Dr. Hal ScherzDoctor Hal Scherz is a pediatric urological surgeon at Georgia Urology and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. He also serves on the faculty of Emory University Medical School and is president of Docs4PatientCare. Just recently, he wrote that “because the issue this upcoming election is so stark — literally life and death for millions of Americans in the years ahead — we are this week posting a ‘Dear Patient’ letter in our waiting rooms.” This is, in part, what that letter says:
“Dear Patient: Section 1311 of the new health care legislation gives the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and her appointees the power to establish care guidelines that your doctor must abide by or face penalties and fines. In making doctors answerable in the federal bureaucracy this bill effectively makes them government employees and means that you and your doctor are no longer in charge of your health care decisions. This new law politicizes medicine and in my opinion destroys the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship that makes the American health care system the best in the world.”
In this same letter, Doctor Scherz writes:
“Badly exacerbating the current doctor shortage [ObamaCare will bring] major cost increases, rising insurance premiums, higher taxes, a decline in new medical techniques, a fall-off in the development of miracle drugs as well as rationing by government panels and by bureaucrats like passionate rationing advocate Donald Berwick that will force delays of months or sometimes years for hospitalization or surgery.”
He also cites the brutal, unignorable, irrefutable facts of ObamaCare’s passage:
“Despite countless protests by doctors and overwhelming public opposition — up to 60% of Americans opposed this bill — the current party in control of Congress pushed this bill through with legal bribes and Chicago style threats and is determined now to resist any ‘repeal and replace’ efforts. This doctor’s office is non-partisan — always has been, always will be. But the fact is that every Republican voted against this bad bill while the Democratic Party leadership and the White House completely dismissed the will of the people in ruthlessly pushing through this legislation….
“In the face of voter anger some Democratic candidates are now trying to make a cosmetic retreat, calling for minor modifications or pretending they are opposed to government-run medicine. Once the election is over, however, they will vote with their party bosses against repealing this bill.”
The letter’s final lines are perhaps the most important:
“Please remember when you vote this November that unless the Democratic Party receives a strong negative message about this power grab our healthcare system will never be fixed and the doctor patient relationship will be ruined forever.”
This message is going out to an electorate that is already frustrated over what they see happening to health care. Missouri voters rejected ObamaCare overwhelmingly in August, voting by a margin of 71%-29% to reject the federal requirement that all individuals purchase health insurance. Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen has assessed that ObamaCare is “a disaster” for Democrats. And around the country many little-noticed primaries have reflected voter rage—including the Republican primary victory of surgeon, political newcomer, and advocate of repeal Daniel Benishek in Michigan’s first district.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s damage-control efforts have fallen flat. The latest round of pro-ObamaCare television spots targeting the elderly and starring veteran actor Andy Griffith have not only failed to move the polling numbers. They have caused five U.S. Senators to ask for an investigation of the ads as a violation of federal laws barring the use of tax dollars ($750,000) for campaign purposes.
From a Providence newspaper, local fishermen are infuriated over the Obama administration’s junk science catch limits: “All these politicians scream about is jobs, jobs, jobs. Why are they putting us out of business?”
EDGARTOWN, Massachusetts – Aug 24, 2010 – The Northeast Seafood Coalition has taken out a full page ad in today’s Vineyard Gazette. The ad is an open letter to President Obama from Russell Sherman, captain of the Fishing Vessel Lade Jane of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The text follows:
“MR. PRESIDENT, WE NEED YOUR HELP”
Dear President Obama,
My name is Russell Sherman, and I am a life-long fisherman. Like New England fisherman before me have done for 387 years, I take my vessel, the 72-foot F/V Lady Jane from the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, into North Atlantic waters to bring back cod, haddock, flounder, and other groundfish for America’s table. I hope that while you’re in New England, you and your family are enjoying a few meals of our fresh catch – there’s none better tasting or healthier in the world.
Mr. President, my fellow fishermen and I need your leadership. We are small businessmen and women who want to continue the profession we love. We have worked hard over the past 16 years to rebuild groundfish stocks. Today, some stocks are fully rebuilt, and most others are expected to rebuild in three years, by 2014. According to federal forecasts, a fully rebuilt fishery will yield a sustainable catch nearly five times current landings.
At a time when we should be hopeful about the future of our businesses, we are desperate instead. We are being driven from our work and the fishery we have helped to rebuild. Ironically, what’s putting us out of work are the rules to rebuild the fishery. The most recent version of these rules – effective on May 1, 2010 – impose very low annual catch limits on stocks for the next three years, and at the same time institute a
“catch share” system.
Take my case. Under the 2010 rules, my permit allows an annual catch of only 60,000 lbs of groundfish. At an average price of $1.50 a pound, that’s an annual gross of $90,000, or about one-quarter of my business’ gross income last year. I simply cannot run my business and support my crew of four – each with a family – on only $90,000 a year.
My business is only one of hundreds facing extinction. While there will be a small handful of “winners” under these new rules, the vast majority of us will be losers. And when we “losers” are forced out, jobs will be lost, coastal communities gutted, and crucial commercial fishing infrastructure gone forever. Is this the way to rebuild our storied, centuries-old groundfish fishery?
I belong to an organization called the Northeast Seafood Coalition, a New England-wide organization of 255 small, entrepreneurial fishing businesses and allied support businesses that participates in the public process. The Coalition has tried to bring this matter to the attention of your Department of Commerce. We have tried to offer constructive solutions to the challenge of rebuilding fisheries without at the same time destroying them. But our efforts have fallen on deaf ears.
Mr. President, we desperately need your leadership. We ask that you please direct your Department of Commerce to listen to us and work with us. We know that we can meet this challenge by working together.
Sincerely yours,
Russell Sherman, Captain, F/V Lady Jane Port of Gloucester, Massachusetts
Professor Jim Cox
Jim Cox is one of my favorite living economists. His slim but pregnant book — The Concise Guide To Economics — is a miniature masterpiece. The following comes from Chapter 37:
The Spanish Scholastics of 14th through 17th century Spain had produced a body of thought largely similar to our modern understanding of economics. The work of these scholars was largely lost to the English speaking world we’ve inherited. The French physiocrats carried the discipline forward in the 18th century with prominent economists of the time including A. R. J. Turgot and Richard Cantillon. A strategic error was made by these French advocates of laissez-faire as they attempted to change policy by influencing the King to embrace free markets, only to have the institution of monarchy itself delegitimized. Thus a guilt by association undermined the credibility of the laissez-faire theorists.
In 1776 Scotsman Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations only to set the discipline back with his cost of production theory of value. (Smith did properly emphasize specialization and the division of labor in his analysis.) The correct subjective theory of value had been understood by both the Spanish Scholastics and the French laissez-faire school. Why Adam Smith chose the faulty cost of production theory over subjectivism is a mighty mystery as it is clear from Smith’s lecture notes that he had endorsed marginal utility analysis prior to the publication of his book. The marginal revolution of the 1870’s–with Carl Menger in Austria, William Stanley Jevons in England, and Leon Walras in Switzerland each writing independently and in differing languages–reestablished the correct marginal approach. As stated by Joseph Schumpeter in The History of Economic Thought:
It is not too much to say that analytic economics took a century to get where it could have got in twenty years after the publication of Turgot’s treatise had its content been properly understood and absorbed by an alert profession. p. 249
Unfortunately, the theory was perverted into a mathematized method with the rush to positivism in the 20th century.
