We like this article by Andrew Klavan, both what he says and how he says it:

The true test of a philosophy is not what it promises to make of the world but what it makes, in fact, of its adherents. Human nature is remarkably recalcitrant, but ideas do affect people over time, for good or ill, and the societies people make will ultimately bear the image of those effects and thus of the ideas. … Our beliefs arise from who we are and we become what we believe …

Leftism is bad for people. It makes them awful. The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy” believe their ideas will lead to a better society — but they actually are the society their ideas lead to. Their behavior when compared to the polite, law-abiding, non-racist demonstrations of so-called tea partiers tells you everything you need to know about the end results of statism on the one hand and constitutional liberty on the other.

This is not, of course, to say that every left-winger is a miscreant but rather that the natural, indeed inevitable, result of statism is to produce nations of miscreants. When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal; when the state is permitted to redistribute wealth, it chains the citizen into a rigid, two-tiered hierarchy of power rather than freedom’s fluid, multi-layered rankings of merit and chance; when the people are taught to be dependent on entitlements, they are reduced to violence when, inevitably, the entitlement well runs dry; when belief in the state usurps every higher creed, the people become apathetic, hedonistic, and uncreative and their culture slouches into oblivion. I need hardly expend the energy required to lift my finger and point to Europe where cities burn because the unemployable are unemployed or because the hard-working won’t fund the debts of the indolent; where violent and despicable Islamism eats away portions of municipalities like a cancer while the authorities do nothing; where nations that once produced history’s greatest achievements in science and the arts can now no longer produce even enough human beings to sustain themselves. 

Why wait to see such results come home? Leftism is an ignoble creed on the surface of it. Its followers display their awareness of its shamefulness by projecting its evils onto their opposition. Leftists accuse conservatives of avarice, but which is greedier in a person: to seek to hold on to what is his own, or to seek, as the leftists do, to plunder what belongs to others? Leftists call conservatives racist and sexist, but who is it who wants race and gender enshrined in law? Who penalizes white or male babies for sins they never committed on the long-exploded theory that evil can undo evil? Leftists call conservatives hateful… I would answer “Read the papers!” but the papers lie because our journalists are leftists and they know down deep what they’re like, who they are. Compare instead the rhetoric and honesty — not of those selected by the media, or those quotes they’ve selected — but of those in equivalent positions at equivalent times. The gracious and open-hearted George W. Bush versus the divisive, self-serving, and dishonest Barack Obama, just to take one example.

Every one who sympathizes with the Occupy movement should take a good look at them — not as they will be in the paradise of their aspirations but as they truly are this minute. Look at them, and understand that that’s what tomorrow will look like if they have their way today. 

As a perfect illustration of what Andrew Klavan is talking about, here’s Roseanne Barr:

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

Earth now has 7 billion people. Are we overcrowded? About to outstrip our resources? Should we prepare for the catastrophic population bomb we’ve been warned about? No, no and no.

In 1968, a Stanford biologist named Paul R. Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb,” an unnecessary alarmist book that warned of famines in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation.

Ehrlich, still honored and respected for reasons we don’t understand, likened humans to a cancer that must be cut out using “brutal and heartless decisions.”

Ehrlich, of course, advised governments to impose population growth limits. One solution included “the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food,” doses of which “would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size.” …

Despite it being a tome of gloom and barbarism, Ehrlich’s book became a best-seller, which is odd since he did nothing but repeat the false theme that Thomas Malthus and the rest of the doomsayers have been saying for centuries.

It makes no sense to us why so many want to believe predictions of mass human tragedy, especially when the end-of-the-worlders such as Ehrlich have always been wrong and spectacularly so. 

Naturally, the misanthropes, environmentalists and gaia worshippers have latched onto the anti-humanity message to support their Earth-first, people-are-invaders radicalism. …

Humans are in fact a resource, an infinite form of capital. We have had an uncanny way of using our minds to overcome all of the environmental challenges we’ve faced and there’s no reason to think that won’t continue as long as the Ehrlichs don’t succeed in stamping out large portions of the population.

