If you don't like being laughed at, don't be a Marxist

Boston Globe, what are you doing?

This week the Globe printed a ridiculous one-sided crybaby piece from someone who chose to become a public figure but didn't like having her own words used against her.

Wellesley College economics professor Julie Matthaei was one of 600 academic economists who signed a letter of support for raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. A right wing group called the "Employment Policies Institute" printed this critical ad in the New York Times quoting Mattaei and seven other people who signed the letter of support that shows those people saying radical things that expose them as Marxists, socialists, Stalinists or 9-11 conspirators.

In Matthaei's example, they took a quotation from her Wellesley webpage where she described herself as a “Marxist-feminist-anti-racist-ecological-economist.”

In short, the Employment Policies Institute (which is not a real institute) is saying that the "600 economists" who lined up to support raising the minimum wage has some crushed drywall mixed in with its cocaine for bulk.

Matthaei didn't express any disagreement with that conclusion, but tried to play it off as persecution for her beliefs. The Boston Globe reporter and headline writer sprinkled in scare terms like "echoes of the cold war" and "This flashback to the Cold War..." It also said:

The Times ad, taken out by the nonprofit Employment Policies Institute in Washington, had a distinctly 1950s flavor, employing excerpts from quotes that used derivatives of “Marx” four times, praised Soviet-style socialism, and questioned official accounts of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Keep in mind that it was the reporter declaring the ad had a "distinctly 1950s flavor" and not Matthaei. There is no issue with the Globe quoting Matthaei as saying things like “I felt I was being red-baited” because that's a statement attributed to her, the focus of the piece. The problem is when the reporter used similar opinionated language to paint a picture, and the reporter here most definitely did.

The Employment Policies Institute did not prove that all 600 economists who signed the letter are batty. It instead said what people who lack supporting data always do and hid behind vague wording. It said "Many" of the 600 economists are radical researchers. That's not a slam dunk, and it ignores people like Kenneth Arrow, one of six Nobel Prize winning economists who signed on.

But what's completely fair game is holding people responsible for their actual words and beliefs. Matthaei really is an anti-capitalism Marxist who lives in a commune. Just like alternative medicine nonsense has infiltrated higher education despite being completely at odds with reality, so has Marxist economics. Matthaei is part of that sect of academic Marxist economics, and they should be seen as a separate group, like we see doctors and witch doctors as separate groups.

For what it's worth, economists now have a lot of debate on the minimum wage, and as Greg Mankiw said, there are hundreds on both sides of the argument.

One of the radicals quoted in the ad actually said something true about Marxist economics. That was Renee Toback, who said “Marxist analysis is as useful today as it ever was.”

I couldn't agree more.

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Greg Mankiw takes on the Pope

Pope Francis's anti-capitalist remarks have received the attention of Greg Mankiw as well. He made two points that I made in my response, that it's well established that capitalism has made the world a better place, and the Pope's use of "trickle-down" was a pejorative and not the name of an actual theory.

But then Mankiw made a point I wish I had though of:

Third, as far as I know, the pope did not address the tax-exempt status of the church. I would be eager to hear his views on that issue. Maybe he thinks the tax benefits the church receives do some good when they trickle down.

In the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx wrote that capitalism has been an essential part of the world's progress, but that it is no longer useful. Specifically, he said:

It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

There is a thought being passed in some parts of the modern left that capitalism has never contributed to advances in civilization, and Pope Francis appears to subscribe to that view. It's troubling to think that there are people today, serious upright breathing people, that hold views to the left of Karl Marx.

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A lesson we never learned

It's very difficult to make it through this week without learning that today is the 50 year anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

There's a big misconception that JFK was an important civil rights leader, and that that may have cost him his life. This is very wrong for two important reasons.

Despite what folk songs tell you, Kennedy did not consider the civil rights of black Americans a priority and did little to help them. He was much more concerned with the future of the Democratic party and as a senator in 1957 he voted against civil rights legislation. In the words of the BBC's Nick Bryant, he was a bystander on civil rights for the first two and a half years of his three years in office. The only contributions he made were in words, not actions:

At times, however, his rhetoric was considered inadequate. James Meredith, whose determination to register as the first black student at University of Mississippi led to one of the climactic battles of the civil rights era, submitted his application in anger at Kennedy's failure during his inaugural address to denounce the evil of segregation... 