The Austrian tradition of Menger was completed in the theories of Ludwig von Mises with the application of marginal utility analysis applied for the first time to money, which in turn led to the correct business cycle approach during the 1920’s. This approach was gaining headway in the English speaking world with F. A. Hayek’s appearance in England in the early 1930’s. But in the late 30’s the well-named Keynesian Revolution displaced the Austrian theories–not by refutation, but by neglect–taking economic theory to the bizarre point of splitting macro-theory from an underlying micro-emphasis; a point where it still is today.
Jim Cox is an Associate Professor of Economics and Political Science at the Gwinnett Campus of Georgia Perimeter College in Lawrenceville, Georgia and has taught the principles of Economics courses since 1979. Great Ideas for Teaching Economics includes nine of his submissions. As a Fellow of the Institute for Humane Studies his commentaries were published in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Wichita Journal, The Orange County Register, The San Diego Business Journal, and The Justice Times as well as other newspapers. His articles have also been published in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Margin Magazine, Creative Loafing, The LP News, The Georgia Libertarian, The Gwinnett Daily News, The Atlanta Business Chronicle, The Gwinnett Post, The Gwinnett Citizen, The Gwinnett Business Journal and APC News. Cox has been a member of the Academic Board of Advisors for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, and is currently on the Board of Scholars of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.
Not quite ten years ago, in May of 2001, Robert Tracinski wrote the following:
Past regulations have been imposed in the same manner that the new, less-restrictive process is being adopted: by executive-branch decree. The result of those decrees over the past three decades has been a vast environmentalist land grab, with millions of acres of land sealed off from logging, mining, grazing and even recreation. This is a basic technique used by the Left to achieve through the regulatory agencies what they could not achieve in an open vote. The technique is to introduce legislation to achieve some vague, positive-sounding generality, such as “worker safety” or “environmental protection” – things no politician will want to go on record voting against….
Consider that federal regulatory agencies make thousands of rulings each year, adding about 80,000 pages annually to the Federal Register. Do you think Congress can exercise “oversight” by debating all 80,000 pages of these regulations? Do you think the president, his advisors and his cabinet officers can consider and personally approve all of these decrees?
Of course not.
And the very process which Robert Tracinski describes above, far from diminishing, has suddenly accelerated. To wit:
On April 16th, 2010, Barack Obama released a so-called Presidential Memorandum, which he and his clownish administration termed “A 21st Century Strategy for America’s Great Outdoors.” Did you hear about it? You’re not alone. In fact, that’s part of the point: legislation by stealth.
Across the country, White House officials have been meeting quietly with environmental groups to map out government plans for acquiring untold millions of acres of both public and private land. It’s another stealthy power grab through executive order that promises to radically transform the American way of life….
Take my home state of Colorado. The Obama administration is considering locking up some 380,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land and private land in Colorado under the 1906 Antiquities Act. The Vermillion Basin and the Alpine Triangle would be shut off to mining, hunting, grazing, oil and gas development and recreational activities. Alan Foutz, president of the Colorado Farm Bureau, blasted the administration’s meddling: “Deer and elk populations are thriving, and we in Colorado don’t need help from the federal government in order to manage them effectively.”
The bureaucrats behind Obama’s “Great Outdoors Initiative” plan on wrapping up their public comment solicitation by November 15. The initiative’s taxpayer-funded website has been dominated by left-wing environmental activists proposing human population reduction, private property confiscation, and gun bans, hunting bans and vehicle bans in national parks.
Make no mistake: this issue is entirely about private property, which is the crux of freedom, and which the religion of environmentalism explicitly seeks to do away with.
Well, just recently the following article appeared in Investors Business Daily. I reproduce it here in full because America is currently under the thumb of people like this:
The Internet is a large-scale version of the “Committees of Correspondence” that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington’s failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.
People are asking, “Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?”
Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency.
Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion to make too many open-ended rules controlling too many aspects of our lives. There’s no end to the harm an out-of-control president can do.
Bill Clinton lowered the culture, moral tone and strength of the nation — and left America vulnerable to attack. When it came, George W. Bush stood up for America, albeit sometimes clumsily.
Barack Obama, however, has pulled off the ultimate switcheroo: He’s diminishing America from within — so far, successfully.
He may soon bankrupt us and replace our big merit-based capitalist economy with a small government-directed one of his own design.
He is undermining our constitutional traditions: The rule of law and our Anglo-Saxon concepts of private property hang in the balance. Obama may be the most “consequential” president ever.
The Wall Street Journal’s steadfast Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote that Barack Obama is “an alien in the White House.”
His bullying and offenses against the economy and job creation are so outrageous that CEOs in the Business Roundtable finally mustered the courage to call him “anti-business.” Veteran Democrat Sen. Max Baucus blurted out that Obama is engineering the biggest government-forced “redistribution of income” in history.
Fear and uncertainty stalk the land. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says America’s financial future is “unusually uncertain.”
A Wall Street “fear gauge” based on predicted market volatility is flashing long-term panic. New data on the federal budget confirm that record-setting deficits in the $1.4 trillion range are now endemic.
Obama is building an imperium of public debt and crushing taxes, contrary to George Washington’s wise farewell admonition: “cherish public credit … use it as sparingly as possible … avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt … bear in mind, that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue, that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised, which are not … inconvenient and unpleasant … .”
Opinion polls suggest that in the November mid-term elections, voters will replace the present Democratic majority in Congress with opposition Republicans — but that will not necessarily stop Obama.
A President Obama intent on achieving his transformative goals despite the disagreement of the American people has powerful weapons within reach. In one hand, he will have a veto pen to stop a new Republican Congress from repealing ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank takeover of banks.
In the other, he will have a fistful of executive orders, regulations and Obama-made fiats that have the force of law.
Under ObamaCare, he can issue new rules and regulations so insidiously powerful in their effect that higher-priced, lower-quality and rationed health care will quickly become ingrained, leaving a permanent stain.
Under Dodd-Frank, he and his agents will control all credit and financial transactions, rewarding friends and punishing opponents, discriminating on the basis of race, gender and political affiliation. Credit and liquidity may be choked by bureaucracy and politics — and the economy will suffer.
He and the EPA may try to impose by “regulatory” fiats many parts of the cap-and-trade and other climate legislation that failed in the Congress.
And by executive orders and the in terrorem effect of an industrywide “boot on the neck” policy, he can continue to diminish energy production in the United States.
By the trick of letting current-law tax rates “expire,” he can impose a $3.5 trillion 10-year tax increase that damages job-creating capital investment in an economy struggling to recover. And by failing to enforce the law and leaving America’s borders open, he can continue to repopulate America with unfortunate illegals whose skill and education levels are low and whose political attitudes are often not congenial to American-style democracy.