No one honest or decent person can say what the right number of people is for this planet. But overpopulation at 7 billion isn’t a concern. …

Population growth is no plague. It is an opportunity.More people mean more minds able to solve problems and sustain human progress. …

In contrast with the academic and left-wing pessimism about population growth, there exists a cogent argument that our planet is actually underpopulated. We are headed toward a world with a population that’s growing old — and peaking in 25 years.

We will be looking for help that won’t be there as birth rates fall and life spans increase. Under these conditions, who’ll pay taxes to fund the aging population’s pensions? …

How will a shrinking labor force provide the goods and services the older population demands in its extended retirement years?

And how will it pay off the staggering debt that keeps growing in so many nations?  …

While 7 billion might seem like a teeming crowd ready to devour the Earth, it’s not. There’s no population bomb to worry about. Worry instead about how population bombers, so wrong for so long, get into academe and other places of influence — and stay there.

*

Free enterprise, meanwhile, responds to the demands of the “misanthropes, environmentalists and gaia worshippers”, the back-to-nature cultists, the apostles of anorexia, the role-playing children of the prosperous West, catering to their faddish tastes by opening a stone-age restaurant.

This report is from the MailOnline:

At first glance, Berlin’s Sauvage restaurant looks much like many of the German capital’s other trendy eateries.

But take a closer look at the chalkboard out front and you’ll discover they are embarking on a culinary shake-up that takes its inspiration from the Stone Age.

Proudly announcing a “Real Food Revolution – Paleolithic cuisine!“, there is no cheese, bread or sugar available, only fare accessible to our hunter-gatherer ancestors more than two million years ago.

Sauvage claims to be the first restaurant in Europe to solely serve a Caveman diet.

The restaurant menu shows a stereotypical image of modern humanity’s forbearer, the jutting profile of a hirsute caveman.

Inside, diners eat at candle-lit tables [wax candles are too mod-con for cavemen, actually – JB] with a contemporary cave painting hanging in the background …

Sauvage, which is the French word for “savage” or “wild”, is part of the Paleolithic diet movement and claims to be first of its kind in Europe.

Probably only the first of many. And they’re unlikely to be cheap.

That means serving only organic, unprocessed fruit and vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, and herbs.

The truly obsessed build an entire lifestyle around the concept, mimicking caveman-era exercise.

This can involve lifting boulders and running barefoot, with some even emulating the blood loss they believe Stone Age hunters might have experienced in pursuit of their dinner by donating blood every few months. …

Sauvage’s Boris Leite-Poço … said: “Many people think the Paleolithic diet is just some hipster trend, but it’s a worldwide phenomenon, with an online community that spans the globe. The trend is probably strongest in the United States …”

We wish the enterprising Boris Leite-Poço success. He should do well until the food fashion changes, and the play-boys and play-girls of the free capitalist world move on to indulge their next modish whim.

Unless socialism-induced, global economic collapse plunges them – and all of us – into the real thing: the life that Thomas Hobbes accurately described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short“.

… and are snubbed by Godists. 

Walter Hudson writes an article about this, telling the religious members who object to atheists joining them, why they are wrong:

It began without controversy. At a routine board meeting of the North Star Tea Party Patriots (NSTPP), a coalition of activist groups in Minnesota which this author chairs, a vote was taken to admit a new member organization. The new group was the Minnesota Objectivist Association (MOA) which advocates the philosophy of Ayn Rand …  Though not a Tea Party organization in name, MOA was nonetheless supportive of the movement’s mission and principles. Signs reading “Who is John Galt?” in reference to Rand’s novel [Atlas Shrugged] had been a staple at Tea Party rallies since the movement began.

