mean liberals got healthcare for the poor in Medicaid, healthcare for the aged in Medicare but not cradle-to-grave, as we used to say.  That only came really with ObamaCare.  That&#8217;s really his achievement.  </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the problem is, he, as you may have noticed, his administration has run into some trouble, and the source of that trouble is that if you look at Europe today, you can see that the standard model of the welfare state is not working. </span>And the same problems are coming to America.  They haven&#8217;t quite hit us with force that they&#8217;re beginning to hit in Europe, but they&#8217;re coming to America.</p>
<p>And so I think liberalism really does face a crisis. In some ways it&#8217;s at its peak right now – I mean Obama persuaded us that liberalism could live again; that you could believe in progress again; that you could have breathtaking across-the-board rapid political change like the New Deal, like the Great Society.  That&#8217;s what he tried to do and in part did deliver in his first two years in office.  Now it&#8217;s all on the defense of trying to preserve those achievements.  But unfortunately, there seems to me two causes of I think what will be a kind of crisis for liberalism in the next few years.  One is fiscal – as in Mrs. Thatcher&#8217;s immortal words, the problem with socialism is you quickly run out of other people&#8217;s money, and we can&#8217;t pay for today&#8217;s welfare state much less tomorrow&#8217;s – welfare state, and the second crisis is philosophical because if you live on the campus of a modern university as I do, you see this a lot.  Liberals don&#8217;t really believe, avant-garde liberals, academic liberals don&#8217;t believe in right and wrong, justice and injustice anymore.  They&#8217;re thoroughgoing relativists or nihilists – so they can&#8217;t believe in liberalism.</p>
<p>They can&#8217;t believe that liberalism is really right in the old-fashioned sense of the term, and so it&#8217;s left as a kind of a hollowing phenomenon that gets more and more hollow every year, and all that&#8217;s left really is self-interest.  Liberals like liberalism because it gives power to liberals, and that fact I think is becoming more and more transparent, and so it seems to me that something has to give in the next few years, and we hope of course it&#8217;ll be in a conservative direction, but my analysis doesn&#8217;t make that inevitable.  I mean I think you could also move in a truly left-wing, much more openly socialist direction as well.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And that&#8217;s a good place to pause for a second, but we go to a lot of these conferences and we hear bad news and we live under President Obama and Harry Reid, and that&#8217;s bad enough news, but what is the breaking point?  Maybe Michael, I&#8217;ll throw this question to you and then Charles?  But what is the breaking point?  A lot of people have said we&#8217;ve already hit the breaking point –and you don&#8217;t believe that from your book –</span></p>
<p><strong>Mike Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Not yet.  No –I live in Illinois.  It&#8217;s much worse in Illinois and we still haven&#8217;t hit the breaking point yet.  So Mrs. Thatcher said you run out of other people&#8217;s money and Herb Stein said if something can&#8217;t go on, it won&#8217;t.  You&#8217;re absolutely right that the intellectual vision of liberalism is a non-realistic, areal vision and it can&#8217;t ultimately succeed.  They&#8217;ll always spend a lot more money than they can have and they do things &#8217;til they break.  Okay.  And we see that right now.  We see the deficits going up and the debt going up so fast that it&#8217;s ultimately going to break.  $130 trillion, whatever it is.  So the question isn&#8217;t when, it isn&#8217;t if there will be a massive, painful default to hundreds of millions of people who have been relying on this and who have basically done nothing wrong, expected to have Medicare, Social Security and other things and whatever Obama Care purports to give them, and they&#8217;re not going to get it.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So the question is starting to put proposals in place to wind this up, basically have a national bankruptcy, and have an open process rather than one that&#8217;s done behind the table and done in a sort of crony capitalist fashion.  And I think it&#8217;s important to start proposing big and radical changes because you are going to get vilified and attacked, full-scale nuclear attack, no matter what you do.  One of the things we talk about in the book is breaking up the larger states that are going bankrupt.  They&#8217;re ungovernable.  Okay.  All the scholarships shows that thriving economies attend to be small, a few million people.  The genius of the founders was creating a federal system that allowed lots of local activity with a fairly minimal overlay to create a free-trade zone and a single unitary defense policy and let everybody play their own game, and we have to move back toward that.</span><br />
So the stress and ultimate giving way of this 20th century legacy state is an opportunity for us, even though it&#8217;s gonna be a difficult transition and it&#8217;s gonna be difficult to persuade people this is happening until very bad things are happening like welfare checks bouncing and things like that.</p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah, I mean I think we live in a period when big thinking by conservatives is more necessary. </span>I mean Mark Levin&#8217;s book on possible constitutional amendments.  Michael&#8217;s book is very much worth reading for the picture he paints of what America could look like after we successfully negotiate this coming time of troubles. And knowing there is a possible future – this is really the nice thing about your book – knowing there&#8217;s a possible future encourages you, empowers you to think more radically –about what&#8217;s possible.</p>
<p><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael Lotus:</strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right.  Right.  And it ties into your book too &#8217;cause your book is really the story of the 20th century liberalism which is always motivated by a vision.  They always have a vision, and how often are we just reacting?  Reacting tactically, reacting to their initiatives.  What are we caught up in?  Stopping ObamaCare.  Right?  We want to be initiating action.  One thing we need to do to do that, and my coauthor and my&#8217;s vision is to think through what the future would look like if we got our way.  One of the things that happens – try this with your friends.  You ask a conservative, and you say all right, things go our way; two, four, six, eight-year election cycles.  We elect great people.  We&#8217;ve got 42 governors.  We&#8217;ve got two terms of a great president.  We&#8217;ve got eight Supreme Court justices.  We get everything we want.  What does America look like?  What is the America where your grandchildren are starting school look like?  And they almost never have any picture.  They tend to say we gotta go back to something, or they&#8217;ll just start talkin&#8217; about Barak Obama again, and one of the things we did in our book that&#8217;s conscience is at the beginning of the book we say we go back 1,500 years to our cultural roots and we go forward to the Year 2040 to try to imagine one generation down the road. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So in that span of time any one president is gonna be relatively modestly consequential.  So this is the only sentence in this book that will contain the name Barak Obama, and that required some self-discipline, but we all need to think that like that.  This guy has been elected twice.  We&#8217;re stuck with him.  Reagan said we aren&#8217;t going to defeat communism.  We&#8217;re gonna transcend communism.  We&#8217;re gonna transcend Barak Obama.</span></p>
<p>And by the same token, one of the very interesting paradoxes of this weekend is we hear two things; one big message and one more muted, and I think we should turn the volume up on the more muted one.  The big one is the menace of progressivism and what a threat it is to us and how destructive it is and how powerful it is and how it dominates this and that sector of American life, but the subtext is it doesn&#8217;t work.  It never works.  It doesn&#8217;t make people happy.  It doesn&#8217;t put food on the table.  It&#8217;s ruinous, and we know what happened.  The Soviet Union fell apart, and I was old enough to think when Reagan started talkin&#8217; to Gorbachev, he&#8217;s being duped.  The Russians, they&#8217;re the communists.  They&#8217;ve got thousands of ballistic missiles.  They&#8217;ve got the tanks.  They&#8217;ll never go away.  We&#8217;re just gonna have to be on guard forever and they went whoof.  This thing we&#8217;re up against is – Americans are smarter.  American progressives are smarter than Soviet communists.  What they&#8217;ve built is a little stronger.  Okay.  But the epic failure of that website, that&#8217;s a sign that these guys are taking on things so far beyond what they can dream of accomplishing that they&#8217;re gonna fail.  So we don&#8217;t wanna be standing there without a game plan when they fail.  We wanna be ready.  Just like Milton Friedman said, they don&#8217;t wanna turn to us &#8217;cause they know it&#8217;s gonna hurt.  We&#8217;re gonna have to get the inflation out of the system.  We&#8217;re gonna have to change the way we&#8217;ve done things.  They will turn to us when everything else has failed.  So we wanna be ready with the alternatives &#8217;cause everything is going to fail.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So let me turn to you for a second Charles.  So let&#8217;s assume – you said a couple minutes ago that it could go either way with the crisis of liberalism.  Sure they could fail and then we have this conservative resurgence in our country, but what&#8217;s the alternative and what&#8217;s the catalyst for that alternative where maybe things fail, and I mean for example, I mean Sally&#8217;s work on ObamaCare.  Say ObamaCare fails. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I mean and the two options are single payer or going back to a more market-based system.</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Charles Kesler: </span></strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well I think on that narrow question, I think the left is already preparing the post-ObamaCare  debate.  I mean there is a lot of chatter on the left now, hearings in the Senate about single payer again because I think we&#8217;re set up now for a failure of ObamaCare. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">They may not wish it but I think it&#8217;s dawning on them that it&#8217;s likely, and so how do they react to that, and their reaction will of course be to blame it on the insurance companies, blame it on the surviving private part of the healthcare economy and say, well, we tried it.  We tried capitalism.  We tried free-market economics.</span></p>
<p>And now we have to go to, the only alternative is full socialist nationalized healthcare, the single payer plan, but I think in the larger question, where do they go?  The only way to pay for modern liberalism is with massive tax increases on the middle class. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That&#8217;s where the money is.  And so that&#8217;s the plausible alternative to turning towards a more conservative or free-market model of America, and a value-added tax, a wealth tax, there are disincentives to simply raising the income tax enormously or adding brackets, though they would be happy to do that I think. But to get the amount of money they would need you really have to socialize the economy. And in order to do that, that means more than 50 percent of the economy has to be run through the government. And the only way to do that is probably a massive new tax, a new kind of tax – On top of all the existing ones.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which will provoke outrage and resistance and hopefully successful resistance, and if the resistance fails when they do it, socialism will fail in America at a lower level, and we&#8217;ll be more damaged and need to recover from a lower level, but it ultimately cannot work, and it especially can&#8217;t work in a country like ours.  You can get away with a little bit of socialism in Denmark where you&#8217;ve got a couple of million people who all eat the same food and they&#8217;re all cousins and they all get along and they all trust each other.  This is a county of hustlers.  This is a country of people who are individualists, and they cooperate by voluntary agreement, and when you tell them do it or else, and they don&#8217;t see what&#8217;s in it for them, they gonna resist it. </span></p>
<p>And I&#8217;ll just mention – we seem to be having a dramatic technical effect to my left here.  Whenever things get really bad and we start to see a major institutional failure in American life, mass political movements arise.  The progressive movement just didn&#8217;t come out of the blue.  It didn&#8217;t come off of flying saucers.  It came around because the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy was incredibly disruptive, and millions of people wanted something different to happen.  They wanted the government to protect them when there were downturns because they couldn&#8217;t go back to the farm &#8217;cause there was no farm to go back to.  By the same token we&#8217;re gonna have change on that scale.<br />
It&#8217;s funny we saw the Tea Party start with the TARP bailouts, and I thought this is right on schedule.  Right?  In all mass political movements, just like the anti-war movement that ultimately at least got the draft repealed, right, and probably caused us to lose the Vietnam War, but mass political movements start out with enthusiastic amateurs who look like kooks, who then mature into more effective and more productive politicians and then they take over one of the major political schedules.  I think we&#8217;re more or less on schedule.  But yeah, it&#8217;s certainly the case we could get to a much more damaged level in America before we begin to turn it around.  I hope that doesn&#8217;t happen.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I think the NSA didn&#8217;t like what you were saying Charles, because they turned off your mike but we got you a hand mike.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">President Putin?  President Putin? Who knows who&#8217;s listening?</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah.  Who knows?  Let me play devil&#8217;s advocate for a second here.  Newt Gingrich in private conversations we have had when he comes into town and public conversations probably in front of this group on many occasions had said that California is the harbinger of things to come for the rest of the country.</span><br />
So let me channel the assertion, or challenge the assertion of both of you about the appetite for taxes.  I mean Californians in large numbers, I mean a large majority passed income tax increase and sales tax increases that affected not only the wealthy, but will also impact, or already are impacting, the middle class.<br />
So is there a new generation of Americans who have bought into this idea that we need to pay more in taxes because government should be bigger and doing more?</p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well I don&#8217;t know why he thinks – California is a one-party state the way Illinois is and Massachusetts is.  There is no organized resistance to it.  So you&#8217;re punching into a vacuum here.  But another thing is this, if we had a federal government that had a less-heavy hand, different communities in this country are gonna want different levels of a welfare state, and people in Minnesota are gonna have more progressivism and more of a benevolent state than people in Texas, and we should have that diversity.  We have 320 million people.  We should have a wide variety of ways to do this, and if the Californians think we wanna not have offshore drilling in our seacoast.  I&#8217;ve never been to this part of California before.  It&#8217;s just so beautiful.  Why would anyone wanna leave, right? And I have to go back to Chicago.  It&#8217;s 30 degrees colder.  Say we just won&#8217;t drill &#8217;cause God forbid something should happen, right?  Well let them.  It&#8217;s their state, right?  So I don&#8217;t know if everyone is suddenly gonna buy into the idea that we&#8217;re gonna have to have more taxes across the nation.  I just don&#8217;t see that happening.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah.  California is increasingly atypical I think.  But you also have the strangely unacknowledged fact that at the lower levels of political office in cities and in counties within California half of the elected officials are Republicans. I mean so the party which does seem dead as a statewide party, there are no statewide officeholders in California who are Republican. But there is a lot of local and county officeholders who are Republican, so at the grassroots there are still signs of life, and indeed real strength in the Republican Party.  So even in California it&#8217;s not impossible that if things get worse before they get better that you could see a kind of recrudescence of the Republican Party and even of some version at least of conservatism.</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong>Let&#8217;s open it up to questions from the audience.  Michael?</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>Audience Member:</strong> </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As a physician, there are other alternatives to the way that single payer can work.  I&#8217;m against them all, but the way it can work is not just by taxing people, but reducing services.  Reducing the opportunity of individuals to get their hips replaced or their knees done, cutting off expensive equipment for MS, cutting off chemotherapy if you&#8217;re over 60, and look at Medi-Cal in this state.  I mean as a physician we can&#8217;t afford to take care of these people.  They get absolutely horrible quality care, but they do have insurance, so that&#8217;s a way that single payer can work.  It&#8217;s devastating.  It&#8217;s not a system that anybody would really, any of us would want to be a part of. But it&#8217;s another alternative.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No, that&#8217;s quite true, and my wife, Sally Pipes, knows much more about the subject than I do, but her cousin who is a cataract surgeon in Canada was just told by a regional regulatory agency that he&#8217;s doing his surgeries too quickly, too many patients.  He is seeing too many patients, and so instead of an average wait time of five weeks, seven weeks, now there&#8217;s a, what is the? Five months. Five months a patient must wait for the cataract operation, and that&#8217;s to save money. Because the government doesn&#8217;t want to spend more. But there are plenty of patients who want them. But it&#8217;s an entirely amoral or immoral top-down bureaucratic nightmare.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right.  The only way that we&#8217;re gonna improve delivery of healthcare is if we give people a voucher-like sum of money to then have it provided competitively.  That&#8217;s the only way anything is ever improved.  It&#8217;s the only way you ever drive cost down to drive innovation, and unless Republicans start perhaps at the state level proposing these types of alternatives and pushing them and proving them in the field so that people will believe in them then we&#8217;re not gonna get anywhere.  We&#8217;re just saying we&#8217;ll give it to you but not funded as much, you just look like a scrooge.  There is a guy who was running for the Senate in Illinois who lost to one of the old guys, a guy named Doug Truax, who I think we&#8217;ll hear from again.  Doug&#8217;s an insurance broker and he did some arithmetic and said for a fraction of what we pay for the – the overwhelming majority of people who are uninsured are in something like 30 locations.  They&#8217;re basically inner-city-type locations.  You could set up health clinics where you have young people come out of medical school.  You forgive their loans, and you have older doctors who are retired or close to it supervise them so you got the people with the brand new skills but who aren&#8217;t experienced, and the guys who are highly experienced and they&#8217;ll work.  It&#8217;s not gonna be that expensive and you can treat all these people.  You think this is creative thinking.  This will cost something like a tenth of what it would cost to do it through the ObamaCare-type approach.  We need to have 50 laboratories of democracies at least with these types of innovations coming, and we need to be thinking and proposing this stuff, &#8217;cause if we try to oppose ObamaCare with just, &#8220;please, stop!&#8221; It&#8217;s awful.  Stand in front of the train, we&#8217;re gonna get run over.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael&#8217;s book calls for what, 71 states?</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><br />
</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael Lotus: </span></strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well it&#8217;s so funny, we wrote this thing and the stuff we mentioned supposedly happening 2040, we tried to be ultra-conservative, all this stuff started coming along.  California is ungovernable.  California should probably be multiple states, right? So we say three, and then a fairly realistic and well-supported effort to turn it into six starts makin&#8217; it into the newspapers.</span><br />
So it&#8217;s not like we&#8217;re just delusional.  These ideas are afloat out there in the world.</p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yeah.  Art Laffer in his book, his most recent book on California, suggests that California should be cut into multiple states, and then the gentleman you&#8217;re referring to, Tim Draper, the venture capitalist from  the Bay Area is going around the state.  I met with him last week and he&#8217;s hell bent.  This will and eventually has to happen.</span></p>
<p><strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Michael Lotus: </span></strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One curious historical fact, when Texas came into the union the treaty provided that it could divide itself into five states without having to get permission from the federal government.  So if the Texans ever want to divide themselves up and gerrymander themselves, we&#8217;ll probably have two dark blue senators and four red senators, I mean eight senators all the Texas&#8217;s.</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I&#8217;m afraid if we divide California into six states we&#8217;ll have 12 dark blue senators –It was a little bit of a commentary on what&#8217;s going on in Canada and the healthcare system there.  There are 60,000 or so I think he said refugees that would be coming to the United States would not be able to and a critique on how we need to be using those resources and the data coming out of the Canada system to help fight ObamaCare in the U.S.  I think that&#8217;s a fair.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That&#8217;s a fair summary.  Yeah.  I mean it&#8217;s interesting too that we have Canadians fleeing to the USA.  We also have medical tourism, right? Where people are flying to India and all kinds of other places.  One of the things that happens to is you build up a bureaucratic monster and market forces start to eat at the edges.  As it gets worse and worse, people are paying their property taxes, but then they&#8217;re doing other things to educate their kids outside the public school system, right?  Or people are looking for tutoring and after a while you gotta hope they&#8217;re gonna say wait a second, why am I paying twice?  Right.  And that can be a point of entry to revolt against the system we have now.</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I mean, Norm go ahead.</span></p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">What you&#8217;re talking about, Michael, is sort of what Walter Russell Mead is talking about in his death of the blue state model. I see two difficulties in the transition from where we are now, 2.0, to 3.0.  The first is a huge debt overhang that&#8217;s already there and encased in law. The second is the sclerotic, purposefully sclerotic nature of our government. </span>And it&#8217;s very difficult, and then the founders set it up that way to get from where we are now to somewhere else.</p>