A wounded rampaging president can do much damage — and, like Caesar, the evil he does will live long after he leaves office, whenever that may be.
The overgrown, un-pruned power of the presidency to reward, punish and intimidate may now be so overwhelming that his re-election in 2012 is already assured — Chicago-style.
• Christian, an attorney, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Ford administration.
• Robbins, an economist, served at the Treasury Department in the Reagan administration.
Please remember: the revolution will not be televised, but it will be broadcast live right here. Stay tuned.
In response to which, one should also point out what many people still don’t know: namely, that nature alone, apart from man, “spills” far more oil than all the world’s oil companies combined. For example:
Oil residue in seafloor sediments that comes from natural petroleum seeps off Santa Barbara, Calif., is equivalent to between 8 to 80 Exxon Valdez oil spills, according to a new study by researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
Oil content of sediments is highest closest to the seeps and tails off with distance, creating an oil fallout shadow. The amount of oil in the sediments down current from the seeps is the equivalent of approximately 8 to 80 Exxon Valdez oil spills, the study said.
WHOI marine chemist Chris Reddy said Chris Farwell, the lead author of a paper on the subject and at the time an undergraduate working with UCSB’s Dave Valentine, “developed and mapped out our plan for collecting sediment samples from the ocean floor. After conducting the analysis of the samples, we were able to make some spectacular findings.”
There is an oil spill everyday at Coal Oil Point (COP), the natural seeps off Santa Barbara, where 20-25 tons of oil have leaked from the seafloor each day for the last several hundred thousand years.
Earlier research by Reddy and Valentine at the site found microbes were capable of degrading a significant portion of the oil molecules as they traveled from the reservoir to the ocean bottom, and that once the oil floated to sea surface, about 10% of the molecules evaporated within minutes.
“One of the natural questions is: What happens to all of this oil?” Valentine said. “So much oil seeps up and floats on the sea surface. It’s something we’ve long wondered. We know some of it will come ashore as tar balls, but it doesn’t stick around. And then there are the massive slicks. You can see them, sometimes extending 20 miles from the seeps. But what really is the ultimate fate?”
This is what happens when you treat other people’s money as if it’s your own to do with what you please:
London 2012 Olympics: Usain Bolt set to shun Britain over punitive tax rules
Organisers of next month’s Aviva London Grand Prix at Crystal Palace had hoped to stage the first 100 metres head-to-head of the season between Bolt, Tyson Gay and Asafa Powell but the triple Olympic champion is set to shun the meeting because it would expose him to a huge tax bill.
Unless the tax rules are relaxed, athletics administrators fear British fans will be denied the chance to see the sport’s biggest star in action again until he returns to the capital in two years’ time to defend his Olympic titles.
“I wouldn’t be optimistic about seeing Bolt compete on British soil this year and there is a strong chance he won’t be back until 2012,” said an insider close to the negotiations with the Jamaican.
Since April, foreign sports stars competing in Britain are liable for a top rate of income tax of 50 per cent but, controversially, the tax is charged not just on the money they earn in Britain but on a proportion of their worldwide sponsorship income.
Usain Bolt is not the only one with good sense. Today’s headline in the UK Telegraph reads:
Usain Bolt’s Tax Dash From UK Causes Alarm For Ryder Cup Organisers
The article continues:
The European Tour, which stages the Ryder Cup in partnership with the United States Professional Golfers’ Association, is among a number of governing bodies concerned that the Inland Revenue’s policy of taxing overseas sports stars in the UK on their global endorsement income is undermining their ability to stage top-quality events.
Also lobbying for a change in the law is UK Athletics, the London Marathon and the All England Club, which has concerns that the tax issue has reduced the quality of the field at Wimbledon warm-up events, including Queen’s. The sports this week requested a meeting with sports minister Hugh Robertson to discuss the issue.
…Other sportsmen understood to have avoided UK events, in part because of the tax issue, include Roger Federer, who has never played at Queen’s, and Sergio Garcia, who is thought to require a top-three finish at this week’s Open to avoid losing money on his week in Scotland.
The European Tour will tell the Government that the tax measures disproportionately affect overseas golfers and are a major reason why UK tournaments, including the Welsh Open played over the Celtic Manor course that will host the Ryder Cup, attract fewer overseas stars.
All of which serves to illustrate nicely, once again, that there are producers of wealth and there are plunderers of wealth, and government, by definition, can only ever be the latter.
FDRFranklin Delano Roosevelt is, along with Abraham Lincoln, one of Barack Obama’s heroes, as Barack Obama is among the first to point out. Accordingly, Obama is pursuing a number of the same disastrous economic policies that Franklin Roosevelt pursued, which policies only served to keep the United States depressed for years.
Yes, the truth about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which people on both sides of the political spectrum hate to hear, is that he not only did not bring this country out of the Great Depression: he prolonged it for well over a decade.
By the time FDR’s reign of destruction was through, the United States was still in a deep depression, and the interventionist precedents he established, which served only to keep the country depressed, haunts America to this very day.
Never again, until Barack, has an American president so brazenly and so consistently demonstrated this lack of regard for individual human beings; and never since Barack has a president stomped so savagely upon the unalienable right to life and property.
Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945.
It was not until 1947, when wartime controls and government spending finally ended and free markets were at last allowed to operate somewhat freely – i.e. without the stranglehold of the federal government – that this country at last began to emerge from its eighteen-year depression.
That depression was much exacerbated by the interventionist Herbert Hoover, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt took interventionism to a whole new level.
Quoting FDR’s own economic adviser, Rexford Tugwell:
“The ideas embodied in the New Deal Legislation were a compilation of those which had come to maturity under Herbert Hoover’s aegis. We all of us owed much to Hoover” (Rexford Tugwell, 1946).
One of FDR’s first acts as President was to close down all banks, a maneuver he hoped would prevent scared depositors from withdrawing their savings.
What this maneuver actually did, however, was intensify the public’s panic. It didn’t improve banking at all, nor did it help in any way with the Great Depression.
Unemployment rates over the course of the Great Depression looked like this:
FDR averaged 17.7 percent unemployment, which is staggering: to be more precise, FDR’s unemployment average was more than five times the 1929 level.
Many FDR apologists like to cite the 1933 to 1940 drop in unemployment as the greatest drop, percentage-wise, in the unemployment rate ever by an American President. Of course, what this fails to take into account, among a litany of other things, is the fact that centralized banking, as opposed to privatized, through the artificial manipulation of interest rates, caused the problems to begin with, and the subsequent interventions, first by Herbert Hoover and then by FDR, exploded those problems astronomically, as testified by the unprecedented unemployment rates that decade saw: in other words, 14 percent unemployment, is, by any legitimate standard, ghastly, and only a lunatic or a fool would call it “a success.”
Quoting economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway, who used statistical models to evaluate the results of FDR’s New Deal:
“The Great Depression was very significantly prolonged in both its duration and its magnitude by the impacts of New Deal programs.”