Within days, word got around to the broader NSTPP membership that MOA had been admitted. Pushback began. Some complained that MOA did not have “Tea Party” in their name. Others noted that MOA was not listed on Tea Party Patriots’ national directory. The concern over these relatively minor points seemed disproportionate. Provision had been made in the NSTPP constitution to include organizations which predated the Tea Party movement yet sought the same ends. A group without “Tea Party” in its name had been admitted before.

After some beating around the bush, the crux of the matter emerged. Ayn Rand was an atheist, and her philosophy of Objectivism did not acknowledge the existence of God. Thus was alleged an irreconcilable difference between the Tea Party and Ayn Rand.

As the controversy progressed, MOA ultimately withdrew from the coalition, citing the episode as a needless distraction to all parties concerned. Precluding debate left some important questions unresolved. What role does religion play within the Tea Party? Must one be a theist in order to be philosophically aligned with the movement?

These questions are important because their answers define what the movement is really about. Is it solely an effort to affect fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets? Or is it something more which goes unsaid? Is the movement on a mission from God? Or are its principles applicable to the religious and the non-religious alike? The answers to those questions could affect the integrity of the movement. …

Unfortunately, attacks upon religious expression by a relentless secular minority have placed many religious people on the defensive.

While we appreciate Walter Hudson’s intention, we interrupt him here to murmur  that complaints about crosses in public places and “the ten commandments” being displayed on the walls of government and judicial buildings, or grumbles about public prayer, are not “relentless” as the Inquisition and Witch Trials of the religious once were, or the jihad is now.

The result is an inherent suspicion of anyone without faith, the assumption that atheists are necessarily antagonistic toward religion, or worse – inherently anti-American.

Speaking for ourselves, we are antagonistic towards religion, though not aggressive towards religious people – unless in self-defense.

But inherently anti-American, atheism is not. Patriotism and atheism do not have any bearing on each other. There is nothing about atheism that makes it necessarily anti anything except religion.

As Hudson rightly says –

Nothing could be further from the truth. Ayn Rand is perhaps the best example of an atheist whose unrelenting Americanism has been established beyond question. Rand was an anti-communist long before it was cool. More than that, she escaped the Soviet Union and took great effort under blistering criticism to warn Americans about the horrors behind the Iron Curtain. Her first book, We the Living, was panned by critics who claimed she didn’t understand the noble Soviet experiment. Aversion to Objectivism among religious conservatives seems to ignore this history, along with Rand’s fundamental arguments.

It is popular among theists to assert that belief in God is an essential prerequisite to a morality which recognizes natural law and the rights of the individual. The Soviet Union is cited among other tyrannical regimes as an example of atheistic thought manifest in government. However, if atheism leads inexorably to progressivism and communism, why did the atheist Rand spend her entire life decrying collectivism and advocating individual rights more aggressively than most of her American contemporaries? The answer is worth pursuing, and can be found in her work. …

And he concludes:

The line which divides friend from foe within the Tea Party ought not be belief in God, but recognition of individual rights. In a world where government acted only to secure those rights, religious freedom would be assured for the theist and atheist alike.

Agreeing with an atheist like Rand about individual rights, and working in tandem to affect their protection, in no way compromises religious conviction. Atheism is not contagious. Why then vet political relationships with a religous test? What end does that serve? We don’t expect religious cohesion with our mechanics, co-workers, grocers, or in other incidential relationships. Why expect it in our political coalitions?

The Tea Party’s wise focus on economic and legal concerns ought to exclude religious affiliation as it excludes social issues.  The goal of affecting public policy consistent with the principles of fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets is explicitly secular. … In the face of statist opponents who are strengthened by division in the movement, Tea Partiers ought to unite on principles of civil government and leave religious distinction to religious forums.

We like to think most Tea Party members would agree with that.

We see the “Occupy Wall Street” protest as a manifestation of economic ignorance and the politics of envy.