<p>And there are so many people with vested interest in the status quo. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s gonna be a huge revolution anyway, but hopefully a peaceful one, hopefully a political, strictly political one.  I think you&#8217;re gonna see – and thank you for mentioning Walter Russell Mead.  He&#8217;s great and we&#8217;re influenced by him, and it&#8217;s, we seem to be thinking along very similar lines.  You&#8217;re right.  The debt overhang is unbelievable, and so what&#8217;s gonna happen?  We say it&#8217;s gonna get repudiated.  It&#8217;s not gonna be paid.  So the only question is how is that gonna be worked out, and what&#8217;s gonna happen is we&#8217;re gonna see people losing their medical care and nickels and dimes and they&#8217;re gonna try to save money on the margins and your taxes are gonna go up and the quality of what you get is gonna come down, and we&#8217;re gonna basically be surfs and not get anything for our money.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Now I don&#8217;t know about you, but the American I live in is composed of people who tend to get irritated if their hamburger doesn&#8217;t have a tomato on it when they ask for it, and if their app on their phone doesn&#8217;t work exactly right they raise hell.  I&#8217;m hoping that if the basic things we need to live are being taken away from us we can get ourselves organized.  This event shows that people are getting themselves organized.  So hopefully they&#8217;ll be resistance to that throughout and we&#8217;ll be able to stop that kinda doubling down.  The rest, all the people who are incumbents who benefit from – that&#8217;s what happens every time there&#8217;s a major change, right? </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We fought a Civil War against a huge community of people who had a vested interest in something that was completely embedded in our society.  The first slaves were sold a few years after the first Europeans settled here, right?  That was part of America.  Then it went away.  We don&#8217;t wanna do it with armed conflict, but we&#8217;re gonna have to make a lot of that go away, and what you might do is the public sector workforce you tell &#8216;em look the money is not there.  The taxpayers aren&#8217;t gonna pay it.  The technology is letting people hide their money.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">You know bitcoin is like the ModelT of what&#8217;s coming.  Bitcoin is like this like thing that&#8217;s like what is it, but it&#8217;s gonna be harder and harder for the government to find the tax money from people who are determined not to let the government see it.  Okay.  We have the creepy state that spies on us all the time.  But some of those tools are gonna be available to us, and the government&#8217;s gonna have to get things by agreement.  So we&#8217;re gonna have to tell &#8216;em look, you&#8217;re gonna get so many number of pennies on the dollar of what you are promised, and they aren&#8217;t gonna like it and they&#8217;re gonna fight politically, and I see no other way it works out.  So we should be ready for them.  We should be ready with our proposals.  Here is what you guys are gonna get.</span></p>
<p>Well that ties back into the whole business of kind of losing the cultural battle &#8217;cause we haven&#8217;t fought it.  Really.  Charles&#8217; book shows that.  All the smart people, the novelists and the creative people all are on the left.  I never understood why that is, but we need to try to keep that from always being the case, and you&#8217;re right.  People are being energetic and creative about trying to solve problems who might say, well, of course I&#8217;m a liberal &#8217;cause I care about poor people.  That&#8217;s just &#8217;cause they don&#8217;t know who we are or understand what we are.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And your point about the world decentralizing, that&#8217;s absolutely right, and one of the things we say in the book is our constitution is futuristic.  Woodrow Wilson thought it was outdated.  He might have been a tough fit for an industrial era hierarchical society, but we&#8217;re moving completely away from that.  What the founders actually lived with is kind of like the future we&#8217;re heading towards except we&#8217;re gonna be massively more productive.  Our work and our homes are gonna be located in the same place much more as they lived in.  The idea of a job, that&#8217;s like everyone gets a job where someone else owns the capital in a building away from where you live and you go there and come back and they write you a check, that&#8217;s gonna disintegrate.  I don&#8217;t know about you, but I&#8217;m not psychologically prepared for that new world yet.  I don&#8217;t know quite what it&#8217;s gonna be like, and our government certainly isn&#8217;t built to accommodate it.  So it&#8217;s gonna be big changes.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But on the other hand, I mean the danger of excessive personalization, decentralization is that you retreat into a series of private communities and you lose the sense of a public good that you have in common. And so there are many scenarios where increasing decentralization goes with increasing centralization in government because people retreat into their private world of their friends and their work peers. And pay no attention to politics.  They lose any sense.  They are alienated from politics. And one of the differences with the founding period and today is that I think that&#8217;s much more prevalent today than it was then, that we&#8217;ve given up on that.  The market is much superior, and it&#8217;s so superior it can satisfy all of our needs for the playlists that we want, the kind of food that we want, the kind of television or movies that we&#8217;d like to see. So what do we need government for? And it maybe it&#8217;s easier to just turn your back on it than it is to overthrow it. And so one of the problems is it may be that in today&#8217;s hyper decentralized economy you lose the sort of critical mass you need to make a political revolution to make a political difference.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And I detect a fourth person on the stage.  Alexis de Tocqueville is the ghost speaking there a little bit.  But I quibble with this still.  I think that the network technology and the social media, which is gonna get better and better and better, doesn&#8217;t create a mirage of companionship and friendship and new association.  It&#8217;s real.  My coauthor and I did not meet in person once when we wrote the book, and we probably only had four or five hours of telephone communication over a year.  It was all email, and our friends who would look at things, it was all – there are people who I talk to every day who are very close to me, who are very dear to me who I never see in person, and those are real friendships, right?  And the black conservatives who found each other, this is fantastic, right?  These are real connections.  Okay.  And the means to do that are gonna get better and better.  So the prospect of the kinda Tocquevillian retreat into your personal world and shunning the outer world is certainly always possible, and there is always gonna be some of that, but I hope that that&#8217;s not going to be a general trend, and I don&#8217;t think the technology necessarily pushes us in that direction.</span></p>
<p><strong> Brian Calle:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">I was in a conversation about this in the Bay Area this week with another venture capitalist who is actually starting a ballot initiative that would do not exactly what you&#8217;re proposing, not by congressional district, but by percentage of votes statewide.  So Democrats get 65 percent of the vote, they get 65 percent of the Electoral College that&#8217;s for that presidential nominee.  Likewise, Republicans get 35 percent, they would get 35 percent.  I&#8217;m not sure I would be ready to pass judgment as to whether or not it&#8217;s a good or bad idea just yet, but I would say we must look at this holistically, which is that if we do it in California where that might be beneficial to a particular party, what if they do it in Texas that way? Or what if they do it in Arizona that way?  And so I think you have to look at the consequences as a whole, but on face it&#8217;s more representative so it might be a good idea, but there are some proposals for that already floating.</span></p>
<p><strong>Charles Kesler:</strong> <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hmm.  Yeah.  I mean one of the downsides is it potentially opens you up for recounts in every district, whereas now you have a statewide recount which involves every district, but still it&#8217;s the aggregate total that you&#8217;re fighting over. The amount of chicanery possible. If every district has a delegate and the popular vote decides it, it would be enormously multiplied.</span></p>
<p><strong>Michael Lotus: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Right.  There is also a positive to the winner-take-all version because if you had it that it&#8217;s divided pro rata or divided by district in somewhere, you&#8217;re gonna be able to run national campaigns focused on national-type issues and not have to go to each state and seek to make local-type deals and the smaller states are gonna get left out entirely.  They&#8217;re not gonna be considered.  You can win the whole election from California, New York, Illinois, a couple of other places, and I think the system we have now forces you to pay attention to at least the medium-size states and try to get a few of those into your column.  So the Electoral College is something people always seem to not like, but I think it&#8217;s very much a not broke and don&#8217;t fix it part of the U.S. Constitution and I&#8217;m not super, super inclined to see it changed.</span></p>
<p><strong>Brian Calle: </strong><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And on that note we are going to end.  Thanks very much to our two panelists.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/what-of-americas-future/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>7</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Thank You to the Koch Brothers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/thank-you-to-the-koch-brothers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=thank-you-to-the-koch-brothers</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/thank-you-to-the-koch-brothers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 04 Apr 2014 04:04:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[donation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Harry Reid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jobs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Koch Brothers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222651</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left's war on pro-liberty job creators and philanthropists. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/KochNKoch1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222672" alt="KochNKoch1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/KochNKoch1-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>Americans of all political stripes must stand up and say thank you to David &amp; Charles Koch, billionaires who are the majority shareholders of Koch Industries, an oil, gas, and chemical company which is the second largest private company in America.  Simply by virtue of owning a huge company – which employs so many – these men should be thanked.  (Imagine their tax bill.)</span></p>
<p>This patriotic family has a family foundation that devotes hundreds of millions to charities, offers tens of thousands of people a chance to prosper, and is the epitome of entrepreneurship, which should be celebrated.  The charities that they donate to include a recent $100 million donation to New York-Presbyterian Hospital and charities devoted to the arts, including the American Ballet Theatre, the New York City Ballet, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Museum of Natural History.</p>
<p>Their parents have the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, which, according to Wikipedia, is devoted to “support non-profits in Kansas&#8221; focusing on &#8220;arts, environmental stewardship, human services, enablement of at-risk youth, and education&#8221; through the funding of diversity programs at Kansas State University; the program Youth Entrepreneurs, a high-school level entrepreneurial and business program; the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which develops programs to enhance schools&#8217; history curricula; and the Bill of Rights Institute, an organization that holds seminars and workshops for teachers and administrators to provide &#8220;educational resources on America’s Founding documents and principles&#8221; to enhance the learning experience for students.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">These are the things which people do not know about him.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Of course, the Koch brothers are leading advocates of a free-market economy and all-important issues of liberty.  </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579475860515021286?mg=reno64-wsj&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303978304579475860515021286.html" target="_blank">As Charles Koch wrote yesterday in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, he is “Fighting to Restore a Free Society,” and “Instead of welcoming free debate, collectivists engage in character assassination.” He could not be more right. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) recently said that the billionaire Koch brothers are &#8220;un-American.&#8221; For daring to speak out against Obamacare, Reid said, “It’s too bad that they&#8217;re trying to buy America, and it&#8217;s time that the American people spoke out against this terrible dishonesty of these two brothers who are about as un-American as anyone I can imagine.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.newsmax.com/RonnTorossian/reid-koch-adelson-obama/2014/03/17/id/559908/" target="_blank">How terrible is it that a private citizen is attacked by the Senate Majority leader, Harry Reid</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Imagine a private person is forced to write an op-ed in one of the nation’s most influential papers, where he writes, “[T]he fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation&#8217;s own government.” Of course, we saw it coming, when Obama in a well-publicized speech to business owners during his re-election campaign said, “You didn’t build that.”</span></p>
<p>Koch is so right when he writes that “[t]he central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism.” (This government also wants to run the lives of people in countless other foreign nations as well.)</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Read this paragraph in Koch’s op-ed: </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Koch companies employ 60,000 Americans, who make many thousands of products that Americans want and need. According to government figures, our employees and the 143,000 additional American jobs they support generate nearly $11.7 billion in compensation and benefits. About one-third of our U.S.-based employees are union members.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is not an employer of that size and magnitude worthy of private dialogue? Or a certain level of respect?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Koch family employs 60,000 Americans, donates hundreds of millions of dollars to philanthropic (non-political) causes, and they are attacked as un-American?  These private citizens who are among the most prominent executives and philanthropists are attacked by the most powerful man in the world and his allies for opposing the Democratic Party and exercising their democratic rights.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is what Obama’s America has come to. It’s awful, unfair and brutal. The right admires and respects hard-working executives, while the left hurts and attack. All the American people should say to this fine family is: &#8220;Thank you.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/thank-you-to-the-koch-brothers/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>41</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Does Washington Know Best?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/does-washington-know-best/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=does-washington-know-best</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/does-washington-know-best/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 15 Nov 2013 04:20:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cooperation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[individuals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Washington]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210733</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Would you trust Congress to oversee every stop light in the nation? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ap_capitol_nt_110928_wblog.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210737" alt="ap_capitol_nt_110928_wblog" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ap_capitol_nt_110928_wblog.jpg" width="246" height="188" /></a>According to some estimates, there are more than 100 million traffic signals in the U.S., but whatever the number, how many of us would like Washington, in the name of public health and safety, to be in sole charge of their operation? Congress or a committee it authorizes would determine the position of traffic signals at intersections, the length of time the lights stay red, yellow and green, and what hours of the day they can be flashing red.</p>
<p>While you ponder that, how many Americans would like Washington to be in charge of managing the delivery of food and other items to the nation&#8217;s supermarkets? Today&#8217;s average well-stocked U.S. supermarket stocks 60,000 to 65,000 different items from all over the U.S. and the world. Congress or some congressionally created committee could organize the choice of products and their prices. Maybe there&#8217;d be some cost savings. After all, what says that we should have so many items from which to choose? Why wouldn&#8217;t 10,000 do?</p>
<p>You say, &#8220;Williams, those are ludicrous ideas whose implementation would spell disaster!&#8221; You&#8217;re right. Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, one of the greatest economists of the 20th century, said it is a fatal conceit for anyone to think that a single mind or group of minds, no matter how intelligent and well-meaning, could manage to do things better than the spontaneous, unstructured, complex and creative forces of the market. The biggest challenges in any system, whether it&#8217;s an economic, biological or ecological system, are information, communication and control. Congressmen&#8217;s taking over control of the nation&#8217;s traffic signals would require a massive amount of information that they are incapable of possessing, such as traffic flows at intersections, accident experiences, terrain patterns and peak and off-peak traffic flows.</p>
<p>The same information problem exists at supermarkets. Consider the challenge in organizing inputs in order to get 65,000 different items to a supermarket. Also, consider how uncompromising supermarket customers are.</p>
<p>We don&#8217;t tell the supermarket manager in advance when we&#8217;re going to shop or what we&#8217;re going to buy and in what quantity, but if the store doesn&#8217;t have what we want when we want it, we&#8217;ll fire the manager by taking our business elsewhere. The supermarket manager does a fairly good job doing what&#8217;s necessary to meet that challenge.</p>
<p>You say, &#8220;C&#8217;mon, Williams, nobody&#8217;s proposing that Congress take over the nation&#8217;s traffic signals and supermarkets!&#8221; You&#8217;re right, at least for now, but Congress and the president are taking over an area of our lives infinitely more challenging and complex than the management of traffic signals and supermarkets, namely our health care system. Oblivious to the huge information problem in the allocation of resources, the people in Washington have great confidence that they can run our health care system better than we, our physicians and hospitals. Charles Darwin wisely noted more than a century and a half ago that &#8220;ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.&#8221; Congress exudes confidence.</p>
<p>Suggesting that Congress and the president are ignorant of the fact that knowledge is highly dispersed and decisions made locally produce the best outcomes might be overly generous. It could be that they know they really don&#8217;t know what they&#8217;re doing but just don&#8217;t give a hoot because it&#8217;s in their political interest to centralize health care decision-making. Just as one example, how can Congress know whether buying a $4,000 annual health insurance policy would be the best use of healthy 25-year-old Joe Sanders&#8217; earnings? Would he be better off purchasing a cheaper catastrophic health insurance policy and saving the rest of the money to put toward a business investment? Politicians really don&#8217;t care about what Joe thinks is best, because they arrogantly think they know what&#8217;s best and have the power to coerce.</p>
<p>Hayek said, &#8220;The curious task of economics is to illustrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.&#8221; We economists have failed miserably in that task.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/does-washington-know-best/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>5</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Obamacare: The Unimaginable Suffering That Awaits Us</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/obamacare-the-unimaginable-suffering-that-awaits-us/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamacare-the-unimaginable-suffering-that-awaits-us</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/obamacare-the-unimaginable-suffering-that-awaits-us/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 05 Nov 2013 04:43:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[John Perazzo]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[doctors]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[universal healthcare]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209618</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The horrifying direction Obama and company are leading us to. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/article-0-002ADAD300000258-120_468x286.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209619" alt="Abortion clinic - picture posed  by model" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/article-0-002ADAD300000258-120_468x286.jpg" width="257" height="199" /></a>There is a vital reason for all Americans to take a close look at how, specifically, the various government-run, single-payer healthcare systems around the world have already affected the lives of the people living under them. This is vital because Barack Obama and the Democrats actually have their sights set on creating precisely such a system here in the United States. For them, Obamacare is, and always has been, nothing more than a stepping stone toward their ultimate goal of a single-payer leviathan administered entirely by the federal government. Indeed, they&#8217;ve been quite clear about their intentions:</p>
<p>• In early August, Senator Harry Reid was asked whether his goal was to eventually use Obamacare as a springboard to a single-payer system. “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes,” he <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/08/10/sen-harry-reid-obamacare-absolutely-a-step-toward-a-single-payer-system/">replied</a>. “What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever.”</p>
<p>• In late October, Rep. John Conyers <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2013/10/21/Conyers-Obamacare-Very-Small-and-Modest-Bill-Compared-To-The-Universal-Healthcare-Thats-Coming">stated</a> that Obamacare was just “a very small and modest bill,” and that Congressional Democrats were already contemplating ways to pass “universal healthcare for everybody, single payer.” “That&#8217;s what the new direction is,” Conyers affirmed, even as the supposedly “small and modest” Obamacare project was proving to be nothing more than a colossal lie administered with inexpressible incompetence.</p>
<p>• Nancy Pelosi, too, is on record <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/88476:final-health-care-bill-vote-due-as-early-as-next-week">stating</a>: “I have supported single payer for longer than many of you have been—since you&#8217;ve been born, than you&#8217;ve lived on the face of the earth. So I think, I have always thought, that was the way to go.”</p>
<p>• Kathleen Sebelius, the chief architect of Obamacare&#8217;s pathetic rollout last month, has candidly <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/12/flashback-sebelius-called-for-a-single-payer-system-eventually/">declared</a> herself to be “all for a single-payer [healthcare] system eventually.” On October 7, she <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/08/stewart-to-sebelius-on-health-care-law-am-i-a-stupid-man/">told</a> interviewer <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1939">Jon Stewart</a> that “if we could have perhaps figured out a pathway [to single-payer], that may have been a reasonable solution.”<br />
