Thought Control In The Name Of Mother Earth - Part 2

Progressive visions of the Apocalypse

This is the second part of a three-part essay.

by Steve Kogan 

By 1948, the time was ripe for a second world enemy to be proclaimed at large since the French Revolution. Ruling class oppression was the first, but now the ravages of two world wars, economic crises in the intervening years, and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s provided the necessary fuel to ignite new fears of ecological and social collapse. On the first page of his introduction, Osborn writes that, "towards the end of the Second World War," it occurred to him that another and far older planetary war had been taking place, a "silent war, eventually the most deadly war," which was responsible for more human misery "than any that has resulted from armed conflict" and "contains potentialities of ultimate disaster" beyond even the reach of "atomic power." Our Plundered Planet would have made a fitting subtitle for The Communist Manifesto, for in both works war is another word for the course of human events, in Marx by his fixation on class warfare through the ages and in Osborn through the "silent war" that "The Plunderer" began waging thousands of years ago against the earth. Even Marx's view of capitalism as the ultimate predatory force in history finds a corresponding echo in Our Plundered Planet, with "the story" of America's relationship to the land in the nineteenth century representing "the most violent and destructive of any written in the long history of civilization."

Published in the same year as Osborn's best seller, William Vogt's The Road to Survival also found a wide audience for its attack on the "European and American economic system"; but where Osborn darkly speaks of "vast industrial systems" superimposing "new environments ... like crusts, on the face of the earth," Vogt pulls out all the stops and demonizes "the parasite of European industrial development," which buried "its proboscis deep into new lands," thus making the Europeans who arrived in North America "one of the most destructive groups of human beings that have ever raped the earth."

An instructive point of comparison appears fifty years into the industrial revolution in the second stanza of William Blake's "Jerusalem" (c. 1804): "And was Jerusalem builded here / Among these dark Satanic mills?" Blake's demonic factories are evil incarnate, yet there is nothing accusatory about the poem, for they appear in a redemptive setting of spiritual wonder ("And did the Countenance Divine / Shine forth upon our clouded hills?"), and the work ends with the poet's promise not to "cease from mental fight / Till we have built Jerusalem / In England's green and pleasant land." Blake's lyrical poem was set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916 and became a kind of national anthem, whereas Vogt's fear-inducing image of Europe's "proboscis" sucking up "new lands" might almost have been crafted in view of Hieronymous Bosch's weirdly grotesque and unnerving creatures of hell.

It is Vogt's image of Europeans, however, that is particularly vicious, because it insidiously suggests that the continent which still lay in ruins deserved its recent wartime fate. Indeed, Vogt intends his words to convey precisely this suggestion, which follows from his earlier remark that, over the course of the nineteenth century and the twentieth to date, Europeans ravaged the planet "with the seemingly caculated inexorability of a Panzer division," as though the victims of Hitler were the last in a long line of ecocidal Nazis, while "The handwriting on the wall of five continents" was now telling mankind that "the Day of Judgment is at hand."

Eco-theology also plays a part in Osborn's book, in which he speaks as though he were the Dostoevsky of environmentalism as he reflects on nature's abuse at the hands of man, who has "disregarded the words of the gentle Nazarene" and "destroyed a large part of his inheritance" as prophecied in the Sermon on the Mount: "'Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.'" There is even an echo of Dostoevsky's Christian faith in redemption through suffering, in which the destroyer's only "hope for the future" lies in remorseful "recognition of his failures in the past."

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's Father Zossima makes this very connection between love of nature and remorse for one's sins, but he does so in view of his own life, as the Gospels themselves center on the life of an individual. Osborn, on the other hand, reads "the words of the gentle Nazarene" as an environmentalist message, which is intellectually incoherent and makes a hash of Christ's prophecy several times over. In his version of the sermon, "the "meek" become mankind, which not only cancels Christ's blessing on the humble and poor but also erases "the meek" themselves, since man remains "The Plunderer" that he always was. Literally speaking, it is Osborn himself who has "disregarded the words of the gentle Nazarene" by subverting their meaning and turning them upside down. This inversion appears at the very beginning of the passage, in which we discover that it is "The Plunderer," the very figure who "has already destroyed a large part of his inheritance," who has simultaneously inherited the earth. In Osborn's words, "Part of the saying of Jesus ... has been fulfilled" now that "humanity, in great and growing numbers, is crowded upon most of the habitable areas of the earth," as though Christ's prophecy, in "part," had to do with overpopulation.

As for Vogt's "Day of Judgment," Revelation is a mystical vision of Christ's second coming, in keeping with Christ's reply to Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world." Vogt's apocalypse, on the other hand, concerns nothing but this world and, like all environmentalist warnings of planetary doom, is a scientistic form of prophecy. Hence my earlier characterization of this movement as an irreligious religion.

In Blue Planet in Green Shackles (2008), the Czech president Václav Klaus cites a number of Czech critics of environmentalism who likewise regard it as a secular religion, among them Ivan Brezina, "a biologist by academic training," who calls it "ecologism" to distinguish it from "scientific ecology" and critiques it at length in "Ecologism as a Green Religion" (2004). Klaus also cites a passage from "An Inconvenient Demagogy" (2006) by Michal Petřík, who notes that there is nothing of real science in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, which not only "includes all the errors it could possibly include" but "completely omits" any justification for the methods by which the film maximizes "negative forecasts and coming catastrophes." With the doomsday clock running out, there "comes a politician who is the only savior averting the catastrophe and saving all humankind." It is a classic echo of Soviet-style agitprop, as in a World War II Soviet film that an American veteran who had served in our Lend-Lease program to Russia once described to me, in which a dying soldier looks up at a nighttime sky and sees Stalin's face in a full moon looking down at him.