On civil rights, his early inaction as president led white segregationists to believe they could prolong segregation, and prompted black protesters to adopt more provocative tactics and make more radical demands.

The other big reason why Kennedy should not be considered a civil rights martyr is that we know what motivated his killer. For reasons I won't get into here, it's well established that Lee Harvery Oswald assassinated the president. Oswald was a communist and Kennedy focused a lot of his energy on fighting communism.

A recent New York Times piece about the political climate in Dallas in 1963 as compared to today tried to blame right-wing extremism on Kennedy's death, but it had to admit that Oswald was to the left of Bernie Sanders with this reluctant paragraph:

Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist and not a product of right-wing Dallas. But because the anti-Kennedy tenor came not so much from radical outcasts but from parts of mainstream Dallas, some say the anger seemed to come with the city’s informal blessing.

"Some say" being reporter lingo for "A point I wanted to make in the story but couldn't find anyone to say it for me."

Kennedy was behind the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, went through the tense Cuban Missile Crisis and was a friend and defender of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. His policy of containment and reversal for communist influence was called the Kennedy Doctrine.

In his book "Death of a President" William Manchester quoted JFK's wife Jackie as saying "He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights... It had to be some silly little communist."

Kennedy's murder is a tragedy, and a tragedy we should learn from, but we can't ever learn anything if we hide behind myths and stories. Something Steven Pinker said tells us exactly what that lesson is:

...there are ideologies, such as those of militant religions, nationalism, Nazism, and Communism, that justify vast outlays of violence by a Utopian cost-benefit analysis: if your belief system holds out the hope of a world that will be infinitely good forever, how much violence are you entitled to perpetrate in pursuit of this infinitely perfect world? 

Well, as much as much as you want, and you're always ahead of the game. The benefits always outweigh the costs. Moreover, imagine that there are people who hear about your scheme for a perfect world and just don't get with the program. They might oppose you in bringing heaven to earth. How evil are they? They're the only things standing in the way of an infinitely good Earth. Well, you do the math.

Kennedy was a martyr in the battle against communism, a battle that we may have to fight again one day. Let's make sure we learn before history repeats itself.

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It's like rooting for the Washington Generals

Forgive C. Bradley Thompson for not having a wall of books in his office and being forced to record this short video in a library. He asks a very good question:

"Why do [people] become communists, despite everything we know about communism?"

The full video, with his answer, is here.

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We're stuck with Marxism forever

Writing for Tablet magazine, Michelle Goldberg tells us that Marxism is gaining popularity with young people.

Of course it is. Marxism will always be with us.

It's like a remake of "No Exit" where human society's punishment for its frequent callowness and ignorance is to be trapped with Marxists for all eternity.

Like it or not, we will always have capitalism and Marxism in our social order, but for very different reasons.

Capitalism will always be with us because it works. It's not very popular, its imperfect and causes known problems, but still it works. Even if a group of people destroy it and forbid its return, the general public will secretly toil to bring it back simply because it works.

Marxism, in its many forms, will always come back because its general platitudes appeal to the uninformed. It makes great promises and forms a secular religion, where all the inequalities of society can be burned away in the casting of a great utopia.

Goldberg's piece tells us that the 20-somethings of today are too young to remember the Soviet Union but old enough to have their lives damaged by the 2007 financial crisis, and while the group as a whole isn't turning to Marxism, there is a large trend. She even referenced a 2011 Pew Research poll that showed 18-to-29-year-olds buck the trend and have a more favorable view of socialism than of capitalism.

What's going on here is the Cycle of Ignorance, where past generations have experienced the folly of things like Marxism, patent medicines and doomsday prophecies but the younger generation missed those lessons and have to learn the hard way. Eventually they become the older generation, but by then there are more young people who just won't listen.

Naturally, some of those who lived through the first iteration of these arguments—and the subsequent cultural disillusionment with left-wing radicalism—will find all this irritating, if not infuriating. There are, after all, good reasons that Marxist political economy fell out of fashion. And it’s true some of the leftmost communist revivalists are disturbingly blithe about the past; at times one senses a self-satisfied avant-garde delight in making outrageous pronouncements. In The Communist Horizon, part of Verso’s Pocket Communism series, the newly fashionable academic Jodi Dean, a professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, airily dismisses the “circumscribed imaginary” in which “communism as Stalinism is linked to authoritarianism, prison camps, and the inadmissibility of criticism,” as if such links are a neoliberal fabrication.