And of course President Obama himself has been unambiguous about his own views on this matter:</p>
<p>• At an AFL-CIO conference in 2003, Obama <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/10/29/Flashback-Obama-s-Campaign-to-Transition-to-Single-Payer-Health-Care-VIDEO">said</a>: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care plan&#8230;. &#8216;Everybody in. Nobody out.&#8217; &#8230; That&#8217;s what I&#8217;d like to see, but as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.”</p>
<p>• At an <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6535">SEIU</a> Health Care Forum on March 24, 2007, <a href="http://sroblog.com/2009/08/04/shock-uncovered-obama-in-his-own-words-saying-his-health-care-plan-will-eliminate-private-insurance/">Obama declared</a>: “My commitment is to make sure that we&#8217;ve got universal healthcare for all Americans by the end of my first term as President&#8230;. But I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There&#8217;s going to be, potentially, some transition process. I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out &#8230;”</p>
<p>• On August 4, 2007, Obama <a href="http://freedomeden.blogspot.com/2010/03/obama-and-single-payer-system.html">announced</a> that he planned to pass healthcare reform legislation and then “build off that system to … make it more rational.” “By the way,” he added, “Canada did not start off immediately with a single payer system. They had a similar transition step.”</p>
<p>• In the summer of 2008, Obama <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2008/08/19/obama-touts-single-payer-system">said</a>: “If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system.”</p>
<p>• And in June 2009, Obama <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35272">told</a> an American Medical Association audience that “there are countries where a single-payer system works pretty well.”<br />
So, now that we know definitively what Obama and the Democrats ultimately want, let us look at the track record of single-payer systems around the world, so that we can see exactly what is in store for us if we follow the counsel of these masterminds. A monumentally important 2008 <a href="http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-613.pdf">Cato Institute study</a> offers keen insights into those systems:<sup> </sup></p>
<p><b>Great Britain</b></p>
<p>Under Britain&#8217;s highly centralized National Health Service (NHS), some 750,000 ailing and desperate people are currently on waiting lists for admission to a hospital. More than half of all British patients must wait more than 18 weeks to receive care of any kind. For most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within that time frame. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is just 20 percent. Cancer patients must sometimes wait as long as eight months for treatment, and roughly 40 percent of them never even get to see an oncologist. Many who were considered treatable when first diagnosed are incurable by the time their treatment is finally made available. Indeed, this is the sad fate of nearly one-in-five Britons with colon cancer. In addition, many life-saving procedures such as kidney dialysis and open-heart surgery are subject to explicit rationing, and treatment is often denied altogether to patients who are judged too ill or too old for the procedures to be worth the costs.</p>
<p><b>Canada</b></p>
<p>Physicians and modern medical equipment (such as MRI units and CT scanners) are in short supply nationwide, and at any given time as many as 800,000 Canadians are awaiting necessary medical treatment. Across all specialties and all procedures (emergency, non-urgent, and elective), it takes an average of 17.7 weeks for a patient to go through the process of seeing his or her general practitioner (GP), getting a referral to consult with a specialist, and receiving final treatment. And that figure does not even include the time a patient must wait to see a GP in the first place. Canada&#8217;s longest waiting periods are for procedures such as hip or knee replacements and cataract surgery, which could arguably be classified as elective. According to the journal <i>Health Affairs</i>, a 65-year-old Canadian man requiring a routine hip replacement must wait more than <a href="http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2004/09/01/canadas-medical-nightmare">six months</a> for this surgery. In August 2006, then-Canadian Medical Association president Brian Day <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/international/americas/26canada.html?_r=0">lamented</a> that “this is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week, and in which humans can wait two to three years.”</p>
<p>There are likewise protracted waiting periods for more urgent procedures such as neurosurgery and vascular surgery, where delays can dramatically affect a patient&#8217;s chances of survival. A study published in the <i>Canadian Medical Association Journal</i> noted that 50 patients in Ontario alone had recently died while they were on the waiting list for cardiac catheterization. In an address to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, University of Ottawa Heart Institute cardiologist <a href="http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2004/09/01/canadas-medical-nightmare">Richard F. Davies</a> noted that in a single year, 71 Ontario patients had died before being able to undergo coronary artery bypass graft surgery, while another 121 had been “removed from the [waiting] list permanently because they had become medically unfit for surgery,” and 44 others had left the province to have their surgery performed elsewhere—usually in the United States.</p>
<p><b>Italy</b></p>
<p>Because cutting-edge instruments such as MRI units and CT scanners in Italy are in short supply as compared to the United States, Italian patients must wait, on average, 70 days for a mammogram, 74 days for an endoscopy, and 23 days for a sonogram. Moreover, the nation&#8217;s public hospitals are largely considered substandard, unsanitary, and overcrowded.</p>
<p><b>Spain</b></p>
<p>Because Spain has a severe shortage of primary care physicians and nurses, patients are not free to select their own healthcare providers. Rather, they are assigned a primary care doctor from a list of physicians in their local community, and if they need more specialized care, they must obtain a referral from that doctor. On average, Spaniards must wait approximately 65 days to get an appointment with a specialist—including, for instance, 81 days to see a gynecologist and 71 days to see a neurologist. Similarly, they must wait an average of 62 days for a prostectomy and 123 days for hip-replacement surgery. And a number of vital health services that U.S. citizens take for granted—such as rehabilitation, convalescence, and care for those with terminal illness—are virtually unavailable in Spain, where public nursing homes, retirement homes, hospices, and convalescence facilities are in limited supply.</p>
<p><b>Portugal</b></p>
<p>Portugal has only one general practitioner per 1,500 people in its population, and only about one-seventh as many MRI units per capita as the United States. Thus, despite guarantees of “universal coverage,” waiting lists are so long and so prevalent that the European Observatory on Health Systems says that they resemble “de facto rationing.” More than 150,000 Portuguese are currently on waiting lists for surgery, out of a population of just 10.6 million. Further, there is little freedom to choose one&#8217;s own doctor anywhere in the country; patients may change their GP only by applying in writing to the NHS and explaining their reasons.</p>
<p><b>Norway</b></p>
<p>Long and growing waiting lists are a serious problem in Norway, where citizens must consult a government list in order to choose a general practitioner who subsequently acts as a gatekeeper for whatever specialty services and providers they may need. On any given day, some 280,000 Norwegians (out of a population of just 4.6 million) are waiting for care. The average wait for hip-replacement surgery is more than four months; for a prostectomy, nearly three months; and for a hysterectomy, more than two months. Approximately 23 percent of all patients referred for hospital admission must wait longer than 90 days before they can be admitted.</p>
<p><b>Greece</b></p>
<p>Greece has fewer than one-eighth the number of general practitioners that would be required to meet the overall population&#8217;s demand. Patients routinely wait as long as six months for surgery, five months for an outpatient appointment with specialists in fields like hypertension or neurology, and 30 days for just a simple blood test. The country&#8217;s public hospitals are widely considered substandard; most suffer from severe staffing shortages caused, in large part, by low pay.</p>
<p><b>Cuba</b></p>
<p>Leftists revere Communist Cuba for numerous reasons, not the least of which is the government-run, universal healthcare system that was put in place by Fidel Castro. Many of these admirers—among the most notable of whom is the filmmaker Michael Moore—form their impressions of the Cuban healthcare system from its tourist hospitals, which are, by any standards, clean, well staffed, and of excellent quality. Indeed Cuba, in an effort to attract wealthy foreigners who are willing to spend their money on healthcare services, has pioneered the practice of so-called “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism">health tourism</a>” through agencies such as <a href="http://www.haciendapublishing.com/articles/socialized-medicine-cuba-2002-part-ii-other-hidden-faces-cuban-medicine">SERVIMED</a>, which markets Cuban medical services abroad. Calling Cuba “the ideal destination for your health,” SERVIMED frankly admits to being “a tourist subsystem.”</p>
<p>But after providing for the needs of affluent foreigners (and of the country&#8217;s top government officials), the Cuban healthcare system has little left for the general public. Hospitals for ordinary Cubans are typically <a href="http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/cuba/socialized-medicine.htm">unsanitary</a>. Syringes are frequently used to inject multiple patients without any sterilization, and “disposable” gloves are likewise used and reused. Consequently, infectious diseases such an impetigo and hepatitis—and infestations such as scabies, lice and fungal diseases—are commonplace in the Cuban hospital population.<br />
Moreover, Cuban hospitals have serious <a href="http://capitalismmagazine.com/2003/04/bad-cuban-medicine/">shortages</a> of antibiotics, insulin, heart drugs, blood-pressure meters, disinfectants, and even clean water and soap.</p>
<p>It is noteworthy that in the pre-Castro years of the 1950s, the Cuban population as a whole had access to <a href="http://capitalismmagazine.com/2003/04/bad-cuban-medicine/">outstanding</a> medical care through association clinics (<i>clinicas mutualistas</i>) which predated the American concept of health maintenance organizations by decades, as well as through private clinics. At that time the Cuban medical system ranked among the best in the world, as evidenced by the fact that it had Latin America&#8217;s lowest infant-mortality rate—comparable to Canada&#8217;s and better than those of France, Japan, and Italy.</p>
<p>So the evidence is crystal clear. As the Cato Institute <a href="http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-613.pdf">puts it</a>, “In countries weighted heavily toward government control, people are most likely to face waiting lists, rationing, restrictions on physician choice, and other obstacles to care.” By contrast, “<a href="http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa-613.pdf">those countries</a> with national health care systems that work better, such as France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, are successful to the degree that they incorporate market mechanisms such as competition, cost-consciousness, market prices, and consumer choice, and eschew centralized government control. In other words, socialized medicine works—as long as it isn’t socialized medicine.”</p>
<p>Yet socialized medicine is <i>precisely</i> the direction in which Obama and Democrats wish, beyond any shadow of a doubt, to steer the United States of America. What, then, does this tell us about the judgment and the motivations of these men and women?</p>
<p>Some questions simply answer themselves.</p>
<p><strong>Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em>, which explores <em><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/to-lie-for-obamacare-on-the-glazov-gang/ ">To Lie for ObamaCare</a></em>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/obamacare-the-unimaginable-suffering-that-awaits-us/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>46</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Who&#8217;s the Real Iron Lady of Norway?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whos-the-real-iron-lady-of-norway/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=whos-the-real-iron-lady-of-norway</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whos-the-real-iron-lady-of-norway/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Oct 2013 04:30:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Margaret Thatcher]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Norway]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209088</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A battle of philosophies. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Erna-Solberg-and-Siv-Jens-010.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209174" alt="Erna Solberg and Siv Jensen" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Erna-Solberg-and-Siv-Jens-010.jpg" width="255" height="193" /></a>As Norway&#8217;s non-socialist coalition government has been settling in, I&#8217;ve been poking around in <i>New Wind over Norway, </i>an assemblage of sixteen essays “about freedom and responsibility” edited by Hanne Nabintu Herland, a historian of religion, and written by some of the country&#8217;s more prominent non-socialist voices, including the heads of the two governing parties, Erna Solberg (Conservative) and Siv Jensen (Progress Party). Writing in <a href="http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kommentarer/Idbris-fra-hoyre-7225796.html#.Um8SEBCeZpM"><i>Aftenposten</i></a><i>, </i>Knut Olav Åmås – who after the installation of the  new government on October 16 left his job as that newspaper&#8217;s opinion editor to accept an appointment in the Ministry of Culture – described the book as “an expression of the ideological mobilization that has taken place on the right in recent years, especially around the think tank Civita and the journal Minerva, but also in Christian conservative circles.”</p>
<p>Ideological mobilization or not, it&#8217;s not every day one reads a Norwegian book in which (among much else) leftist groupthink is condemned, the EU is called “morally confused,” America&#8217;s “pluralistic melting pot” and “American values” are celebrated, and writers like Tocqueville, Hayek, John Stuart Mill – and even Ann Coulter and Mark Levin (!) – are quoted respectfully. How cheering to read a Norwegian author (Herland, in this case) who actually recognizes how absurd it is that many Norwegian cabinet ministers “have never had an ordinary job but nonethless direct policy in sectors they have little or no education in or practical knowledge of.” What a pleasure to see a professor from the University of Oslo casting a critical eye on the Norwegian political class&#8217;s obsession with minimizing economic differences – and, by extension, with encouraging sameness and uniformity across the board. How remarkable to find a Norwegian writer who dares to suggest that socialists view freedom as “the right to take part in the development of socialist society” and that they regard their ideological opponents as “obstacles on the road to utopia.”</p>
<p>The book is quite a smorgasbord. Position papers by the two party leaders – about which more presently – are followed by a series of “ideological reflections” in which <i>Minerva </i>editor Nils August Andresen wonders what Edmund Burke would make of today&#8217;s Europe, veteran Conservative politician Lars Roar Langslet calls for efforts to improve students&#8217; Norwegian language skills and preserve Norway&#8217;s artistic heritage, Asle Toje of the Nobel Institute sums up the post-Soviet history of European socialism, and Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, the new head of the Ministry of Education, contrast socialist utopianism with the need for pragmatism. “Politics,” he writes, “is where the world of ideas meets reality&#8230;.One ignores reality at one&#8217;s own risk.” (Such a proposition may seem self-evident, but not necessarily in the world of Scandinavian politics.) There&#8217;s a section on religion, consisting of a long, sweeping overview of Western Christianity by Herland and several shorter essays – it wouldn&#8217;t be too far off to call them sermons – in which theologians and pastors hail the enduring significance of Norway&#8217;s religious heritage.</p>
<p>Although there&#8217;s quite a degree of ideological variety here, there&#8217;s also plenty of overlap. In the political pieces, we&#8217;re told more than once about our debts to John Locke and Edmund Burke; in the sermons, we hear repeatedly about <i>laïcité </i>and about rendering under Caesar, etc. While there&#8217;s a good deal here that&#8217;s of genuine value, moreover, there&#8217;s more than a bit too much abstraction and generalization. And there&#8217;s a pronounced lack of bite, with some of the writers apparently reluctant to take on anybody by name. We&#8217;re reminded frequently that several of Herland&#8217;s contributors are politicians: Isakson, for example, in classic Conservative Party style, seems to try to have it both ways on immigration, reciting the tired mantra that Norway has been culturally enriched by its newcomers but adding that he wants tighter rules, and saying that integration “doesn&#8217;t work well enough, but much of it works well.” (Which, of course, can mean anything you want it to.) It&#8217;s the last part of the book – about the challenges posed by the influx of non-Westerners into Europe – that has some real edge. In a stirring philippic, Hege Storhaug deplores the death threats against Islam&#8217;s critics in Europe and the vituperation directed against them by politicians and the media. Hallgrim Berg denounces the lingering, toxic impact of Sixties radicalism on European democracy. And Iranian-Norwegian author Walid al-Kubaisi, in the book&#8217;s most personal (and only emotionally moving) essay, mounts a strong argument that Norwegian nationalism is not necessarily a bad thing.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most striking thing about Herland&#8217;s collection, however, is the contrast between the two opening essays by Solberg and Jensen, which reflect – and provide a vivid capsule lesson in – the contrast between the two parties that make up Norway&#8217;s governing coalition. Solberg, the Conservative leader, has barely finished clearing her throat before she&#8217;s telling us about her recent visit to a Ahmadiyya mosque, whose members, she writes, “experience peace because they&#8217;re Muslims, but&#8230;also find that it&#8217;s difficult to be accepted in society because they make some choices based on their faith, just by following the commandments they believe in.” Balderdash. In fact, Norway is a refuge for Ahmadiyya Muslims, who are oppressed, persecuted, beaten, and even executed throughout much of the Islamic world, where they&#8217;re considered infidels. But that reality doesn&#8217;t fit into the phony picture Solberg wants to paint of innocent Muslims being denied social acceptance by bigoted Norwegians.</p>
<p>That aside, exactly which Islamic “choices” and “commandments”  is Solberg standing up for here? Female subordination? Forced marriage? Female genital mutilation? The stoning to death of adulterers, apostates, gays? Solberg insists that Norwegians must “respect” Islamic belief – if they don&#8217;t, she maintains, Norway will fail in its “family policies” and in its integration efforts. What, exactly, is she trying to say here? What&#8217;s her logic? What is she calling for? She doesn&#8217;t explain anything. And she can&#8217;t, because it&#8217;s all just empty, feel-good, head-in-the-sand rhetoric – in other words, vintage Solberg. She&#8217;s always dealt with the challenge of Islam by turning the truth on its head – by turning inside-out the fact that Islamic family values are utterly <i>incompatible</i> with real integration and that if one seriously wishes to integrate Muslims into a free society, the first step is to dismiss entirely the idea of “respecting” the tenets of their faith. This is, one is reminded, the woman who, in 2004, as Minister of Integration, welcomed a Pakistani Muslim leader to Norway by bowing to him with one hand on her chest – a gesture which, as she plainly knew, betokened female submission.</p>
<p>While Solberg&#8217;s essay is painfully toothless, Jensen&#8217;s is a call to arms. In her second sentence, in italics, she declares that her party is engaged in a struggle for values. “People who flee the Islamist regime in Iran,” she pronounces, “do not flee to Norway to encounter that negative culture here, too. It&#8217;s that negative culture that they&#8217;re fleeing from!” Also: “People who come here and want religious freedom&#8230;must also tolerate the fact that along with their right to practice their religion comes the right to criticize religion. People with Christian beliefs have had to accept this, and people of other faiths must do so as well. That&#8217;s how it is here in this country, and that&#8217;s how it will stay.” Unlike Solberg, Jensen tackles head-on the Muslim leaders in Norway who spread conspiracies about Jews and who refuse to reject the death penalty for gays. Perusing her essay, you&#8217;d scarcely know she was talking about the same country as the bland, sanguine Solberg, for whom the only Islam-related problem in Norway, one would assume from her essay, is anti-Muslim prejudice. Jensen is, moreover, terrific on Israel, individualism, and the free market; she approvingly quotes Ronald Reagan&#8217;s observation, in his farewell speech, that “&#8217;We the People&#8217; are the driver; the government is the car.”</p>
<p>I happened to read this book at a time when I&#8217;ve also been making my way through the one-volume edition of Margaret Thatcher&#8217;s memoirs. It&#8217;s impossible not to notice that the contrast between Jensen and Solberg bears more than a passing resemblance to that between Thatcher and the timid Tory establishment in the period before she came to power. On one issue after another, Thatcher&#8217;s party colleagues were reluctant to assert first principles, loath to articulate a vision, content for their party to be a somewhat milder version of Labour – just as Norway&#8217;s Conservatives today basically stand, more or less, for socialism lite. While her fellow Tories supported <i>détente</i>, Thatcher, whose “gut instinct was that this was one of those soothing foreign terms which conceal an ugly reality that plain English would expose” (isn&#8217;t that a wonderful line?), felt that “too many people in the West had been lulled into believing that their way of life was secure, when it was in fact under mortal threat”; while in the wake of Enoch Powell&#8217;s sensational 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech about the perils of immigration “it had been the mark of civilized high-mindedness among right-of-centre politicians to avoid speaking about immigration and race at all, and if that did not prove possible, then to do so in terms borrowed from the left of the political spectrum, relishing the &#8216;multi-cultural,&#8217; &#8216;multi-racial&#8217; nature of British society,” Thatcher refused to snobbishly dismiss the concerns of hard-working citizens whose lives were being transformed by radical sociocultural changes that didn&#8217;t affect upper-crust Tory suburbanites at all.</p>