We find confirmation of our view at PowerLine, where Steven Hayward quotes from the great free-market economist Friedrich Hayek:

As we continue to fixate on the inchoate [“incoherent” would be more apt  – JB] but plainly radical demands/desires of the lefty-losers Wall Street Occupiers, this passage from Hayek’s famous chapter in The Constitution of Liberty on “Equality Value, and Merit” hits the spot dead on:

“When we inquire into the justification for these demands [to equalize all outcomes], we find that they rest on the discontent that the success of some people often produces in those that are less successful, or, to put it bluntly, on envy. The modern tendency to gratify this passion and to disguise it in the respectable garment of social justice is developing into a serious threat to freedom. Recently an attempt was made to base these demands on the argument that it ought to be the aim of politics to remove all sources of discontent. This would, of course, necessarily mean that it is the responsibility of government to see that nobody is healthier or possesses a happier temperament, a better-suited spouse or more prospering children, than anybody else. If really all unfulfilled desires have a claim on the community, individual responsibility is at an end. However human, envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as “that most anti-social and odious of all passions.”

It’s almost as if Hayek wrote this with Occupy Wall Street in mind.

Ron Paul must not be elected president because he is dangerously unrealistic in his opinion of what the role of the US should be (effectively none at all) in world affairs.

But his proposals for cutting government spending, and so reducing the power of government, should be seriously considered by whichever Republican candidate is elected.

Here’s an outline of his ideas from an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily:

Paul proposes cutting $1 trillion within a year, including closing down five Cabinet agencies, the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development and the Interior, and reducing most other federal spending to 2006 levels. …

He would slash the federal workforce by 10% and reform Washington’s fiscally doomed entitlements by letting younger Americans opt out of Social Security and Medicare. Medicaid and other social welfare programs would become block grants for the states, giving flexibility to local government.

The regulatory nightmares of ObamaCare, Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank would all be dumped into the ashcan of history, the Bush tax cuts on income and investment would be extended, the corporate tax lowered to 15%, and the estate tax abolished.

That would be a good start – but only a start.

We are libertarian conservatives, “minarchists”, emphatically not anarchists.

Having a libertarian bent, we like much of what John Stossel writes in an article at Townhall:

Here’s my fantasy: Libertarians are elected to the presidency and to majorities in Congress. What would happen next? Well, if libertarians were “in charge,” you’d have more freedom and prosperity.

Freedom frightens some people. They say if no one is in charge there would be chaos. That is intuitive, but think about a skating rink. Before rinks were invented, if you proposed an amusement in which people strap blades to their feet and skate around on ice at whatever speeds they wish, you’d have been called crazy. There’s got to be speed limits, stoplights, turn signals. But we know that people navigate rinks safely on their own. They create their own order, with only minimal rules.

Society would work the same way — and does to a large extent even today. “Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government,” Thomas Paine, the soul of the American Revolution, wrote. “It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. … Common interest (has) a greater influence than the laws of government.”

Yes. Common interest is the wellspring of morality.

If libertarians were “in charge,” there would be laws to protect us from foreign enemies and those who would steal from us or injure us. Today, by contrast, under the rule of Democans and Republicrats, we’re drowning in rules — 160,000 pages’ worth. Micromanagement kills opportunity and freedom.

Maybe if there were a way to have more competition among governments, things would be better. Competition forces people to become more efficient and to get rid of stupid rules. What if we let people take over some unused land in America to create areas with fewer rules, simpler legal systems, smaller government?

Stossel quotes Michael Strong , who with his wife Magatte Wade founded the Free Cities Project.

Strong said, “We want to encourage thousands of people to create new governments that have different rules, each competing for customers with the best education and best health care, the most peace and prosperity you could imagine.”

We expect that where government interfered least with the economic life of the people there would be the greatest prosperity. Where it had nothing at all to do with education or health, the people would stand the best chance of being well educated and effectively cured. Where it most strongly protected liberty, they would probably endure the least crime. Where it armed the people most formidably they might least expect to be invaded.

