This recent tweet captures the half-assed distinction Marx tried to make between so-called bourgeois property and personal property:
On the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre — when the totalitarian socialist government of China quashed, with extreme force, a political uprising by the people of China who rebelled at last against the obliteration of their freedom — I sincerely hope that the dire error of the illustration above is both obvious and horrifying.
If, however, it’s not obvious or horrifying, this is perhaps a testament to the steady erosion and the subsequent non-understanding of the concept of rights — which, in turn, is the result of the ideology and the ideas which have for decades reigned supreme in academia and across western culture.
The fatal error in the illustration above is this:
A complete non-understanding of — or, worse, deliberately ignoring — the supreme importance of the amount of money (i.e. capital) that it takes to start and run a large business, including but not limited to all the equipment required; and even more important than that: the role of ideas and the knowledge and learning that goes into starting and maintaining a business.
James Jerome Hill, Thomas Edison, John Rockefeller, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, Ray Crock, and thousands upon thousands upon thousands of others could be appropriately cited here — and they should be: because they represent the principle precisely: they and all others like them, who have brought the entire world incalculable amounts in incalculable ways, are the total argument to the illustration above. Moreover, any employee of any business is free to raise her or his own capital and invest her or his own time and learning into a business of her or his own, and the division of labor and the specialization which creates the machines that the business-owner buys with the capital she’s raised is perfectly legitimate, and it is good.
But I suggest we make it more personal:
Let us say your mother, who was born into poverty, the second oldest in a family of ten, and who then worked very hard all her life, beginning as a young teenager, in restaurants and kitchens around southwestern Colorado — let us say that one day this mother of yours, after 53 years of working and learning her trade, of perfecting her pie-crusts and cinnamon rolls and donuts and biscuits and all the other recipes she learned and developed and invented, finally went for it: She mortgaged the home she did not yet fully own, and she raised other money, and she at last, at age 54, opened her own restaurant.
She thereafter worked tirelessly to make this restaurant succeed — and it did:
People voluntarily and happily came into her establishment and paid their money to eat her pies and cinnamon rolls and donuts and biscuits and soups and everything else she’d learn to make and create, and which she daily worked so hard in producing anew. In turn, your mother, because her business was earning money, could afford to hire people — people who voluntarily agreed to work for her in exchange for a wage, and whom she taught the things she’d learned over the course of her life. And more than that: these employees liked your mother — they liked working for her, because she was fair, and they learned from her as she learned from them, and the money was good for everyone.
The contractual relationship was mutually beneficial: because she hired them and they voluntarily agreed upon the wage she offered, and because the restaurant, which (let us never forget) was her idea and upon which she took all the financial risk and started up, and, armed with knowledge she’d accumulated and developed over four decades of her life, she worked tirelessly to build — knowledge and skill people willingly paid for — she succeeded.
Now imagine someone suddenly comes along and tells your mother that the employees who voluntarily agreed to work for her, and who do so by contractual arrangement, and who invested no capital in starting up this restaurant or buying any of the expensive equipment, and who can leave at any time — they by right have equal ownership in your mother’s business, merely by virtue of the fact that she hired them.
That is the horrifying error in the illustration above.
The exact same principle applies to any business, no matter the specific industry.
If you think that I’m in any way being hyperbolic, you’re perhaps forgetting your history lessons.
It’s called expropriation. It is a horrible injustice — and it’s flatly, unequivocally wrong.
It’s what everyone from Lenin, to Mao, to Castro, to Pol Pot, to Che, to Occupy Wall-Street, to many others, believe:
Note the phrase “by force.” Under a system of freedom, anyone is allowed to create a business which is non-hierarchical and entirely employee-owned. Under the opposite system, however, the opposite thing is not true.
It is a very great irony indeed that socialism — which through the media-mob and especially the social-media-mob — has, in the last two decades especially, developed a reputation as being hip and trendy and young and even new and cool: a glittering new idea, this 21st century socialism.
The irony is that it’s just the opposite, and the grim joke is on all the true-believers: because the ideas which underpin all socialist theory are embarrassingly outdated, antiquated, and old as hell. They’re also proven failures, mathematically doomed.