There will be countless articles in the future about the return of Marxism. Long after the current generation of Marxists are dead and the mass graves of citizens subjected to a socialist revolution have been paved over, there will be other revivals. Each time, those enlightened by calamity will swear that they will never let it happen again, but after they die their books and essays will be shrugged aside by innocent little monsters who think they have stumbled onto something foolproof.
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Who gets offended by medieval farming?

If you haven't seen it yet you need to check out Jon Hochschartner's piece at Salon.com "The Legend of Zelda” is classist, sexist and racist. This is a great white shark in a sea of sheltered, oversensitive, grumpy, perpetually-grieving guppies.

The article's existence on a major news website obviously followed a horrible series of errors in the editorial process. Somehow, it even made it into the Salon Twitter feed.

To post a point by point response would be like debunking the plot of a dream. The writer aimlessly drifts from poorly cribbing Anita Sarkeesian's shtick to nonsensical pearl-clutching because the criticism of greedy rich people didn't cut deep enough to quoting Karl Marx to complaining when one of several non-white races is cast as villains to, well, this:

From the perspective of domesticated animals, agriculture of the past was a gentler prospect than the modern, factory-farm system. But for non-humans the pre-industrial farm, as symbolized by Lon Lon Ranch, was still a place of exploitation and violence, where their lives, in general, would be significantly shorter and more circumscribed than those of their nearest, wild cousins. 

But in the game, domestication is portrayed as a mutually beneficial, voluntary arrangement. The anthropomorphized cows of Hyrule speak to Link, literally saying, “Have some of my refreshing and nutritious milk!” Of course depicting a relationship as anything like symbiotic when one party kills and eats the other, as well as the latter’s children, would be laughable if it weren’t so appalling.

Not only is Hochschartner appalled, but he expects the reader to be as well. Hey guys, the happy cartoony cow upset you too, right? Right? Holstein solidarity!

It's obvious from the context that Hochschartner is upset that this go-lucky milk cow isn't plotting to overthrow the farm. I think he read the first three pages of Animal Farm, closed the book, and assumed everything turned out well and wishes Link could visit that perfect little place.

The entire article reads like a rushed essay from a C-average high school student, a student who didn't go to the prom or shower regularly.

We are fortunate that Hochschartner is cursed with an unusual name, as we can easily find his other writings, including grunt work at a regional newspaper, another whiny Salon piece complaining that Grand Theft Auto publisher Rockstar Games dared to portray corruption in a socialist revolution, Marxist drivel and Marxist drivel directed at vegans.

Probably the most disturbing thing here is not that Salon published a low-quality, sophomoric piece, but that the company presented the ramblings of a social misfit Marxist as if he possess a legitimate place in modern society.

Last week I came across a piece titled Datings tips for the feminist man that started with:

You’re a straight monogamous cismale who identifies as a leftie. Maybe you’re a Marxist or a socialist; maybe you’re an anarchist. You respect women. You would never act like a player. You fall in love with strong, smart, feminist women. You believe that our movements are stronger if they include everyone.

Excuse me people, this is the real world, not a university campus. What's with the lack of shame and ostracism for these fringe beliefs? What's with all the... acceptance. Mentally, being a Marxist in the 21st century is akin to being a Klansman, a flat-Earther, an AIDS denier or a Westboro Baptist Church member. These people need to be pushed into the shadows and ignored, not given a platform and treated with anything other than contempt.

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Strong start, weak finish

I was excited to when I stumbled across the BBC's Masters of Money miniseries that presented a trio of one-hour documentaries on economists John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Marx, all available free online. Sadly, that enjoyment turned to annoyance and resentment when I watched the series and it unraveled from educational material into a slanted, ill-informed personal opinion piece.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first piece on John Maynard Keynes, which I felt was a celebration of his ideas wrapped in a detailed biography of his personal life. Keynes is a great subject and it's a shame his legacy hasn't soaked into the broader culture the way Albert Einstein's visage has extended beyond physics.