As Ludwig von Mises correctly noted, in the absence of government intervention, unemployment is always voluntary. Yet over ten million Americans were unemployed in 1938.
Compare that to the eight million in 1931.
Fact: not until FDR conscripted millions of men and sent them off to war did unemployment levels truly come down to manageable levels. Which, however, was hardly the end of the Great Depression; for unemployment, as everyone knows, is only one of several components. Thus:
In terms of aggregate production, statistics show no recovery until after World War II ended, when the size of government was at long last reduced.
The gross national product (GNP) didn’t recover to 1929 levels until 1940.
Personal consumption was 8 percent lower in 1940 than in 1929.
Net private investment, the backbone of a healthy economy, from 1930 to 1940 was negative $3.1 billion, a breathtaking figure.
Because of FDR’s mind-spinning interventionist policies, European nations came out of the Great Depression years ahead of America.
FDR believed that the Great Depression was caused by low wages. That was his fatal flaw. Because, in fact, the truth was the diametric opposite, as we now know: low wages (and prices) were caused by the depression.
And yet based upon this stupendous misunderstanding of basic economics, FDR proceeded to mandate wage and price controls, which thus kept the American people in a state of poverty for well over a decade.
When prices and wages are forced by government, the demand for labor is necessarily reduced. Why? Because in order to stay in business, businesses must turn a profit; so that when wages and prices are forced, businesses must adjust their employment and spending accordingly, or they run out of money. They must therefore cut back on workforce, and they must decrease output. In this way, forced wages create unemployment. You see, not even FDR can subvert economic law.
This is the most basic cause and effect process you can imagine: employers simply cannot pay out money that they don’t have.
Production and production alone generates wealth. That’s another crux, and FDR’s interventionist policies crippled production.
By means of the National Industrial Relations Act (NIRA), FDR’s First New Deal sought to turn United States agriculture, and other industries, into a massive government cartel.
It was at this time also that FDR began restricting production, so that unemployment began increasing.
The NIRA failed spectacularly, but in the process, it gave birth to another disaster: the National Recovery Administration (NRA).
The NRA was bureaucratic up to the gills, and, among other things, it required every businessperson to sign a pledge to observe FDR’s job-destroying minimum-wage laws, his maximum-hour laws, and his prohibitions on “child labor” (i.e. teenage labor), and so on.
Prices were therefore not permitted to rise above or fall below “costs of production,” regardless of consumer demand.
Quoting historian John T. Flynn:
[Code-enforcement police] roamed through the garment district like storm troopers. They could enter a man’s factory, send him out, line up his employees, subject them to minute interrogation, take over his books at the instant. Night work was forbidden. Flying squadrons of these private coat-and-suit police went through the district at night, battering down doors with axes looking for men who were committing the crime of sewing together a pair of pants at night (John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, 2007).
Countless people across America were arrested and sentenced to jail or prison for invented crimes like “pressing suits of clothes for thirty-five cents when the Tailors’ Code fixed the price at forty cents” (Ibid).
FDR also made the private ownership of gold illegal.
He nationalized gold stocks.
He created an abortion called the Agriculture Adjustment Administration (AAA), which implemented a government cartel on agriculture markets, and which quite literally paid millions and millions of dollars to farmers for slaughtering their livestock and burning their fields, while the rest of the country starved.
Under the AAA, one sugar refining business was paid $1 million to not refine sugar.
He made null and void all existing contracts that promised to pay in gold, which was an act of pure and simple theft, and which in any case did not inflate prices, as was his whole intention in making gold illegal in the first place.
In 1935, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Roosevelt’s NRA and AAA were unconstitutional.
It’s worth noting also, if only for posterity sake, that the NRA and the AAA were both explicitly modeled after Mussolini’s fascist system, of which FDR was an explicit admirer.
FDR also emulated Mussolini’s propaganda campaign against freedom and free-markets. Under the Second New Deal, Roosevelt’s AAA, which the Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional, was, however, resurrected under the “soil conservation program.”
It too paid taxpayer money to farmers for not producing.
A number of other programs that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional were simply reenacted by FDR under different names as well.
Many of these unconstitutional programs, also modeled after European fascism, are still in place today.
The Second New Deal, announced on January 4, 1935, introduced a number of new programs, in addition to the renamed old, each one equally unconstitutional, though never, alas, brought before the court.
There was, for instance, the National Labor Relations Act.
There was the Fair Labor Standards Act, which amounted to more job-destroying minimum-wage laws.
There was the Works Progress Administration.
Of course too there was the egregious and now bankrupted Social Security Act, which, among other things, forgot to take into account increasing life expectancies, and so was doomed to fail from the start, a fact which, unfortunately, most Americans don’t realize even today.
Also, the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which Herbert Hoover made into law in 1932, was much more stringently enforced under FDR’s authoritarian hand, thereby making it impossible to prosecute against labor union violence, of which the whole history of labor unions is largely composed.
Extortion by unions was under FDR legally permitted, as long as that extortion concerned “the payment of wages by a bona fide employer to a bona fide employee” (Congressional Record 78th Congress, first Session, House, 1934).
There were in addition, of course, the interminable taxes imposed upon businesspeople, which taxes siphoned money out of the private sector and increased unemployment, as taxes against entrepreneurs always and inevitably will, since they take away the capital that is normally used to reinvest and thus produce.
Indeed, tax increases (much of which were used to pay FDR’s bureaucrats) were as responsible as anything else for annihilating the American economy.
Quoting FDR’s adviser Harry Hopkins:
“I’ve got four million at work [in federally created jobs], but for God’s sake, don’t ask me what they are doing.”
This same Harry Hopkins again: “We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect.”
Even prior to World War II, government spending under FDR doubled and then some.
Government spending went from $4.6 billion in 1932 to $9.1 billion in 1940.
Over $23 billion in deficits were accumulated.
Current profligacy makes these numbers look comical, and indeed in terms of sheer profligacy, Barack cannot be matched; but one must not fail to take into account the times.
Deficits annually during FDR’s reign averaged 42 percent of the federal budget, a truly incredible figure, especially considering that in 1932 FDR had the nerve to campaign against budget deficits, and he even vociferously denounced them.
The primary purpose of FDR’s preposterous New Deal spending – at least, according to many – was simply to ensure his reelection, because he, like his protégé, was another power-mad politician. Accordingly, he gave free money to hoards and hoards of poor people in exchange for the vote.
What follows is from the Official Report of the U.S. Senate Committee on Campaign Expenditures, 1938:
• In one Works Progress Administration (WPA) district in Kentucky, 349 WPA employees were put to work preparing forms listing the electoral preferences of every employee on work relief. Many of those who stated that they did not intend to vote for Roosevelt were laid off.
• In another Kentucky WPA district, government workers were required, as a condition of employment, to pledge to vote for the senior senator from Kentucky, who was an FDR supporter. If they refused, they were thrown off the relief rolls.
• Republicans in Kentucky were told that they would have to change party affiliations if they wanted to keep their WPA jobs.