Not only are these ideas out-of-date, in fact: they’re out-of-touch — out-of-touch with even the most rudimentary economic laws — and it is a frightening thing when the leaders of the free world, behind whom the people have lined up in lockstep, do not have any inkling of these rudimentary laws (such as knowing that America absorbs and subsidizes much of the world’s socialized pharmaceuticals).
You have the natural-born right to grow wealthy, so long as you do not infringe upon the rights of others: your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.
If you need any more convincing, please watch the following debate — it’s genuinely fascinating — in which the young, hip socialist (founder of Jacobin Magazine) is soundly defeated by a so-so defender of private-property and free-exchange. I urge you to take particular note of the young socialist’s absolute refusal to answer the question: if people voluntarily want to work for someone who starts up a business, and if these same people voluntarily agree to that business-owner’s offered wage, should they be free to do so? Should such business transactions be legal and allowed?
And the reason the hip socialist does not answer this question is that he doesn’t believe this business structure and this sort of voluntary transaction should be allowed — because he, like so many others, has bought into the dismally old and failed ideology of egalitarianism-by-force.
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.
Bernie Sanders tweeted that yesterday, and it’s pretty damn awesome.
Perhaps Bernie is unaware that the Chinese regime has also, for a very long time now, been killing female infants in order to control their population.
Perhaps he’s unaware of China’s notoriously barbaric one-child policy.
Or perhaps, like the socialist Sierra Club — which has explicitly advocated that “state and federal laws be changed to encourage small families and discourage large families” — Bernie Sanders also supports this sort of authoritarian regime.
The Drudge Report has this as its headline right now:
Barack Obama in 1998: “I Actually Believe In Redistribution”
I’d personally file this under the “No Shit” column, but evidently there is still some question about it, so here you are, straight from the dingy source:
The storm of controversy surrounding the provision in ObamaCare that will force America’s many Catholic institutions to fund, for example, sterilizations, contraceptives, and morning-after pills for their employees — “despite each of these being fully athwart fundamental Catholic doctrine on sexuality, abortion and life,” as Rex Murphy eloquently put it — has many people like me wondering the following:
Why suddenly the big furor now? I mean, this is socialism:
I don’t pay for my own medicine, because it’s not my responsibility: it’s yours.
This is exactly what you voted for when you voted for Barack Obama.
Please don’t insult us by being surprised now, after all the time we spent trying to tell you.
Governmental compulsion: it’s the American way.
“We’ve actually been operating in a way entirely consistent with free-market principles.” — Barack Obama, 2009
Occupier Bianca Piemonte, 21, above, will be spending Thanksgiving with family away from tent city (photo courtesy of the Boston Herald).
It looks as though even some of the Occupy Wall Street people can’t resist the warm allure of heading home for the holidays — despite the fact that these folks are against the true spirit of Thanksgiving:
Jason Mattera, author of the excellent book Obama Zombies — which captures very well the mindset of the brainwashed masses who went in for Barack Obama without any real regard for the actual content of his political philosophy — is refreshingly fearless in confronting politicians and calling them out. Politically, I do not always agree with Jason Mattera, but I always enjoy watching his videos:
Also, in response to Joe Biden’s false and outrageous remarks, as Ed Morrissey notes, “the President’s ‘jobs’ bill doesn’t go directly to hire police officers anyway. Instead, it allows states to paper-over budget gaps for another year rather than address their systemic budgetary issues, and protect unionized bureaucrats whose jobs should be on the chopping block.”
Here are a couple of other Jason Mattera videos that I hope you enjoy as much as I did:
Openly socialist Vermont senator Bernie Sanders selling his book (capitalistically) at (capitalistic) Barnes & Noble:
Jason Mattera to Barney Frank: “All right, sir. Fist bump?” Barney Frank: “No.”
Al Franken to Jason Mattera: “You have to shut up right now and listen to me.”
The protesters are massively wrong about the incompatibility of capitalism and social justice.
Social justice shouldn’t be measured on what the rich have, which is the fixation of the protesters. Instead, the focus should be on the lot of the poor. The spread of market capitalism has done more to improve living standards for more of the world’s poor than anything else in human history.