I anticipated a similar treatment of Friedrich Hayek, but never received it. Instead, I saw Hayek treated as a flawed extension of Keynes, the way Ptolemy would be presented in a documentary on Copernicus. What irked me the most is how they were shown as bitter rivals when in fact Keynes and Hayek became good friends despite being the leaders of opposing camps.

Host Stephanie Flanders really went off the deep end with the third piece on Karl Marx, who she gave way more credit than deserved. Flanders is hard to take seriously when she endorses Marx's criticism of capitalism. She does not endorse socialism or communism and the piece made a great point of showing that Marx never adequately fleshed those ideas out - something that irks the hollow-headed Stalinists of our generation. As Brad DeLong said, Marx's real contribution to economics was presenting the best arguments for modern mainstream economists to combat, not for advancing any sort of alternative.

The series constantly flouts The Open University tie in on the BBC website which promised several cartoon shorts on basic economic concepts. I thought most of them were garbled and visually ugly. Worse of all, the short on comparative advantage makes the cliche outsider argument that the concept is outdated and irrelevant, something Paul Krugman demonstrated has been happening for ages as a form of intellectual hipsterism.
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Socialism's tolerance problem

There's been plenty of great write-ups about why the death of Hugo Chavez isn't a tragedy. My favorites are from Nick Gillespie at Reason.com, Michael Moynihan at The Daily Beast, a Venezuelan citizen in a CNN.com comment and, most surprising, Zack Beauchamp at ThinkProgress. I also rediscovered a great piece from Christopher Hitchens about his impressions from meeting a deranged Chavez and the shameless propaganda employed when Chavez declared himself the reincarnation of Simón Bolívar while desecrating his corpse.

Every one of them is a gem, and props to Beauchamp for revealing that much of the supposed success of Chavez's anti-poverty policies really come from an ongoing South American trend.

So with that out of the way, there is something important I want to express about the difference between socialist and capitalist nations. Only one tolerates the other when they are in charge.

In capitalist nations, you're allowed to speak in support of socialism. You can have stupid little coffee houses or dirty book stores devoted to the subject. You're even allowed to build your own little Marxist commune and count down the days until it falls apart.

In socialist nations, supporting capitalism is a criminal offense. Basic human rights like freedom of speech are stamped down and spreading unauthorized messages is a crime against the state. Trying to establish a capitalist subculture can mean execution.

If I was a Venezuelan Chavez would have had me destroyed. If he was an American he would have been mocked, just as he is being mocked now.

It's clear to see which system has the moral high ground.
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Follow-up on secular poverty cures

I'm writing to make some corrections and clarifications on several details from last week's article about realistic ways secular and skeptical groups can go about fighting poverty, which included heavy criticism of a David Hoelscher piece that sought to corrupt those movements with Marxist doublespeak.

In a private message Debbie Goddard suggested that "demand" was too strong of a word to describe her attempts to include an education focus in secular activism when I wrote "I've previously criticized demands for skeptics, atheists and secular people to [fight other causes]." Fair enough. I had other people in mind when I wrote that sentence, as some people are demanding that third-wave feminism should become a central aspect those movements. I did not intend to imply Goddard was part of that group.

I stand by when I wrote that Goddard and Walker Bristol endorsed Hoelscher's piece. Goddard said she did not endorse it, but did agree with some of its points about Atheism+ falling short on its promise to fight for social justice. She referred to it as "...A provocative and substantive (i.e., worthwhile and quite long) article." I consider that an endorsement, but either way she did not specifically support the anti-capitalist sections.

Bristol wrote to clarify that my introduction mischaracterized his stance for working with churches to fight inequality. His stance is not to work like the churches do to fight poverty because it would increase prestige and win converts in the black community, but to work with the churches to fight inequality because they are effective.

In a blog comment to my piece, Hoelscher informed me that I got his stance on a Noam Chomsky quotation backwards. Rereading that area, the previous paragraph tells us that classism shows up in unexpected places so the Chomsky quotation was intended to be criticized. That was my mistake.

Of course, this didn't have anything to do with the focus of the piece. The Chomsky error was one of several examples intended to demonstrate Hoelscher's insistence that secular and skeptical activists need to fight capitalism. Two hours after he wrote his comment he posted this image on his Facebook page.