• Letters were sent out to WPA employees in Kentucky instructing them to donate 2 percent of their salaries to the Roosevelt campaign if they wanted to keep their jobs.
• In Pennsylvania, businessmen who leased trucks to the WPA were solicited for $100 campaign contributions.
• As in Kentucky, Pennsylvania WPA workers were told to change their party affiliation if they wanted to keep their jobs. Many people refused and were fired.
• Government employment was increased dramatically right before the elections. In Pennsylvania, “employment cards” were distributed that entitled holders of the cards to “two to four weeks of employment around election time.”
• A Pennsylvania man who had been given a $60.50-per-month white-collar job was transferred to a pick-axe job in a limestone quarry after refusing to change his voter registration from Republican to Democrat.
• Tennessee WPA workers were also instructed to contribute 2 percent of their salaries to the Democratic Party as a condition of employment.
• In one congressional district in Cook County, Illinois, the WPA instructed 450 of its employees to canvass for (Democratic) votes around election time in 1938. The men were all laid off the day after the election.
(Cited in John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, and How Capitalism Saved America, by Thomas Dilorenzo.)
In the words of historian Stanley High:
“In states like Florida and Kentucky – where the New Deal’s big fight was in the primary elections – the rise of WPA employment has hurried along in order to synchronize with the primaries” (Stanley High, “The WPA: Politicians’ Playground,” Current History, 1939).
In 1969, when all this evidence about New Deal spending came into the light, FDR apologists (i.e. academics) immediately began making excuses and rationalizing FDR’s disgustingly biased spending – for instance, the fact that residents of western states received 60 percent more federal money than residents of southern states. All the excuses these academics have made are factually inaccurate and have been refuted, many times over, by people like Jim F. Couch and William F. Shugart, in their excellent book Political Economy of the New Deal.
Franklin Roosevelt was, to quote one David Gordon, “a vain, intellectually shallow person whose principal interest was to retain at all costs his personal power” – i.e. “total subordination of his country’s welfare to his personal ambition” (David Gordon, “Power Mad,” 1999).
FDR had no grasp of economics, and in fact was really just another garden-variety politician, much like today’s world leaders, but more so.
The dynamic Doctor Mariela Resendes (M.D.) is a private practitioner who spent her previous 5 years as the Managing Partner/CEO of the largest Radiology practice in the San Joaquin Valley of California, CMI Radiology Group. Just recently, she wrote an irrefutable and scathing essay on the coming healthcare disaster that Barack Obama and his clownish administration have just unleashed. I reprint it here in full:
As a practicing doctor in California it troubles me that those with the ability to influence health care legislation have either been politically motivated to remain silent, or strikingly inarticulate when it comes to voicing the major issues patients and taxpayers will face with the new health care bill. My own, long-held view has been that any reform should be of the free market variety.
In that sense, I’m increasingly scared as I learn more about what’s inside the health legislation passed by Congress not long ago. Despite the rising level of unhappiness with what has transpired, it dismays me that the general public, like me, is not fully aware of the financial tsunami that is on the way for patients, insurers and hospitals thanks to this legislation, not to mention the irregular way in which it was passed.
In the newspapers we all read that the legislation was passed via reconciliation. Most people do not understand what this represented. What Congress did was to pass this legislation under the Congressional Budget Act of 1984, which allows a loophole to avoid a 60 vote filibuster in laws which refer to changes in revenue and spending amounts; i.e. budgetary issues.
The legislation which Congress passed certainly does affect the budget, but clearly the bill’s intent wasn’t budgetary; rather it concerned dramatic changes for a large portion of our economy: health care. Given the bill’s intent, one can only hope that the upcoming elections bring greater ideological balance so that what promises to be damaging can at the very least be amended.
“Obamacare”, as it is colloquially termed, is financially a disaster for doctors, hospitals, insurers, and will ultimately be a disaster for our nation’s budget. It is also unfortunate for patients needing care.
Obamacare’s proponents tout the legislation’s cost controls, along with expansion of coverage for those who currently do not have insurance. The policy wonks seek cost containment and “efficient” use of resources. More realistically, cost containment could only be achieved if access to care were rationed.
Rationing in mind, Rahm Emmanuel’s brother published a very well received paper in the New England Journal Of Medicine about efficient or optimal deployment of resources in health care. The upshot is that a young man is worth spending a lot of money on, a young child much less, and for seniors, pretty much nothing; all in a calculated return on investment model.
For physicians, Obamacare initially offered promises of tort reform, as well as promises to reverse the Medicare cuts that made it so difficult for physicians to practice. Neither is in the final legislation. As a result, doctors will continue to practice defensive medicine, and for doing so will face 20%+ cuts in their Medicare payments.
Physicians in primary care will initially see an income boost from 2011-2014, thus encouraging them to take on indigent patients the system needs to absorb. Unfortunately, starting in 2014, the payments per patient will fall for primary care doctors too.
Specialists will receive a financial hit right from the beginning. The goal here is to have less in the way of specialists, and more general practitioners. On its face this will drive more doctors into early retirement.
As for the physicians that choose to continue practicing, they’ll have difficulty staying afloat financially, and many will seek employment opportunities similar to those of “foundation” practices (such as those seen in states like California where hospitals can’t employ physicians), or hospital owned practices in other states.
The explicit goal here is to slow the move toward private practice. Doctors in foundation types of practices act more like union or shift-workers, and less like professionals. Their productivity tends to be lower than in traditional private practices; ergo more doctors are needed for a similar number of patients. Considering a scenario of rising physician retirement alongside a large increase in the number of patients, it is unclear how treatment and diagnosis will occur in a timely fashion.
Hospitals are similarly not going to fare well, and many will simply go under. Previously, hospitals took in higher payments from privately insured patients in order to care for those who couldn’t pay, or for those covered by Medicaid. At the same time, hospitals which had a higher number of indigent patients also received what is called disproportionate share funds from state and federal governments. Rural hospitals in particular received extra funds.
But with Washington’s new mandate, the expectation is that all of the previous non-paying patients will now pay for themselves such that subsidies for indigent-care will be eliminated. Unfortunately, this will occur in concert with reduced inflows from privately insured patients whose costs will be reduced to Medicaid levels.
In short, the money from the increased volume of “paying” patients is not enough to counter the loss of disproportionate funds and decreased classic private insurance payments. The net result will be a deficit for many hospitals. They will not be able to keep their doors open if they sustain persistent losses, which is what is expected.
Many insurance companies will be squeezed out of existence thanks to rules that will bar them from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. And unlike the federal government they won’t be able to operate in the red forever. The end result points to a single-payer system run out of Washington.
Looking ahead, it is increasingly apparent that by 2020 we will have severe cuts in service thanks to rising retirement among doctors, a decrease in the number of private insurers, and a reduction in the number of hospitals due to federal mandates that fail to marry costs with services. The end result will be rationing and delay of elective procedures, denial of expensive but effective treatments a la England, and most likely a single-payer system the likes of which is seen in other, less advanced health care systems around the world.
