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Barack Obama: Inside the Mind of a Genius

Admit it: you find it curiously comforting to see that neither time nor age nor experience has taught Obama anything: he remains as politically-economically brilliant as he always was.

But perhaps over the last seven or so years you’ve not been able to hear him over the noise of his propaganda machine.

Well, just yesterday, he had a great many people shaking their heads when he told an audience of Argentinian youths that there’s no real difference between communism and capitalism and that they should just “choose from what works.”




“So often in the past there has been a division between left and right, between capitalists and communists or socialists, and especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate,” Obama said.

“Those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it really fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory. You should just decide what works.”

He went on to laud Communist Cuba and their dictatorial regime, which is such a socialist paradise that each year a great many Cuban people are willing to risk 100 miles of shark-infested waters just to get the hell out of there.

(Note to dems: please tell me again how no serious democratic today still actually admires the Castros. Tell me again how “backward” the Republicans are.)

Obama concluded his lecture by arguing that a market-based system “has to have a social and moral and ethical and community basis.”

Barack Obama, ladies and gentleman: one little glimpse inside the mind of a genius.





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Castro Pot Bust Goes Awry, Law Professor Converts, Threatens to Sue

Professor Clark Freshman: Convert
One year ago, I wrote in a previous post that virtually everyone believes in freedom — that is, until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. Then almost no one believes in it. Freedom simply means you are left alone: you are neither helped nor hindered. And that’s all it means.

Rightwing politicos and leftwing politicos don’t usually agree on specifics, but they do often agree on principle: namely, that government’s proper sphere of authority does extend beyond protection against the initiation of force.

Like most politicians, today’s politicians, both right and left, believe that human beings are not capable of flourishing without the aid of bureaucrats; these bureaucrats therefore believe they must help us live our lives for us. And nowhere is this unquestioned conviction made clearer than in the issue of drugs.

Drugs, like prostitution, provide us with an excellent example of how the rightwing and the left are not fundamentally opposed but merely disagree on superficialities, insofar as both sides agree that not all drugs should be legal.

This notion is so entrenched in the mind’s of Americans that to question its legitimacy at all is considered lunatic-fringe thinking.

True, there are representatives on both sides of the political spectrum who support legalizing marijuana and perhaps a few other drugs. But start talking about legalizing all drugs on principle, or mention doing away with all drinking-age laws on principle, and all liquor laws on principle, or speak of legalizing gambling and prostitution in all states and cities — and then you really begin to sort out the men from the boys.

The principle I’m speaking of is of course the principle that it is not within the proper sphere of government to be involved in these aspects of human lives.

If we each possess the right to our own life and only our own life — and we do — then drug usage is obviously the right of each individual. The fact that it has become unquestionable to the majority that we do not possess the right to use drugs is we choose is a sad testament to the power of entrenchment.

It is a sad testament to how people get so used to thinking about something in one way that changing minds becomes absolutely out of the question. Yet if you truly believe in freedom, which the overwhelming majority of people don’t, you not only should but must believe in the legalization of all drugs. If you do not, then you do not believe in freedom, and you must choose: freedom or statism.

This point can be made on principle alone, and it is a foolproof argument, the first and strongest line of defense. But it will not satisfy those who believe the proper scope of government does extend into telling us how we may and may not live.

This point was very recently hammered home to a UC Hastings law professor named Clark Freshman, who, in his own words, had “been on the fence for years about the legalization of drugs … and now I’m a victim of this crazy war on drugs.”

The full article, which appeared in this week’s San Francisco Weekly, is entitled “Castro Pot Bust Goes Awry and a Law Professor Threatens to Sue.”

So we have another convert. The only question I have is for Mr. Freshman is this: what the hell took you so long?

(Hat tip Timothy Sandefur.)




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Vasily Grossman

The Russian writer Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 in what is now the Ukrainian town of Berdichev. At that time, Berdichev was still part of the Russian Empire. Vasily Grossman attended high school in Kiev and then the University of Moscow. He graduated from University in 1929 with a degree in chemical engineering. He worked as an engineer for five years, after which time he devoted himself entirely to writing.

He published his first news article in 1928, his first fictional story in 1934.

During the middle and latter 1930’s Vasily Grossman was exceptionally prolific, and even more so after the start of World War II. At that point he became a correspondent for Red Star (Krasnaya Zvezda). He spent the entire war on the treacherous front, covering, in minute detail, the blood-soaked siege of Stalingrad. In popularity his war reportage was second to none (well, maybe one: the famous Ehrenburg), and Grossman is loosely portrayed by actor Joseph Fiennes in the inaccurate movie Enemy at the Gates.