Of course, his intention with the Chomsky quotation would have been a lot clearer if he had included any actual criticism of the remark. As it stands, this is what he he would have us believe is an obvious case of classism:

Take for instance Noam Chomsky. The New Atheist message, he once told an interviewer, “is old hat, and irrelevant, at least for those whose religious affiliations are a way of finding some sort of community and mutual support in an atomized society lacking social bonds.” If “it is to be even minimally serious” he continued, “the ‘new atheism’ should focus its concerns on the virulent secular religions of state worship” such as capitalism, imperialism and militarism.

I have no idea what Hoelscher's issue is with Chomsky and he didn't try to explain it.

Hoelscher's essay is a perfect illustration of "Modern English" as described by George Orwell in Politics and the English language. The writing is snaggletoothed, meandering and pretentious and fails to convey ideas without hiding behind vagueness and impenetrable run-on sentences.

Of course, I would expect him to say his writing is clear as an icicle during a spring thaw and I lack the ability to understand him. I say the Emperor has no clothes. It's up to the reader to determine which is true.

Hoelscher also called me out for tossing a few rude words in to describe his views on economics. He right, of course, but I offer no apology. Anti-capitalism is an adolescent disease and I can give Bristol a pass because he's young but Hoelscher is a tenured professor and needs to be held to a higher standard. As I've said time and time again, there is no excuse to be a Marxist in the 21st century. These are dead-end ideas and the lessons of history are both fresh and clear. Honesty requires harshness in criticism of that position.

If he wants to be rude back, then I have no right to complain. Fair is fair.
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How should secular people fight poverty

Debbie Goddard wrote an interesting piece last week that says promoting education should be an important goal of the secular movement.

I want to see the movement do more than pay lip service to the value of education. I’ve talked about this before, but I am frustrated that we-the-movement only seem to get involved with public education when a teacher puts Bible quotes on the walls of her classroom, when a football coach leads his high school team in prayer, when a science teacher spends time promoting intelligent design, when an administration prevents a student from starting an atheist club, or when a high school graduation is scheduled to take place in a church. Then we swoop in with our science advocates and Wall of Separation to make everything right…but don’t seem to worry about the fact that the high school’s graduation rate might be less than 50% and the shared science textbooks are older than the students.

I've previously criticized demands* for skeptics, atheists and secular people to engage in mission creep, such as to shift their focus away from their central themes and towards other causes that already have support movements. There's no need to retrace those steps, and Goddard did reiterate a good point from Walker Bristol that the black church gains a lot of its power from presenting itself as a force to combat poverty* and it is in the interest of secular groups to copy that approach..

So assuming secular groups should fight poverty what approaches should they use?

Bristol's concentration was on the Why and not the How, so he didn't name any specific approaches the way Goddard spoke of funding education scholarships. Unfortunately both* of them endorsed a piece in the fringe leftist publication CounterPunch written by philosophy professor David Hoelscher about class problems in atheist circles.

To be fair, I do remember thinking when I signed up for my first TAM, the biggest conference of the skeptics movement, that the high registration fees assume that everyone is rich.

Hoelscher started his sprawling essay with a quote from Karl Marx, which should hint at the quality of the rest of the piece. He later quotes Noam Chomsky favorably* as saying "'the new atheism should focus its concerns on the virulent secular religions of state worship' such as capitalism, imperialism and militarism." Later he wrote:

As the Marxist Terry Eagleton observes, there is something egregiously amiss when “[atheist] avatars of liberal Enlightenment like Hitchens, Dawkins, Martin Amis, Salmon Rushdie, and Ian McEwan have much less to say about the evils of global capitalism as opposed to the evils of radical Islam” and “most of them hardly mention the word ‘capitalism’ at all.”

So what are we to make of this, should secular groups who want to fight poverty spend their time fighting capitalism? Instead of asking a shallow philosophy professor, why don't we hear what economist Milton Friedman had to say on the subject:

...the question is how can we as people exercise our responsibility to our fellow man most effectively? That is the problem. So far as poverty is concerned, there has never in history been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than the free enterprise system and the free-market.