Petřík's following observation is particularly astute:

Thought Control In The Name Of Mother Earth - Part 1

Progressive visions of the Apocalypse

This is the first part of a three-part essay.

by Steve Kogan 

On a cross country trip some twenty years ago, I pulled into a truck stop that caught my eye moments after it came into view. High above the rows of gas pumps two displays were mounted: a huge, inflated model of a polka dotted Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Christian billboard inspired by the Book of Revelation. It was a sign from above two ways in one, with the last quarter hour of a white clock face printed against a black background, the words "Jesus is coming - Be Prepared," and the hands permanently set to five minutes to twelve, Judgment time.

There they were, big as life: a whimsical echo of Sinclair Oil's Dino the Dinosaurⁱ and a message from Scripture on the hour of reckoning. It was American to the hilt: a super-sized comic representation of the one prehistoric animal that everyone can recognize standing next to a literal image of Revelation 1:3, "for the time is at hand," and both of them serving as commercial roadside attractions.

I had driven through towns and cities when Route 66 was still Main Street U.S.A. and had seen any number of signs and cartoon-like models of foods, human figures, and animals at diners, car washes, and auto body shops from the midwest to LA, but the combination of dinosaur and Judgment clock stopped me in my tracks. When I think of them now, their effect becomes all the more heightened by association with the America of Henry Miller's "air conditioned nightmare," which now includes over 65,000 miles of land-destroying interstate highways, millions of cars, buses, SUVs, and tractor-trailers overheating the planet, thousands of junk food restaurants, rampant obesity in cities and towns, new dangerous technologies in energy and food production, and all the other demonisms of America's original sin in exploiting nature for profits, to the point where the earth trembles before its imminent ruin, according to the eco-litany of the left.

I was reminded of that New Testament sign halfway through Al Gore's Earth in the Balance, when his insistent message began to sound like the voice of a secularized Bible thumper in my mind, with his scientistic proofs of nature in crisis substituting for scriptural visions of the Apocalypse. To one degree or another, the warnings of countless environmental catastrophists are similarly filled with doomsday scenarios on the coming of famine, chaos, and extinction of life; and many of the titles of the foundational works read like a secular version of the end of days: The Rape of the Earth, Our Plundered Planet, Silent Spring, and Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, all written between 1939 and 1968. The alarms they sounded ring louder than ever, and all evidence to the contrary has not lessened their appeal to fresh generations of believers. There is nothing transcendent, however, about the last days they envision, nothing of Christ's "My kingdom is not of this world" or that the righteous will be spared the fate of the sinners. As Fairfield Osborn concludes in Our Plundered Planet(1948), either we send a message across the globe about "the threat of an oncoming crisis," so that "all peoples everywhere may join in common endeavor" to save the earth, or we will all succumb to "the present terrific attack" upon nature's "living resources." Osborn's work had a pronounced effect on Ehrlich in his youth, as it did on Gore when he took a course titled Theology and the Natural Sciences at the Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Translated into thirteen languages and reprinted eight times in the post-war year it was published, Our Plundered Planet broadcast an S.O.S. on the death of civilizations at the hands of "The Plunderer," which is Osborn's term for mankind and the title of part two. Given "the accumulated velocity" with which man was destroying "his own life sources," Osborn insisted that only world-wide planning" could end "the ongoing peril" as a result of "the profit motive," whose defenders were even now causing "mounting injury to people everywhere." In effect, Osborn was calling for a planetary form of centralized planning and describing "the present terrific attack" upon nature in similar terms that Karl Marx had used a hundred years earlier in his call for the proletariat "to centralize all the means of production in the hands of the state" and thereby end capitalism's "exploitation" of the working class "in every land." Osborn recognized the political implications of his work and in his conclusion stated that "others far more competent will have to formulate the program, or others, more audacious, grasp the right to prophesy."

Two decades later, in the midst of the Vietnam War, environmentalist politicians and prophets began to appear. Taking the "teach-ins" and anti-war demonstrations as his model, Governor Gaylord Nelson founded Earth Day in 1970ⁱⁱ and in a commemorative speech thirty years later claimed that it was now possible "to forge a sustainable society," transform America by imbuing its institutions "with a guiding environmental ethic," and thereby "change the course of history." In themselves, there is nothing messianic about the science of ecology and its practical applications; but Nelson managed to incorporate Osborn's two types of future spokesmen in one and infused a new politics of environmentalism with an older "right to prophecy," as he did here by nailing the words "sustainable," "sustainability," and "sustaining" twenty-five times into his speech and combining them six times with "forge" and "forging," an industrial metaphor that was popular in old leftwing slogans on the "forging" of a new society, a new world, and even a new man.

