[VIDEO] Conservatarian Novelist Brad Thor: ISIS Exemplifies Islam, Trump and Clinton are Terrible
Posted: November 1, 2016 Filed under: Art & Culture, Entertainment, Mediasphere, Politics, Reading Room, Think Tank | Tags: Access Hollywood, Alan Greenspan, American Dream, Annie Lowrey, Arabic, Ayn Rand, Billboard (magazine), Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Republican Party (United States) Leave a comment
In an unbroken chain of best-selling and page-turning thrillers featuring special-ops agent Scot Harvath, Brad Thor has created a fictional universe that reflects our chaotic contemporary world.
Enemies are everywhere and up to all sorts of evil, but there are good guys who are not only principled but even victorious most of the time. His books are also chock full of philosophizing and political and economic commentary from a “conservatarian” perspective. 2013’s ‘Hidden Order’, which revolved around attempts to assassinate nominees to head the Federal Reserve, quoted extensively from libertarian economics writer Henry Hazlitt and histories of the Fed. Thor notes that he was raised in a part-Objectivist home and exposed early and often to the works of Ayn Rand. That upbringing infuses his fiction with a love of ideas and his education at the University of Southern California with acclaimed novelist T.C. Boyle helps imbue his work with literary flourishes.
Thor’s latest book, ‘Foreign Agent’, engages the threat of extremist Islam and provocatively argues (amidst the action scenes and plot twists) that the truest form of the faith isn’t practiced by contemporary reformers but by fundamentalist Muslims and the terrorists in ISIS and Al Qaeda. A native of the Chicago area, Thor talked to Reason in his adopted hometown of Nashville. During a wide-ranging interview with Nick Gillespie, he says,
“I believe that if Mohammed came back today…and handed out trophies for who the best Muslims were, ISIS would get them. Al Qaeda would get them. They’re practicing Islam exactly the way he told them to practice it. So they’re not perverting the religion. Technically, its the people that we like, the moderate, peaceful Muslims, who are actually perverting it.”
No stranger to stirring the political pot, the “conservatarian” author also discusses his discussion with Glenn Beck about the hypothetical removal of a President Donald Trump. Thor’s #NeverTrump call to action got him in hot water with Sirius XM after a vociferous exchange last May on Glenn Beck’s radio show, with some listeners claiming he was talking about assassination (a charge Thor absolutely rebuts in this interview).
His discussion of his early development as as writer is of interest to his many fans. A writer who can turn the Federal Reserve Bank into a nail-biting thriller – as Thor did in ‘Hidden Order’ – has valuable lessons to share in the arts of espionage and storytelling. Read the rest of this entry »
Venezuela’s Road to Literal Serfdom
Posted: August 15, 2016 Filed under: Economics, Politics, Reading Room, Think Tank | Tags: Ayn Rand, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Friedrich Hayek, Gary Johnson, Hillary Clinton, Hugo Chávez, Libertarian Party (United States), Libertarianism, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Nicolás Maduro, Socialism, The Road to Serfdom, Venezuela, William Weld 1 Comment
Friedrich Hayek’s classic book The Road to Serfdom describes the popular delusions that have led to the breakdown of civil society in Venezuela.
Barry Brownstein writes: In his classic 1841 book on financial bubbles, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay observed, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
“In societies turning to socialism, there is no appreciation of scarcity. There is no appreciation that ‘things cannot all be done at the same time, that anyone of them can be achieved only at the sacrifice of others.’”
Mackay covered religious and political delusions, too. “We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple,” he recounts, “and 
neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity.”
[Order Friedrich Hayek’s classic “The Road to Serfdom” from Amazon.com]
Venezuela is sowing its harvest of “groans and tears.” Due to the breakdown of civil society in the country, even war-plagued Syrians feel more safe in their homes than do Venezuelans. Venezuelans are so hungry that they cried at the sight of food in Columbia. Recently the hungry broke into a zoo to kill a horse for its meat. Literally, they have become serfs that may be required to work 60 days or more in agricultural fields.
