The View From 1776

Senator Obama denounced President Bush’s speech to the Israeli Knesset, during which the President said:

”...some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”


"We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history..."

Senator Obama issued a statement saying:

"It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel. Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power—including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy—to pressure countries like Iran and Syria..."

One might ask, where has the Senator been for the last four or five years? 

The Bush administration, solo and working with France, Germany, and England, has held almost continuous discussions with Iran seeking a mutually agreeable way to stop Iran’s production of weapons grade nuclear fuel.  Moreover, the issue has, just as with Iraq, been frequently brought before the UN, which has passed resolutions, all of which Iran has ignored and denounced.  Syria has been dealt with in a similar fashion.

The Senator says that he wants, not tough talk, but action.  Does his meeting personally with Iran’s president, with no preconditions, constitute such action?  Or does he propose to launch a military attack against the two countries?

Of course, if he really wants to get tough, he can send House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a repeat of her earlier, illegal diplomatic foray into Syria.

The implicit belief of liberal-progressives is that their socialist religion will, by equally redistributing income and wealth, fundamentally change human nature.  Eliminating socialism’s version of original sin - private property - theoretically will eliminate aggression, crime, and war.

Only capitalist greed, in that religious conception, stands in the way of a harmonious, one-world socialism. 

One-worldism, however, leads to moral relativism, because necessarily it both rejects the spiritual dimension of the individual human soul in favor of political collectivism, and it demands rejection of patriotism and pride in one’s own nation and culture.  This dogma is hammered into college students today, accounting for the disparagement of American business and the rampant anti-Americanism on campuses.  The latter was evidenced in a minor way by the remark of Senator Obama’s wife that in the past she had seen nothing of which to be proud in the United States.

Socialist one-worldism accounts for Senator Obama’s presumably sincere, but utterly naive, belief that talking face to face with our national enemies without preconditions will magically defuse their burning desires to destroy the United States.  It leads to Senator John Kerry’s foreign policy “sensitivity” and liberals’ apotheosis of the UN and a non-existent “thing” called the international community.  It requires giving the UN a veto over our own national security interests.  It requires a faith that diplomacy alone can forestall international conflicts.  And it dictates a diminution of our military strength and pulling immediately out of Iraq. 

Liberal-progressive philosophical speculation necessitates that history be a tangible “thing” moving along a discernible, predictable, progressive path, inexorably toward a single world government.  A single world government, of course, would require the ultimate in collectivist, iron-fisted power, unless it is possible, as liberal-progressive-socialists believe, to change human nature fundamentally, using materialistic means. 

This possibility first was articulated in the early 1800s by socialism’s founders, Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, then taken up 20 years later by Karl Marx.  Different ends of history were postulated, but the underlying principle is that the “thingness” of history exists and can be predicted.  All three saw the increased productivity of science applied to industrialization as the engine of historical progress.

Comte articulated his Religion of Humanity, in which the entirety of the human race, as evolved by the progress of history, was to be the object of human veneration in a godless world.

Marx, of course, saw the end of history as the socialistic state in which transformed human nature would result in gradual withering away of formal government, with political power in the benevolent hands of the workers of the world, united by the Socialist International.

Thus liberal-progressives can denounce Judeo-Christianity and fervently embrace the mythology of their socialist religion that under a President Obama our nation and the world would become peaceful and harmonious, with plenty for all. 

Despite Senator Obama’s 20-plus years’ embrace of the heretical Black Liberation Theology variant of Christianity that he now rejects, his method of change is not the spirit of Divine love preached by Jesus Christ. Instead he proposes to harmonize society with sharply higher taxes, greater Federal deficit spending, and massively expanded regulation of business and personal activity.  This also rests upon the doctrine of Saint-Simon, Comte, and Marx, who saw the laws of history as driven by atheistic, material factors. 

That is the substance of Senator Obama’s messianic call for change.  He, as the Fuhrer of the Fourth Reich of socialism harnessing the laws of historical progress toward a one-world government, will change human nature, enabling us to end domestic strife and wars.

It stands in happy contrast to liberal-progressives’ certainty that President Bush toppled Sadam Hussein solely to benefit capitalist corporations like Halliburton and major petroleum companies that presumably wanted to gain monopoly control of Iraq’s oil.

While the great wars since the 19th century have had underlying economic causes, those economic causes ironically were the product of liberal-progressive socialism, not of capitalism.  Capitalism has never produced a totalitarian state, but liberal-progressivism inevitably tends toward totalitarian tyranny, which has been the source of the great, total wars since 1900.

For a realistic assessment, read Ludwig von Mises’s Economic Causes of War.

Far from moving our nation toward international cooperation and peace, electing Senator Obama to the presidency will move the United States closer to economic autarky, the goal of Hitler’s National Socialism, and heighten international conflicts.  One can see this economically self-sufficient, autarkic thrust clearly in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s willingness to dump a free trade agreement with Colombia, one of our staunchest allies in South America, in order exclude foreign competition, to the benefit socialist labor unions, at the expense of average American citizens.

The generation who fought the War of Independence and wrote the Constitution understood that all political and economic power resided in the citizenry as individuals and that the people were, with great care and caution, granting certain limited and defined powers to the Federal government.