In the Concise Guide To Economics, author and economist Jim Cox correctly explains that the Multiplier is one of the major components of Keynesian policy.
For those who still don’t know it, Keynesian economics — named after John Maynard Keynes — are the economics that Barack Obama, as well as George W. Bush (et al), espouse in full.
The following explanation of the Multiplier Theory, though exceptionally clear and cogent, gets a bit technical, but please read through it. It is short, and it is also crucial that everyone understands the degree to which economic illiteracy grips the political leaders who have power over us.
The multiplier effect can be defined as the greater resulting income generated from an initial increase in spending. (For example, an increase in spending of $100 will generate a total increase in income received of $500 as the initial income is respent by each succeeding recipient–these figures are based on an assumption that each income receiver spends 80% of his additional income and saves 20%, the formula being Multiplier = 1 / % Change in Saving.)
Fundamentally, the multiplier is theory run amok, as Henry Hazlitt has explained in The Failure of the New Economics:
If a community’s income, by definition, is equal to what it consumes plus what it invests, and if that community spends nine-tenths of its income on consumption and invests one-tenth, then its income must be ten times as great as its investment. If it spends nineteen-twentieths on consumption and invests one-twentieth, then its income must be twenty times as great as its investment….And so ad infinitum. These things are true simply because they are different ways of saying the same thing. The ordinary man in the street would understand this. But suppose you have a subtle man, trained in mathematics. He will then see that, given the fraction of the community’s income that goes into investment, the income itself can mathematically be called a “function” of that fraction. If investment is one-tenth of income, income will be ten times investment, etc. Then, by some wild leap, this “functional” and purely formal or terminological relationship is confused with a causal relationship. Next the causal relationship is stood on its head and the amazing conclusion emerges that the greater the proportion of income spent, and the smaller the fraction that represents investment, the more this investment must “multiply” itself to create the total income! p. 139
A bizarre but necessary implication of this theory is that a community which spends 100% of its income (and thus saves 0%) will have an infinite increase in its income–sure beats working!
A further reductio ad absurdum is provided by Hazlitt:
Let Y equal the income of the whole community. Let R equal your (the reader’s) income. Let V equal the income of everybody else. Then we find that V is a completely stable function of Y; whereas your income is the active, volatile, uncertain element in social income. Let us say the income arrived at is:
V = .99999 Y
Then, Y = .99999 Y + R
.00001 Y = R
Y = 100,000 R
Thus we see that your own personal multiplier is far more powerful than the investment multiplier, it is only necessary for the government to print a certain number of dollars and give them to you. Your spending will prime the pump for an increase in the national income 100,000 times as great as the amount of your spending itself. pp. 150 -151
The multiplier is based on a faulty theory of causation and is therefore in actuality nonexistent. Keynesians today will often admit to this but cling to their multiplier by citing the fact that it has a regional effect. Without them saying so explicitly, what this means is that if income is taken from citizens of Georgia and spent in Massachusetts it will benefit the Massachusetts economy(!).
The multiplier is an elaborate attempt to obfuscate the issues to excuse government spending. It and Keynesian theory are nothing more than an elaborate version of any monetary crank’s call for inflation; Keynes managed to dredge up the fallacies of the 17th century’s mercantilist views only to relabel them as the “new economics”!
The following questions were submitted to me some time ago by Mr. Maxwell Hoaglund, of Slagheap magazine, which unfortunately closed its doors before this penetrating Q & A appeared. I publish it here with Mr. Hoaglund’s full knowledge and permission. Q: Congratulations on the success of your novel More and More unto the Perfect Day. Where can we read an excerpt?
Ray Harvey: At my website.
[Editor’s note: You can also hear an excerpt here:
Q: If your finger isn’t typing, where is it?
Ray Harvey: It’s on the pulse of the people.
Q: Are you really a bartender?
Ray Harvey: Yes.
Q: What is your signature cocktail?
Ray Harvey: The Harvey Fingerbanger.
Q: It sounds fantastic.
Ray Harvey: You have no idea.
Q: What all’s in it?
Ray Harvey: Two parts finger, three parts banger. The rest is secret.
Q: Working in the food and beverage industry — has it made you into a foodie?
Ray Harvey: Perish the thought!
Q: Do you have dietary restrictions? Vegetarian? Vegan?
Ray Harvey: No, no, no. Not that which goeth into a man can defile him but only that which cometh out; for out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. Gourmandizing of any kind is one of the surest signs of stupidity. The food snobbery of the vegan or the food snobbery of the vegetarian or the food snobbery of the organic-only cult, no matter how shabbily dressed, is every bit as beastly as the food snobbery of the rich and famous.
Q: As an anti-environmentalist —
Ray Harvey: I’m not primarily an “anti-environmentalist.” I’m primarily an anti-authoritarian. Environmentalism is just one of many species of the genus Authoritarianism, nothing more, nothing less.
Q: As an anti-statist, are you stalking your victims? If so, doesn’t your tendency to shoot from the hip startle them?
Ray Harvey: On the contrary, it lulls them into a false sense of security.
Q: Your article on Postmodernism, including the comments, created a small sensation in our office. What, may I ask, is reality? Can you prove existence?
Ray: Reality is existence. And existence is that which exists. Reality is that which is. The only alternative to existence is non-existence. But non-existence does not exist. There is only existence. In the words of Victor Hugo: “There is no nothing.” Regarding whether we can prove existence: yes. Proof, by virtue of what it is, assumes existence. How so? Existence must necessarily come before proof, because of what proof actually is: i.e. the preponderance of evidence which admits no other alternative. Evidence means that something exists. The very proof of existence is existence itself, to which there is only one alternative: non-existence. But non-existence does not exist. Only existence exists.
Q: Where do thoughts go when one is not thinking?
Ray Harvey: Where does the wind go when it’s calm? Said Voltaire.
Q: Who or what have been your biggest literary influences?
Ray Harvey: Karl Shapiro, Dostoevsky, Blood Meridian and Suttree [by Cormac McCarthy], Nine Stories [by J.D. Salinger].
Q: More than once, you’ve been accused of declaiming, as you’ve also been accused of ribaldry.
Ray Harvey: Paraphrasing Nabokov, Conventions and cliches, particularly of the sexual variety, breed remarkably fast: the blotchy buttock, the bulbous breast, the baggy balls, phony moans of bliss, the endless talky-talky of dick this, ass that, vagina this, oral that — it’s worse than primitive: it’s boring. The lack of style in these discussions of various copulation techniques is enough to wilt the most tremendous of boners.
Q: What is the real difference between Democrats and Republicans?
Ray Harvey: There is no real difference: the difference is purely superficial. Death by taxation, or death by so-called tradition; death by property expropriation, or death by middleclass morality. Take your pick.
Q: I see —
Ray Harvey: But I’d like to say a little more about that, if I may: if you’re going to call yourself liberal, or if your going to call yourself conservative, fine. At the very least, though, have the decency to refrain from calling yourself a proponent of freedom. Freedom is one thing and one thing only.