<p>Most politicians in the Norwegian parties (other than the Progress Party) that are generally deemed non-socialists exhibit this same deplorable tendency to echo leftist and multicultural formulas – it&#8217;s this go-along, get-along attitude that has made them acceptable to the left. What has set the Progress Party apart from the beginning – and exposed it to the very same kind of patronizing criticism and ridicule, from both left <i>and</i> right, to which Thatcher was subjected throughout her career – is its stubborn, uncompromising belief in the same things Thatcher believed in: namely, individual freedom and the free market. Solberg and Jensen are both formidable women, and over the years both of them have been likened, sometimes by admirers and sometimes by detractors, to Lady Thatcher; but there&#8217;s no doubt in my mind which of these two leaders is Norway&#8217;s real Iron Lady.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/whos-the-real-iron-lady-of-norway/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Left&#8217;s War on Neoliberalism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/the-lefts-war-on-neoliberalism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lefts-war-on-neoliberalism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/the-lefts-war-on-neoliberalism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 23 Aug 2013 04:15:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steven Plaut]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[neoliberalism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=201679</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The most acute intellectual disease of the 21st century. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/occupy-london-460x2881.jpg"><img class="wp-image-201682 alignleft" alt="occupy-london-460x2881" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/occupy-london-460x2881.jpg" width="212" height="171" /></a>We all know how contorted the use of the term &#8220;liberalism&#8221; has been for decades.  Liberalism once upon a time (before 1970) meant free competition and meritocracy without discrimination.  But ever since then liberalism has meant affirmation action quotas and dumbed-down standards to achieve radical homogeneity in &#8220;representativeness.&#8221;  Liberalism once favored eliminating the use of gender, racial and ethnic group membership as a criterion for advancement, whereas these days liberals almost unanimously endorse subordination of all advancement to such things.  Liberalism once meant removing obstacles to competition and elimination of measures that simply protect special interests.  These days liberals favor retaining as many such obstacles as possible. Liberals once favored reining in government and preventing subordination of markets to bureaucratic whims and political allegiances.  Today the very essence of liberalism is to favor such things.</p>
<p>Nineteenth century liberalism was essentially the belief in free-market economics in most markets.  This means that a nineteenth century liberal differs little from a 21st century conservative.</p>
<p>All this is highly confusing.  When someone calls himself a liberal these days, we always need to clarify if he means that he believes in the 19th century&#8217;s classical liberalism, that of David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, or the 21st century liberalism of Rev Al, Obamacare, and MSNBC, or perhaps even the hardcore Stalinism &#8220;in the name of liberalism&#8221; of people like Noam Chomsky and the writers at &#8220;Counterpunch.&#8221;</p>
<p>As if the uses of &#8220;liberalism&#8221; had not muddied the waters sufficiently, along comes the even worse rhetorical invention of &#8220;neoliberalism.&#8221;   Whatever it may have meant in the past, these days &#8220;neoliberalism&#8221; is the nonsense word of choice used by Marxists to refer to anyone who rejects communism.  A more honest pejorative by such people should have been &#8220;anti-communist,&#8221; but that word has lost its ability to shock and trigger goosestepping and line-toeing by wannabe fellow travelers.</p>
<p>The simple fact of the matter is that <a href="http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=180332">anyone using the word &#8220;neoliberal&#8221; these days</a> is a Marxist or at least someone who thinks that markets should never be allowed to operate freely.  Anti-neoliberals favor nationalization and state controls.</p>
<p>The term &#8220;neoliberalism&#8221; was originally coined in the 1930s to refer to the general favoring of free international trade.  We need to distinguish between the original neoliberalism and the contemporary 21st century misuse of the term.  The current trendiness originated in the 1980s.  While some centrist liberals at the time used the word to describe themselves, it increasingly turned into a term of disparagement and mocking by radicals.  Ironically, radicals these days seem to be using the word as a substitution for the earlier terms of disparagement: &#8220;neoconservatives&#8221; and &#8220;paleoconservatives.&#8221; Those derisions are a bit stale.</p>
<p>The &#8220;neoliberal&#8221; word was long used by the Left and especially by Marxists to dismiss the saner writers and columnists from Left of Center, particularly those associated with the New Republic and Washington Monthly.  David Brooks <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/opinion/11brooks.html?_r=1&amp;">used it in his NY Times</a> essay &#8220;The Vanishing Neoliberal.&#8221;  Google and Yahoo list thousands of pages in which the Stalinist web magazine &#8220;Counterpunch&#8221; <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/03/13/is-this-really-the-end-of-neoliberalism/">has used the term</a><a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/undone-neoliberalism#axzz2chfUbLQc">.  &#8220;The Nation&#8221;</a> is <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/undone-neoliberalism">not far</a> behind.</p>
<p><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/neoliberalism-and-higher-education/">Writing in the NY Times a few years back</a>, Stanley Fish describes the emergence of the term:</p>
<blockquote><p>I’ve been asking colleagues in several departments and disciplines whether they’ve ever come across the term “neoliberalism” and whether they know what it means. A small number acknowledged having heard the word; a very much smaller number ventured a tentative definition.</p>
<p>I was asking because I had been reading essays in which the adjective neoliberal was routinely invoked as an accusation, and I had only a sketchy notion of what was intended by it….</p>
<p>What I’ve learned (and what some readers of this column no doubt already knew) is that neoliberalism is a pejorative way of referring to a set of economic/political policies based on a strong faith in the beneficent effects of free markets.</p></blockquote>
<p>As an example of neoliberalism, he provides this:</p>
<blockquote><p>In a neoliberal world, for example, tort questions — questions of negligence law —  are thought of not as ethical questions of blame and restitution (who did the injury and how can the injured party be made whole?), but as economic questions about the value to someone of an injury-producing action relative to the cost to someone else adversely affected by that same action. It may be the case that run-off from my factory kills the fish in your stream; but rather than asking the government to stop my polluting activity (which would involve the loss of jobs and the diminishing of the number of market transactions), why don’t you and I sit down and figure out if more wealth is created by my factory’s operations than is lost as a consequence of their effects?</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/to-boycott-or-not-to-boycott-that-is-the-question/">Stanley Fish later cites one of his critics as saying that neoliberalism</a>, like neoconservatism, is “an opaque catchphrase coined by wannabe pundits” that does not “refer to anything.”</p>
<p>These days the main function of the word &#8220;neoliberalism&#8221; is to reveal that the person using it is a Marxist.  The Marxist jihadists against neoliberalism, along with quasi-marxists who kvetch against it, are using the word to dismiss anyone who thinks that markets sometimes work better than People&#8217;s Kommissars.  &#8220;Neoliberals&#8221; according to the Left are people who oppose all forms of regulation of markets and all measures that boost equality.  But in most cases, those neoliberal offenders being dismissed are not libertarian absolutists at all, just mainstream people who understand that regulation is one, but not necessarily the automatic first instrument for legitimate economic policy.  If you reject the idea that every market must be nationalized and controlled by the vanguard party representing the interests of the &#8220;people,&#8221; then you just may be a neoliberal.  The vanguard party, by the way, knows just what the &#8220;people&#8221; (or sometimes the working class) need, based on their having read Marx and not by means of asking the people (or workers) what they want.</p>
<p>Anti-neoliberals have an enraged bee in their bonnet when it comes to international trade.  This is ironic because if there is one idea that enjoys universal support across the entire spectrum of economic thought and ideologies, it is that international trade always benefits people.  It benefits small countries more than large countries.  It benefits poor and undeveloped countries more than developed countries.  But international trade smacks of &#8220;globalization&#8221; in the minds of anti-neoliberals, and so must be fought, although none of them can say just why.  Globalization benefits the US and so it must be evil, and never mind if it also benefits sub-Saharan Africa.  The anti-neoliberals are little different from the violent anti-globalization rioters and the &#8220;Occupy Wall Street&#8221; hordes.  Their dream is for the world to adopt the autarky-to-the-death policies of North Korea, where countries should seek &#8220;independence&#8221; by means of disruption of international trade and impoverishment of their populations.</p>
<p>The Left&#8217;s reversion to the snooty dismissal of liberals, neo or otherwise, is itself enlightening.  While conservatives long mocked them by saying that socialists are merely liberals in a hurry, there was an underlying revulsion towards liberals among real radicals.  Liberals tended to be too touchy-feely, non-violent, defending the need for freedom of speech, appreciative of middle class standards of living and wealth, and too anxious to get their kids into good colleges.  Radicals wanted violence and class warfare, and were more than willing to forego bourgeois niceties like freedom of speech and the rule of law in order to seize power.  While willing to play along with their assigned theater roles as &#8220;liberals in a hurry,&#8221; especially when this allowed them to manipulate &#8220;popular front&#8221; broad coalitions, the radicals felt nothing but disdain toward the non-Marxists.  That pretense has now been dropped.</p>
<p>A gentler and kinder person these days would conclude from hearing anyone toss out the term &#8220;neoliberal&#8221; that the speaker is an idiot who has nothing of value to say about anything at all.  Someone less kind will understand that the speaker is a communist.</p>
<p>Anti-neoliberalism is emerging as the most acute intellectual disease of the 21st century.   I think only Jeff Foxworth could do the term justice.  If he is listening, here are a few modest suggestions for a new Foxworthy shtick:</p>
<p>*   If you believe that the same government that cannot deliver the mail must serve as the single health care provider, then you just might be an anti-neoliberal.</p>
<p>*  If you believe that true communism has never yet been tested or tried, then you just might be an anti-neoliberal.</p>
<p>*  If you believe that the rioters who trashed Seattle in the anti-globalization protests really care about people, then you just might be an anti-neoliberal.</p>
<p>*  If you believe that the &#8220;Occupy Wall Street&#8221; urchins really represent 99% of the public, then you just might be an anti-neoliberal.</p>
<p>* If you believe that the US was attacked by al-Qaeda on 9-11 because America is such a racist, selfish place, then you just might be an anti-neoliberal.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/the-lefts-war-on-neoliberalism/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>7</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Health Care Solutions: Patients in Command</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/health-care-solutions-patients-in-command/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=health-care-solutions-patients-in-command</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/health-care-solutions-patients-in-command/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 21 Aug 2013 04:15:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[expensive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health Care]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[patients]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[regulation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=201205</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What if America truly had a free medical market? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/doctor_visit.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-201255" alt="10018 Medicine, Lackner, ECMC" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/doctor_visit.jpg" width="279" height="211" /></a>In a scene from the movie &#8220;Monty Python’s Meaning of Life,&#8221; a pregnant woman in labor is seen being wheeled down hospital corridors at freeway speeds, with the bumpers of the gurney crashing through swinging fire doors inches from the top of her head until the delivery room is reached, where an excess of necessary and unnecessary equipment momentarily obscures the location of the patient. While the doctors and nurses prep for the procedure, a crowd of ostensibly qualified strangers (but not the patient’s husband) are invited to observe from a strategic viewpoint. The woman asks, “what do I do?” to which John Cleese’s doctor replies “Nothing darling, you’re NOT QUALIFIED!”</p>
<p>Which is about how our discussions of the controversies of health care reform, health management, Accountable Care Organizations, Scope of Practice Expansion, etc. go.  The patient is rarely consulted for an opinion, much less approval.</p>
<p>And why should patients be consulted?  They’re not experts, like doctors and nurses, or more to the point, like the MBAs, executives and employees of federal departments who exercise the power. Even more to the point, the patients aren’t the ones paying, at least not directly.</p>
<p>American patient-consumers are not permitted to control how their insurance premium dollars and medical expenditures are spent without interference from government.  There is one set of (tax) rules for employees who may get a health plan through an employer, and another set of rules for people purchasing plans individually. With few exceptions, Americans who are not in an employer/employee relationship are not at liberty to freely associate under the First Ammendment for purposes of creating health insurance pools.  Farmers, ranchers and other self-employed individuals are forced to fend for themselves alone.</p>
<p>Unlike the normal rules of freedom of commerce whereby any American may buy or sell from or to anyone in any state or country, in health insurance there is one elaborate and rigid set of rules for Californians, another set for New Yorkers, another for Mississippians and so on. Consumers and medical insurance companies are not free to negotiate on mutally agreeable terms as they are (relatively) with auto, home, earthquake, fire or flood insurance. In essence, the consumer’s money is not his or her own but the government’s, to be directed as the elected representatives and unelected administrators and czars determine.</p>
<p>Is it any mystery, then, that costs are out of control and billing patterns and practices are irrational, even diabolical?  The people who have the greatest stake in the game – the patients – are hardly consulted in how much they are willing and able to spend on what.</p>
<p>Most of us, if presented with a choice of a BMW 740iL luxury performance sedan or a KIA Forte, would prefer the BMW. But not all of us can afford a BMW, while the KIA is perfectly adequate for getting from Point A to Point B. How many BMWs and KIAs get produced and sold, and to whom, depends upon the resources and preferences of millions of individuals acting on their own account and commanding their own resources, which, at least in the West and to the degree that the free market is permitted to function, are substantial. There is no runaway inflation or gross imbalances of supply and demand of automobiles, bicycles, flat-screen TVs, personal computing devices, clothing or a thousand other products and categories where the footprint of government, regulation and taxation treads relatively lightly. People of the most modest means today have a cornucopia of products and services from around the world available to them at affordable prices, thanks to capitalism. No king, or emperor, or even secretary general of the Supreme Soviet ever enjoyed such abundance even 50 years ago.</p>
<p>What if there existed in the USA a truly free market in health insurance and and health care services, that is, what if the government did not interfere in favoring and then dis-favoring employer-provided insurance? What if the government did not mandate what benefits had to be included in insurance plans; did not interfere with interstate commerce in financial products, thereby limiting consumer choices; did not monopolize medical residencies through Medicare and Congress (number of residencies frozen since 1997 in spite of growth and need for more doctors); did not monopolize medical services to the elderly and then cut reimbursements to a level that makes it a losing proposition to many doctors to accept Medicare patients; did not deliberately put Health Savings Accounts and Flexible Spending Accounts at a disadvantage relative to Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs); and a thousand other interventions, prohibitions, taxes, favoritism, prejudices, fines, penalties and taxes? Then patients and their families would be in far greater command of their own resources and of those being spent on their behalf. Then they, through their choosing and rejecting, spending and withholding, could sort out which of the brilliant ideas of the experts truly have merit, which are nice tries and which are losers.  They could and would determine whether mid-level providers may substitute for fully-licensed physicians in the operating room, and whether compliance with evidence-based protocols enforced by bureaucrats and computers or hard-earned professional experience and judgment should govern physician behavior. They will fine-tune to what degrees medicine is a scientific discipline, a production process to be administered, or an art.</p>
<p>The mess that we are in with Medicare (looted), Medicaid (failed; statistically better to have no insurance at all than to be enrolled) and now Obamacare (train wreck, according to one of its prominent sponsors) underscores the perils of &#8220;solving problems&#8221; instead of pursuing opportunities. Controlling costs by denying treatments and steering patients away from the most trained and qualified professionals, rationing, death panels, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) etc. all &#8220;solve problems.&#8221; On the other hand, our dedicated physicians, nurses, specialists, pharmaceutical research, and medical art, science, creativity and innovation, along with patients in command of the resources that are to be spent on their behalf, are our opportunities.  Freedom, voluntary cooperation, liberty of contract and the generosity of American neighbors and friends – unmatched anywhere in the world – are our opportunities. If we Americans will pursue those, we will once again pull ahead in our lead as the world’s foremost medical innovator and most responsive to the needs of the patient, as we have been for at least 50 years.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/howard-hyde/health-care-solutions-patients-in-command/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism (Part VI)</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-vi/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-vi</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-vi/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 14 Aug 2013 04:12:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[class]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Poor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rich]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[wealthy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200478</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The free market: the great enemy of social class systems. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/capital.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200556" alt="capital" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/capital.jpg" width="280" height="210" /></a>Editor’s note: The following is the sixth, and final, installment of the FrontPage series “Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism” by Dr. Mark Hendrickson. Click the following for <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-i/">Part I</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-ii/">Part II</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iii/">Part III</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iv/">Part IV</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-v/">Part V</a>. </em></p>
<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">We have already discussed how, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, most progressives and other advocates of more government intervention believe that Washington should have greater control over economic activity in order to increase prosperity for more people. We also have examined the glaring holes in their arguments of advocates of intervention who insist that government redistribution of property is fairer and morally superior to allowing free markets to distribute wealth. The third point they make in support of their statist agendas is the alleged problem of class divisions inherent in capitalism. Their arguments in this case are equally feeble. In fact, charges that capitalism divides people into irreconcilable classes is a hollow canard.</span></b></p>
<p>When one surveys the history of capitalism, starting with the onset of the Age of Capitalism in the 18<sup>th</sup> century, one can’t help but notice its revolutionary effects on social structure in addition to its pronounced positive economic effects. Pre-capitalist societies in Europe had been characterized by rigid social stratifications. A person born into a certain social stratum was doomed, barring a miracle, to die there. Royals, aristocrats, and their retinues enjoyed the privileges of a rigged Big Government system that enriched them and left the common man with such scant economic opportunities that having enough to eat was a recurring problem.</p>
<p>Capitalism changed all that. By virtue of its superiority in producing goods, capitalism “provided sustenance for the masses of paupers. Capitalists emptied the poor houses, the workhouses, and the prisons. They converted starving beggars into self-supporting breadwinners.”<sup>1</sup> Capitalism liberated millions from hereditary poverty. By shifting control of economic production from the privileged few to the masses (i.e, consumer sovereignty in free markets), new fortunes were made and old fortunes were eclipsed.</p>
<p>In short, tremendous upward mobility supplanted social stasis as capitalism multiplied opportunities for individual advancement. Capitalism sundered pre-existing class divisions and made it possible for the talented and industrious to make the proverbial leap from rags to riches. When Karl Marx and his successors fixated on the theory of class conflict, they were like the proverbial general fighting the last war. They were obsessed with the rigid, antagonistic class divisions that characterized the politico-socio-economic orders—feudalism and mercantilism—that preceded capitalism.</p>
<p>Capitalism, in fact, broke up the old order, supplanting rigid social hierarchies with social mobility. Capitalism unlocked the doors of economic progress for the masses, both by lowering the cost of goods so that those once too poor to purchase various goods now could afford to do so; and also by increasing the amount of capital in society so that it became possible for citizens from poor backgrounds to become entrepreneurs and make the proverbial leap from rags to riches.</p>
<p>It is historically inaccurate for socialists to accuse capitalism of sowing the seeds of class conflict by dividing society into classes whose interests were implacably opposed to each other. The calumny that capitalism would keep workers in a permanent state of inferiority has been disproved millions of times throughout American history. Worse, though, than the socialists’ diagnosis is their proposed cure for the class divisions allegedly created by capitalism. Socialism commits the very sin of which it accuses capitalism: It divides society into two classes, a dominant upper class and submissive lower class—the elite government planners and the masses of people, respectively.</p>
<p>Whereas capitalism represented a radical departure from the class divisions inherent in mercantilism, socialism seeks to reinstitute such divisions. Socialism is, in some very fundamental ways, a neo-mercantilist system. Indeed, by deposing the sovereign consumer—the democratic economic rule of Everyman—and replacing it with a privileged ruling class, socialism is politically reactionary.</p>