“The hard to give up delusion of socialists is that there are coercive plans that will benefit all. Venezuelans have seen the means of production nationalized in the name of the common good and with every intervention their standard of living fell further.”
Venezuela has the world’s worst rate of economic growth, and the worst inflation rate. It has become like “a gangster state that doesn’t know how to do anything other than sell drugs and steal money for itself.” Socialism has virtually destroyed civilization in Venezuela making it seem like a “hurricane [has] swept things away.”
[Read the full text here, at Foundation for Economic Education]
When the history of this tragic period in Venezuela is written, the population will have plenty of “culprits” to blame. In blaming many will eschew their own responsibility. Some will blame Chavez; others will blame Maduro. Some will follow their beloved leaders and continue to blame the “elite” and the capitalists. The true believers will continue to insist there is no inherent flaw in socialism; they will simply say mistakes were made that will not be made again.
“Believing that the “coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority,” can coordinate and adjust our individual activities is delusional. With this delusion comes disbelief that a market economy can solve problems and advance society. Those who cherish such delusions may find themselves hungry.”
We are not the victims of the world we see. Our delusions, our beliefs have consequences. The fact that our delusions are often invisible to us does not make them any less powerful or any less consequential. Again, Mackay observed that a population subject to delusions “only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
The new idea of freedom “gave the socialists another word in common with the liberals and they exploited it to the full.
Venezuelans have not yet recovered their “senses.” Caracas radio host Glen Martinez stubbornly insists that the “reforms” that Chavez instituted will never be reversed. “We are not the same people we were before 1999,” Martinez said. Many share Martinez’s sentiments; daily the true believers still march and promise to spill their blood in support of the government.
“The fact that our delusions are often invisible to us does not make them any less powerful or any less consequential.”
There is no better book than Friedrich Hayek’s classic The Road to Serfdom to explain the popular delusions that helped to virtually eliminate the market economy and civil society in Venezuela. Writing during the depths of World War II, Hayek intended his book as a warning “to the socialists of all parties.” What happened in Venezuela can happen wherever a critical mass of the population begins to hold certain delusionary beliefs.
Popular Delusion 1: Freedom Means Freedom from Necessity
Hayek points out that freedom in Western countries traditionally meant “freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men.”
Socialists point to a “new freedom” which is “freedom from necessity” which releases us “from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us.”
Hayek adds, “the demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for an equal distribution of wealth.”
Believing that these two types of freedom can be combined is delusional. Hayek points out that the new idea of freedom “gave the socialists another word in common with the liberals and they exploited it to the full….Few people noticed [that the word freedom was being used differently] and still fewer asked themselves whether the two kinds of freedom promised really could be combined.”
Popular Delusion 2. Only Coercive Planning Can Coordinate Activity
Almost every individual and organization plans. Writes Hayek, there is no “dispute about whether we ought to employ foresight and systematic thinking and planning our common affairs.”
Hayek thought that to plan or not to plan is not “the real question.” Instead, we should ask if “the holder of coercive power should confine himself in general to creating conditions under which the knowledge and initiative of individuals is given the best scope so that they can plan most successfully; or whether a rational utilization of our resources requires central direction and organization of all our activities according to some consciously constructed ‘blueprint.’”
Those who cherish such delusions may find themselves hungry.
The humanitarian disaster in Venezuela has been a long time in the making. In 2010, the hungry waited while “2,340 shipping containers with more than 120,000 tons of rotting food (estimated to feed 17 million people for one month)” sat at the government run port of Puerto Cabello. Read the rest of this entry »
Robert Tracinski: ‘The Party of Coercion Hasn’t Thought Much About Coercion’
Posted: April 11, 2015 Filed under: Economics, Law & Justice, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand Institute, Class discrimination, Coercion, Communism, Conservatism, Criminal justice, Force, government, Interrogation, Progressivism, Robert Tracinski, Sally Kohn, School-to-prison pipeline, Socialism, Supreme Court of the United States, The Federalist, The Left Leave a comment
Government Force is the Left’s Entire Agenda
Robert Tracinski writes:
The left is the side of the political debate that wants more government: more taxes, more spending, more regulations, more laws. So you would think they would have highly developed thoughts about what a law is and how laws are actually enforced. This is, after all, the stuff they want more of.