Q: Yes?
Ray Harvey: That absence of compulsion. Freedom does not does not guarantee wealth. It does not guarantee success. It simply means that you are left alone. Freedom means no entitlements, no minimum guarantees, no help (or hindrance) at all, no public education, no “free” health care, no drinking laws, no illegalization of drugs, and so on.
Q: What exactly do you mean?
Ray Harvey: I mean that everyone believes in freedom — until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. Then no one believes in it. Freedom does not mean “freedom until it comes to legalizing drugs.” Nor does it mean “freedom until it comes to doing away with speed limits.” It does not mean “freedom until it comes to recycling.” It does not mean “freedom until it comes to a woman’s right to decide what happens to her own body, and what lives off that body.” Freedom does not mean “freedom until liquor stores are open on Sunday.” It does not mean “freedom until it comes to no drinking-age laws.” Freedom doesn’t mean “freedom until a war breaks out, at which time you can lawfully be drafted.” None of that is freedom.
Q: What is justice?
Ray Harvey: Justice is the legal recognition of the fact that each and every human being, regardless of race, sex, sexual orientation, color, class, or creed, is individuated and sovereign, and no human or government institution may therefore infringe upon another’s property or person.
Q: Why is justice important?
Ray Harvey: The path of the just is as a shining light, which shines more and more unto the perfect day. But what is the alternative? Only injustice. We are each born free. Freedom is a birthright.
Q: Gordon Gano once said “Happiness is a word for amateurs.” Do you think that’s true?
Ray Harvey: No, I do not.
Q: What is happiness? A chocolate turtle?
Ray Harvey: Yes.
Q: Would it be fair to say that you see life as a funny but cruel joke?
Ray Harvey: No, it wouldn’t fair. That question has the unmistakable shimmer of inanity. Life is neither inherently silly, nor inherently angst-ridden. The only alternative to life is death. I suppose you could say death is what gives life meaning in the sense that death is what life constantly strives against. But it’s not the other way around: from the perspective of the dead, life obviously doesn’t carry any particular relevance. I think you may be confusing me with the walleyed Existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, or one of his ventriloquist dolls.
Q: Where is The Good located?
Ray Harvey: The Good ultimately resides inside the human brain, which is conceptual by nature and operates (therefore) by means of choice. There can be no good nor evil if there is no choice. Thought is not automatic. Thought requires effort; it requires an act of will. Quoting the psychologist Rollo May: “When we analyze will with all the tools that modern psychology brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or inattention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of will is really effort of attention; the strain in willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, i.e. the strain of keeping attention focused.” That is where The Good resides. That is ultimately the source of all good and all bad behavior: the choice to pay attention or not. The rest is just an elaboration on this.
It is not new — it came out in 1997 — and yet it remains, I think, one of the most underrated movies ever.
It was written and directed by the New Zealand born auteur Andrew Niccol, who, before and after Gattaca, has been inexplicably silent.
It stars Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Jude Law. (Ultra-leftwinger Gore Vidal [RIP] plays an apt supporting role.)
In 1997, Gattaca was nominated for an Academy Award: Best Set Decoration.
Gattaca — the title of which is based on the initial letters of the four DNA nitrogenous bases (guanine, adenine, thymine, cytosine, guanine) — is set in the near future.
It is a slightly cyberpunk, highly biopunk thriller that presents a vision of society driven by liberal eugenics.
Vincent Freeman, played by Ethan Hawke, is an imperfect man who desires to travel to the stars. But given his genetic make-up (he’s born with congenital heart condition), society, led by an elite bureau of planners called Gattaca Corp, has deemed Vincent “unsuitable.” He has therefore been relegated to the status of “underclass,” one of those human beings useful only for menial work. And yet not disclosed in his DNA is the fact Vincent’s will is unbreakable.
Thus he assumes a fraudulent identity: the identity of one Jerome Morrow. The real Jerome Morrow (played brilliantly by Jude Law) is a perfect genetic specimen who as a result of a botched suicide attempt is a paraplegic. The two of them, learning among other things how to deceive DNA sample testing, conspire to send Vincent on a space trip to one of Saturn’s moons. They succeed at passing one genetic test after another, using samples of the real Jerome’s hair, skin, blood and urine. Ultimately, a colleague of Vincent’s (A.K.A. Jerome Morrow) is killed, and so Vincent is at long last scheduled for his space mission. At which point, however, another colleague begins to suspect Vincent’s true origins, and the police investigate.
Vincent, understand, is one of the last “natural” babies. He is myopic and his DNA says that he is likely to die at age 30. He has an estranged younger brother named Anton (played by Loren Dean), who is now a police detective pitted against Vincent. For me, the most moving moments in this very moving movie are the swimming contests — one told in flashback, when the two brothers are young, and one in the present — and when, afterward, Anton asks Vincent how as a genetically deficient human being, he nevertheless won the swimming contests, Vincent answers that he won because he didn’t save his strength for the swim back, since he was always willing to risk everything to succeed…
Gattaca is a timeless movie — timeless, I say, because it is a profound testament to the human spirit and to that fundamental act of will which we each possess, and which each individual alone can choose to activate, or not.
It is a movie that hammers home the devastating truth that we are each the shapers of our own clay.
David Horowitz: “I am a Jew. The head of Hezbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. … For it or against it?”
Jumanah Albahri: “For it.”
Watch this chilling exchange, which just recently occurred at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD):
Albahri’s blatant support for genocide has sparked a backlash, prompting students to try and get the UC chancellors to condemn her remarks as inflammatory hate speech. The movement has taken the form of a petition directed at UCSD Chancellor Marye Anne Fox. (The petition originated in a Facebook group named “Condemn UCSD MSA’s ex-Officer for Supporting 2nd Holocaust.”
Begun on May 13, the group has, in the course of a few days, swelled to nearly 600 members. It provides updates on the situation, including the press releases and statements released by the UCSD MSA, Chancellor Fox, and Albahri herself. Most importantly, of course, it provides a link to the petition asking Chancellor Fox (and potentially the other UC chancellors) to directly condemn Albahri’s pro-Holocaust statement.
On May 15, in a half-hearted damage control scramble, the UCSD MSA released a statement denouncing “all groups or organizations, whether state or non-state actors, who target civilians or target a civilian population to impose collective punishment.” The statement is very vague and non-committal, and does not even mention the incident or the people that elicited it. It then goes into an anti-Israel diatribe and a quote from Malcom X that is totally irrelevant to the situation in question. It is, for all intents and purposes, utterly meaningless.
Albahri, on May 16, released a statement via a new blog she set up titled “For Truth, For Justice, For Peace.” In her statement, Albahri attacks Horowitz as a “seasoned polemicist” who avoided her initial (and irrelevant) question and accuses him of turning the conversation around on her, which, of course, is something one must expect when leaping into these types of discussions.
Read her full equivocation here, which comes straight out of the anti-Semitic guidebook for how-to-try-and-make-yourself-look-victimized, which guidebooks do exist.