In his youth and well into his thirties, Vasily Grossman was devoted to the communist philosophy. But during and immediately after the war, he became increasingly disillusioned with that socialist system, so that, starting in 1943, he began explicitly challenging the whole Soviet ideal — both for its repression of freedom and for its anti-Semitism.

His war fiction at this time also began to generate criticism from high Soviet officials. In a matter of months, thus, his writings were suppressed. Over the course of his latter years, Vasily Grossman became an outright opponent of socialism. His writings are, at times, not consistently, among the most eloquent expression of freedom of any person in any era.

Stomach cancer killed him in 1964.

What follows is a short passage from his last novel Forever Flowing. It is one side of a brief dialogue spoken, in part, by the novel’s protagonist Ivan Grigoryevich, who after thirty years of imprisonment has just been released from the Russian Gulag. I quote it as a tribute to freedom, to be sure, but also as a tribute to the man who came to understand the philosophical roots of freedom — and that in a country where freedom was not allowed; in a country where philosophies and freedom were replaced by blind obedience and dogma. It’s important that people like Vasily Grossman are not forgotten.

I’d like you to please think of the following passage the next time you hear, for example, an environmentalist talk about more centralized government and more government ownership of land for the sake of “our endangered environment.”

Please think of it next time you see someone wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt (or necklace) in glorification of Che Guevara’s communistic ideals, or romanticizing communist Cuba and Castro for their healthcare system, or Chairman Mao with the blood of billions on his hands:

I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it’s a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom – not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes.

Forever Flowing

Vasily Grossman (1905–1964)

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Howard Zinn: Freedom Versus Equality

Howard Zinn was born on August 24, 1922. He died January 27, 2010.

Zinn taught Political Science at Boston University from 1964 until 1988; he was an American historian, of sorts, a self-proclaimed Marxist who, by his own admission, did not believe in objective history:

I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching….

Objectivity is impossible, and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.

Howard Zinn is probably second only to Noam Chomsky in terms of the neo-Marxist influence he wields, and in light of Howard Zinn’s recent revivification, which began just prior to his death, the History Channel aired a program called The People Speak, which was a documentary written and produced by Matt Damon and based upon Howard Zinn’s propaganda publication A People’s History of the United States.

Quoting from his People’s History:

“The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history, because it uses wealth to turn those in the 99 percent against one another” (A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn).

That is Howard Zinn’s philosophy in compendiated form: Ninety-nine out of one hundred of us are not actually free, even if we think we are, because income inequalities exist.

Howard Zinn never seriously asked why income inequalities exist in the first place — at least, not that I’ve ever seen — but the answer to that question is this: not everyone possesses the same degree of talent, skill, and most especially, ambition. (This point, incidentally, was dramatized persuasively in the late Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.”)

Inequality is inherent to freedom.

Humans left free naturally stratify, as several famous experiments have demonstrated. Why? Because of the reason just stated: humans possess varying degrees of talent, brains, and most of all, ambition.

Freedom, of course, does not guarantee wealth; it does not guarantee success. Freedom is one thing and one thing only: the absence of compulsion. 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.

Howard Zinn did not pretend to be an advocate of liberty. He, like all postmodernists and neo-Marxists, believed that “social equality” and “social justice” are more important than freedom, and, accordingly, individual rights (particularly the inalienable right to your own property — i.e. your money) can be lawfully expropriated by the government and redistributed.

To this day, Zinn’s A People’s History remains a staple among academics and other leftists — despite the fact that it is the only “academic” history book that doesn’t contain a single source citation, and despite the fact that it was refuted long ago, and devastatingly so, by the Harvard historian Oscar Handlin in the pages of the The American Scholar (49). Here’s an excerpt of that refutation:

It simply is not true that ‘what Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots.’ It simply is not true that the farmers of the Chesapeake colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries avidly desired the importation of black slaves, or that the gap between rich and poor widened in the eighteenth-century colonies. Zinn gulps down as literally true the proven hoax of Polly Baker and the improbable Plough Jogger, and he repeats uncritically the old charge that President Lincoln altered his views to suit his audience. The Geneva assembly of 1954 did not agree on elections in a unified Vietnam; that was simply the hope expressed by the British chairman when the parties concerned could not agree. The United States did not back Batista in 1959; it had ended aid to Cuba and washed its hands of him well before then. ‘Tet’ was not evidence of the unpopularity of the Saigon government, but a resounding rejection of the northern invaders (Dr. Oscar Handlin, The American Scholar, 49, 1980).

Ron Radosh has also very recently written an excellent article on Mr. Howard Zinn and Mr. Good Will Hunting.

Howard Zinn: 1922-2010