You would be wrong.
Sally Kohn recently argued, bizarrely, that law as such is not coercive.
This issue of government force is a funny one. You could also argue that the government is forcing you to drive below the speed limit or wear a seatbelt in your car. But it’s not. There isn’t a police officer holding a gun to your head literally forcing you to buckle up. In fact, you are 100 percent free to speed and not wear your seatbelt—and simply deal with the consequences if you’re pulled over. Is the threat of the fine for breaking the law amount to “forcing” you to follow the law? No.
Get that? Unless someone is literally holding a gun to your head at this very moment, you’re not being coerced. Don Corleone would be glad to hear it. After all, he didn’t coerce anyone. He just made a suggestion that you’ve got a nice place here, and it would be a shame if something were to happen to it.
[Read the full text here, at The Federalist]
I forgot to pay a speeding ticket once. I’m pretty sure if I had persisted, the “consequences” would have involved handcuffs and the inside of a jail cell. And the guys who put me there would have been armed with guns. So I paid it.
Tracinski continues,
This is a pattern I’ve seen over and over again, everywhere, for as long as I can remember: the party of coercion hasn’t thought much about coercion.
Government force is the left’s entire agenda. They want to expand Social Security, seize more wealth from taxpayers, force traditional Christians to cooperate with gay weddings, license beauticians, and impose vast regulations on every aspect of the economy with the goal of controlling the weather 100 years from now.
It is a program of coercion on a vast scale, encompassing matters great and trivial. Yet if you quiz them about the nature and justification of government force, they profess confusion: “The issue of government force is a funny one.”
Many year ago, I was helping to run a college club for Objectivists—fans of the arch-capitalist author Ayn Rand—and we had the idea of co-sponsoring a capitalism-versus-socialism debate with the Democratic Socialists. In the middle of the event, one of the debaters we brought in on our side made a direct challenge to the socialists: aren’t you in favor of force? The socialist debaters just skittered away and evaded it, finally mumbling something about how, when a policy is decided democratically, it doesn’t really matter how it is implemented. And these weren’t just cranks brought in off the street. They were professors at well-regarded universities, and one of them has gone on to some prominence.
This is how it always seems to work. Read the rest of this entry »
[BOOKS] Ayn Rand’s Early Novel ‘Ideal’ To Be Published After 80 Years
Posted: December 4, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, History, Mediasphere, Reading Room, Think Tank | Tags: American Enterprise Institute, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand Institute, Collectivism, John Galt, Objectivism (Ayn Rand), Random House, The Fountainhead Leave a comment
Jennifer Maloney writes: Ayn Rand fans, here’s something to whet your appetites: New American Libraryhas released the cover image for “Ideal,” the first Ayn Rand novel to be published in more than 50 years.
“I’ve heard wishful comments over many years from readers wondering if there were other novels in Ayn Rand’s papers.”
— Richard Ralston, publishing manager at the Ayn Rand Institute
Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” invented the philosophy of Objectivism. More than 25 million copies of her novels have been sold around the world.
[Order Ayn Rand’s book “Ideal“ from Amazon]
“Ideal” tells the story of a screen actress who is accused of murder and visits six of her most devoted fans to ask for help. In 1934, when she was in her late 20s, Rand first wrote “Ideal” as a work of fiction.