Other "audacious" prophets armed themselves with an all-purpose critique that moved from the "counter-culture revolution" into universities, including the "new environmentalism" that Nelson had helped to popularize. In every succeeding variation, from new historicist and post-colonial rhetoric to feminist and social justice theory, there was either overt or implicit agreement that something was "fundamentally wrong with American government and American society" and that "traditional Western thought as a whole needed reconsideration."ⁱⁱⁱ A similar atomizing took place in the environmental movement, which came to include social justice ecology, anti-Christian ecology, "theological," or mystical ecology, eco-feminism, eco-socialism, and even anarchist-inspired eco-terrorism, as in the following outcry at a congressional hearing by a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, who struck the pose of a revolutionist facing a capitalist firing squad:

All power to the people. Long live the earth liberation front. Long live the animal liberation front. Long live all the sparks attempting to ignite the revolution. Sooner or later the sparks will turn into flame.iv

Craig Rosenbraugh's outburst bears no resemblance to Osborn's modest claim in his conclusion that he has only attempted "to present a synthesis of some of the biological and historical facts of human existence"; yet Osborn's "synthesis" is based on a series of narrow choices among "some" of these "facts," and, like Rosenbraugh's vision of a planet in crisis, they are all directed to the warning that "man is destroying the sources of his life." It has been the working premise of environmentalist ideology for at least a hundred years: "... the final goal of 'progress' is nothing less than the destruction of life,"v now rendered as "The very future of life on Earth is in danger," which Earth First! places at the beginning of its mission statement under the title "No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth." Echoing Marx's declaration that capitalism and its global "giant, Modern Industry" have modernized oppression through "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation," Osbornremarks early in his work that the industrial revolution has allowed man "to exploit far more effectively than he could previously the living natural resources of all of the continents of the earth." Both statements illustrate Simone Weil's observation in "The Power of Words" (1934) that "we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence," among them "the idea of limit, measure, degree," and "proportion," and replaced them with "myths and monsters." For Osborn, the exploitation of "our life sources" is just such a monster, which he projects onto the human record as a story of "plunder," "depletion," "destruction," and "despoliation," with man's "silent war" upon the earth playing the same part in Our Plundered Planet as the victimization of the lower orders by "the ruling class in every age" in The Communist Manifesto.vi

Ana

Royalty and Servitude 

By Yoani Sanchez

My grandmother made a living washing and ironing for others. When she died, in her mid-eighties, she only knew how to write the three letters of her name: Ana. For her whole life, she worked as a maid for a family, even after 1959 when official propaganda boasted of having emancipated all servants. Instead, many women like her continued to work in domestic service but without any legal security. For my sister and me, Ana spent part of her days in “the house on Ayestarán Street,” and we never said out loud that she was paid to clean the floors, wash the dishes and prepare the food there. I never saw her complain, nor did I hear of her being mistreated.

A couple of days ago I heard a conversation that contrasted with the story of my grandmother. A plump lady dressed in expensive clothes was telling her friend — between glasses of white wine — how she behaved with her young domestic. I transcribe here — without adding even a word — a dialog that left me feeling a mixture of revulsion and sadness:

- From what you tell me, you’re lucky. - Yes, I really can’t complain. Suzy started with us when she was 17 and she just turned 21. - Now we’ll see if she gets pregnant and you have to throw her out. - No, she’s very clear on that. I told her that if she gets pregnant she’ll lose her job. - Yes, but you know, “the fox always returns to its den.” So maybe she’ll run after some man from the village where she was born. - No way! She won’t even go to that “den” on vacation. Imagine you didn’t have any electricity, the floor of her parents’ house is dirt, and the latrine is shared by four families. – - It’s like the heavens opened up for her since she’s been with us. All she has to do is what I tell her, that’s all I ask. - That’s how they start, but later they start thinking things and ask for more.

You Only Live Twice

Vibrant Jewish communities were reborn in Europe after the Holocaust. Is there a future for them in the 21st century?

By Michel Gurfinkiel

Samuel Sandler, an aeronautical engineer and head of the Jewish community in Versailles, France, announced a few weeks ago that he’d had the local synagogue registered as a national landmark. “My feeling is that our congregation will be gone within twenty or thirty years,” he told friends, “and I don’t want the building demolished or, worse, used for improper purposes.”

Once the seat of French royalty, Versailles is now among the tranquil, prosperous, and upscale suburbs of Greater Paris. Among the townspeople are executives employed in gleaming corporate headquarters a few miles away. They and their churchgoing families inhabit early-20th-century villas and late-20th-century condominiums set in majestic greenery. Among the townspeople too, are a thousand or so Jews of similar economic and social status who have made their homes in Versailles and nearby towns. In addition to the synagogue and community center of Versailles itself, a dozen more synagogues dot the surrounding area.

So what makes Sandler so pessimistic about the future?

One answer might be thought to lie in the personal tragedy that befell him last year, when an Islamist terrorist shot and killed his son Jonathan, a thirty-year-old rabbi at a school in the southern city of Toulouse, along with Jonathan’s two sons, ages six and three, and an eight-year-old girl. But Sandler had faced his grief with uncommon courage and self-control. Both at the funeral in Jerusalem and in later media appearances, he had made a point of defending democracy, patriotic values, and interfaith dialogue.

Personal experience, then, may play a part in explaining Sandler’s grim diagnosis of the prospects of French Jewry, and by implication of European Jewry at large; but it is far from the whole story. Nor is that diagnosis unique to him. To the contrary, the more one travels throughout Europe, the more one confronts an essential paradox: the European Jewish idyll represented by Versailles is very common; so is the dire view articulated by Samuel Sandler.