Are there any free cities along the lines Strong and Wade envision?

“Hong Kong and Singapore are the best examples,” Strong said. “Now they are among the wealthiest places on earth.”

True – and proof that small government, doing little more than enforcing the rule of law, works well.

And there is a free city in Dubai because the emirate wanted to create a financial sector …

And did, though the emir had to abandon sharia law in the free city to achieve what he wanted:

“Dubai was brilliant,” Strong said. “They looked around the world. They saw that Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, Chicago, Sydney, London all ran British common law. British common law is much better for commerce than is French common law or sharia law. So they took 110 acres of Dubai soil, put British common law with a British judge in charge, and they went from an empty piece of soil to the 16th most powerful financial center in world in eight years.”

It’s what libertarians have said: Freedom works, and government, when it grows beyond the barest minimum, keeps people poor.

As liberty is most likely to bring prosperity, why are libertarians a political minority?

Is it because many people fear it, and if so why?

Some want governments to be parental and care for them “from the cradle to the grave”. They think such welfare governments can guarantee that they’ll  be fed, housed, educated, medically treated all through their lives.

They could not be more wrong. The welfare states of Europe are rapidly going bankrupt.

And besides, what a government provides a government can withhold. To put yourself wholly in the power of a government is to put yourself not into safety but into danger. You are most safe when you control your own life, and the government does no more than guard your liberty. (And as everything governments do they do badly, it is wise to own a gun.)

Some need to feel that there is “someone in charge” – a king, a chief, a Secretary-General of the Communist Party, a powerful president, a Father in Heaven.

We don’t want someone in charge. Neither on earth nor “in heaven”. Throughout our earthly lives we want the rule of law, that wholly abstract authority, emotionless, fixed. (As Lord Denning, the British judge, said: “Be you ever so high, the law is above you”.)

And we delight in a universe that does not have and does not need “someone” to make, maintain, rule, watch over, manipulate, or give a damn about it.

Down with evil corporations

(Hat tip Andrew M)

The Environmental Protection Agency is a curse on the American nation, and must be abolished.

Its innumerable regulations “to protect the environment”  make energy more expensive, and consumers poorer.

This is from Investor’s Business Daily:

Those [in the US] who fancy themselves to be green progressives are about to get some unwelcome “progress.” Thanks in part to environmental rules, electricity bills are headed for double-digit increases. …

A review of regulatory filings by the news source found that “utilities are seeking permission to pass on hundreds of millions of dollars in new charges to customers to help upgrade aging infrastructure and build new or retrofitted power plants that comply with tougher environmental regulations.” …

Yes, the environmentalists’ bill is now coming due. Some cost hikes are unavoidable. The electrical grid, like other infrastructure, needs to be updated and improved. But the costs due to “tougher environmental regulations” are avoidable. …

Trying to scrub and eliminate carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, is counterproductive. CO2 is not a pollutant. It’s a naturally occurring gas necessary for life on Earth.

But the environmentalists are extreme in their loathing of man-made carbon emissions, and their agenda is supported by many policymakers.

Remember when a 2008 presidential candidate said if he’s elected his cap-and-trade policy would bankrupt anyone who tried to build a coal-fired power plant on his watch?

Well, President Obama has yet to get a cap-and-trade scheme through Congress, yet he is seeing a version of the future he wanted unfold. American Electric Power, which provides electricity to customers in 11 states, plans to retire five of those hated-by-the-left coal plants, which generate enough power to light 3 million homes; retrofit a number of other coal plants at a cost of $8 billion; and add at least two natural gas plants by the end of this decade. …

AEP is not the only power company that is having to pass on the costs of decarbonization and other environmental regulations to its rate payers. The entire industry has to play the game whose rules are fixed in Washington and state capitals. 