But Rand was dissatisfied with it and set it aside. The same year, she rewrote it as a play. The play didn’t have its New York premiere until 2010 – 66 years after she wrote it. Read the rest of this entry »
The New York Times Anti-Ryan Campaign
Posted: March 18, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Ayn Rand, England, Ireland, New York Times, Nick Gillespie, Paul Ryan, Saint Patrick's Day, The Great Famine, Timothy Egan Leave a commentThe Worst St. Patricks Day Article You’ll Read All Year: How Paul Ryan is Like Genocidal Englishmen
We may have to reserve judgement on the worst article we’ll read all year. It’s still early! Though other lazy NYT op-ed writers have nine more months of blindfolded typing to catch up with him, Tim Egan is definitely a contender.
First, Krugman’s jaw-dropping, quote-worthy Paul Ryan smear, now Reason‘s Nick Gillespie has to clean up after Tim Egan’s smug, lazy historical association flim-flam. Both Krugman and Egan employ the same tactic, see if you can notice the identical device, disclaiming responsibility for responsibility via a weasel-worded disclaimer.
Nick Gillespie writes:
In Sunday’s New York Times, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Timothy Egan likens Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to the English overlords of Ireland’s great potato famine of 1845-1852. Seriously.
Egan says he did a bit of “time traveling” in anticipation of St. Patrick’s Day (whose celebration in the form of parades and drunkeness is largely an invention of colonial America). What did Egan find while traipsing about in the Old Sod?
“A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”
And there I ran into Paul Ryan…the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.”
But wait, before you dare say that Egan in any way means to compare Ryan to the architects of one of the most heinous acts of imperial brutality, perish the thought:
“There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs. Read the rest of this entry »
Rand Paul Is Right. Social Conservatives Should Embrace Libertarianism
Posted: February 25, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Ayn Rand, David Harsanyi, Huffington Post, Jeff Flake, NPR, Rand Paul, Robert P. George, United States 1 Comment
David Harsanyi writes: Buzzfeed recently offered readers a peek into the bottomless well that is right-wing hypocrisy. “Republican Senator Who Voted To Defund NPR Says He Listens To NPR,” reads the headline, “He declined to mention that on the show.” Arizona Senator Jeff Flake is evidently a fan of cerebral upmarket radio programming, but also voted to defund the media organization.
…”Paul argued that a dose of libertarianism would not only help the GOP broaden its base, but that it was philosophically compatible with social conservative values.”
You know, it’s almost as if he knows one of these positions has absolutely nothing to do with the other. I enjoy NPR. I believe NPR, a network that boasts an audience in the tens of millions, can compete without taxpayer funding. You see: those are two distinct and non-conflicting sentences. But you know the drill. Distinctions are distracting. If you fail to support the Fair Pay Act, deep down you believe women are nothing but baby-making automatons. If you oppose nanny-state intrusions, you’re probably cool with fat kids and their diabetes… and so on.
For progressives, politics is not just a difference of opinion, but a great battle between decency and unfettered greed. So the conflation of choice and coercion is often aimed at your morality. You may claim to care about the underprivileged, but your votes say otherwise. To even suggest that a fiscally conservative outlook might be compatible with faith is hypocrisy.
Objectivist Valentine
Posted: February 14, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Humor, Politics | Tags: Ayn Rand, Humor, Liberty, Objectivism, Romance 1 Comment
Kevin D. Williamson: ‘Politicians Steer the Economy Like Chimps Fly Rockets’
Posted: January 30, 2014 Filed under: Economics, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Ayn Rand, Kevin D. Williamson, National Review, Progressives, Social Darwinism, Thomas Hobbes, United States 2 Comments
Kevin D. Williamson writes: When I was about four years old, I was having dinner with my family and eating spinach. Being a slightly unnatural child, I’d always liked spinach, but developed an odd way of eating it: I’d take a mouthful, chew, lean way over to the left, swallow, take another mouthful, chew, lean way over to the right, swallow, etc. My mother was used to a fair amount of inexplicable behavior from her younger son, but this eventually caught her attention, possibly because she feared I was suffering from vertigo. When she inquired, I responded that spinach is well known as a source of physical strength and muscular development — such was the inescapable influence of Popeye cartoons in the 1970s — and that while gravity could be counted on to deliver spinach-y benefits to my lower extremities, I wanted to make sure plenty got to my arms, thus the leaning. To a four-year-old, that was a perfectly sensible thing to do. My understanding of human anatomy was literally skin-deep — everything deeper was unknown to me.