<p>The reason why capitalistic systems like the United States never fell prey to a worker’s revolt or class warfare was because the vast majority of Americans have seen that they could advance themselves economically without bloodshed or revolution. Instead, they could take advantage of the opportunities that capitalism continually presents. Why resort to force and violence if the system offers your children a better life by peaceful means? How can anyone organize a proletarian army of oppressed, impoverished malcontents if the members of the would-be army are climbing out of poverty and rising above (sometimes considerably above) their previous social status?</p>
<p>In the United States, the individual liberty that accompanies and characterizes capitalism has allowed millions of Americans to rise two, three, or even four quintiles in social rankings of income and net worth. America&#8217;s perennial economic, social, and political mobility has been a healthy antidote to class conflict, since anyone with the talent and initiative was free to go up the social/economic ladder, rendering notions of rigid class distinctions untenable. A U.S. Treasury study found that “over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile” in the ten-year period, 1996-2005.<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>It seems incredible that anyone would try to fan the flames of class conflict in the U.S. today when a middle-income American enjoys a standard of living that in many ways is more affluent than the lifestyle enjoyed by 19<sup>th</sup>-century monarchs. Today, the average poor American “has more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France, or the United Kingdom”; “80 percent of poor households have air conditioning” (as recently as 1970, only 36 percent of Americans had A/C); “31 percent have two or more cars”; “nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite TV,” etc.<sup>3</sup> It has to be hard to organize a movement based on income when society is so fluid and large numbers of people continually move up to higher income levels.</p>
<p>Socialists, progressives, and other opponents of capitalism are nothing if not persistent. As latter-day ideological heirs of Marx, they continue to see the world in terms of class conflict. They seem to need class conflict so badly that if they can’t find it, they will do their best to manufacture it. Whether consciously or not, government interference with free markets over the past two or three generations have managed to thwart capitalism’s natural tendency to lift people out of poverty and have produced a long-term (some sociologists even use the adjective “permanent”) underclass in American society.</p>
<p>Many social scientists—Charles Murray preeminent among them—have documented the secular trend toward declining poverty rates over the course of American history.<sup>4</sup> Except when this trend was interrupted during the Great Depression of the 1930s (itself a tragic sequence caused by a succession of pernicious policy mistakes in Washington)<sup>5</sup> free-market capitalism reduced the incidence of poverty in every decade—until the mid-1960s when the poverty rate quit declining and has remained range-bound ever since.<sup>6</sup></p>
<p>What policies interrupted capitalism’s progress against poverty? One has been the devastation and even literal destruction of thriving black business communities in the name of urban renewal.<sup>7</sup> Another was the breakdown of the black family, famously warned about by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965, and then abetted by a series of government anti-poverty programs that created what Heritage Foundation analyst Robert Rector memorably dubbed “the incentive system from hell” that financially rewarded and incentivized single parenthood. Another was the strategy resulting in the Curley effect, by which interventionist politicians kept large numbers of inner-city residents in various misnamed <i>social welfare</i> programs in exchange for their political loyalty. This deal with the devil lured many urban residents to accept a state of permanent economic dependence on the political plantation of slick politicians who purveyed their status as <i>defenders of the poor</i> into permanent control of city governments. Thus, we have essentially one-party hegemony in America’s poorest, most rundown cities.<sup>8</sup></p>
<p>By blaming stubborn poverty on capitalism, those advocating more government economic intervention are projecting their own faults onto others. It is government intervention that is responsible for the unnecessarily large size of the chronically poor in America. Capitalism is no panacea; people can still be poor where there is capitalism (read the book of <i>Proverbs</i> for numerous reasons why that is the case), but the historical record of capitalism has proven that it does more to promote upward economic mobility than any form of socialism or interventionism.</p>
<p>The assertion that capitalism leads to class conflict is not only historically false; it is a cynical lie. Rigid class divisions—economic, social, and political—are only possible where governments subvert free markets and impede people’s ability to advance economically. It takes a powerful government, or a strong cultural-religious caste system, to maintain rigid class distinctions. Capitalism does not erect divisions between economic classes; it demolishes them. Far from being the cause, as Marx and his followers claimed, capitalism is the antidote for class conflict.</p>
<p>The left talks a lot about “peace.” What could be more peaceful than free individuals choosing with whom to interact economically for mutual benefit in the noble framework known as <i>capitalism</i>? In such a system where voluntary action is the rule and individual rights are respected, human beings encounter allies, not enemies, and individual self-interest tends toward harmony instead of conflict. Perhaps this is the greatest and most blessed feature of capitalism, and a primary reason for why capitalism is worth defending and preserving.</p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p><sup>1</sup> Ludwig von Mises, <i>Human Action</i>, Scholar’s Edition, p. 615.</p>
<p><sup>2</sup> “Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005,” Report of the Department of the Treasury, November 13, 2007.</p>
<p><sup>3</sup> Official government data cited in “Understanding Poverty in the United States&#8230;”  March 22, 2012, <a href="http://www.projectworldawareness.com/2012/03/understanding-poverty-in-the-united-states-surprising-facts-about-americas-poor/">www.projectworldawareness.com/2012/03/understanding-poverty-in-the-united-states-surprising-facts-about-americas-poor/</a>.</p>
<p><sup>4</sup> Charles Murray, <i>Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980</i>, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984.</p>
<p><sup>5</sup> Cf. Lawrence Reed, “Great Myths of the Great Depression,” <a href="http://www.mackinac.org/4013">www.mackinac.org/4013</a>; Burton Folsom, <i>New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America</i>, New York: Threshold Editions/Simon &amp; Schuster, 2008.</p>
<p><sup>6</sup> Ezra Klein’s “Wonkblog,” “Poverty in the 50 years since ‘The Other America,’ in five charts,” The Washington Post, posted July 11, 2012, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/11/poverty-in-the-50-years-since-the-other-america-in-five-charts/">www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/11/poverty-in-the-50-years-since-the-other-america-in-five-charts/</a>.</p>
<p><sup>7</sup> Cf. Ellen Pierson, “Race and City Planning in Pittsburgh’s Hill District,” 16 May 2008, posted in “The Not-So-New Face of Urban Renewal,” <a href="http://documents.kenyon.edu/americanstudies/">documents.kenyon.edu/americanstudies/</a>; Matt Lakin, “1960s brought end to segregation, prohibition,” July 29, 2012.<a href="http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/jul/29/1960s-brought-end-to-segregation-prohibition/?print=1">www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/jul/29/1960s-brought-end-to-segregation-prohibition/?print=1</a>; Peter Dreier, “Jane Jacobs’ Radical Legacy,” National Housing Institute Issue #146, Summer 2006, <a href="http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/146/janejacobslegacy.html">www.nhi.org/online/issues/146/janejacobslegacy.html</a>.</p>
<p><sup>8</sup> Edward L. Glaeser &amp; Andrei Shleifer, “The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate,” Department of Economics, Harvard University,2005, <a href="http://www.economics.harvard.edu/facutly/shleifer/files/curley%E2%80%94effct.pdf">www.economics.harvard.edu/facutly/shleifer/files/curley—effct.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-vi/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>46</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism (Part V)</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-v/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-v</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-v/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Aug 2013 04:06:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Corporation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ethics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200359</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The ethical wonder of the free market. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/144-free-market-killed-the-coffee-industry.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200360" alt="144-free-market-killed-the-coffee-industry" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/144-free-market-killed-the-coffee-industry.jpg" width="245" height="185" /></a></span></b><em>Editor’s note: The following is the fifth installment of the FrontPage series “Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism” by Dr. Mark Hendrickson. Click the following for <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-i/">Part I</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-ii/">Part II</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iii/">Part III</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iv/">Part IV</a>. </em></p>
<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">The opponents of capitalism charge that capitalism concentrates power and wealth unjustly in the hands of an elite, to the detriment of the masses of people. Let’s take a look at power first.</span></b></p>
<p>Large private corporations are a favorite bogeyman of anti-capitalists. There can be no denying their economic importance and impact, but <i>power</i>? Power to do what to whom?</p>
<p>Under capitalism, corporations don’t have the power to compel anybody to invest in their business, give them supplies, or lend them money. They certainly can’t compel consumers to buy their products. Instead, they have to win the patronage of consumers, gain market share, and earn profits (i.e., succeed) on their own merit—their efficiency, their adroitness at serving consumers, their adaptability, skill, talent, and effort.</p>
<p>In a free market, even the largest and most prestigious firm today will shrivel and perhaps die if it fails to keep abreast of what the ever-changing sovereign consumer prefers. If you don’t think so, check out a list of the mega-corporations included in the Dow-Jones Industrial Average over the last century. You will see that many of the corporate giants of yesteryear no longer exist.</p>
<p>Whatever happened to American Can, Pan Am Airways, Studebaker, Smith-Corona, Montgomery Ward, Circuit City? They are just a few of the allegedly powerful corporations to whom the sovereign consumer gave a thumbs down and revoked their lease to serve them. Think, too, of the A&amp;P grocery stores, Howard Johnson restaurants, and other once-dominant firms that barely survive. What kind of power do they have?</p>
<p>It may appear today that Wal-Mart and Apple Computer will dominate their respective markets indefinitely, but in fact, there are only two ways for them to remain Number One in the decades to come: Either they will continue to excel over their competition in giving the consumers the most value for their dollars, or their position will be protected by some sort of alliance with government, whether that be by subsidies, legal or regulatory protection against competition, or some form of nationalization.</p>
<p>“But wait,” you say, “You can’t deny that American corporations today wield enormous political influence through their lobbying activities. Just look at all the bailouts, corporate welfare, etc.” Yes, exactly so. In that sense, corporations indeed gain some power at the expense of consumers and taxpayers. But if a corporation is enriching itself through the political process, that does nothing to discredit capitalism, for, as we have already said, such political favoritism constitutes cronyism and is the antithesis of capitalism.</p>
<p>The only businesses that wield any true power over consumers are the businesses in non-capitalistic systems that are propped up by the power of the state. The most extreme example of business enterprises having power to depose the sovereign consumer is in the very system that those who complain about corporate power advocate as an alternative: socialism. Under socialism, the state compels resources to be diverted to state-owned enterprises, and then it continues to prop them up regardless of whether consumers are satisfied with them. Under socialism, the counterfeit pseudo-capitalists (the political appointees) in charge of these enterprises are unaccountable to the people. They have the full power of the state behind them. This enables them to treat consumers badly and operate the business inefficiently with impunity, insulated from the financial loss and failure that a privately owned business behaving so poorly would suffer.</p>
<p>The greater the state support of business enterprises, the more sovereign power is taken away from consumers. Those concerned about power and justice need to understand that consumer sovereignty is the ultimate economic democracy. Consumer sovereignty means that everyone’s economic values and choices help to shape and determine the pattern of economic production. Every dollar vote counts. Under this economically democratic system, power is diffused over the entire population.</p>
<p>By contrast, under socialism, economic power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, the government planners. Socialism thus subverts rather than strengthens democracy. Similarly, to the governments in various mixed economy systems use their power to commandeer resources, and to tax, spend, and regulate, they indeed overrule the will of the people in terms of what is produced and who produces it. When speaking of economic power, only governments have the power to force their desired outcomes on an unwilling public; capitalistic businesses do not.</p>
<p>It is simply incorrect to assert that capitalism concentrates power in the hands of private businesses. The second allegedly unfair aspect of capitalism—that it enriches businesses at the expense of the citizenry—is also a myth. Yes, in capitalistic systems, businesses can accumulate spectacular riches. More precisely, some businesses can. The critics of capitalism tend to forget that under capitalism, a majority of U.S. business enterprises fail within four years,<sup>1</sup> and that, as recently mentioned, even the most successful corporations eventually die out.</p>
<p>The pertinent question is: Is there anything inherently illicit or objectionable about some corporations amassing billions of dollars of profits? In the absence of force or fraud, the answer is “no.”</p>
<p>The beauty and fairness of capitalism is that people prosper in proportion as they supply economic value to others. Henry Ford, for example, earned a fortune many, many times as large as that earned by his fellow automobile maker, Henry Royce, because Royce delivered value to a small number of people while Ford delivered economic value to millions of people. Indeed, it is in the nature of capitalism the largest business fortunes result from having rendered economic value to large numbers of people.</p>
<p>The economically illiterate tend to look at hugely successful businesses and speak of them as if they are a menace to society. It is a strange mentality indeed that regards economic benefactors as an antisocial pestilence. What such critics generally fail to grasp is the actual economic significance of profits earned in a free market in which all transactions are voluntary and uninfluenced by government intervention.</p>
<p>What does it mean when a corporation earns gonzo profits? To answer that question, we need to know why consumers willingly paid the prices that produced a spectacular rate of profit. In a free market, voluntary exchanges are positive sum, meaning that the buyers valued what they bought more highly than they valued the money they paid (perhaps quite a bit more than what they paid—what economists call <i>consumer surplus</i>). In other words, however gaudy a business’s profits, they created more than that amount of value for their customers.</p>
<p>To assert that it is somehow unfair for an exceptional capitalistic enterprise to earn large profits is to assert that it isn’t fair for one entity to create so much value for others. On what ethical grounds can one say that it is fair to limit how much good any individual or corporate enterprise can do for others? To seek to impose higher taxes on such economic benefactors is to punish beneficence. It is also unfair to workers, because profits are a major source of the new capital that will fund new jobs, produce new goods and services, and further uplift standards of living.</p>
<p>The ethical essence of capitalism is that it rewards voluntary service to others. By contrast, government intervention uses state power to support some enterprises over others. Those firms don’t have to excel at meeting the needs of consumers. Often they don’t have to take into consideration consumers’ wishes at all. They are subsidized and supported according to their political pull rather than their economic service. They benefit from privileges that the rest of us don’t have—a manifest injustice.</p>
<p>The fact is, there is no system of interpersonal economic relations other than capitalism that is predicated on the principle and practice of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. In truly free markets, the only legitimate way to enrich oneself is to render unto others something of value to them.</p>
<p>The ethical principle that wealth in any amount is legitimate, so long as it is acquired through honest service to others will not satisfy those who are committed to what they perceive as the ethical principle of egalitarianism. A full rebuttal of egalitarianism lies beyond the scope of this short work, but it is self-evident that each individual human being is different in terms of abilities, talents, skills, drive, discipline, industry, etc. Economic differences, then, are built into the cake of human society. Egalitarians are at war with either God or evolutionary nature—whichever they believe is responsible for the present human condition of differentness. They are obsessed with wanting to correct what they believe to be a cosmic blunder. Their solution is always the use of government force, redistributing property from productive citizens and businesses to favored recipients (presumably the less productive, although the subsidies to firms like GE and Archer-Daniels-Midland show that the well-to-do often are on the receiving end of supposedly just redistribution).</p>
<p>Ethically, the egalitarians and redistributionists have a problem. Their agenda rests on the problematical premise that some people have a right to property taken from others without compensation. Such compulsory transfers of property are technically unconstitutional according to the Fifth and Thirteenth Amendments. The Fifth guaranteed that no person “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” (i.e., a judicial proceeding, not a legislative act); the Thirteenth abolished chattel slavery and “involuntary servitude,”  which would include being compelled to surrender part of one’s income to others upon whom the state had bestowed a special privilege.</p>
<p>Those in favor of government redistribution of property have another ethical problem: Where is the principle that tells them how far to go in the process of redistributing property? Once they decide the state should bestow a favor on Mr. A, why shouldn’t they do something for B, C, D, et al.? Furthermore, if the state does favors 1, 2, and 3 for some citizens or businesses, why not 4, 5, 6, etc., too? The fact is, there is no ethical guideline showing how far it is right to proceed along these lines. What happens in practice, then (as is the case in the contemporary USA), is that whatever political coalition has enough votes simply bestows however much property it has the power to dole out. This is the crude, primitive ethical precept, “might makes right.”</p>
<p>With ethical principles as primitive as “might makes right” supporting their political agenda, it is little wonder that the opponents of capitalism try to change the subject by condemning capitalism for breeding greed. This is a red herring. In the first place, greed can surface in any human society. Indeed, some of those who denounce capitalism manifest a virulent greed for power, fame, and privilege. More importantly, though, capitalism has built-in defenses against greed, so that greed becomes irrelevant.</p>
<p>One of the more interesting curiosities of the pro-capitalism intellectual camp is the vigorous debate between followers of Ayn Rand, who insist that selfishness is the basis of capitalism, and George Gilder and others, who insist with equal vehemence that capitalism is essentially altruistic.<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>What matters in a free-market economy is not someone’s intent or motivation, but his actions. Let’s assume a particular merchant is ambitious, driven, and greedy, obsessed with getting rich. Some critics have made such accusations against highly successful American entrepreneurs, such as Richard Sears, under whose leadership Sears became a retail titan. Are those accusations true? Maybe, but it doesn’t matter (at least, not to the public, although an obsession with success may cause serious problems in one’s family life, but that is a private matter). In a free market, in which force and fraud are outlawed, how can any greedy person achieve great wealth? The means to that end is to out-compete others in serving the economic wants of others, and to do it over and over for more and more people.</p>
<p>Contrariwise, let’s assume someone is impelled by altruistic motives so that their primary goal is to be of service to others by supplying them with what they need for a lower price than anyone else. The only viable way to be able to continue doing this year after year (absent having an inexhaustible source of wealth from inheritance or donations from others) would be to earn enough of a profit to be able to afford to continue doing good for others. As Ludwig von Mises summarized it nine decades ago:</p>
<p>“In the society based on division of labor and cooperation, the interests of all members are in harmony, and it follows from this basic fact of social life that ultimately action in the interests of myself and action in the interest of others do not conflict, since the interests of individuals come together in the end. Thus the famous scientific dispute as to the possibility of deriving the altruistic from the egoistic motives of action may be regarded as definitely disposed of.”<sup>3</sup></p>
<p>In sum the ethical gap between capitalism and alternative economic systems is immense. At the risk of over-simplifying, it boils down to one fundamental antipodal difference: Capitalism rejects the use of force, whereas interventionism relies on force; in capitalistic systems, economic transactions are voluntary; interventionism compels involuntary exchanges; capitalism sides with individual rights against the encroachments of state power; interventionism exalts, to varying degrees, state power above individual rights; where there is capitalism, all people, rich and poor, are equal before the law; where there is interventionism, George Orwell’s warning from <i>Animal House</i> comes into play: “All animals [citizens] are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”</p>
<p><strong>Read Part VI of this series in the next issue of FrontPage Magazine.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p><sup>1</sup> U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics cited in Amy E. Knaup, “Survival and longevity in the Business Employment Dynamics data,” <i>Monthly Labor Review</i>, May 2005, p. 51.</p>
<p><sup>2</sup> One of the most famous passages in the history of economic literature is Adam Smith’s discussion of the importance of self-interest in human commerce, but Smith clearly sees that where no force is used, self-interest conduces to peaceful cooperation and reciprocal benefit. See Smith’s <i>Wealth of Nations</i>, Book 1, Chapter II.</p>