But let's not kid ourselves, secular people who don't study mainstream economics are hostile to capitalism and market-based solutions and reject Friedman. It doesn't seem to matter that economists like Cass Sunstein have convinced modern progressives like President Barack Obama to view markets as an effect tool for organizing society. For example, in last night's State of the Union Address the president advocated market-based solutions to climate change. When it comes to economics, there are far too many secular people on the fringe.

It's also true that capitalism hasn't worked as a magic panacea everywhere, such as in the former USSR and chaotic poor nations. It has, however, worked to eliminate a lot of poverty in famous cases like Hong Kong, Sweden, Estonia, Singapore and Denmark. It even worked when brutal dictators tried it while keeping the rest of the country locked down in China and Chile. Compare West Germany with East Germany or South Korea with North Korea to see the difference between capitalist and anti-capitalist approaches.

Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for eliminating poverty. If we knew of one beyond all uncertainty then academic economists would be advocating its adoption. With no sure-thing to advocate, here are some positions and actions for secular groups that I believe will reduce poverty:

* Promoting financial literacy for poor people. This could take the form of luring adults to free classes with free food, or raising money for public schools in poor districts to require a personal finance class.

*Addressing condom fatigue. I know that sex education is important for reducing unwanted pregnancies, which are a poverty-creating machine, but we can't keep looking at poor people as too stupid to understand how pregnancy works. Americans have access to cheap contraceptives and know plenty about them but many choose not to use them.

*Help increase the purchasing power of the poor through housing zoning deregulation, ending rent control laws, fighting price cartels like barber licensing and increasing access to affordable food.

*Promote international trade as a way to bring lower prices to poor consumers and increase the standard of living for poor foreign workers. For the exact same reasons, promote free and open immigration.

* Stop listening to economic know-nothings like David Hoelscher. Seriously, just close the browser window when he comes up. You have nothing to learn from him about economics except efficient ways to kill poor people.

We should never make zero-sum assumptions and think wealth in one place causes poverty in another. Poverty is the natural state of the world and it is through innovation and human cooperation that we are able to eliminate it. Some places just haven't had as much growth and have been left behind. Those of us who know about growth owe it to everyone else to share what our civilization has learned.

Adamantium Claws: I received messages from Goddard, Walker and even Hoelscher pointing out details I got wrong. I chose to preserve and asterisk them and the clarifications, responses and  admissions of errors are found here. None of these issues challenge or change my thesis in any way.
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Keep the middle man

This weekend I've been reading The Locavore's Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu and several passages about the role of intermediaries reminded me that I have been meaning to write about the importance of middle men.

Intermediaries, they write, complete important tasks like assembling, grading, packaging, processing, storing, transporting, financing, distributing and adverting products. The uninformed public, especially Marxists, have seen these middle men as redundant parasites who stand between the customer and the craftsman or farmer. They insist this makes buying and selling impersonal and the process needs to be changed.

This mentality is just a knee-jerk reaction to the division of labor, something Henry David Thoreau compared to letting another man do his thinking for him. What they gloss over is that when you don't hire a middle man that labor has to be performed by someone else, often the customer.

This is called shadow work, unpaid labor that the customer picks up from an eliminated middle man. When you spend an hour on the Internet searching for cheap airline tickets instead of hiring a travel agent, you are doing shadow work. The money you save is the shadow work payment. For some people, that's worth it. If you are a corporate attorney, it probably isn't and you'd rather have the free time.

In 2011 Craig Lambert wrote a New York Times article on the growing problem of shadow work. That is to say, the problems that have come from eliminating middle men.

To be sure, shadow work has its benefits. Bagging one’s own groceries or pumping one’s own gas can save time. Shadow work can increase autonomy and enlarge our repertoire of skills and knowledge. Research on the “Ikea effect,” named for the Swedish furniture manufacturer whose products often require home assembly, indicates that customers value a product more highly when they play a role in constructing it. 

Still, doctors routinely observe that one of the most common complaints today is fatigue; a 2007 study pegged its prevalence in the American work force at 38 percent. This should not be surprising. Much of this fatigue may result from the steady, surreptitious accumulation of shadow work in modern life. People are simply doing a huge number of tasks that were once done for them by others. 

Doing things for one another is, in fact, an essential characteristic of a human community. Various mundane jobs were once spread around among us, and performing such small services for one another was even an aspect of civility. Those days are over. The robots are in charge now, pushing a thousand routine tasks onto each of our backs.