We only know what we know.
Twenty-odd years later, I was visiting my mother and making dinner for her: spinach crepes. Being a southern woman, she was incurably suspicious about anybody else operating in her kitchen, and she peeked over my shoulder as I chopped the spinach: “What’s that?” she asked. I told her that it was spinach, and her face went blank for a second — and then I could almost literally see the metaphorical light bulb going on. She’d never seen fresh spinach before. Or, almost certainly, she had — I bought the spinach at the same place she habitually bought her groceries — but her formative marketing experiences had been in the 1940s and 1950s, in small towns in the Texas panhandle, and to her spinach was something that came in a can marked “Del Monte,” as soggy and densely packed as seaweed. She’d probably been walking past fresh spinach stocked next to the iceberg lettuce for years, but it was not part of her mental matrix.
[Note: I’m reading Kevin D. Williamson’s book, The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome, you can get it at Amazon]
We only know what we know.
On Tuesday, the president of these United States called for an end to the “rancorous argument over the proper size of the federal government,” so that he might move forward with his economic agenda uninhibited by “stale political arguments.” It was an interesting moment. The president’s childlike faith in his own ability to direct resources according to his own vision is almost touching in its way, though when the actual costs are accounted for it is terrifying. Read the rest of this entry »
Obama To Americans: You Don’t Deserve To Be Free
Posted: January 1, 2014 Filed under: Economics, Politics, U.S. News, White House | Tags: Ayn Rand, Barack Obama, Federal Reserve System, Free market, George W. Bush, Harry Binswanger, Laissez-faire, Obama 6 Comments
Photo by: Pablo Martinez Monsivais
Harry Binswanger writes: President Obama’s Kansas speech is a remarkable document. In calling for more government controls, more taxation, more collectivism, he has two paragraphs that give the show away. Take a look at them.
“…there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes–especially for the wealthy–our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.
Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.”
Though not in Washington, I’m in that “certain crowd” that has been saying for decades that the market will take care of everything. It’s not really a crowd, it’s a tiny group of radicals–radicals for capitalism, in Ayn Rand’s well-turned phrase.
The only thing that the market doesn’t take care of is anti-market acts: acts that initiate physical force. That’s why we need government: to wield retaliatory force to defend individual rights.
Radicals for capitalism would, as the Declaration of Independence says, use government only “to secure these rights”–the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. (Yes, I added “property” in there–property rights are inseparable from the other three.)
That’s the political philosophy on which Obama is trying to hang the blame for the recent financial crisis and every other social ill. But ask yourself, are we few radical capitalists in charge? Have radical capitalists been in charge at any time in the last, oh, say 100 years?
Seattle’s Flowers of The Left: NY isn’t the only Election with a Socialist Candidate on the Ballot
Posted: November 5, 2013 Filed under: Education, Mediasphere, Politics, The Butcher's Notebook, U.S. News | Tags: Ayn Rand, Danny Westneat, Ed Murray, Kshama Sawant, Left-wing politics, Marxism, Michael McGinn, Michelle Goldberg, New York, New York City, Peter Beinart, Seattle, Seattle Public Library 3 CommentsFunny How Everything’s Gone Left
Sawant is running for Seattle City Council under the socialist Alternative banner
Says the Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat, who — captivated by some pretty gosh-darn amazing insights in Peter Beinart‘s Daily Beast essay, “The Rise of the New, New, Super-New-and-Much-Better-This-Time-We-Promise-Left“— suggests that while the Reagan-Clinton generation might look favorably on the pro-business centrism and robust entrepreneurialism of that era, the younger millennials are rejecting it.
Having been burned by financial collapse of the Bush era, and weak economic malaise of the Obama era, millennials distrust business, profits, and corporations.