1. The Paradox

European Judaism looks healthy, and secure. Religious and cultural activities are everywhere on the rise. Last December, in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg, an exquisite new synagogue was inaugurated in Ulm, the most recent in a long series of new or recently restored sanctuaries in Germany. In Paris, a European Center for Judaism will soon be built under the auspices of the Consistoire (the French union of synagogues) and the French government. Many European capitals now harbor major Jewish museums or Holocaust memorials. In Paris, a visitor can proceed from the National Museum for Jewish Art and History housed at the Hôtel de Saint-Aignan, a 17th-century mansion in the Marais district, to the national Shoah memorial near the Seine, to the Drancy Holocaust memorial in the northern suburbs. Berlin hosts the Jüdisches Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind; the cemetery-like grid of the Mahnmal, the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe whose concrete slabs are spread over an entire city block in the center of the capital; and another national Holocaust memorial and educational center at Wannsee.

And yet, despite all their success and achievement, the majority of European Jews, seconded by many Jewish and non-Jewish experts, insist that catastrophe may lie ahead.

Why Syria Isn’t the Big Story This Week

Land policy in India is a bigger deal than sectarian politics in Syria

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

The world’s eyes are riveted on Syria this week, as the United States, France and perhaps a few others organize plans to punish a bloodstained government for its use of chemical weapons against its own people. It’s a story that has everything: the prospect of violence, the political agony of an embattled White House, David Cameron’s loss of grip, and perplexing questions about right and wrong. For liberal internationalists, few international laws are more important than those that ban the use of WMD against civilians; on the other hand, when the political patrons of a war criminal block action at the UN Security Council, liberal internationalists must choose between their highest values and their most cherished institution.

That’s why the Syria story is dominating the news this week, and like the rest of the world, VM has been following it closely. But another story that is getting less attention is much more important for the future of the world: the economic crisis in India represents a much more fateful moment in world politics than anything happening in Syria.

What’s so important about India’s economic problems? It’s more what they tell us about the state of the country than the severity of the problems themselves. The stock market jitters, the currency crash, the GDP slowdown and the government deficit aren’t enough in themselves to sink India. All economies go through rough patches every now and then, but the question isn’t about a downturn. The question is whether the Indian political system has what it takes to get the economy back on track.

Two horrible things happened in India this week: an inept government reeling from serial corruption scandals and mounting evidence of economic failure pushed two bad bills towards enactment. There’s a wasteful “food security law” that will do much more to nourish India’s rich world of government corruption than to help the poor on a sustainable basis, and a poorly designed “land reform” law that could be even more crippling.

We’ve noted the food bill before; the land law is new and its consequences could be devastating enough to India’s growth prospects to change the course of world history. In India, under a law dating from the British Raj, the government has wide powers of eminent domain. Essentially, the government is the nation’s real estate agent, organizing transactions between buyers (often Indian or foreign companies who want to build factories, or Indian government organizations wanting to build roads or other infrastructure) and the farmers and others who own the land. For many Indians, this approach makes sense for two reasons. First, there are so many small plots in India that without the convenience of government organization (and its powers of eminent domain to force unwilling holdouts to sell), it would difficult if not impossible for private organizations to get the land for big projects. The second reason is that given the low level of education among many rural people in India and their lack of economic sophistication, there is a fear that unscrupulous investors will swindle the poor unless the government is there to protect them.

Ze Germans Aren’t Coming

23 percent of German men say “zero” is the ideal family size

By Jonathan V. Last

Last week, the New York Times ran a piece on the dire demographic problems facing Germany. The short version: Germans aren’t having enough kids, and as a result the economy is in trouble and there are all sorts of logistical problems—vacant buildings that need to be razed; houses that will never be sold, sewer systems which may not function properly because they’re too empty. If you want to read the long version, I write pretty extensively about Germany’s problems in What to Expect When No One’s Expecting. 

The Times piece reaches a couple interesting conclusions. The first is that they, somewhat surprisingly, acknowledge how much trouble demographic decline represents. This is surprising not because it’s news—most economists believe, and much of the historical record suggests, that aging, declining populations are problematic. No, it’s surprising because the Times is normally one of the last bastions of the neo-Malthusian idea that small is beautiful and that shrinking populations will be good for everyone. Because, you know, this time will be different. Maybe the reporters behind the Times’s Germany story are just conservative moles.

But probably not, because the second conclusion of the piece is that what Germany needs to do is stop trying to prod families with handouts and start focusing on helping working mothers:

There is a band of fertility in Europe, stretching from France to Britain and the Scandinavian countries, helped along by immigrants and social services that support working women.

Raising fertility levels in Germany has not proved easy. Critics say the country has accomplished very little in throwing money at families in a system of benefits and tax breaks that includes allowances for children and stay-at-home mothers, and a tax break for married couples.

Demographers say that a far better investment would be to support women juggling motherhood and careers by expanding day care and after-school programs. They say recent data show that growth in fertility is more likely to come from them.

“If you look closely at the numbers, what you see is the higher the gender equality, the higher the birthrate,” said Reiner Klingholz of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development.

And liberal bloggers agree! So, problem solved. Prop up nationalized daycare and demographic difficulties just take care of themselves.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not that simple.