The beauty of middle men is that they perform tasks that would otherwise end up as shadow work. There's nothing redundant or parasitical about that.

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New Year's Eve, socialism style

Hugo Chavez, the dictator of Venezuela, is not doing well following a cancer operation in Cuba, so the Venezuelan government has decided to show the peasants how real Marxists celebrate a holiday:

By staying home and praying things will get better.

Venezuela called off public New Year's Eve festivities on Monday and social media sizzled with worry after the government said cancer-stricken President Hugo Chavez had taken a turn for the worse.  

The streets of Caracas were quiet as front page headlines relayed that Mr Chavez had developed "new complications" from a respiratory infection after undergoing his fourth cancer-related surgery, on December 11 in Havana... 

Authorities canceled a New Year's eve concert in a downtown plaza and Information Minister Ernesto Villegas urged families "to ring in the New Year at home, praying and expressing hope for the health" of Mr Chavez.

You think with all the money he confiscates from his subjects he could afford to be a medical tourist in a better country than Cuba.
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Doesn't anyone want to challenge this middle class view?

Mark Perry said it all with his recent headline:

Pew Research Calls It "Hollowing Out of the Middle Class," But 150 Americans Moved Up for Every 100 Who Moved Down Between 1971 and 2011

I've found myself hearing this same exchange again and again. Someone who considers income inequality to be a major issue will lament the "death of the middle class" and the response from free market fans will be to say it's not because people are getting poor, but because they are getting rich.

I've seen this same exchange a dozen times, but I can't say I've heard anyone on the left come back with a reply.

Don Boudreaux shared a classic post on the subject from Arnold Kling showing decreases in the number of both low and middle income households and a three-fold increase in upper income households. I believe the facts are on our side, but every time I try to find a rebuttal on Google I just come across more people agreeing with us.

Karl Marx predicted that capitalism would cause fewer and fewer people to be rich, and the former rich would join the hordes of the masses in a violent struggle against the small number of rich people. Add this to list of things he got wrong, which includes nearly everything he wrote.

Update: I managed to find one article on the HuffPo that could be said to qualify, but I don't find the argument compelling. For starters, the author wants us to ignore non-monetary forms of compensation like health care benefits, as if they aren't something the employer has to pay for. He also said he doesn't argue the middle class will disappear, as that is a contradiction of the concept of the middle.
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The Cycle of Ignorance

One of the great tragedies of the human existence is the way certain problems are defeated at a great cost, only to resurface later, fully rejuvenated and dangerous as ever.

Take the snake oil and patent medicine craze, where hucksters sold phony cures using a variety of tricks and specious reasoning. It went away, but several generations later it has returned under the banner "alternative medicine."

I call this phenomena the cycle of ignorance. People are victimized by some problem, such as a natural disaster or the consequences of a bogus idea, and after much suffering, they learn how to protect themselves. The problem is fixed and everything is fine, but time marches on. Those dark days are forgotten and younger generations who never experienced them fail to protect themselves. The hard-learned lessons are forgotten.

Look at HIV and AIDS rates among the gay community in America. After surviving the gruesome AIDS crisis of the 1980's and early 1990's, gay men embraced condom use and infection rates dropped off quickly. However, the younger generation of gay men never lived through the horror of the AIDS crisis and as a group, have been less careful and have seen a large spike in new cases.

Disproved economic ideas always come back. The central issue of this blog, the "Buy Local" movement, is just a rehash of Mercantalism. That bogus idea never fails to show up as a scheme to boost the economy whenever times are tough.

Price controls made the gas shortage of the 1970's worse and as soon as that generation dies, we can expect to see it considered as a solution again.

The embrace of socialism among even well-educated young people is a horrifying trend, albeit a minor one. We can expect to have Marxist prophets fling themselves in front of crowds for the rest of civilization. Hopefully, the high death count can dissuade people from giving it one more chance.

It appears that unfortunately, real-life experience is a better educator than text and testimonials. How many of the problems we bury today will be dug up by our children, like an unwitting explorer opening the cell door that imprisoned a demon.
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We must never forget

Blogger Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy is on a quest to mark May Day as Victims of Communism Day, in the same vein as Holocaust Memorial Day. Why May 1?