Because of this game, “consumers,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “could see their electricity bills jump an estimated 40% to 60% in the next few years” due to “pending environmental regulations” that will make coal-fired generating plants, which produce about half the nation’s electricity, more expensive to operate. “Many,” continued the Tribune, “are expected to be shuttered.”

This is only the beginning of higher prices.

National Economic Research Associates estimates that the cross-state air pollution and proposed maximum achievable control technology rules could cost the electric power industry $21 billion annually (which will be paid by customers), kill an average of 183,000 jobs a year, and reduce the typical family’s disposable income by $270 a year.

The people behind the policies that drive power bills higher will argue that their motives are pure. They’d say they’re simply trying to make the planet a healthier place.

They’re unlikely to say that their real motive is to gain ever more political power, but gain it they do – and bear the burden with beatific equanimity.

More expensive energy cannot make people healthier, only poorer and colder.

As the  IBD editorial rightly concludes:

They  ignore how much cheap energy has promoted health and accelerated the prosperity that has contributed to our wellness. As such, there’s nothing progressive about the environmentalists’ agenda.

Today the estimable Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, commenting on the just assassination in Yemen of the American-born al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, said on Fox News that “we are winning” the “War on Terror”.

Great news, if it were true. But the US, the West, the non-Islamic world are not winning.

For one thing, it is not, and never was, a “war on terror”. It is a war of defense against Islam. And Islam is winning. Terrorism is winning. The West is allowing it to win.

Islam’s terrorist tactic is proving hugely powerful and has gained victories that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It has cowed all the governments of western Europe, and innumerable authorities at all levels in the US. Islam is advancing day by day. Its terrorism is not practiced continually in all target countries, but the threat of it, and the memories of what has been done and could be done again at any moment, are always there. Because authorities are afraid, Islam creeps on.

Day by day, in Western countries into which Muslims migrate in ever-growing numbers, Islam gains its concessions, its privileges: here a mosque; there a partition of a public swimming pool for Muslim women; here a prayer room in a government building; there the removal from a public library of famous children’s books with pictures of pigs in them; here (in Britain for instance) the allowing of sharia courts and the upholding of their rulings by the state; there entitlements tamely paid to multiple Muslim wives by a welfare state with laws against polygamy; and here and here and here the establishment of faculties of Islamic studies, or even whole colleges, with immense grants of money from the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Chunks of history, such as the Holocaust, are omitted from school courses because they might offend Muslim students – let truth be damned. Defense contracting companies in the US fall under the ownership of Muslims, who divert a part of the profits – and what defense secrets? – to the Muslim Brotherhood. In places of hot battle, Iraq is plagued with terrorist attacks day after day; and in Afghanistan the Taliban is undefeated and undefeatable, and ready to re-assume its despotic rule when the coalition soldiers have departed. In Libya an al-Qaeda leader has seized a position of power. And all the while, the mullahs of Iran are preparing to attack the West with nuclear weapons.

True, there have not been any more planes flown into buildings in America, but smaller plots of destruction and mass murder are constantly being laid. True, some of them are foiled, but some are attempted (such as an underwear bomb in a plane over Detroit) and some carried out (such as the massacre at Fort Hood), and the motive behind all of them remains: jihad, the holy war of Islam, perpetually waged one way and another for the conquest of the world by successive generations of Muslims, and coming closer to success now than ever before in history.

If the West does not capitulate totally and abjectly – which it might – the fiercest battles are still to come.

Jillian Becker   September 30, 2011

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

So quoth Elizabeth Warren, attorney, Harvard professor of law, US Senate candidate, communist, and erstwhile Methodist Sunday School teacher, recently appointed Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Ari Armstrong at PajamaMedia argues cogently against her assertions:

To hear Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren tell it, successful business owners get rich off the efforts of taxpayers and contribute nothing in return until they pay a hefty tax bill themselves. Warren gets the story exactly backwards.