Millennials, the former New Republic editor says, are increasingly comfortable supporting candidates who proudly campaign under the banner of socialism.
Yes. Really.
By “Everything’s Gone Left“, what Westneat means, is that already pretty far-Left-wing political micro-cultures in two places, New York, and Seattle, have Gone.. Left. Well, gone further left. (Sorry to have to translate, but it’s necessary to explain to outsiders: inside the media bubble, these two geographic locations are synonymous with “Everything”)
A fair question might be: are we so sure pro-socialist millennials in New York, and Seattle, are really leading… anyone…anywhere?
The generation right behind the millennials are already questioning the millennials’ suspicious embrace of the welfare state, the youth-punishing costs of Obamacare, and the lurid spectacle of pro-government excess. As a casual dip into Twitter or Tumblr, or Facebook‘s college-campus-generation’s anti-Left pushback will reveal, they’re not cool with it, and they’re outspoken about it.
As I wrote in in my introduction to Michelle Goldberg‘s essay, “2008 Crash Prompts Young Intellectuals to Revisit Marxism”:
“The same financial crash prompted young intellectuals to revisit Ayn Rand, too, judging from the surge in sales of Atlas Shrugged…is but one example of the resurgence in philosophical questioning and renewed examination of historic texts that inevitably follows economic disasters. I think this is natural…”
[See also: The Left is Trying to Rehabilitate Karl Marx. Let’s Remind Them of The Millions Who Died in His Name]
Westneat tells readers that Seattle, like New York, is right there on the leading edge of this Rise of New Leftism. The more activist, wage-control-advocating, socialism-embracing new-Left phenomenon is flourishing. Like a pretty flower.
To be fair, Westneat isn’t promoting the trend. He’s not without skepticism. He’s just reporting on it. And since he just donated a copy of Emily Gets Her Gun But Obama Wants to Take Yours, to the Seattle Public Library, in honor of the city’s recent policy change regarding the legal carry of firearms by law-abiding citizens in library facilities, I admire his civic priorities. I’ll give anything he writes a fair reading.
Also, I could be wrong, and Westneat is right, about this trend.
So, step aside New York. You’re not the only knuckle-dragging throwback to romanticism of Pol Pot, the radical hipness of the Sandinistas, and the historic grandeur of Marxist solutions. Seattle is now a “leading indicator”!
Here’s the Seattle Times‘ Westneat, explaining the good news:
The election isn’t for 10 days, but we can already declare the big winner in Seattle.
It’s the socialist.
Out in left field? Seattle politics may seem that way, but it’s really the leading edge.
2008 Crash Prompts Young Intellectuals To Revisit Marxism
Posted: October 18, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Reading Room, Think Tank | Tags: Ayn Rand, Benjamin Kunkel, Berlin Wall, Cold War, Dissent, Doug Henwood, Jacobin, Jay McInerney, Keith Gessen, Marx, Marxism, New York Intellectuals, Occupy Wall Street 1 Comment
Photoillustration Tablet Magazine; original photo Jens Schott Knudsen/Flickr)
For those too young to remember the Cold War but old enough to be trapped by the Great Recession, Marxism holds new appeal
Note: The same financial crash prompted young intellectuals to revisit Ayn Rand, too, judging from the surge in sales of Atlas Shrugged. Goldberg’s article—exploring Marxism’s renewed popularity among the disenchanted youth—is but one example of the resurgence in philosophical questioning and renewed examination of historic texts that inevitably follows economic disasters. I think this is natural. I wouldn’t be surprised if this dual popularity of these two competing philosophies effectively cancel each other out.
The darlings of the Left will always reengineer and promote various brands of Marxism–easily the most successfully murderous ideology in human history, 94 million deaths worldwide and counting–for impressionable neophytes, in spite of its undeniable record of doom, death, and suffering. And romantic young intellectuals will always have an appetite for its radical appeal.