There is, however, a serious social justice problem that has developed in American market capitalism. Two of the bridges to the middle class for those without a college education — manufacturing and construction — have been eroded. Manufacturing jobs haven’t been lost mainly to free trade, as the brief against capitalism would have it, but to sharply improved productivity. And construction wages have been undermined by illegal immigrant labor.
The American economy hasn’t really developed substitutes for these bridges. While the protesters misdiagnose and exaggerate the problem, conservatives shouldn’t be so dismissive of the rising income gap based upon education.
The protesters are occupying Wall Street because they see large investment banks as the heart of American capitalism. They are also wrong about that, but their mistake is shared by the policymakers in both of the country’s major political parties.
Capital is the bloodline of commerce. Businesses produce first, then get paid by those who buy their goods or services. They need money to get from Point A to Point B.
There are an infinite number of ways that businesses get capital. Large Wall Street investment banks play a role, but a rather small one. And almost exclusively for big businesses, which isn’t where the growth in the American economy occurs.
In related news — and in response to the emails I keep getting from folks who insist that these protests aren’t Marxist — please check out these recent vids:
In a recent interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, socialist documentarian Michael Moore — who, not coincidentally, made a socialist propaganda movie called Capitalism: A Love Story — revealed Monday (September 27th, 2011) what we all already knew: he has no understanding whatsoever of what capitalism really is.
The video clip won’t embed, but you can watch it here (and I suggest you do).
This is what Michael Moore said:
When you say the word capitalism, you have to talk about it in its current sense. You can’t told about the old days or the way maybe, you know, Adam Smith. The sort of old capitalism….
[In the] old days when you worked hard and prospered, everyone else prospered as well. And not only that, as you prospered, the wealth was shared with your employees, with the government. Everybody had a piece of the pie. You, who started the business or invented the light bulb or whatever, you got a bigger piece of the pie. And you know what, nobody cared because you invented the light bulb. That was a pretty cool thing….
None of the major religions, in fact they all, say it’s one of the worst sins you could commit, is to take such a large piece of the pie while others suffer.
Isn’t that heavy?
But the truth is, capitalism is the diametric opposite of what Michael Moore would have you believe.
What is capitalism?
Capitalism is a social system based upon private ownership of the means of production and the preeminence of the individual over the group.
This issue — capitalism-versus-socialism — hinges upon one thing, and this one thing is the only thing you’ll ever need to know about the subject: private ownership (capitalism) versus public or government ownership (socialism).
Do we each own ourselves and (corollarily) our property?
Or do others own us and our property?
Money is property.
Capitalism is an entire political theory — not, as is sometimes supposed, merely economic.
The exclusively economic component of capitalism can be described as the right to life, liberty, and property applied to commerce and industry.
Pure laissez-faire capitalism, which does not exist now and has never existed fully, means that government removes itself from all commerce (and that includes healthcare), in the same way that government removes itself from the bedroom.
In addition to early America, there is at least one other society that has come close to laissez faire capitalism:
“After the War Hong Kong had no minimum wage, low and simple taxes, zero tariffs, zero capital controls, and a stable legal environment. Postwar Hong Kong went as far with economic laissez faire as any other country in history. This resulted in economic development that benefited virtually all the people of Hong Kong. Living standards increased substantially even for the poorest people in Hong Kong” (Stefan Karlsson, “Inflation Leads to Protectionism,” 2004).
Capitalism means that commerce and industry are entirely privatized.
Corporations that receive government subsidies are not capitalistic. They’re the opposite: they’re mercantilistic.
The same is true of small businesses and farms that receive subsidies.
Trade tariffs are not capitalistic but mercantilistic.
Mercantilism is an ancient and more primitive form of socialism. It is socialism before Karl Marx.
Political theory is the theory of government, and government, properly defined, is the body politic that possesses rule over a certain specified geographic region.
Economics is the science of production and exchange, but production does not just mean agriculture, although that is certainly included.
Productive work is any kind of work geared toward the task of survival — survival in the fully human sense of the word, including, therefore, arts, sports, industry, and so on.