For starters, the countries in the “high fertility band” from France to Scandinavia don’t really have “high” fertility. None of them is above the replacement rate and only France is even close. Germany’s total fertility rate is about 1.43. Now, sweep down the list and look at the TFR’s in Scandinavia: Norway is at 1.77; Denmark 1.73; Sweden 1.67. That’s the “success” being heralded.

Are the Scandinavian countries better off than Germany? Sure. Are they still in a whole mess of trouble, even with their super-progressive daycare programs and cultures of gender equality? You betcha. Think about it this way: If we had Sweden’s fertility rate here in America, you’d be hearing klaxon alarms every day about the demographic cliff we had careened over.

Which leaves France. France has a legitimately great fertility rate: 2.08—which is within spitting distance of the replacement rate. But is French fertility driven by its daycare centers? Not so much. Separate out the fertility rates of native-born Frenchwomen from the foreign-born population and you see a tremendous divide. Native-born French women have a TFR around 1.7. Foreign-born French women are much higher, probably north of 2.8. (Finding hard numbers here is difficult because it is taboo in France to make such demographic distinctions. Which means that in order for French demographers to get the same numbers our Census Bureau puts out every year, they have to hand-count (and sort) birth records. For a good discussion of all of this, see Christopher Caldwell’s definitive Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.)

What the gulf between native- and foreign-born French fertility suggests is that daycare centers and gender equality have only helped France so much—about as much, actually, as they’ve helped Scandinavia. What really gives France its demographic boost has been immigration which, in the French experience, has also been a source of many problems.

There’s actually been a fair amount of academic study on the efficacy of pro-natalist measures—everything from baby bribes to state-run daycare—and the evidence suggests that none of these efforts bring about much more than marginal returns. (This econometric analysis by Gauthier and Hatzius is a good place to start, if you’re interested.)

This isn’t to say that nationalized daycare is a bad idea. If people on the left (or elsewhere) want to make a principled case that such a system is an important expression of societal values and would work as a building block in showing national seriousness about pro-natalism, then that’s a perfectly good argument and we should absolutely have that discussion.

But anyone who looks at demographic decline and says, “Hey, just give us nationalized daycare and the problem takes care of itself” is either uninformed, or trying to sell you something.

I’m not selling anything myself. (Except a book—pick up your copy of What to Expect When No One’s Expecting today!) But I’d suggest that when it comes to demographics and falling fertility rates there are no easy answers. If you want to understand how truly deep Germany’s problems run, consider this: In 2005, Europe did a Population Policy Acceptance Study which looked at a broad range of demographic indicators. One of these indicators was “ideal fertility”—that is, how many kids an individual thought was the ideal number.

Twenty-three percent of German men—that’s not a typo, 23 percent—said that “zero” was the ideal family size. There probably aren’t public policy solutions to a cultural worldview like that.

Everybody Is a Criminal

The Law – Growing Like a Weed

By Pater Tenebrarum

In a recent article at the Mises Institute entitled 'Decriminalize the Average Man', Wendy McElroy writes: 

“If you reside in America and it is dinnertime, you have almost certainly broken the law. In his book Three Felonies a Day, civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate estimates that the average person unknowingly breaks at least three federal criminal laws every day. This toll does not count an avalanche of other laws — for example misdemeanors or civil violations such as disobeying a civil contempt order — all of which confront average people at every turn.” 

(emphasis added)

Along similar lines, here is a brief excerpt from Chalres Norman Fay's 'Too Much Government, Too Much Taxation', a book published in 1923 (!) on the production of laws: 

“The natural result of filling local and state legislative bodies with second- or third-rate men of small experience and limited education, who go there to make what they can out of the job; especially when coupled, as it is in most states, with the practice of paying them a per-diem allowance for time spent in session, is a flood of perfectly useless legislation.

Each alderman, representative, or senator feels, of course, that he is there to legislate, and that he ought to do something himself in that direction. Some bill must be introduced and passed that bears his name. The most enticing proposition to him is apt to be one involving the expenditure of public money in his district; or perhaps the regulating or controlling some other fellow whose ways he does not like; or per contra the throwing of something in the way of someone whom he does like.

[...]

There are a thousand reasons for introducing a thousand or more bills; and introduced they certainly are.” 

(emphasis added)

In an interview with the Austrian Economics Newsletter that he gave a while ago, Hans-Hermann Hoppe stated: 

“The democratic ruler does not invoke the principle of private property to show that he is the legitimate ruler. He invokes the principle that no property is entirely private. It follows that these people are tempted to think of law as simply legislation.

Under democracy, you can change law whenever you want. No one knows what the laws will be tomorrow. In fact, hardly anyone knows what the laws are today, because there are so many. In this way, democracy undermines the value of property and undercuts long-term planning and decision making.” 

We would submit that while in the beginning, the flood of regulation and legislation of the modern State was more or less the result of the factors Charles Fay describes above, this jungle of laws and thicket of regulations in the meantime serves a very specific purpose. By making a criminal out of everybody, as all of us are every day bound to break a number of laws and regulations without even knowing it, anyone who is disliked by the State or one its minions can be made into a target to be harassed at will.

Once there are so many laws that it would be simpler to jot down what isn't expressly forbidden yet, it is completely vain to talk of the 'rule of law'. One has in fact arrived in a state of tyranny – and an iron fist is hiding behind the velvet glove.