<p><sup>3</sup>Mises, <i>Socialism</i>, pp. 397-8.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-v/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>5</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism (Part IV)</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iv/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iv</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iv/#respond</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 12 Aug 2013 04:20:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[monopoly]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200255</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why socialism inevitably fails. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/0130-money_full_600.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200269" alt="0130-money_full_600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/0130-money_full_600-450x329.jpg" width="270" height="197" /></a>Editor’s note: The following is the fourth installment of the FrontPage series “Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism” by Dr. Mark Hendrickson. Click the following for <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-i/">Part I</a>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-ii/">Part II</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iii/">Part III</a>. </em></p>
<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">In the earlier installment about “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-ii/">Capitalists</a>,”  we discussed how capitalists raised the standard of living of their employees. While the pace of past economic progress seems agonizingly slow to us from our vantage point of mass affluence, the Age of Capitalism (starting in the 1700s) inaugurated a new era in which the pace of wealth production, and therefore, standards of living, improved in every succeeding generation.</span></b></p>
<p>The Age of Capitalism dawned in the 18<sup>th</sup> century. Since then, capitalism has liberated the majority of human beings from the bondage of chronic poverty in which they had been trapped for thousands of years. By lifting billions out of poverty, it has produced a new phenomenon in the history of the human race: Entire countries now have affluent middle classes numbering in the millions. Perhaps most wonderfully, capitalism’s superior productivity has resulted in a great increase in human longevity, enabling the human population to multiply far beyond the cramped limits which pre-capitalist production had mercilessly imposed from time immemorial.</p>
<p>Since most people prefer prosperity to poverty, few leftists are so audacious as to criticize capitalism for its unprecedented ability to generate wealth (although some of the more radical greens advocate economic de-development). Indeed, even such an arch-enemy of capitalism as Karl Marx acknowledged capitalism’s superior economic performance. He cited its “low prices,” its creation of “enormous cities,” and that, “during its rule of scarce one hundred years, [it] has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>Contemporary critics of capitalism focus on its alleged unfairness. That claim will be analyzed in the next installment of this series. First, though, it is important to understand why capitalism produces more wealth than any other system of economic organization, and thus to comprehend the unavoidable fact that replacing capitalism with any known alternative will come at a stiff price: It will make people poorer.</p>
<p>Despite capitalism’s demonstrated ability to lift the masses out of poverty, anti-capitalists of various stripes claim that they have a better deal for “the people.” They assert that government planning and control can make economic production more rational and efficient, and so make society more prosperous, than can unplanned free markets. This is an enormous intellectual error.</p>
<p>The theory of centralized economic planning overlooks the fact that there is plenty of planning involved in free markets. The difference is that, in a free market, the planning is diffused among virtually the entire population in which everyone shapes production in their role as “the sovereign consumer,” whereas under government control, economic planning is shifted away from everyone to a relatively small number of government-appointed planners.</p>
<p>It is a delusion to believe that government-appointed experts are capable of arranging production to maximize economic value, wealth creation, and standards of living for “the people.”  Even if that were the planners’ goal (in practice, it never is) and even if the government appointed the world’s most brilliant, fair-minded, kind-hearted geniuses to plan and oversee production, those experts are doomed to fail. They can never know what Joe Lunchbucket wants as well as Joe knows. (Even if we concede the impossible—i.e., that a committee of planners could figure out what everyone wanted in real time, thereby replicating the flow of economic information that free-market prices transmit—the overhead costs of such a bureaucracy inevitably would make the society poorer, because the people would be paying for a service that market prices render for free.</p>
<p>The anti-capitalists haven’t grasped that government intervention inevitably makes economic planning less rational. This is so because, in a market economy, the economic rationality (that is, his hierarchy of preferences about what he wants) is communicated through ever-adjusting market prices reflecting the ever-changing constellations of supply and demand. This economic information guides producers to produce what is most highly valued—that is, to meet consumers’  most highly valued needs, which is another way of saying “to maximize wealth.” To the extent that government intervention suppresses, censors, and replaces the economic information communication through free-market prices, the rational input into, and hence the value of, national production is reduced. In other words, people are made poorer when government intervention prevents them from getting what they most value, and instead forces producers to produce things that people value less.</p>
<p>The most irrational economic system of production is socialism. Under socialism, there is no private ownership of the means of production; thus, the bulk of economic production has been taken from producers who must compete to serve the most highly valued needs of consumers. Instead, the state allows a small elite to determine what gets produced, and in support of the official plan, the state has the power to continue diverting scarce resources from the production of goods more highly valued by the people to goods less highly valued. Socialism, therefore, lacks markets whereby supply and demand can help participants discover the market-clearing price (the price where supply meets demand). Consequently, instead of prices being economically rational and communicating what the people value most highly, the central planners have to set prices by guessing what they think they should be.</p>
<p>My friend Dr. Yuri Maltsev, an economic adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, once worked in the Soviet price-setting council. There, a staff of 328 bureaucrats was in charge of setting 23 million different prices.<sup>2</sup> This caused at least two major problems. First, that council had to set prices of consumer goods without knowing what consumers wanted most. This rendered Soviet prices arbitrary and irrational, insofar as they were divorced from the economic realities of supply and demand. Second, unlike market prices that can fluctuate moment by moment in response to changes in supply and demand, the council’s “guestimated” prices remained inflexible for protracted periods of time, since the council could only revisit and adjust prices at multi-year intervals due to the sheer number of prices they were supposed to manage.</p>
<p>As anyone who has taken Economics 101 knows, if the planners set prices too high, they produced unwanted surpluses; if too low, then there were painful shortages. The common citizen in the Soviet Union suffered from both. It doesn’t take a degree in economics to understand that if a system wastes precious resources by producing some things that people don’t want and not enough of other things that they do want, that those people will have been made poorer by the very system that was supposed to prosper them.</p>
<p>Another insuperable defect of not having economically meaningful prices (that is, prices that reflect what people value most highly) is that it is impossible to measure profit and loss. There is no way to tell whether individual enterprises are increasing or decreasing wealth. Socialists mistakenly believe that profits are wasteful; in fact, profits are essential for the economic well-being of society. Regardless of the economic system under which one lives, if factors of production with a total value of A are arranged in such a way that they are now worth A+1, then there is more wealth in society. Profits, then, represent newly created wealth and the economic progress of a society.</p>
<p>Conversely, if factors worth A are arranged to produce something worth A-1, then society has less wealth than before. Under capitalism, money-losing enterprises either mend their ways or go out of business. For a money-losing business to close its doors is economically beneficial to society. It curtails uneconomic, wealth-destroying activity and releases misallocated scarce economic resources to be redeployed to more rational (i.e., profitable) uses. Government intervention, by contrast, often props up and subsidizes wealth-depleting enterprises for years, making a society poorer.</p>
<p>The profits generated by capitalism are of great historical significance. In the pre-capitalist systems of feudalism and mercantilism, the system was rigged to prosper the elite at the expense of the masses. Capitalism, by contrast, doesn’t guarantee economic success. Instead, it forces entrepreneurs to earn profits by out-competing others in serving consumers, and punishes those who don’t serve consumers well. Socialism claims to be a step in advance of capitalism, but it rejects profits (i.e., new wealth) categorically and so guarantees the impoverishment of the masses much as the pre-capitalist systems did.</p>
<p>Besides misunderstanding profits, the opponents of capitalism also misunderstand monopolies. They accuse capitalism of promoting rapacious monopolies that devour the economic substance of the people. There are a couple of very serious holes in this argument.</p>
<p>In his classic essay, “The Phantom Called ‘Monopoly,’” economist Hans Sennholz described capitalism’s natural defenses against monopoly<sup>3</sup>: 1) The sovereign consumer may substitute other goods; 2) demand is, in varying degrees, elastic (that is, as prices rise, more and more buyers simply do without; 3) in a market economy, the ever-present invisible threat of new competitors entering into markets with unusually high profit margins restrains would-be monopolists from engaging in price gouging.</p>
<p>In actuality, monopolies have been exceedingly rare in the United States. Two of the most famous—the post office and, until the 1980s, “Ma” Bell, the AT&amp;T long distance telephone monopoly—were established by government decree, not by market forces.</p>
<p>Of course, some private corporations have become gigantic and highly profitable while achieving dominant market shares. However, the leftist assertion that such firms obtained their fortunes at the expense of consumers does not withstand scrutiny. As Dominick Armentano documented so ably in <i>Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure,</i><sup>4</sup> his classic study of many of the landmark antitrust cases in American history, the government found itself in the peculiar position of prosecuting firms that not only were not monopolies, but which had been charging consumers lower prices than their competitors had been charging rather than exploiting their dominant market share to charge the kind of high, rapacious prices for which monopolies are feared.</p>
<p>It is a strange jurisprudence that punished companies for being the benefactors of consumers and key agents of rising standards of living. The only beneficiaries of prosecuting and penalizing corporations for having served consumers well have been the less efficient competitors who were given a reprieve from the consumers’ “thumbs down”  verdict—a form of cronyism amounting to a government rescue or bailout.</p>
<p>There is great irony (and more than a little hypocrisy) in people insisting that socialism is preferable to capitalism on the grounds that capitalism spawns monopolies: Under socialism, the state establishes monopolies as the normal mode of organization. Far from providing a refuge from monopolies, socialism is, in fact, an entire system of monopolies. Under socialism, political elites forbid economic competition and charge whatever price they want. Henry Ford and the other hugely successful entrepreneurs that emerged under capitalism never came close to holding the kind of power over consumers that socialist central planners exercise.</p>
<p>Naively, many people believe that monopolies under socialism are benign, because socialists don’t try to make profits—that is, they forsake the creation of new wealth while focusing on redistributing and subsidizing the consumption of society’s existing wealth. What eludes the apologists of socialism is that monopolies insulated from potential competitors by the government always have a tendency to lapse into undesirable monopolistic practices. Soviet monopolies, for example, were notorious for producing goods of shoddy quality and for offering poor service to consumers. Indeed, clerks often treated citizens standing in lines rudely, because the consumers had nowhere else to go (except for risky forays into black markets).</p>
<p>In short, socialism simply can’t match the economic productivity of capitalism. Mises figured this out nine decades ago. In his book, <i>Socialism</i>, Mises demonstrated logically, from an economically scientific perspective, that socialism inevitably cripples economic production because of its monopolistic inefficiencies and its absence of a tool (i.e., market-based prices) with which to make economic calculations.<sup>5</sup> Even the socialist intellectual and economic historian, Robert Heilbroner admitted, when the Soviet Union collapsed seven decades after Mises’ prescient analysis, “Mises was right.”<sup>6</sup></p>
<p>Despite the overwhelming historical evidence of socialism’s inherent defectiveness, many American intellectuals remain determined to find an alternative to capitalism. They are convinced that government intervention into the economy is better than genuine, untrammeled capitalism. They seek “a middle way” between capitalism and socialism, a mixed economy that will combine the best features of both systems.</p>
<p>The problem is, the hoped-for “middle way,” the seductive vision of a system that combines the supposed virtues of both capitalism and socialism, is a chimera. Both the avowed enemy of capitalism, Karl Marx, and the unwavering champion of capitalism, Ludwig von Mises, agreed that government economic intervention breeds additional intervention, inexorably pushing society toward socialism by increments.<a href="https://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/?ui=2&amp;ik=a929d6cd39&amp;view=att&amp;th=14026b7b4421fa32&amp;attid=0.4&amp;disp=vah&amp;zw&amp;saduie=AG9B_P9TijVFtqY0LhzHew5Cqtih&amp;sadet=1376283436980&amp;sads=J9bNOQR-Kq9te69JygiWqUlJmqU#0.4_footnote7"><sup>7</sup></a>  Multiple studies show that the greater the degree of government economic intervention—that is, the greater the percentage of Gross Domestic Product consumed by government—the slower the rate of economic growth in that country.<sup>8</sup></p>
<p>In sum, the argument that socialist planning can improve upon capitalism’s unprecedented productivity is fallacious. That is why most proponents of greater government control of economic activity emphasize the fairness angle. Those arguments, too, are problematical, as we shall see in the next installment.</p>
<p><strong>Read Part V of this series in the next issue of FrontPage Magazine.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p><sup>1</sup> See Chapter One, “The Communist Manifesto.”</p>
<p><sup>2</sup> Yuri N. Maltsev in conversation with Mark Hendrickson February 14, 2012.</p>
<p><sup>3</sup> Hans F. Sennholz, “The Phantom Called ‘Monopoly,’” <i>The Freeman</i>, March 1960, pp. 39-52. <a href="http://www.thefreemanonline.org/features/the-phantom-called-quotmonopolyquot/">www.thefreemanonline.org/features/the-phantom-called-quotmonopolyquot/</a>.</p>
<p><sup>4</sup> Dominick T. Armentano, <i>Antitrust and Monopoly; Anatomy of a Policy Failure</i>, New York: John Wiley &amp; Sons, 1982.</p>
<p><sup>5</sup> Mises, <i>Socialism</i>, pp. 95-103.</p>
<p><sup>6</sup> Robert Heilbroner, “After Communism,” <i>The New Yorker</i>, September 10,  1990, p. 92.</p>
<p><sup>7</sup> Cf. Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto,” Chapter Two; Ludwig von Mises, “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism,” in <i>Planning for Freedom and sixteen other essays and addresses, 4</i><i><sup>th</sup></i><i> enlarged edition</i>, South Holland IL: Libertarian Press, Inc., 1980, pp. 18-35.</p>
<p><sup>8</sup> Cf. Mark W. Hendrickson, “Country Economic Policies: What the U.S. Could Learn From Other Countries,” <a href="http://forbes.com/">forbes.com</a>, March 12, 2012, <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/03/12/country-economic-policies-what-the-u-s-could-learn-from-other-countries/2/">www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/03/12/country-economic-policies-what-the-u-s-could-learn-from-other-countries/2/</a>; Alan Reynolds, “Countries That Cut Debt, Taxes And Spending Are Thriving,” posted April 3, 2013 on <a href="http://ibdeditorials.com/">ibdeditorials.com</a>. <a href="http://www.news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-viewpoint/040313-650293-nations-that-lower-debt-cut-taxes-reduce-spending-thrive.htm?ref=SeeAlso&amp;p=2">www.news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-viewpoint/040313-650293-nations-that-lower-debt-cut-taxes-reduce-spending-thrive.htm?ref=SeeAlso&amp;p=2</a></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iv/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism (Part III)</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iii/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iii</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iii/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 09 Aug 2013 04:12:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Hendrickson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Legal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marx]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=199956</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Rescuing the definition of "capitalism" from the clutches of the Left.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/stock-footage-woman-s-hand-counts-the-money.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-199957" alt="stock-footage-woman-s-hand-counts-the-money" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/stock-footage-woman-s-hand-counts-the-money.jpg" width="283" height="220" /></a>Editor’s note: The following is the third installment of the FrontPage series “Capital, Capitalists and Capitalism” by Dr. Mark Hendrickson. Click the following for <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-i/">Part I</a> and <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-ii/">Part II</a>. </em></p>
<p>Capitalism. “The economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution&#8230;are privately owned and operated for profit, originally under fully competitive conditions.”<sup>1</sup></p>
<p>Perhaps the greatest difficulty in any discussion about capitalism is overcoming the widely divergent concepts of what <i>capitalism </i>means and settling upon an agreed definition. For the political left, the term <i>capitalism </i>is so heavily laden with negative connotations that leftists have employed it as a label of derision, scorn, and condemnation, if not an outright curse, for more than a century-and-a-half. Karl Marx may be long gone, and the grand socialist experiment in central economic planning widely discredited after the collapse of the USSR two decades ago, but many people still loathe capitalism and yearn for a radical alternative to it. Both the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s and the Occupy Wall Street movement of the current decade have held demonstrations prominently featuring signs proclaiming, “Kill capitalism!”</p>
<p>The dictionary definition given above is correct as far as it goes, but let’s expand on that definition so that we may increase our chances of engaging in intelligent discussions about it. The late economist Hans F. Sennholz, who earned his doctorate in economics (he also earned one in political science) under Ludwig von Mises and later guided me through my doctorate, preferred the phrase <i>private property order</i> to <i>capitalism</i>.</p>
<p>Indeed, <i>private property order</i> is a less problematical term. First, it describes a real-world political-legal system instead of another contentious ideology, another “-ism.” Second, as stated earlier, all human societies require capital as a factor in economic production, regardless of whether capital is privately or publicly owned. <i>Private property order</i> is a more precise, accurate, and illustrative descriptive term than <i>capitalism</i> as a name for a particular order and organization of economic production.</p>
<p>If we were starting from scratch, I would favor adopting Dr. Sennholz’s term. However, given the left’s constant misuse of the term and leftists’ Orwellian attempt to mutilate the term by bastardizing its definition, it is important to rescue the word from their malign distortions.</p>
<p><i>Free market economy</i> and <i>free enterprise system</i> are two other acceptable alternative terms for the <i>private property order</i> or <i>capitalism</i>. The key distinctions between <i>capitalism </i>and alternative systems involve the role of government and the related question of who is in charge of economic production.</p>
<p>In a truly free market—genuine capitalism—the “means of production and distribution&#8230;are privately owned and operated,” and the government does not tell individuals or companies what to produce, how much to produce, how to produce it, what wages it should pay or what prices it should charge, etc. Under capitalism, the government does not redistribute property from some citizens to others, nor does it pick economic winners and losers in the business world by favoring some with subsidies, bailouts, insulation from competition, etc., or weighing down others with discriminatory taxes, regulatory requirements, and other economic hindrances.</p>
<p>Under capitalism, the proper role of the government is to act as a night watchman, impartially defending everyone’s rights—upholding legal contracts, upholding clearly defined property rights, punishing fraud, theft, etc. To use a metaphor from sports, the government in a capitalistic system plays the role of the referee, enforcing the rules of the game, but does not become an active participant in the economic contest that determines who prospers.</p>
<p>In a free market, all transactions are voluntary. No business can compel anyone to purchase its products or services. Every day, providers of goods and services compete with other providers (actual and potential, within their line of business and between different product choices) for customers. Those providers of goods and services who fail to provide what consumers want at a price consumers are willing to pay either amend their business plan or go broke. Only those providers who excel at fulfilling the most highly valued wants of consumers will survive and prosper.</p>
<p>This is the doctrine of <i>consumer sovereignty</i>. Under capitalism, the consumer sits in the position of the crowd watching Rome’s gladiatorial games, rendering the fateful verdict of “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on the various business enterprises seeking their approval and patronage in the competitive marketplace.</p>
<p>Ludwig von Mises described <i>consumer sovereignty</i> in these clear, succinct passages: The consumers’ “buying and their abstention from buying decides who should own and run the plants and the land. They make poor people rich and rich people poor. They determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities.</p>
<p>“The consumers determine ultimately not only the prices of the consumers’ goods, but no less the prices of all factors of production. They determine the income of every member of the market economy.”<sup>2</sup></p>