Liberal-progressives turn the Constitution upon its head and insist that all power resides in the hands of intellectual planners in Washington, DC, who may from time to time deign to parcel out some amounts of their presumably unlimited power to local governments and even occasionally to individual citizens.

A Wall Street Journal editorial shines sunlight upon the shadowy efforts of Congressional liberal-progressives to corrode further the original Constitutional structure guaranteed by the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

The abomination addressed by the Journal editorial is that members of the Democrat-Socialist Party and other liberal-progressives aim to force all cities and towns with more than 5,000 population to hand over their finances to union headquarters.  The mechanism is a pending legislative enactment to compel all of these towns and cities to unionize their police forces and firemen.

In Stamford, Connecticut, where I live, police, fireman, and teachers unions, which constitute more than 70% of the budget, are driving property taxes upward at rates of 8% to 10% per annum. 

Emblematic of the malevolent influence of these unions is the daily spectacle of uniformed policemen, at $70 per hour, doing an indifferent job of directing traffic around roadside work crews.  Such work could and should be done at no more than $10 per hour by lower-income people eager for such work.  Moreover, those roadside policemen are technically working overtime, and worse, that overtime is included as part of their base income for retirement pay. 

It’s no accident that ordinary police patrolmen rank ahead of elected officials and administrators in every year’s list of top-paid municipal employees. And it’s no accident that life-long Stamford residents are being forced by sky-rocketing taxes to leave the city.

As the Journal reports, 16 states already have considered, and rejected, legislation to compel unionization of police and firemen. 

In this confrontation we see the essential nature of liberal-socialism:

the certainty that individuals and local political bodies lack the intellectual equipment to know what is best for them; the certainty that liberal-progressives do know what is best for everybody; and the certainty that liberal-progressives ought to have an exclusive franchise to impose their intellectual planning upon everyone else.

In socialist theory, labor unions represent the iconic “workers of the world” who are the vanguard of the revolution to destroy capitalism.  One must admit that the unions have done a good job in that regard, our steel mills and automobile plants being prime examples. 

And why were the auto manufacturers and steel makers overwhelmed? 

First because union work rules prevented the most efficient use of labor.  Second, because union feather-bedding demanded excessive numbers of highly-paid workers. Third, because unions went on strike and sabotaged ongoing production with deliberate slow-downs and physical damage to machinery and production to forestall business investment in newer and more labor-efficient production methods.  Add to this the use of monopolistic power, backed by the New Deal and subsequent liberal-progressive administrations, to lever up unionized wages and benefits at the expense of non-unionized workers.

The result? 

The Japanese, employing continuous casting methods for steel making, were able to deliver across the Pacific lower priced and higher quality steel to work sites in the United States than American steel makers could manage from plants only a few hundred miles away. 

In the accelerating eclipse today of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler by Toyota and other foreign auto makers we see the effect of union-imposed, bloated wage and benefit costs.  Foreign auto makers’ plants in the United States are non-union, and company officials have informed state governments that they will shut down and leave if they are legally compelled to unionize.

No doubt our labor unions would be delighted to see that happen.  Not they, but the majority of citizens, who are non-union, would bear the costs of diminished consumer choices and loss of jobs.

Finally, lest we forget, liberal-progressive politicians are unconcerned by the destructive impact of these results, because unions, along with the extortionate tort bar, are their largest source of campaign contributions and their shock troops to get socialist voters to the polls.

Keynesian economic doctrine, not under that name, but in substance, is back in the news in a truly menacing way.  Senator Obama proposes to repeat the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that turned an ordinary two-year recession into an eight-year disaster, with unemployment rates continuously in the high teens.

The key elements of Senator Obama’s proposed economic policies, as in the New Deal and the stagflation of the 1970s, are much higher taxes, along with a pervasive increase of business regulations and price controls in healthcare and energy (which sharply depress business activity and employment rates), full-frontal embrace of labor unions (which will push up wages and benefits to levels deterring profitable expansion of industrial production), and massive new government deficit spending (which will accelerate the already dangerously high rate of inflation and devaluation of the dollar).  Carried out as he proposes, Senator Obama’s polices will lead us again into the swamp of stagflation.

The basic thrust of Keynesianism is the belief that control of the economy must be collectivized at the Federal level, because private business is incapable of providing full employment, and because the proper goal of economic policy must be thwarting greedy businessmen to attain so-called social justice: equal distribution of income and wealth, without regard to merit, capability, or hard work.

Not surprisingly the New York Times editorial board and the Times’s propagandist Paul Krugman are prominent Keynesian enthusiasts.

In practice (in the 1930s Depression and in the 1970s stagflation) Keynesian economics caused devastating harm to every citizen.  In the stagflation of the 1970s not only was unemployment distressingly high, particularly in Midwestern industrial areas, which became known as the Rustbowl, but inflation wiped out roughly 57% of the purchasing power of every citizen’s lifetime savings. 

For an eminently readable analysis of Keynesian economics, the economic bedrock of liberal-progressive worship of the socialist religion, read Professor Murray Rothbard’s 1947 critique, Spotlight on Keynesian Economics.

One caution:  when Professor Rothbard speaks of liberal economists, he is using the classic terminology of 18th England that referred to true freedom: laissez-faire economics, free from government intervention, not to today’s American sect of the international religion of socialism.