As Ludwig von Mises says in 'Omnipotent Government': 

“The total complex of the rules according to which those at the helm employ compulsion and coercion is called law. Yet the characteristic feature of the State is not these rules, as such, but the application or threat of violence.” 

(emphasis added) 

Striking the Root

What prompted us to write about this was an article we came across recently, in which the author complains that “Regulators Repeat Exactly What They Did During the Last Housing Boom” by failing to implement certain provisions of the 'Dodd-Frank' Act, one of the government's more weighty attempts (literally) to close the barn door long after the horse has fled. It is actually quite ironic that the act bears the names of Messrs. Dodd and Frank, who were among those most vociferously arguing in favor of the government-instituted subsidies and market distortions that led to the massive lending spree to  borrowers who were not creditworthy. This is not to say that bankers didn't act irresponsibly, but the very basis for their irresponsible acts has been created by the government.

Our first thought upon reading the article was, “what makes anyone think that a telephone book sized tome of additional regulations can somehow make us 'safer'?” After all, the mortgage credit market was already one of the most over-regulated business activities in the country prior to the housing bubble. In fact, it is a very good bet that the more regulations there are, the more unsafe the financial system will become. This is so because these regulations provide only an illusion of safety – by making everybody think that they will 'prevent' another crash, they invite precisely the kind of risk taking behavior that will in the end contribute to producing the next crash (after all, everybody knows now that nothing can go wrong anymore!).

In fact, all such complaints fail to strike the root. If the privilege of fractional reserve banking were repealed, there could be no more credit expansion that was not backed by an increase in genuine savings. There would no longer be the need for a 'lender of last resort' to bail out the banks when the inevitable busts strike and bank runs ensue as the holders of fiduciary media try to save what they can. The banking cartel could be immediately put out of business and replaced with a free banking system, i.e., a free market in money and banking. Would this require thousands of pages of regulations? Actually, no. The entire regulatory framework for such a system would fit on the back of a napkin. 

The EU: A Club For Anti-Democrats

How Brussels became a hiding place for elites sick of dealing with the demos

By Daniel Ben-Ami 

One of the most shocking political developments of recent years was the lack of any public outcry at the imposition of unelected regimes in Greece and Italy. In fact, the installation of technocratic governments in both countries in the midst of the Eurozone economic crisis in 2011 was widely welcomed. The European Union played a central role in insisting on what could reasonably be called a ‘soft coup’.

If something similar had been attempted a generation or two earlier, it would almost certainly have been met with widespread protest. Europeans might have seen such a blatant attack on democracy as normal in other parts of the world, but not at home, in the birthplace of democracy.

Such changing attitudes point to the rise of technocratic rule. Democracy, even in the limited sense of an expression of the popular will through parliament, has gone out of fashion. Indeed, there is no real politics today, in the sense of popular contestation over different visions of how society should be run. Instead, the trend is towards apolitical administration by an elite of expert technocrats. The general public, the demos in democracy, has been sidelined.

This is the backdrop to James Heartfield’s groundbreaking new book, The European Union and the End of Politics. Both parts of the title are important. Heartfield, a London-based writer and fellow contributor to spiked, explains the rise of the EU against the backdrop of the depoliticisation of nation states. He provides an innovative account of the rise of technocratic rule in its most advanced and grotesque incarnation.

For Heartfield, the drive to European integration in its current form begins in the 1980s. He avoids the common error of reading the recent experience back into earlier pan-European entities such as the European Coal and Steel Community or the European Economic Community. Indeed, technically the EU itself did not even come into existence until 1993.

The EU did not come about as a result of any democratic drive to transcend nation states and replace them with a pan-European superstate. Popular agency did not drive the change. Instead, as Heartfield points out, the EU emerged as a result of the decline of popular democracy within nation states.

Old forms of politics, such as the party system and trade unions, have lost legitimacy. The old right and the old left are both defunct. Free-market reforms have failed to achieve their goal of rolling back the state and national Keynesian solutions have not resolved underlying economic problems.

In such circumstances, the drive towards EU integration has materialised almost by default. National elites have become more dependent on their relationships with their European counterparts as a source of legitimacy. Domestic politics and political parties matter much less than in the past.

Discovery gives learning that touch of magic

Where there is no magic, there is little, if any, learning

BY VERNON L. SMITH, PH.D.

In my early childhood years, I came to think of libraries as places that surely contained all that was known, and I aspired to go to college because – I believed – that is where one learns all there is to know.

Nothing, I naively thought, was unknowable. One had only to seek knowledge. But, as I gradually learned, the action – all the learning and understanding – occurs in the pursuit of knowledge. The questions actually multiply faster than the answers, and that is the charm of education as a search process.

Fantasy is also important to a child. Dreams are fashioned of fantasy, and out of dreams come the desire for adventure, the desire to learn, and ultimately the realization that learning to learn is what is important. In dreams and fantasy nothing is unattainable – and this is not only a model for seeking, overcoming, and coming to know, but also – and most important – a model for living.

It seems that this conception of the role of fantasy for a child was quite unpopular with the constructivist psychologists of the 1950s and '60s, until it was thoughtfully reconsidered in works such as Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment." It's fortunate that these modern educational fads sometimes tend to be short-lived.