<p>“All production must bend to the consumers’ will. From the moment it fails to conform to the consumers’ demands it becomes unprofitable. Thus free competition compels the obedience of the producer to the consumer’s will and also, in case of need, the transfer of the means of production from the hands of those unwilling or unable to achieve what the consumer demands into the hands of those better able to direct production. The lord of production is the consumer.”<sup>3</sup></p>
<p>We can plainly see today that government in the United States often abandons the night watchman, impartial referee role, and instead actively intervenes in economic activity. It frequently overrules the preferences of consumers and usurps a significant portion of the sovereign control that consumers wield in a truly capitalistic system.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the political left and right have been in agreement about the injustice of at least one type of government intervention: federal bailouts of big Wall Street firms during the financial crisis a few years ago. Millions of Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Americans have denounced those bailouts, condemning them as “crony capitalism” or “corporate capitalism.”</p>
<p>This is where the linguistic waters have been muddied. The use of the adjectives<i> crony</i> and <i>corporate </i>is correct, but to use the noun <i>capitalism</i> in this context is utterly incorrect, because in genuine capitalism, government would not intervene to save private corporations from their mistakes. To describe such a clearly non-free-market practice as a form of capitalism is to mutilate the meaning of the word. Neither <i>crony capitalism</i> nor <i>corporate capitalism</i> is capitalism. Linguistically, they are oxymorons; in practice, both are rejections of capitalism, because they denote the replacement of free markets with politically rigged markets.<sup>4</sup></p>
<p>The distortion of words’ meanings can cause great mischief, for by associating <i>capitalism</i> with offensive, non-capitalistic policies, the left believes that capitalism is something pernicious. This can blind them from seeing true capitalism which, when rightly understood and practiced, remedies some of the most serious human problems about which the left professes concern.</p>
<p>Plainly, capitalism in its pure form does not exist today. Government intervenes in economic activity in myriad ways. Perhaps pure capitalism can never be attained, since imperfect human beings are incapable of adhering perfectly to any ideal—although the United States came close to achieving that ideal (at least, for white males) and thus can rightly be said to have been predominantly capitalistic during its first century. Realistically, capitalism may be what Ayn Rand called an “unknown ideal,”<sup>5</sup> but it is an ideal worth striving toward, as we shall now see by comparing capitalism with alternative economic systems in the following subsections.</p>
<p><strong>Read Part IV of this series in the next issue of FrontPage Magazine. </strong></p>
<p><strong>Notes:</strong></p>
<p><sup>1</sup> Webster’s, p. 268.</p>
<p><sup>2</sup> Mises, <i>Human Action</i>, pp. 270-1.</p>
<p><sup>3</sup> Ludwig von Mises, <i>Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis,</i> (trans. J. Kahane), Indianapolis: Liberty Fund/Liberty Classics, 1981, p. 400.</p>
<p><sup>4</sup> To distort the meaning of the word “capitalism” by joining it to an incompatible practice like cronyism is a favorite demagogic tactic of anti-capitalist ideologues. It is the same intellectual deception that they employ when the federal government overrules, suppresses, and prevents the operation of free markets—like it did to cause economic downturns in the 1930s, 1970s, or 2000s—and then, when the inevitable economic dislocations appear, anti-market ideologues blame “the free market” rather than the government intervention that stifled free markets.</p>
<p><sup>5</sup> Ayn Rand, <i>Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal</i>, New York: Signet Books, 1967.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-hendrickson/capital-capitalists-and-capitalism-part-iii/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Organ Donation and Unnecessary Tragedy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/organ-donation-and-unnecessary-tragedy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=organ-donation-and-unnecessary-tragedy</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/organ-donation-and-unnecessary-tragedy/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Jun 2013 04:05:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[donation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[list]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Organ]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sarah Murnaghan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Transplant]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=193151</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Can the free market do better? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/sarah062way-783756826e7ebee68c8b35154e01dc7249d1cab3-s4.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-193152" alt="sarah062way" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/sarah062way-783756826e7ebee68c8b35154e01dc7249d1cab3-s4-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>Last week a federal judge ordered Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to allow 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan, who suffers from cystic fibrosis, to be moved to the adult lung transplant list. That gives her a better chance of receiving a potentially lifesaving transplant. Sarah Murnaghan&#8217;s fate should force us to examine our organ transplant policy.</p>
<p>There are more than 88,000 Americans on the organ transplant waiting list. Roughly 10 percent of them will die before receiving an organ. These lost lives are not so much an act of God as they are an act of Congress because of its 1984 National Organ Transplant Act, as amended, which prohibits payment to organ donors.</p>
<p>Reliance on voluntary donations has been an abject policy failure. The mindless rhetoric used to support this policy is: &#8220;Organ transplantation is built upon altruism and public trust.&#8221; It&#8217;s noteworthy that everyone involved in the organ transplant business is compensated — that includes hospitals, surgeons, nurses and organ procurement workers. Depending on the organ transplanted, the charges range from a low of $260,000 for a kidney to about a million dollars for a heart or intestines.</p>
<p>Many people are offended by the notion of human body parts becoming commodities for sale. There&#8217;s at least a tiny bit of inconsistency because people do sell human blood, semen and hair. But let&#8217;s think through the prohibition on organ sales by asking the question: How many other vital things in our lives do we depend on donations to provide? Food is vital, water is vital; so are cars, clothing, housing, electricity and oil. We don&#8217;t depend on donations to provide these goods. Just ask yourself whether having a car, clothing or a house should be determined by the same principle governing organ transplants: &#8220;altruism and public trust.&#8221; If it were, there would be massive shortages.</p>
<p>Why should people have to depend on altruism and voluntary donations to provide something that one day they may need more urgently than food, water, cars, clothing or housing? All objections to organ sales reduce to nonsense, ignorance or arrogance.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s look at some of them.</p>
<p>One argument is that if organs are sold rather than donated, poor people couldn&#8217;t afford them. This argument ignores the difference between methods of attaining organs and methods of distributing them. For example, poor people might not be able to afford food, but Congress hasn&#8217;t mandated that food be donated instead of sold so that poor people can eat. If Congress did that, there&#8217;d be massive shortages, and poor people would probably starve. So instead of relying on &#8220;altruism and public trust&#8221; to feed poor people, we simply allow the market mechanism to supply food and then subsidize purchases through programs like food stamps. The same principle can be applied to organ transplants: Allow the market to supply organs, and if needed, subsidize or provide them through charity.</p>
<p>Another stated concern is that if there&#8217;s a market for organs, poor people will sell their organs and become ill. From an ethical point of view, if people own themselves, they should have a right to dispose of themselves any way they please so long as they do not violate the property rights of others. Of course, if people belong to the government, they have no such right. By the way, most proposals for organ sales are only for cadaver organs.</p>
<p>Some people have argued that an organ transplant market might lead to murder and the sale of the victim&#8217;s organs to unscrupulous organ brokers. There are many market transactions that can be abused, such as stock market fraud and product misrepresentation, but we haven&#8217;t chosen to outlaw the sale of stock and other products. Murder would remain illegal and punishable.</p>
<p>Finally, there&#8217;s the humane question. If you or a loved one were in dire need of a lifesaving kidney or lung transplant, which would you prefer: being placed on an organ transplant waiting list, or having the right to sell assets or take out a loan to purchase an organ?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/organ-donation-and-unnecessary-tragedy/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>14</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Standing Up Against the European Superstate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/standing-up-against-the-european-superstate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=standing-up-against-the-european-superstate</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/standing-up-against-the-european-superstate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Apr 2013 04:45:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Czech Republic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[european union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Václav Havel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Václav Klaus]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=186619</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Former Czech Republic President Václav Klaus's courageous fight to save freedom in the West. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/vaclav-klaus-at-national-press-club-data.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-186729" alt="VACLAV KLAUS PRESS CLUB" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/vaclav-klaus-at-national-press-club-data-450x302.jpg" width="270" height="181" /></a>In a time when almost everything about America&#8217;s current state of affairs is grounds for gloom, from the economic outlook to the national-security situation to the health status of our traditional liberties, one of the only reasons to smile – especially if you&#8217;re inclined to <i>Schadenfreude – </i>is the fact that the European Union, by most measures, is probably even worse off. To a considerable extent, of course, the dire straits in which America now finds itself are the consequence of an ideology essentially identical to that which has sent the EU into a tailspin.</p>
<p>One European leader who most assuredly doesn&#8217;t share that ideology is Václav Klaus, who for ten years (ending last month) was the president of the Czech Republic. Unlike his predecessor in that office, the late poet and playwright Václav Havel, Klaus, an economist and a champion of the free market who counts among his heroes Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, is a longtime critic of the EU. In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Europe-Shattering-Illusions-Vaclav-Klaus/dp/1408187647/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1366584936&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Europe:+The+Shattering+of+Illusions">Europe: The Shattering of Illusions</a><i>, </i>which has just been published in English, Klaus makes a clear, succinct, and compelling argument against the superstate. The book could have been called <i>Idiot&#8217;s Guide to the EU </i>or <i>EU for Dummies, </i>except that the real idiots and dummies aren&#8217;t those who need to be brought up to speed on the past, present, and plainly imperiled future of the European Union, but those who, rejecting economic logic and democratic values, have tirelessly promoted it and relentlessly pushed for the continual expansion of its powers.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s refreshing to read a book by a national leader that&#8217;s so learned, forthright, and explicit in its opposition to an establishment consensus. What Klaus opposes, specifically, is the “sacred mantra of the eurocrats” – namely, the proposition that “European integration is the Good,” no matter how many bad things it may lead to. Klaus doesn&#8217;t mince words, dismissing the “frivolous concept of world citizenship” as well as EU citizenship, and noting that the EU not only structurally resembles the Soviet world, in its time, but is defended by its adherents using arguments reminiscent of those made by Kremlin apologists. He begins with a brief history of the EU project, quoting EU founding father Jean Monnet as saying in 1952 that “Europe&#8217;s nations should be led towards a superstate, without their people understanding what is happened.” How better, after all, to subject Europe to a neo-Marxist superstate that despises free markets than by starting off with a capitalism-friendly free-trade zone and then moving gradually from A to Z?</p>
<p>And so it&#8217;s been done: established in 1957, the EEC (European Economic Community) gave way after some years to the EC (European Community) – the dropped “e” testifying to the increasing importance of non-economic affiliation – which, in turn, became the EU, the shift from “c” to “u” signaling the beginning of a real transfer of sovereignty from member states to Brussels. The introduction of the euro ushered in the EMU (Economic and Monetary Union), a.k.a. the eurozone; there ensued the creation of what Klaus calls the EFU (European Fiscal Union), generally known as the Fiscal Compact or Fiscal Stability Treaty; the culmination of all this will be, to borrow Klaus&#8217;s own coinage, the EPU (European Political Union), in which the superstate will be fully realized and all pretense of the existence of national powers and national boundaries will cease.</p>
<p>All of this, Klaus explains, has been motivated by “europeism” (also his coinage), an ideology propounded by utopian social engineers and founded on the notion that nation states “represent the Evil – because they were once the cause of wars among other things – while the supranational, continental and global entities represent the Good, because they – according to eurocrats – eliminate all forms of nationalist bickering once and for all.” (Klaus&#8217;s acerbic comment: “This view is obviously childish, yet it is generally accepted in Europe.”) Although rooted in anti-free market socialism, europeism has many non-socialist adherents, such as French politician Édouard Balladur, who called the free market “the law of the jungle, the law of nature,” and defined civilization as “the struggle against nature.” At the heart of the EU sales pitch, indeed, is the claim that the EU is the quintessence of civilization – the final  destination of humanity&#8217;s long evolutionary journey from barbarism, competition, and war.</p>
<p>Klaus is quite properly caustic about these ideas, and about the EU grandees who, cleaving to them, have deftly stripped more and more power from the people of Europe (all the while, in turn, “granting” them “rights”) without asking most of them whether this act of theft was OK with them – and, indeed, without the people themselves, in many cases, quite realizing quite how much was being stolen from them. The smoothness (slickness?) of these transitions has owed a great deal to Europe&#8217;s mainstream journalists, most of whom have been good little EU soldiers, reliably sending forth the message that European integration is “the Good,” period, and that all opposition to it is by definition rooted in prejudice, selfishness, or some other unsavory trait. Then there&#8217;s the urgent search “for the &#8216;soul&#8217; of Europe” – the pathetic, asinine attempt to “fir[e] Europeans up for the idea of the European Union” that EU Commission President Jacques Delors kicked off in the early 1990s (encouraged, alas, by Havel, who, though a great man, was a true believer in “europeism”).</p>
<p>The EU&#8217;s fruits are well known. The accumulation of power in the hands of a remote, unelected elite has eroded democracy. The monetary union, far from resulting (as promised) in prosperity for all, has led to a debt crisis that was predictable from the outset – but whose inevitability the EU&#8217;s architects, driven (like their Soviet predecessors) by ideology rather than economic logic, refused to recognize. (Klaus reminds us that when the euro was introduced, its boosters smugly warned that countries that chose not to adopt it would suffer: now look who&#8217;s suffering and who isn&#8217;t.) Klaus is also harsh about the economic paralysis caused by a decades-long blizzard of inane, intrusive EU dictates, “based on a false, anti-liberal idea that a larger area needs more regulation, although we [in the Czech Republic] – educated by Hayek and our communist past – know very well that a larger area (and complexity) needs more market forces and more decentralized decision-making.” From 2004 to 2011, no fewer than “4527 decrees, 686 directives and 6617 decisions were adopted on the European Union&#8217;s institutional level.” That sound you hear is Calvin Coolidge spinning in his grave.</p>
<p>As EU power has grown apace, a surprising number of Europeans have responded with indifference. Even now, when Germany and other northern countries are transferring huge sums to the improvident south to keep the ship afloat, there&#8217;s remarkably little in the way of efforts to scupper the vessel once and for all (one exception being the UK Independence Party, whose recent successes are a light in the darkness). Why such feeble political opposition to the EU? Klaus attributes it largely to the fact that politics itself – in the sense of robust democratic debate over key ideas and initiatives – is already on its way out, replaced by a centralized technocracy that, being ideologically monolithic, has no need for debate and can concentrate instead on implementing its directives and imposing its will.</p>
<p>Another reason for the low level of dissent, I&#8217;d suggest, is that European voters, unlike their American counterparts, have long since resigned themselves to rule by a consensus-oriented political class. (The demonization of the Tea Party by so many U.S. politicians and journalists reflects nothing more than a frustration over the refusal of so many Americans to be led by a detached, unresponsive statist elite.) Another reason is that EU leaders, in their craftiness, have made it hard for an ordinary mortal to keep up with their mischievous shenanigans: the documents by means of which Brussels has steadily enhanced its authority and enforced its control are simply too many, too long, too impenetrable, and too boring. Nor does it help that, as Klaus notes, even putatively anti-EU pols tend to become EU-friendly once they take office, drawn by a system that promises them the thrill of acting on a bigger stage than they&#8217;re afforded at home.</p>
<p>Klaus&#8217;s prescription for Europe is clear. Shrink the welfare state. Drop subsidies. Slash regulations. Liberate the market. Say goodbye to the superstate and restore full sovereignty to its member nations. He asks Europeans to look to their own experience: “Whenever Europe was free, without the straitjacket of social-engineering projects, there was prosperity.” But, he acknowledges grimly, Europe&#8217;s struggle for freedom, liberal democracy, and individual rights may well be lost – and the faith in europeism, “post-democracy,” and “transnational progressivism” so deep-seated that the captains of this ship will keep refusing to change course right up until the moment it runs aground. We can only hope that Europeans somehow manage to find their voices, reclaim their countries, and restore their liberties – and, failing that, that Americans will at least learn from Europe&#8217;s foolish mistakes and step back from their own precipice before it&#8217;s too late.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/standing-up-against-the-european-superstate/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>26</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Immigrants’ Dilemma in America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/nonie-darwish/immigrants-dilemma-in-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=immigrants-dilemma-in-america</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/nonie-darwish/immigrants-dilemma-in-america/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 27 Nov 2012 04:25:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nonie Darwish]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[assimilation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=166885</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Left is changing the perspective of new immigrants for the worse. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/nonie-darwish/immigrants-dilemma-in-america/new_citizens_oath/" rel="attachment wp-att-166909"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-166909" title="new_citizens_oath" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/new_citizens_oath-425x350.jpg" alt="" width="255" height="210" /></a>If America were to open its borders without restrictions, more than half the world population would be here. It is the American capitalist system that is still a dream come true to many who are more than happy to leave their stagnant, dysfunctional economies, burdened with class envy and re-distribution of &#8220;pennies&#8221; through government bureaucrats and red tape. Many immigrants were more than happy to trade their substandard government-run health insurance for life in America where hard work is rewarded with the best standard of living on the face of the earth.</p>
<p>As a young woman, I accomplished my dream of moving to America in November of 1978.  Even though I had a good job as a journalist, a well-to-do family and connections to some movers and shakers in the Egyptian government, I could never have been financially independent, buy a car or rent an apartment on my own without family help. America was my outlet to freedom, economic self-reliance and escape from being surrounded by misery, injustice and poverty. I knew that if I worked hard in America I would achieve success, and I did.</p>
<p>It is hard to explain to Americans born and raised in this country how happy it felt to enjoy the simple things that Americans take for granted. The satisfaction I had after I looked at my check after a hard day’s work, how I enjoyed the ease of getting and decorating my beautiful apartment, buying a car on my own and dreaming of a bright future I knew I could achieve. How easy it is in America to do business, drive around, buy and sell whatever one needs without having to bribe, beg or threaten a lazy government worker who could care less. Americans rarely hear about life on the outside and the daily difficulties people around the world have to endure for things Americans take for granted.</p>
<p>I was happy to assimilate into American culture while preserving the fun and good stuff I brought with me from my culture of origin, and my American friends loved it. I loved a smile from a perfect stranger on the street and a “do you need any help?” in a store. Many Americans have no idea that such daily little acts of pleasant interaction is a uniquely American tradition rarely seen around the world. To the new immigrant, shopping is a pleasure and affordable. I never envied &#8220;the rich&#8221; in America and looked forward to achieving my own American dream, and I, and many other immigrants, have done just that.</p>
<p>Americans are left uninformed by their media of how the rest of the world lives. Perhaps a good show to watch is “House Hunters International” where Americans can see for themselves that homes and apartments around the world are practically unaffordable to the general public and often unlivable by American standards.</p>
<p>Left on their own, immigrants are grateful to work hard and enjoy the American system, but soon after we are here, we are told by the popular culture that we are victims, must act like ones, and we must not accept what America can offer. America wanted more from us when it came time to vote. We are told that the system is rigged, not fair and that &#8220;whites&#8221; who have welcomed us in the millions for centuries, are racists and bigoted. Many immigrants believed the anti-American propaganda for the sake of approval and benefits. Immigrants are now told to hold on to their old culture, religion, traditional clothes, customs, language, and even some of the archaic laws, which many have escaped from in the first place. The conventional wisdom now tells us that America is no better than the oppressive systems we originally came from.</p>