But the optimist in me hopes that the current Libertarian movement on campuses (which I’ll write about soon) prevails, with more lasting influence. In the meantime, here’s a famous quote, see if you can guess (without googling it) who originated it. Answer at the end of Goldberg’s essay, after the jump. (Don’t cheat!)
“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
Okay, on to our featured essay:
Michelle Goldberg writes: Eight years ago Jay McInerney, poster boy for a certain kind of glossy 1980s literary chic, anointed Benjamin Kunkel as the voice of a new generation. Writing on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, he hailed Kunkel’s first novel,Indecision, for making “the whole flailing, postadolescent, prelife crisis feel fresh and funny again.” He wasn’t alone; many critics were impressed by Kunkel’s evocation of a privileged young man’s passivity and ennui. They were less sure of what to make of his narrator’s culminating conversion to radical politics in South America. “Explaining socialism to the postironic, ambivalent, hopeful, generous twentysomethings of 2005, I suppose, is what sequels are for,” Michael Agger wrote in Slate.
Next March, Kunkel will release his second book, Utopia or Bust. Though not a sequel to Indecision, it will in fact seek to explain, or at least explore, what socialism means now through a series of essays on contemporary leftist thinkers like Fredric Jameson and David Harvey. After the success of Indecision—a spot on the best-seller list, translations into a dozen languages, a Hollywood option—Kunkel didn’t milk his newfound literary stardom in the manner of, say, Jay McInerney. Instead, after falling into a deep depression, he followed the example of his own narrator, moving to Buenos Aires and immersing himself in anticapitalist political theory. In a draft of the introduction to his new book, he writes, “To the disappointment of friends who would prefer to read my fiction—as well as of my literary agent, who would prefer to sell it—I seem to have become a Marxist public intellectual.”
Give Back? Yes, It’s Time For The 99% To Give Back To The 1%
Posted: September 19, 2013 Filed under: Economics | Tags: Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Goldman Sachs, Harry Binswanger, Henry Ford, John Galt, Lloyd Blankfein, Steve Jobs 1 Comment
Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of the Goldman Sachs Group (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife
Harry Binswanger writes: It’s time to gore another collectivist sacred cow. This time it’s the popular idea that the successful are obliged to “give back to the community.” That oft-heard claim assumes that the wealth of high-earners is taken away from “the community.” And beneath that lies the perverted Marxist notion that wealth is accumulated by “exploiting” people, not by creating value–as if Henry Ford was not necessary for Fords to roll off the (non-existent) assembly lines and Steve Jobs was not necessary for iPhones and iPads to spring into existence. Read the rest of this entry »
Poll: Republicans embracing libertarian priorities
Posted: September 11, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Ayn Rand, FreedomWorks, GOP, Kellyanne Conway, Libertarianism, Politico, Republican, Ronald Reagan Leave a comment
The poll offers validation for this trio of libertarian-leaning Republican senators. | AP Photos
A new poll confirms a libertarian renaissance in 2013.
FreedomWorks commissioned a national survey of registered voters last month,shared first with POLITICO, that finds 78 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents self-identify as fiscally conservative and socially moderate. Read the rest of this entry »
Capitalism Is Cooperation
Posted: September 9, 2013 Filed under: Economics, History, Reading Room | Tags: Ayn Rand, Eric Liu, Grover Norquist, Libertarianism, Nick Hanauer, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz 1 Comment
Kevin Williamson writes: I wonder if Bloomberg has any intellectual standards at all. (The news service, I mean; we already know about the mayor.) Consider this column from Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu, titled “Libertarians are the new communists.” Thesis: “Where communism was adopted, the result was misery, poverty and tyranny. If extremist libertarians ever translated their beliefs into policy, it would lead to the same kinds of catastrophe.” Attention conservatives: “Extremist libertarian” here means an admirer of Ted Cruz.
The problem with libertarians, according to these gentlemen, is that they misunderstand the human condition: “Like communism, this philosophy is defective in its misreading of human nature, misunderstanding of how societies work and utter failure to adapt to changing circumstances. Radical libertarianism assumes that humans are wired only to be selfish, when in fact cooperation is the height of human evolution.”