Thus the essential questions of government are these:
Do humans exist by right or by permission?
Are we free by nature?
If so, why?
Are we free to produce, exchange, and exist, or do politicians, elected or not, have authority and jurisdiction over the lives of us — to any degree?
Obviously, there’s only one sane answer to all these questions; for to say that humans do not exist by right is the same as saying humans only exist when someone permits us to. But if that were true, we must then ask: who permits? And why? And who gives these people permission?
Fundamentally, political freedom can be achieved only through recognizing each and every single individual’s right to life.
If, then, you believe that we are each individuated and sovereign, and if you believe that our lives are entirely our own and not the government’s and not another’s, if, in short, you believe “we each have a property in our person,” as John Locke said, then you believe in the inalienable right to life, liberty, and property.
You believe, therefore, in laissez-faire capitalism.
President Obama’s been taking a lot of flak lately for not having a plan. First it was about Libya, but now — even more importantly because, as we know, all politics is local (until it’s not) — about the budget.
The latest White House porte-parole Jay Carney has consequently been taking all kinds of in-coming himself about “where’s the President’s budget plan,” “why doesn’t he have a plan,” etc.
Well, the reason for the latter is simple: because he can’t. The minute the president evinces a budget plan, the game is up. No liberal budget will stand up to scrutiny. There is no money left for deficit spending in our aging society. The welfare state is kaput. It’s gone — probably for generations to come.
Of course, there’s always that canard about taxing the rich. That will save things. But the truth is even if you tax the rich at 100%, it barely sets back our entitlement crisis a year or two, while virtually bankrupting the few job creators who remain.
So no wonder Obama doesn’t have a plan. What would it be?
The Democratic Party, as we have known it for the past 70 years, is now in its last days.
Yes, the House Republicans may raise the debt ceiling for a mix of spending cuts and revenue raisers. Yes, Barack Obama may win the 2012 presidential contest. Yes, bureaucrats and judges will continue to impose new and costly regulations on the economy.
But it doesn’t matter. The long-term trends are almost all bad news for the left wing of the party.
This week’s fight over raising the federal debt limit exposes a key weakness in the warfare-welfare state that has bestowed power onto the Democratic Party: Without an ever-growing share of the economy, it dies.
Miniter’s right. As an ex-lib, it almost makes me feel sorry for liberals. But I’m not because too many of them are still playing ostrich. One lib friend just sent me an email — I’m still somehow on her list — trumpeting a 1954 (!) quote from Eisenhower: “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”
I guess the implication here is that’s what Republicans are trying to do, when, especially in the case of Social Security, they are the only ones making a serious effort to save it (see Paul Ryan). But liberals must preserve their delusions — and actually not read the small print, in Ryan’s proposal or anybody else’s. After all, they are people with no plans. Why should anybody else have them?
Whether people recognize it or not is beside the point: the welfare state is doomed by definition because in order to have the wealth to redistribute, one must first have someone producing that wealth, which (in turn) requires capital — as in capitalism — and that pool will pretty quickly dry up, especially when you vilify and punish the producers.
The following photos were captured by Zombie on May 5, 2011, at the May Day rally in downtown Los Angeles. This event was co-sponsored by the SEIU — a gigantic socialist labor organization that Barack Obama is famously fond of:
Barack Obama:
Everybody: There’s not a presidential candidate, a gubernatorial candidate, a congressional candidate, who won’t tell ya, that they’re pro-union, when they’re looking for their endorsements. They’ll all say, ‘Oh we love SEIU.’ But the question you gotta ask yourself is, do they have it in their gut, do they have a track record of standing alongside you on picket lines? Do they have a track record of going after the companies that aren’t letting you organize? Do they have a track record of voting the right way? But also helping you organize to build more and more power?
And some of you know I come from an organizing background, so — I’ve been working with the SEIU before I was elected to anything. When I was a community organizer, SEIU Local 880 and myself we organized people, to make sure that healthcare workers had basic rights; we organized voter registration drives, that’s how we built political power on the South Side of Chicago….and now the time has come for us to do it all across this country, and then we’ll paint the nation purple, with SEIU!