What has endured from my early school years are memories of pleasure and excitement in learning, a search-and-discovery process that was intrinsically rewarding. But that process was increasingly compromised by the growth of performance testing in the schools. By the high school years, "learning" had become less important in proportion to scores on achievement tests.

For example, in those tests you would read several utterly boring paragraphs of text, and then answer a bunch of questions that would measure your comprehension of the text. What I remember is how little of it was worth remembering. This continued in college, except that now the text was sometimes a bit more memorable. Also, the math and physics problems carried some intrinsic joy in the process of discovering solutions.

The Real Reason College Costs So Much

We have 115,520 janitors in the United States with bachelor's degrees or more

By ALLYSIA FINLEY

Another school year beckons, which means it's time for President Obama to go on another college retreat. "He loves college tours," says Ohio University's Richard Vedder, who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. "Colleges are an escape from reality. Believe me, I've lived in one for half a century. It's like living in Disneyland. They're these little isolated enclaves of nonreality."

Mr. Vedder, age 72, has taught college economics since 1965 and published papers on the likes of Scandinavian migration, racial disparities in unemployment and tax reform. Over the last decade he's made himself America's foremost expert on the economics of higher education, which he distilled in his 2004 book "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much." His analysis isn't the same as President Obama's.

This week on his back-to-school tour of New York and Pennsylvania colleges, Mr. Obama presented a new plan to make college more affordable. "If the federal government keeps on putting more and more money in the system," he noted at the State University of New York at Buffalo on Thursday, and "if the cost is going up by 250%" and "tax revenues aren't going up 250%," at "some point, the government will run out of money."

Note that for the record: Mr. Obama has admitted some theoretical limit to how much the federal government can spend.

His solution consists of tying financial aid to college performance, using government funds as a "catalyst to innovation," and making it easier for borrowers to discharge their debts. "In fairness to the president, some of his ideas make some decent, even good sense," Mr. Vedder says, such as providing students with more information about college costs and graduation rates. But his plan addresses just "the tip of the iceberg. He's not dealing with the fundamental problems."

College costs have continued to explode despite 50 years of ostensibly benevolent government interventions, according to Mr. Vedder, and the president's new plan could exacerbate the trend. By Mr. Vedder's lights, the cost conundrum started with the Higher Education Act of 1965, a Great Society program that created federal scholarships and low-interest loans aimed at making college more accessible.

In 1964, federal student aid was a mere $231 million. By 1981, the feds were spending $7 billion on loans alone, an amount that doubled during the 1980s and nearly tripled in each of the following two decades, and is about $105 billion today. Taxpayers now stand behind nearly $1 trillion in student loans.

Meanwhile, grants have increased to $49 billion from $6.4 billion in 1981. By expanding eligibility and boosting the maximum Pell Grant by $500 to $5,350, the 2009 stimulus bill accelerated higher ed's evolution into a middle-class entitlement. Fewer than 2% of Pell Grant recipients came from families making between $60,000 and $80,000 a year in 2007. Now roughly 18% do.

This growth in subsidies, Mr. Vedder argues, has fueled rising prices: "It gives every incentive and every opportunity for colleges to raise their fees."

Let Them Work!

The First Step to a Free Detroit

By Patrick Barron

I have received more personal emails regarding my earlier essay Declare Detroit a Free City than all my other essays put together. Some have been especially poignant. For example, one lady said that she and her husband, who has been unemployed for two years from a company for which he worked for twenty-five years, would move to a Free Detroit themselves, confident that her husband could find work. I pointed out to her that Ludwig von Mises explained that the only real barrier to economic expansion was the limited supply of labor, which puts a practical limit to the expansion of the division of labor. In other words, the larger the pool of labor, the more specialized is the economy, which results in lower costs of production.

No Unwilling Unemployment in a Free Market

By himself an individual cannot exist much above basic survival, if he can even do that. However, larger groups who engage in peaceful cooperation develop a division of labor which allows each individual to specialize according to his comparative advantage, accumulate capital, and provide everyone else in the group with goods and services that would be impossible for them to produce in a hermit’s existence. Given the fact of an unlimited desire to improve our condition that is limited only by the size of the labor pool, Mises explained that under free market capitalism there is no unwilling unemployment. There is always more work to be done than there are people to it. Therefore, the first step to freeing Detroit from its downward economic spiral is to remove whatever barriers exist that prevent people from working.

Step One–Free the Market for Labor

The greatest of these barriers to work are the myriad and complex laws that interfere in the ability for labor and capital to arrive at mutually agreeable terms of employment. Minimum wage laws should be the first to go, but also the many costly labor regulations that business must consider when hiring. Government has been piling on costly mandatory benefits, whether these benefits would be valued by the employee in a free labor market or not. Again, Mises explained that business must take into account the total cost of labor, not just the wage cost. If business must pay for other benefits, then that cost must be added to the explicit wage cost to arrive at the real, total cost of labor.

Protecting the All Important First Rung of the Ladder

Minimum wage laws and onerous regulation raise–or eliminate altogether–that critical first rung on the employment ladder for many workers, preventing them from gaining that all important first step on the road to independence and self-reliance. The entry level employees and younger workers, those who have less marketable skills and whom labor laws are supposed to benefit, are the ones who are harmed the most by labor laws. These workers are locked out of the labor market by the inexorable laws of economic reality. If their skills provide business with less revenue than their total costs of employment, no business can employ them for long without running out of capital. Hence, they never get on the ladder at all. This is a tragedy not only for them but for all of us, too.