But radical libertarians do not assume that humans are wired only to be selfish, nor do they reject cooperation. The opposite is the case. In fact, one of those radical libertarians — me — just this summer published a book arguing that (see if this sounds familiar) “cooperation is the height of human evolution.” (note: I’m currently reading this book, and a fine book it is–Butcher) A taste: Read the rest of this entry »
“Libertarians are the New Communists.” And Anti-Libertarians Are Out of Ideas
Posted: September 7, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Ayn Rand, Eric Liu, Grover Norquist, Nick Gillespie, Nick Hanauer, Rand Paul, Somalia, Ted Cruz 2 Comments
Nick Gillespie writes: I’ve argued elsewhere that signs of the emerging “libertarian era” are everywhere around us, both in the voluminous and ever-growing positive press adherents of “Free Minds and Free Markets” and the increasingly shrill and misinformed attacks are drawing.
The latest example of the latter is on glorious, semi-literate display in the amazingly awful “Libertarians Are the New Communists,” by Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu and posted at Bloomberg View. Read the rest of this entry »
Five myths about libertarians
Posted: August 2, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Ayn Rand, Declaration of Independents, GOP, Milton Friedman, Nick Gillespie, Rand Paul, Republican, Ron Wyden 1 CommentFive myths about libertarians
By Nick Gillespie
Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason.com and a columnist for the Daily Beast, is a co-author of “The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America.”
by Nick Gillespie The specter of libertarianism is haunting America. Advocates of sharply reducing the government’s size, scope and spending are raising big bucks from GOP donors, trying to steal the mantle of populism, being blamed for the demise of Detroit and even getting caught in the middle of a battle for the Republican Party. Yet libertarians are among the most misunderstood forces in today’s politics. Let’s clear up some of the biggest misconceptions.
1. Libertarians are a fringe band of “hippies of the right.”
In 1971, the controversial and influential author Ayn Rand denounced right-wing anarchists as “hippies of the right,” a charge still leveled against libertarians, who push for a minimal state and maximal individual freedom.
Libertarians are often dismissed as a mutant subspecies of conservatives: pot smokers who are soft on defense and support marriage equality. But depending on their views, libertarians often match up equally well with right- and left-wingers.
The earliest example of libertarian principles in partisan politics might have come in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,when Anti-Imperialist League Democrats rejected empire and war — and believed in free trade and racial equality at a time when none of that was popular. More recently, civil libertarians such as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) supported Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in his filibuster on domestic drones and government surveillance.
Libertarians are found across the political spectrum and in both major parties. In September 2012, the Reason-Rupe Poll found that about one-quarter of Americans fall into the roughly libertarian category of wanting to reduce the government’s roles in economic and social affairs. That’s in the same ballpark as what other surveys have found and more than enough to swing an election.
2. Libertarians don’t care about minorities or the poor.
As the recent discovery of neo-Confederate writings by a former senior aide to Sen. Paul shows, there sometimes is a connection between libertarians and creepy, racist elements in American politics. And given the influence of Ayn Rand among many libertarians, it’s easy to think that they care only about themselves. “I will never live for the sake of another man,” runs a characteristic line from Rand’s 1957 novel, “Atlas Shrugged.”
But at least two of the libertarian movement’s signature causes, school choice and drug legalization, are aimed at creating a better life for poor people, who disproportionately are also minorities. The primary goal of school choice — a movement essentially born out of a 1955 essay about vouchers by libertarian and Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman — is to give lower-income Americans better educational options. Friedman also persuasively argued that the drug war concentrates violence and law enforcement abuses in poor neighborhoods.
Libertarians believe that economic deregulation helps the poor because it ultimately reduces costs and barriers to start new businesses. The leading libertarian public-interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, which has argued Supreme Court cases for free speech and against eminent-domain abuse, got its start defending African American hair-braiders in Washington from licensing laws that shut down home businesses.
pundit from another planet 