I would not be a United States Senator had it not been for the support of your brothers and sisters in Illinois. Those folks, they supported me early, they supported me often. I’ve got my purple windbreaker from my campaign in 2004.
And so, we’ve just got, what, four more days? Four more days of knocking on some doors. Four more days of working the precinct. Four more days of making sure all your co-workers are caucusing. SEIU, I am glad you are with me, let’s together change the country! SEIU! SEIU! SEIU! SEIU! SEIU!”
The first unions in the United States were formed in the late 18th century, and they’ve always been socialist at their core, explicitly or implicitly.
The principle that most people — union people in particular — do not understand about wages is this:
Wages are determined by worker productivity. Worker productivity is determined by the availability of capital goods(tools) to the worker to help him in his production. The availability of capital goods is determined by the prospect of profiting from such an investment. And the appropriate mix of investment in capital goods results from freedom in the marketplace. Thus anyone concerned with the welfare of workers should be the greatest advocate of free markets (source).
Contrary to what they’ve informed you, labor unions aren’t responsible for the increase in wages and living standards in this country. Advances in technology are.
“Historically, real wages (wages adjusted for the effects of inflation) rose at about 2 percent per year before the advent of unions, and at a similar rate afterward” (Morgan Reynolds, Power and Privilege: Labor Unions in America, 1984).
If labor unions were responsible for the historical rise in wages, then the solution to world poverty would be self-evident: unionize all the poorest nations on earth. [And yet] private-sector unions reached their peak in terms of membership in the 1950s, when they accounted for about a third of the workforce. Today, they represent barely 10 percent of the private-sector workforce. All during this time of declining union memberships, influence, and power, wages and living standards have risen substantially. All of the ‘declining industries’ in America from the 1970s on tended to be the highly unionized ones, whereas the growing industries, especially in the high-technology fields, are almost exclusively nonunion. At best, unions can improve the standards of living of some of their members, but only at the expense of other, nonunion workers, consumers, and others. When unions use their power to go on strike, or threaten to strike, and succeed in increasing their members’ wages above what they could earn on the free market, they inevitably cause some union members to lose their jobs.
What is the reason for this? The answer is deceptively simple: When wages rise, it makes labor more costly; therefore, to keep turning a profit, employers simply cannot employ as many workers.
Unions are a matter of pitting one group of workers against other workers; it is not a worker versus manager phenomenon. Successful unions are those which are able to exclude workers, and the unions most able to exclude workers are those composed of skilled workers. Skilled workers are more difficult to replace than unskilled workers and thus are better able to succeed in a strike. As Milton Friedman has stated, “unions don’t cause high wages, high wages cause unions.”
When unions strike they are not merely refusing to work but are preventing any labor from being offered to the employer. Those workers who do cross a union picket line are called “scabs,” thereby illustrating the lack of working class solidarity and clarifying the fact that the issue is one group of workers against other workers. When unions are successful they raise the wages of their membership but do so only at the expense of reducing the number of workers employed by the firm. Those workers unable to find employment in the unionized sector must seek work in the nonunionized sector, thereby depressing the wages for the nonunion workers. Unions do not raise wages, they increase wages for one group of (unionized) workers at the expense of lowering wages for the remaining (nonunionized) workers.
The long and undistinguished history of labor unions is a history of protectionism and violence. And that trend continues to this day — in the following, for instance:
A Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts is raising the stakes in the nation’s fight over the future of public employee unions, saying emails aren’t enough to show support and that it is time to “get a little bloody.”
“I’m proud to be here with people who understand that it’s more than just sending an email to get you going. Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary,” Rep. Mike Capuano (D-Ma.) told a crowd in Boston on Tuesday rallying in solidarity for Wisconsin union members. …
This is not Capuano’s first brush with violent rhetoric. Last month Capuano said, “Politicians, I think are too bland today. I don’t know what they believe in. Nothing wrong with throwing a coffee cup at someone if you’re doing it for human rights.”
In May of 1606, the first American settlers arrived in Jamestown.