Dismantling the Ladder: Cooperative Relations Under Constant Attack 

Our lawmakers seem to live in an alternative world where they believe that wages may be mandated ever upward with no adverse economic consequences. In this tragic world–where unfortunately WE live–they are doing everything possible to stop new entrants from entering the labor force and gaining the skills that businesses would be willing to give them. Currently there even is a movement afoot to outlaw the practice of “employing” interns. Internships are one way for workers with low marginal productivity to gain skills and contacts in the careers of their choice. Typically, an intern works either for free or perhaps for room, board, and a small stipend. Hypocritically, Congress itself “employs” many interns. My son was an unpaid intern for our congressman for two summers while in college. Needless to say his eyes were opened to the ways of the world, which have served him well as an attorney.

The most egregious attempt at interference in what has always been a free labor market occurred recently in the great farm state of Iowa. The U.S. Department of Labor, with assistance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring the children of farm families under their regulatory umbrella! The rest of us benefited immensely when Iowa’s farm families said NO!. Not only was this an intrusion into the hearths and homes of some of the most hard working and independently reliant people in America, it would have created a precedence for even more intrusions into American families’ everyday lives. Tell junior to take out the garbage and mow the grass? Make sure you pay minimum wage, buy workers’ comp insurance, and file that W-2 at the end of the year! (Don’t think that this could not have happened!)

Detroit Could Become a New Beacon of Freedom

What might ordinary people achieve if all barriers to the free use of their labor were removed? Might they not be inspired to move to such a place, set up shop, take on interns, establish apprenticeships, and produce the goods and services that all of us need and cannot produce for ourselves? They would be following in the footsteps of all those who crossed an ocean to do just that, seeking only the opportunity to live and work freely. Detroit could become the new beacon of freedom and liberty for the oppressed people of America, like the lady who told me that she and her husband would move to a Free Detroit. She and her husband would follow in the honorable tradition of our pilgrim ancestors and all who came here later seeking only freedom. Let us establish such a place, a haven free of the oppressive hand of the parasitic state. And let us establish it in the most dysfunction real estate in America–the bankrupt city of Detroit. All that our oppressors have to fear is our success. 

The Fallacy of the Public Sector

Any reduction of the public sector, any shift of activities from the public to the private sphere, is a net moral and economic gain

By  Murray N. Rothbard

We have heard a great deal in recent years of the “public sector,” and solemn discussions abound through the land on whether or not the public sector should be increased vis-à-vis the “private sector.” The very terminology is redolent of pure science, and indeed it emerges from the supposedly scientific, if rather grubby, world of “national-income statistics.” But the concept is hardly wertfrei; in fact, it is fraught with grave, and questionable, implications.

In the first place, we may ask, “public sector” of what? Of something called the “national product.” But note the hidden assumptions: that the national product is something like a pie, consisting of several “sectors,” and that these sectors, public and private alike, are added to make the product of the economy as a whole. In this way, the assumption is smuggled into the analysis that the public and private sectors are equally productive, equally important, and on an equal footing altogether, and that “our” deciding on the proportions of public to private sector is about as innocuous as any individual’s decision on whether to eat cake or ice cream. The State is considered to be an amiable service agency, somewhat akin to the corner grocer, or rather to the neighborhood lodge, in which “we” get together to decide how much “our government” should do for (or to) us. Even those neoclassical economists who tend to favor the free market and free society often regard the State as a generally inefficient, but still amiable, organ of social service, mechanically registering “our” values and decisions.

One would not think it difficult for scholars and laymen alike to grasp the fact that government isnot like the Rotarians or the Elks; that it differs profoundly from all other organs and institutions in society; namely, that it lives and acquires its revenues by coercion and not by voluntary payment. The late Joseph Schumpeter was never more astute than when he wrote, “The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.”[1]

Apart from the public sector, what constitutes the productivity of the “private sector” of the economy? The productivity of the private sector does not stem from the fact that people are rushing around doing “something,” anything, with their resources; it consists in the fact that they are using these resources to satisfy the needs and desires of the consumers. Businessmen and other producers direct their energies, on the free market, to producing those products that will be most rewarded by the consumers, and the sale of these products may therefore roughly “measure” the importance that the consumers place upon them. If millions of people bend their energies to producing horses-and-buggies, they will, in this day and age, not be able to sell them, and hence the productivity of their output will be virtually zero. On the other hand, if a few million dollars are spent in a given year on Product X, then statisticians may well judge that these millions constitute the productive output of the X-part of the “private sector” of the economy.

One of the most important features of our economic resources is their scarcity: land, labor, and capital-goods factors are all scarce, and may all be put to various possible uses. The free market uses them “productively” because the producers are guided, on the market, to produce what the consumers most need: automobiles, for example, rather than buggies. Therefore, while the statistics of the total output of the private sector seem to be a mere adding of numbers, or counting units of output, the measures of output actually involve the important qualitative decision of considering as “product” what the consumers are willing to buy. A million automobiles, sold on the market, are productive because the consumers so considered them; a million buggies, remaining unsold, would not have been “product” because the consumers would have passed them by.