Productive business leaders create the wealth that enables us to thrive, seek employment, and on the side pay for governmental services. Such producers typically work long hours, often for years with little pay, risking their own time and money to bring their vision to life. They turn metals, gases, plants, and other natural resources into valuable commodities, and they direct others’ labor to more prosperous ends, expanding our quality of life.

Some say business leaders should “give something back.” But those operating on a free market never took anything from anybody, except in voluntary and mutually beneficial trade. Instead, they produce the goods and services — the computers and cell phones, the health care, the books and movies, the automobiles, the plumbing pipes — than enrich and extend our lives. …

Great producers deserve our gratitude and respect, not the ugly, envious sneers so often directed at them by today’s political left. Above all these business leaders deserve a government that protects their rights, including their right to produce wealth and use the resulting profits as they judge best.

Warren invokes the “social contract,” but if that means anything sensible it is to protect individuals from the violence, fraud, and plunder of others. In seeking to peacefully pursue our own lives and interact with others on a voluntary basis, we agree to respect the equal rights of others. We institute government to protect those rights for everyone.

Warren argues that business owners use the roads and education system, the “police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.” Warren ignores the fact that the most productive already pay the lion’s share of the tax burden. … The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes … The wealthy also pay more in state and local income, sales, and property taxes (where applicable). In other words, the wealthy pay for most of the governmental services that others use.

Business leaders succeed by intelligently working hard to provide the things their customers want. They succeed despite the onerous taxes and controls of government, not because of them.

Notably, the core governmental services that protect people from harm — the military, police, and the courts — constitute a sliver of the budget of federal and state governments. Most political spending goes toward entitlements at the federal level and welfare or union-dominated education at the state level.

Moreover, businesses directly pay for many of the services that Warren mentions. Businesses pay for their road use through gasoline taxes. Any given business faces a miniscule risk of a large fire breaking out, because businesses provide their own sprinkler systems, alarms, and other fire-prevention infrastructure. Private firms hire more security guards than the total number of police officers in the country. Regarding education, not only do many business leaders finance schools and scholarships, but businesses spend large sums training and educating their employees. …

Warren presumes that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington can spend the wealth created by business leaders better than they can manage themselves. … Warren contends “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” In a sense she’s right: people get rich by providing enormously valuable goods and services to others who willingly pay for them. Warren and other politicians should not be able to dictate what “hunk” of the earnings of others they forcibly seize. Any social contract consistent with justice recognizes that legitimate government does not loot “the rich” (or anyone else) but instead protects people’s rights, including their rights to their earnings.

In Pictures of the Socialistic Future, a prophetic novel written by Eugene Richter in 1893* about a state turning socialist and so ruining the people, there is this passage (Chapter XXX):

Socialism … never contemplated giving to each labourer in his special field the full reward of his work in that particular sphere of labour. It promised the nation as a whole the full reward of the labours effected by the whole people. Whatever these mechanics might turn out of their shops and mills, it was quite clear that the things turned out were not the result purely and simply of hand labour. Expensive machines and tools were equally necessary to their production. In a no less degree were large buildings and considerable means indispensable. All these accessories had not been produced by the workmen actually engaged at the time being. Seeing then that the Community finds all these buildings, plans, and means, it was assuredly only just that the Community should appropriate whatever remained after paying a certain wage calculated at one uniform rate for all persons in the country.

In the story, the hungry, angry mechanics refuse to swallow this absurd argument, and they rise in rebellion against the socialist state that has brought the country to poverty and despair.

The novel was written more than twenty years before any country in Europe tried the experiment of socialism/communism. If  the Russian, German, and Hungarian revolutionary leaders, the communist ideologues who brought disaster on their nations with their long-lived or short-lived revolutions after the First World War, had read it, might they have hesitated to do what they did?

It is interesting to play the game of “what if?” with history, because in human affairs nothing – to contradict Karl Marx – is inevitable.

* To be found at the website of our reader and commenter Don L, to whom thanks for bringing the book to our attention.