What they found when they came to the Virginia Tidewater Region (which is where these original 104 set up their colony) was a breathtakingly fertile chunk of land. And so it was that these first American settlers discovered more resources than they could at first believe: oceans teeming with seafood, the woodlands swarming with birds, inexhaustible game, a soil that grew everything.
Yet within half a year only 38 of the original 104 settlers were still alive, the rest having succumbed to famine.
Not two years later, 500 more people were sent to refresh the devastated settlers.
Within half a year, the majority of these new arrivals — 440, to be precise — had died of starvation or disease.
Cannibalism was not uncommon.
The resources were still as plentiful and rich as ever before — hardly tapped, in fact — and so what went wrong?
This is an extraordinary period in America’s history, and as it happens, it provides us with a real-life illustration of agrarian collectivism-versus-private-property in action.
You see, the original American settlers had intentionally adopted a socialist policy: specifically, communal ownership of property. As a direct result, most of these people starved to death, or were killed off by disease — the very same problem, it turns out, that has been occurring steadily three centuries later in every country that’s collectivized its economy, particularly its agriculture.
As one early Jamestown eyewitness, a man by the name of George Percy, described it (in his antiquated English):
“[The cause of] famine was want of providence, industrie … and not the barennesse and defect of the Countri, as is generally supposed” (Warren M. Billings, George Percy’s Account of the Voyage to Virginia and the Colony’s First Days).
But how could this possibly have been? How could people such as this have “lacked industrie” when many of these people were specifically chosen for having the exact opposite character?
The answer to this question is not particularly difficulty to fathom. On the contrary, the answer is deceptively simple: the people of Jamestown had no financial stake in their endeavors. Indeed, they were little more than indentured servants. Thus everything they produced went into a public pool. Working harder and longer, therefore, did not benefit any one person any more than another. And so these people responded exactly as humans always will in such a situation: they simply didn’t work harder — any of them.
In his book, Mr. Bethel notes what some few insightful economists have been saying for a long time: lack of work and “industrie” go hand-in-hand with lack of property rights.
Or as Philip Alexander Bruce said, in an article about these very Jamestown settlers:
“[They] did not have even a modified interest in the soil … Everything produced by them went into the [public] store, in which they had no ownership.”
Thus, all grew idle and most, in the end, refused to work at all.
“The absence of property rights – and of the work-reward nexus that such rights create – completely destroyed the work ethic of the settlers” (Thomas Dilorenzo, How Capitalism Saved America).
Frustrated, flummoxed, flailing, the British government, which had financed the colonization, sent in 1611 a man named Sir Thomas Dale to serve as “High Marshal of the Virginian Colony.” Listen closely to what Mr. Dale observed; it is astounding and yet perfectly predictable:
“Dale noted that although most of the settlers had starved to death, the remaining ones were spending much of their time playing games in the streets, and he immediately identified the problem: the system of communal ownership” (Ibid).
It was then that the High Marshal Sir Thomas Dale gave every man three acres of land for each to own unto himself. He simultaneously did away with pooling into a communal treasury. Private property, in other words, was officially enacted and public ownership abolished.
Immediately the colony began to prosper.
The notorious “free-rider problem,” endemic to socialism of every strain, vanished as each person became his own master – as each person bore the full brunt of inaction and non-productivity. At the same time, every person had incentive to work harder since harder work meant greater prosperity and a direct benefit to each from that labor.
One of the fundamental flaws of socialism of every stripe is that it assumes that people will work just as hard or harder for others as they will work for themselves. This is untrue. It’s untrue because it is contrary not only to human nature but also to the nature of life. Jamestown shows us a historical illustration of this writ large.
“As soon as the settlers were thrown upon their own resources,” says historian Mathew Anderson, “and each freeman had acquired the right of owning property, the colonists quickly developed what became the distinguishing characteristic of Americans — and aptitude for all kinds of craftsmanship coupled with an innate genius for experimentation and invention” (The Old Dominion, Vol. 1, University of Virginia).
Other propitious things began to happen as well.
“The Jamestown colonists had originally implored the Indians to sell them corn, but the Indians looked down on the settlers because [the settlers] were barely capable of growing corn, thanks to their communistic economics. After the introduction of private property and the resulting transformation, however, the Indians began coming to the colonists to acquire corn in return for furs and other items” (Ibid).