The United States Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by an American socialist named Francis Julius Bellamy, who was also a Baptist minister, and whose cousin Edward Bellamy is the semi-famous author of two socialist utopian novels: Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897).
Francis Bellamy was born in Rome, New York, May 18, 1855. He died August 28, 1931. His original Pledge of Allegiance was first published in a magazine called Youth’s Companion, a nationally circulated publication written for youngsters.
In 1888, Youth’s Companion began its campaign to sell American flags to public schools. For Francis Bellamy, this was more than a mere money-maker: it was an opportunity for him to spread his statist propaganda, and in the end Youth’s Companion became a supporter of the Schoolhouse Flag Project, which, under Bellamy’s watchful eye, aimed to place a flag above every public school in America.
His Pledge of Allegiance was first published in the September 8th (1892) issue of Youth’s Companion.
Along with the Pledge, the children were asked to perform the so-called Bellamy Salute (photo below).
Not four decades later, when the Nazi’s rose to power and began saluting in a similar manner, Franklin Roosevelt changed the salute to the hand-over-heart method we see today.
Francis Bellamy’s original Pledge of Allegiance, the recitation of which he intended to take no more than 15 seconds, went like so:
I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Here, in Bellamy’s own words, is why he chose the specific language that he chose for his Pledge:
It began as an intensive communing with salient points of our national history, from the Declaration of Independence onwards; with the makings of the Constitution … with the meaning of the Civil War; with the aspiration of the people…
The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the ‘republic for which it stands’. …And what does that vast thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation – the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches. And its future?
Just here arose the temptation of the historic slogan of the French Revolution which meant so much to Jefferson and his friends, ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’. No, that would be too fanciful, too many thousands of years off in realization. But we as a nation do stand square on the doctrine of liberty and justice for all…
The phrase under God was incorporated into the Pledge on June 14, 1954. The man to introduce it was a fellow named Louis A. Bowman (1872-1959).
Here are the transmutations that the Pledge has undergone since its inception in 1892:
1892
“I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands: one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”
1892 to 1923
“I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands: one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”
1923 to 1924
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States and to the republic for which it stands: one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”
1924 to 1954
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”
1954 to Present
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands: one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
The Bellamy Salute
The problem, of course, with all this indivisibility talk is that the states were not necessarily intended to be indivisible. As Thomas Jefferson said:
If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation … to a continuance in union, I have no hesitation in saying, “let us separate” (Thomas Jefferson, 1816).
And John Quincy Adams — a devoted unionist — noted in a 1839 speech about secession:
[In] dissolving that which can no longer bind, we would have to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to the center.
If, then, you’ve ever wondered why it is when you hear the Pledge of Allegiance you feel as if you’re hearing the intonations of brainwashed drones, this is why:
The Pledge was a propaganda prayer written by a socialist who’s goal was to inculcate young minds with dogma.
And that’s the end of it.
Author’s Note: This article first appeared January 1st, 2010, on this website.
Communism is a species of the genus socialism. It is one of the many variations on the theme.
Communism explicitly calls for the violent overthrow of government. In theory, it is an anarchist ideology which believes that the state will one day magically “wither away,” as Karl Marx famously phrased it, though only after an unspecified period of GIGANTIC bureaucratic control. Of course, in the long and blood-soaked history of communism, the state has never withered away, and never will. Why? Once entrenched, bureaucracy is impossible to retrogress away from.
Democratic socialism, on the other hand, doesn’t advocate the violent overthrow of government but intends to use force peacefully. By definition, by its very nature, socialism must resort to force because it must expropriate people’s money and other property in order to redistribute it. That is the distinguishing characteristic of any and all forms of socialism: government control of property and the means of production (which is one of the reasons “corporatism” — i.e. crony capitalism — is another variation on socialism).
One must never forget: socialism is by definition an ideology of force.
Not all liberals are, strictly speaking, socialists — in large part because most of them don’t even really know what “socialism” means, and it is for this reason also that many liberals, and, for that matter, many conservatives, are socialists and do not even know it.
Welfare statism is not exactly the same thing as democratic socialism.
Welfare statism wants all the wealth and advantages that laissez-faire and private property creates, but at the same time, it wants to undermine the very things that makes all that wealth possible. Welfare statism takes for granted the advantages of laissez-faire — it wants to hold power over the producers of wealth — yet it wants those same wealth-producers to keep producing it for them. It is a short-sighted ideology the prevalence of which dominates academia from sea to shining sea.
The welfare state, which is what we live in today and have for some time, is the result of what Ludwig von Mises called the “hampered or mixed market economy.” It is not identical to socialism proper, primarily because it is not explicit enough, but it too is a variation on the same theme.
Remember clear back in 2013, when many mainstream dems were citing Venezuela as a model to emulate — “an economic miracle,” as David Sirota called it, created by Hugo Chavez’s “full-throated advocacy of socialism.”
(A number of the left-wing geniuses in this country meanwhile took private jets down to Venezuela to pay their respects to the man himself.)
Let us not (ever) forget either that time Bernie Sanders — who owns three mansions — was lecturing us that “the American dream is more apt to be realized in Venezuela…. Who’s the banana republic now?”
He asked this ostensibly in all seriousness.
In response to which, Robert Tracinski wrote:
We’re seeing the answer to that. Today, Venezuelans are starving and the remainders of the Chavez regime are sending gangs of armed thugs into the streets to attack anyone who protests. And all of the people who praised the Venezuelan regime as a paragon of socialism? They suddenly don’t want to talk about it….
The bodies keep piling up, but the ideology that produced those bodies always gets a free pass. You know what this is? It’s the equivalent of Holocaust denial for the Left.
There has long been a ritual, which I sincerely hope will continue, in which young people are required to immerse themselves in the horrors of the Holocaust. But our culture never did that for the horrors of socialism, which is how you get a majority of young people having a positive view of socialism.
What have they missed that they can believe that? Here’s what they’ve missed: the artificial famine in Ukraine, the Soviet Gulags, the forced deportation of Lithuanians, the persecution of Christians, China’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, North Korea’s horrific prison camps and famines, the systematic impoverishment of Cuba, and now Venezuela’s collapse into starvation and mass-murder. All of this should be absolutely required background knowledge for any educated person.
I didn’t provide links for the second half of those examples. If you don’t know them, your assignment is to go look them up, because you’re precisely the sort of person who needs to learn about them.
Now when I cite all of this history, there’s always someone who insists that it isn’t fair to pin all of these crimes on “socialism” because those examples weren’t really socialism. The only “real” socialism is the warm, fuzzy welfare-statism of a handful of innucuous Western European countries. This is a pretty obvious version of the No True Scotsman fallacy, and a good way of disavowing responsibility for the disastrous results of a system you praised just a few years earlier.
The real question is this:
When will left-wingers and right-wingers alike realize that the principle underpinning this entire godforsaken political ideology — i.e. the belief that it’s okay to force people to live for one another — is as dangerous and as dogmatic as any religion … and for the exact same reasons: they’re both predicated upon a policy of pure, unadulterated blind belief.