<p>In America today, every national origin and race is encouraged to find a minority group to belong to. When I first moved to America, no Muslim women wore the Islamic garb, and you could hardly tell on the streets of America who was Muslim and who was not. Now many Muslims find power in sticking together, and go back to the Islamic garb and cry victimization. When I privately once asked a Muslim professor why she started wearing the head cover in America, her answer was a whisper: “The ethnic look is powerful in America.”</p>
<p>Many years ago, I knew a wonderful hard-working Hispanic family that found success in America after years of the mother working as a cleaning lady and the father a construction worker. Their kids all graduated college and never had to pay a dime for their education and wonderful government jobs. The children of that family today are speaking of discrimination, how California was part of Mexico, and how it is only fair to redistribute wealth. That was the lesson they learned in college.</p>
<p>Immigrants in America today are faced with a dilemma; they must deny their appreciation of the capitalist system that brought them here in the first place. Their children are taught to reject their parents’ experience of hard work to get ahead and regard their parents as victims of discrimination and abuse. They are rewarded for complaining and rejecting assimilation, free enterprise, self-reliance, and appreciation of American values that made this country the envy of the world. They are told to look at the half-empty glass, and are encouraged to throw the baby out with the bath water. They are told to hate white people and those who don’t are shamed as traitors to their race.</p>
<p>It took my three children one visit to the Middle East to understand what America is all about. After the trip, they told me, “Thank you mom for giving birth to us in America.” I wish that every American teenager would have a chance to travel and live in a third world country. I wish that Hollywood, the media, academia and all those who have power to influence our kids, would try to get a job outside of the United States that will provide them with an apartment and a car. Some countries might provide government health insurance, but health insurance is just a piece of paper and does not mean good health <em>care.</em> Many countries that provide some health care have high unemployment, terrible shortages of food and apartments, and many other things Americans take for granted. In America today, we are moving in the same direction: high unemployment, less home ownership and government-controlled health care.</p>
<p>America has always been the symbol of hope and change to the world, but instead of making the world more like us, we are moving in the direction of the rest of the world. Change is good when it is appropriate and necessary, but change just for the sake of change is destructive. Hopeless people could never have built America in two hundred years, and it is a shame for anyone to claim that America needs hope and change &#8212; an expression more suited for a leader of Haiti or Egypt &#8212; rather than a leader of America.</p>
<p>Even though the majority of immigrants in America have been seduced by &#8220;free stuff&#8221; and into preserving their ethnic identity, realistic and honorable immigrants need to resist the seduction of the leftist agenda and remind America of why we immigrants moved here in the first place.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/nonie-darwish/immigrants-dilemma-in-america/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>23</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Anti-EU Brits Threatened with Losing Their Foster Kids</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/anti-eu-brits-threatened-with-losing-their-foster-kids/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=anti-eu-brits-threatened-with-losing-their-foster-kids</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/anti-eu-brits-threatened-with-losing-their-foster-kids/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 26 Nov 2012 04:07:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Britain]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[european union]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foster children]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[membership]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[social worker]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.K.]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=166581</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Stunning political persecution in the U.K.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/anti-eu-brits-threatened-with-losing-their-foster-kids/anti-eu-protesters-belgrade/" rel="attachment wp-att-166637"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-166637" title="Anti-EU-protesters-Belgrade" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Anti-EU-protesters-Belgrade-398x350.jpg" alt="" width="239" height="210" /></a>The other day the editors of the <em>New York Times </em>took it upon themselves to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/23/opinion/britains-place-in-europe.html?hp&amp;_r=0">lecture</a> Britain about its obligations to Europe. Their view, unsurprisingly, is that Britain should stay in the EU. They do not, shall we say, have an inordinate amount of respect for those on the opposite side of the issue. They characterize past opposition by British voters to EU membership as “periodic spasms of parochialism,” attribute anti-EU sentiments in the United Kingdom to a “half-baked longing for the simpler days when the British ruled an empire and had less need for European trade,” and sneer about “the seductive simplicities of the euro-bashers who claim that Britain can ignore Europe and thrive on its own.”</p>
<p>While insisting that EU membership is vital for Britain, however, the <em>Times </em>editors are short on arguments for their position. While they do include a <em>pro forma </em>acknowledgement of the EU&#8217;s “shortcomings,” they don&#8217;t even try to explain why these “shortcomings” (some might use a much stronger word) aren&#8217;t enough of a reason for the U.K. to quit the EU. And while they conclude that “Britain needs the European Union as much as it needs Britain” (a widely voiced sentiment these days: on November 18, Radoslaw Sikorski <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/18/eu-value-for-money-veto-backfire">wrote</a> in the <em>Guardian </em>that “Europe needs the UK, as the UK needs Europe”), the <em>Times </em>editors really only make the case for the second half of their claim, pointing out that the U.K. has served such useful functions as “pushing the bloc toward freer trade and away from political federalism.”</p>
<p>Nowhere in the editorial is there so much as a hint of respect for the democratic right of U.K. citizens to cancel their country&#8217;s membership in a supernational entity that has largely taken over the kingdom&#8217;s sovereignty and robbed them, as voters, of their ability to shape its destiny. Nor, for all their insistence that being in the EU is crucial to British financial health, do the <em>Times </em>editors reckon with the fact that the two largest Western European countries to have stayed out of the EU, Norway and Switzerland, today enjoy what may be the strongest economies in the region.</p>
<p>The <em>Times, </em>of course, isn&#8217;t alone in ridiculing those in the U.K. who oppose the EU and who support withdrawal therefrom. A writer in the <em>Scotsman </em>(in an article that, incidentally, provides a fascinating window on current thinking of the Scottish left) recently <a href="http://www.scotsman.com/news/gerry-hassan-euro-sceptics-may-be-the-real-petty-nationalists-1-2612468">mocked</a> British Euroskeptics as “petty, dogmatic and insular nationalists” – as “&#8217;little Britainers&#8217; and &#8216;little Englanders&#8217; who imagine a fantasyland UK pulling out of Europe and relocating itself into the mid-Atlantic as a tax-cutting, deregulating, free-marketeer country.” A self-admitted “Euro-fanatic &#8216;wet&#8217;” (whatever that means), <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/oh-do-shut-up-about-europe-why-did-the-tories-abandon-the-wisdom-of-thatcher-and-major-8268883.html">writing</a> in the <em>Independent </em>on October 31, derided the “flag waving myths” of British EU adversaries. And earlier this month, Conservative MP Ken Clarke, apparently suffering from some crippling delusionary disorder, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20183406">said</a> on the BBC that those of his countrymen who opposed the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which created the EU, “should die of shame of the warnings they gave.”</p>
<p>This widespread contempt for supporters of British sovereignty is unpleasant enough in theory, but just get a load of it in practice. Last Friday&#8217;s <em>Telegraph </em>brought <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9700001/Foster-parents-stigmatised-and-slandered-for-being-members-of-Ukip.html%20">news</a> of an outrageous act that altered the lives of a middle-aged couple in South Yorkshire. “The husband,” according to the <em>Telegraph,</em> “was a Royal Navy reservist for more than 30 years and works with disabled people, while his wife is a qualified nursery nurse.” For nearly seven years, to their extraordinary credit, they have been active foster parents, over the years taking care of about a dozen children in all. In September, the couple agreed on very short notice to take in three children, “a baby girl, a boy and an older girl, who were all from an ethnic minority and a troubled family background.” The arrangement worked out very well: “the baby put on weight and the older girl even began calling them &#8216;mum and dad.&#8217;”</p>
<p>But then something happened – something disgusting. “Just under eight weeks” after the children moved in, the foster parents received an unexpected visit from “the children’s social worker at the Labour-run council and an official from their fostering agency.” These two bureaucrats told them “that the local safeguarding children team had received an anonymous tip-off that they were members of Ukip,” and that the children would therefore be removed from their home forthwith.</p>
<p>What is Ukip? Usually written UKIP, it&#8217;s short for UK Independence Party, which, to cite its own <a href="http://www.ukip.org/page/ukip-history">website</a>, is a “democratic, libertarian” party that “was founded in 1993 to campaign for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. Not because we hate Europe, or foreigners, or anyone at all; but because it is undemocratic, expensive, bossy – and we still haven’t been asked whether we want to be in it.” The UKIP&#8217;s site further notes that “the EU is only the biggest symptom of the real problem – the theft of our democracy by a powerful, remote political ‘elite’ which has forgotten that it’s here to serve the people.” Now considered a mainstream party, the UKIP has twelve seats in the European Parliament and three in the House of Lords and enjoys the support of as much as nine percent of the British population. In addition to opposing EU membership, it is critical of multiculturalism and supports a range of sensible-sounding immigration reforms. In short, it&#8217;s a good thing.</p>
<p>When the Yorkshire wife asked what her and her husband&#8217;s membership in the UKIP had to do with their role as foster parents, one of their two visitors said, “Well, Ukip have got racist policies.” The social worker added that “Ukip does not like European people and wants them all out of the country to be returned to their own countries.” The wife protested that this wasn&#8217;t true, that she had “mixed race” people in her own family, and that if she and her husband were racists, why in heaven would they want to foster three “mixed race” children? But the visitors were unmoved: “We would not have placed these children with you had we known you were members of Ukip,” declared the social worker, “because it wouldn’t have been the right cultural match.”</p>
<p>The good news here is that the appalling behavior by the social worker and her colleague has not gone unnoticed or uncriticized – although neither of them, apparently, has been officially reprimanded and nobody in authority has actually taken any action to undo the damage. Nigel Farage, head of the UKIP, called the removal of the children from the offending couple&#8217;s home “political prejudice of the very worst kind.” A former children’s minister expressed “concern.” A spokesperson for the British Association of Social Workers made a comment that I, for one, found utterly baffling (“My first question would be, does the local council have a clear equality policy so you can understand a bit more about the decision-making? Otherwise it’s very difficult to fathom”). And the local council that was responsible for the whole mess issued an empty statement declaring that it had acted after “careful consideration” and was “keep[ing] the situation under review.”</p>
<p>The only surprising thing about the story, however, is just how unsurprising it really is in this day and age. Those of us who follow developments in Britain know that this kind of rigid enforcement of multicultural and PC orthodoxy – and inflexible punishment at every level of the “wrong” views – is the new normal in what was once the land of Magna Carta and Winston Churchill and is now the third largest province (Airstrip One?) in the democracy-challenged empire ruled from Brussels. The irony in all this is that the ugly, illiberal, and systematic belittling and bullying of those who reject Britain&#8217;s membership in the EU has itself developed into one of the strongest arguments for the proud reassertion of the independence of a free Britain from an increasingly lockstep and autocratic Europe.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/anti-eu-brits-threatened-with-losing-their-foster-kids/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>8</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Socialist or Fascist?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/socialist-or-fascist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=socialist-or-fascist</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/socialist-or-fascist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Jun 2012 04:05:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[business]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elites]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fascism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=134845</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Where Obama is really leading us. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Picture-61.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-134847" title="Picture-6" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Picture-61.gif" alt="" width="375" height="249" /></a>It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a &#8220;socialist.&#8221; He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.</p>
<p>What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.</p>
<p>Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama&#8217;s point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.</p>
<p>Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous — something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.</p>
<p>Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the &#8220;greed&#8221; of the insurance companies.</p>
<p>The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.</p>
<p>One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.</p>
<p>Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left.</p>
<p>Jonah Goldberg&#8217;s great book &#8220;Liberal Fascism&#8221; cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists&#8217; consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left&#8217;s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/thomas-sowell/socialist-or-fascist/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>45</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Why America Is Still the Best Hope</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dennis-prager/why-america-is-still-the-best-hope/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-america-is-still-the-best-hope</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dennis-prager/why-america-is-still-the-best-hope/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 26 Apr 2012 04:05:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[hope]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Values]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[world war ii]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=130101</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Leftism, Islamism, and Americanism: the three big value systems competing for humanity's allegiance -- but which will triumph? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Free_Wallpaper_Half_Mast_American_Flag_Salute_Background-1-1156X7681.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-130109" title="Free_Wallpaper_Half_Mast_American_Flag_Salute_Background-1-1156X768" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Free_Wallpaper_Half_Mast_American_Flag_Salute_Background-1-1156X7681.gif" alt="" width="375" height="249" /></a>Does it break some unwritten rule for a columnist to bring his readers&#8217; attention to his own book? If so, I ask your indulgence.</p>
<p>But, after nearly a thousand columns and twelve years since my last book, I hope readers will forgive me for noting that today, April 24, 2012, HarperCollins is publishing the culmination of a lifetime of thinking and years of the most challenging writing of my life.</p>
<p>The book is &#8220;Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph.&#8221; It is an argument on behalf of the moral superiority — and universal applicability — of American values.</p>
<p>There are three big ideas — or religions, if you will — competing for humanity&#8217;s allegiance: Leftism, Islamism, and Americanism. I argue that the American value system — what I call &#8220;the American Trinity&#8221; — is the best system ever devised for making a good society.</p>
<p>The problem is that most Americans cannot identify these values, and therefore cannot fight on their behalf. In the meantime, the alternatives, Leftism and Islamism, have been spreading like proverbial wildfire, largely because their adherents know exactly what they are fighting for.</p>
<p>I do not fault Americans for not knowing their distinctive values. No one taught them what they are. And the problem is not new. Even the so-called &#8220;greatest generation,&#8221; the World War II generation, had not been systematically taught these values.</p>
<p>I only came to realize what these values are in the way medical researchers sometimes happen upon a major discovery — by chance. One night, as I emptied my pockets, I stared at the coins I had removed, and, lo and behold, there they were: America&#8217;s values. The designers of all of America&#8217;s money — paper and coin — had been telling me and every other American for well over a century what America stood for. And I hadn&#8217;t noticed:</p>
<p>&#8220;Liberty,&#8221; &#8220;In God We Trust,&#8221; and &#8220;E Pluribus Unum&#8221; (&#8220;From Many, One&#8221;).</p>
<p>No other country has proclaimed these three values as its primary values.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dennis-prager/why-america-is-still-the-best-hope/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>6</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>No They Can’t: Why Government Fails But Individuals Succeed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/no-they-can%e2%80%99t-why-government-fails-but-individuals-succeed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=no-they-can%25e2%2580%2599t-why-government-fails-but-individuals-succeed</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/no-they-can%e2%80%99t-why-government-fails-but-individuals-succeed/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 23 Apr 2012 04:50:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free-market]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[individualism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Stossel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[no they can't]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=129624</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[John Stossel’s new book tells why less government is more.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/no-they-cant.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-129627" title="no they cant" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/no-they-cant.jpg" alt="" width="265" height="403" /></a>Editor&#8217;s note: John Stossel will be speaking about his new book in a Freedom Center event at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills on Monday, April 23. <a href="http://jstossel.eventbrite.com/">Click here for details</a>.</em></p>
<p>In his television specials and in books like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Myths-Lies-Downright-Stupidity-Everything/dp/0786893931/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b"><em>Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel &#8211; Why Everything You Know is Wrong</em></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Give-Me-Break-Hucksters-Media/dp/0060529156/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_c"><em>Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media</em></a>, reporter John Stossel has built an award-winning reputation as a tenacious debunker of commonly-held assumptions, and as a thorn in the side of business-as-usual bureaucrats. Now, as a welcome antidote to President Obama’s “Yes, we can!” big-government campaign mantra, comes Stossel’s latest book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/They-Cant-Government-Fails-But-Individuals/dp/1451640943/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1334644904&amp;sr=1-1"><em>No They Can’t: Why Government Fails But Individuals Succeed</em></a>.</p>
<p>The libertarian Stossel hosts his own show and a series of specials on the Fox Business Network, and appears frequently on other Fox News shows. His consumer reporting has made him a nineteen-time Emmy winner and a five-time honoree for excellence by the National Press Club. Those familiar with Stossel’s laidback, plainspoken, eminently reasonable TV persona (and who isn’t?) will find it in full evidence here in <em>No They Can’t</em> as well.</p>
<p>The book’s thirteen chapters are devoted to a wide range of the biggest issues facing our government today, such as health care, the war on drugs, education, military spending, and the “budget insanity.” Stossel points out that our instinct is to believe that government can and should step in and resolve such problems. In a rhetorical device which he returns to frequently throughout the book, he posits “What Intuition Tempts Us to Believe: When there’s a problem, government should act.” He answers that with “What Reality Taught Me: Individuals should act, not government.”</p>
<p>Other examples of What Intuition Tempts Us to Believe: “If we just elect the right politicians, we can reinvent government and balance its books.” “Individuals are selfish, so we need government to ‘level the playing field’ and make life ‘fair.’” “The Food Police want to help us make better choices.” “It’s nice for people to have their say, but some speech is so hateful and offensive that we must limit it.” “Education is too important to be left to the uncertainty of market competition.” Chapter by chapter, Stossel systematically lays out his case for why these assumptions and many, many more about our government’s problem-solving capabilities are wrong on all counts, and why the truth is actually counter-intuitive.</p>
<p>The overarching, “most socially destructive” assumption of all, writes Stossel, is “the intuitively appealing belief that when there is a problem, government action is the best way to solve it.” For him, “Good government has to mean less government.” One would think that this sentiment would put Stossel squarely in the Tea Party camp. But he believes that even many Tea Party activists don’t want to cut the big government tether entirely (“61% of Tea Party sympathizers believe free trade has hurt the United States,” for example). And he notes that even Tea Party politician favorites can’t be trusted once they’re in office.</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/no-they-can%e2%80%99t-why-government-fails-but-individuals-succeed/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>13</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 1450/1529 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 11:38:00 by W3 Total Cache -->