Thus began a friendly system of free-trade.
The division of labor — an absolutely indispensable component of private property, which promotes specialization of labor, insofar as each is no longer forced to produce all his own food since he can now trade specialty items for specialty products others produce — was instantly born. In addition to this explosion of prosperity, there was also greater peace:
It made no sense now for either side — Indians or settlers — to war with the other, because free-trade was advantageous to each. Whereas, prior to Sir Thomas Dale’s instituting of private property, the settlers used “to steal from the Indians,” and even “beg from them,” a fact which the Indians quite naturally resented.
In Jamestown, the institution of private property changed all this.
But there’s more to the story, much more.
Not many years later, in November of 1620, another group of American settlers — 101 of them, to be exact, this group not financed by the British government — arrived on the good ship Mayflower, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
These Pilgrims, as they were called, moved a short distance away to a place named Plymouth. They were not at all unaware of the early Jamestown disaster, the starvation, the disease, the famine; they were, however, unaware of what had caused it.
Accordingly, they proceeded to make the identical mistake that the settlers of Jamestown had made: namely, collective ownership of land.
And the Pilgrims too paid dearly for it.
Within a few short months, half were dead.
Over the course of the next three years, 100 more settlers arrived from England to Plymouth, all of whom were barely able to feed themselves. As Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford wrote in his famous Of Plymouth Plantation:
“Many [settlers] sold away their clothes and bed coverings [to the Indians]; others (so base were they) became servants of the Indians … and fetch them water for a capful of corn; others fell to plain stealing, both day and night, from the Indians…. In the end, they came to that misery that some starved to and died with cold and hunger. One in gathering shellfish was so weak as he stuck fast in the mud and was found dead in the place.”
But this same William Bradford would soon solve “the ruin and dissolution of his colony,” and he would do it in the exact same way Sir Thomas Dale had saved Jamestown.
Here’s another famous passage from William Bradford’s book:
“After much debate of things … [it was decided that the Pilgrims] should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves … And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, for present use. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”
Bradford came to fully grasp how lack of property rights negates and indeed destroys the work incentive:
“For [men] and men’s wives,” he said, “to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothe, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husband brook it” (Ibid).
“Common course” was abandoned in favor of setting “every man for his own particular,” meaning private property. Instantaneously, those who had been indolent became “very industrious,” so much so that woman and men who had “previously pleaded frailty worked long and hard – once they saw how they and their families could benefit from such hard work.”
William Bradford went on to correctly identify the source of the “disastrous problem” as “that conceit of Plato’s,” who, in direct contrast to Aristotle, advocated collectivism and collective ownership of land, which, as history has repeatedly proven, is pure poison to any society that implements it. Bradford even wrote later that those who mistakenly believed that communal property could make people “happy and flourishing” imagined themselves “wiser than God.”
Next time you hear Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, or Noam Chomsky, or Howard Zinn, or any of the other Neo-Marxists propounding that “some” property should be “collectivized,” remember America’s real history.
Remember also how collectivization obliterates the work incentive, the survival instinct, and human industry.
Remember the real-life history of early America and the total failure of collectivization, which is actually a failure of lunacy.
Remember that not once in the history of the world has a communistic system ever flourished.
Remember that our lives, each and every one of us, are absolutely and inalienably our own, and by direct extension that means our property is absolutely and inalienably our own. Nobody may rightfully take any of that property from you without your permission, not for any reason, not in any amount, not even for the so-called “common good.”
Remember also that being compelled to serve the collective is a slow painful death to each member of that “collective.”
Finally, remember this:
“The Pilgrims had encountered what is called the free-rider problem, which is difficult to solve without dividing property into individual or family-sized units. And this is the course of action that William Bradford wisely took” (Tom Bethell, The Noblest Triumph).
Wisely because it set the trend for all that would make America what she would eventually become: a land of independence, industriousness, ingenuity, experimentation, invention, genius, and greatness.
Freedom and its economic corollary, capitalism, saved us in the beginning.
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.