 May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so. I suggest that May Day be turned into Victims of Communism Day…. 

The main alternative to May 1 is November 7, the anniversary of the communist coup in Russia. However, choosing that date might be interpreted as focusing exclusively on the Soviet Union, while ignoring the equally horrendous communist mass murders in China, Camobodia, and elsewhere. So May 1 is the best choice. 

The choice of date isn't the real issue here. People have a tendency to ignore the lessons the previous generations learned the hard way and make the same mistakes over again. We still live in a world where China, North Korea, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam are lumbering communist nations.

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Why I write about socialism and communism

I read a powerful post today from Alex Tabarrok today about Chinese farmers in the village of Xiaogang who started a secret pact in 1978. They saw that collectivist farming was failing them and made a pact to split the communal land up secretly, much like the solution to the tragedy of the commons. They would keep the surplus they grew, which would motivate them to grow more.

It wasn't a blind love of capitalism that motivated them. The risk of being caught was death by firing squad, which shows how dire the situation was that they would risk death to bring private property to a communist nation.

“Back then, even one straw belonged to the group,” says Yen Jingchang, who was a farmer in Xiaogang in 1978. “No one owned anything.”

At one meeting with communist party officials, a farmer asked: “What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those?” Answer: No. Your teeth belong to the collective.

This is not my first post about why socialism, communism and Marxism are wrong, nor will it be my last. It's not because I think President Barack Obama is a socialist - I don't. It's not because I think there's a commie plot to take over America - there isn't.

But man oh man, is there a lot of Marxism still squirming about.

All the scientific support for collectivism rotted away in the twentieth century. The intellectuals who believed collectivism would replace capitalism embraced the USSR and China, claiming they achieved great improvements in the standard of living for the poor. The grinning skulls of the Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Cubans and other victims have shown how wrong they were.

This revelation has hit home with most people. They know that the hammer and sickle are tools to kill people, not liberation for workers.

But unfortunately, those maggoty ideas thrive with the college crowd, both starry-eyed clueless students and strung-out idiot English professors. They cling to the philosophy of Marx and use special pleading to ignore the lessons of history.

If you hear someone say "real socialism has never been tried," the only appropriate response is to walk away. This is an intellectual cult that's not restricted to the corners of the Internet. It was openly displayed at my college's weekly "Marxist luncheon series," it hung banners and cardboard signs at the 2011 Organized Trespassing protests and it's trendy with the sneering hipster daydreamers in metropolitan areas.

I write about these ideas because they're still shuffling about and the next generation needs to be reminded before it makes the same mistakes.

What's telling is that the specific examples of societies previous generations of Marxists listed as successes have been completely abandoned by the current generation. Check out this hep cat from 1978 talking to Milton Friedman. He thought Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward in China was a success.



He's talking about the same system the farmers of Xiaogang rebelled against. Since you don't hear any Marxists today hold up China as a positive example, what does that say about what future Marxists will say about Cuba, Venezuela and "Democratic Korea?"
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Harris vs. Hayek

I'm used to seeing Friedrich Hayek as a foil to John Maynard Keynes these days, but after turning some thoughts in my head lately about science and value judgments, I think he belongs in the arena with Sam Harris.

I have heard Harris argue that science can help us choose what we ought to value, a position dangerously close to saying science can rank any and all values - and Steven Novella has recently stated that Harris indeed holds that view.

I've added emphasis to what Hayek wrote on page 99 of The Road to Serfdom on why specialist intellectuals are making a mistake when they support central planning:

In our predilections and interests we are all in some measure specialists. And we all think that our personal order of values is not merely personal but that in a free discussion among rational people we would convince the others that ours is the right one. The lover of the countryside who wants above all that its traditional appearance should be preserved and that the blots already made by industry on its fair face should be removed, no less than the health enthusiast who wants all the picturesque but unsanitary old cottages cleared away, or the motorist who wishes the country cut up by big motor roads, the efficiency fanatic who desires the maximum of specialization and mechanization no less than the idealist who for development of personality wants to preserve as many independent craftsmen as possible, all know that their aim can be fully achieved only by planning – and they all want planning for that reason. But, of course, the adoption of the social planning for which they clamor can only bring out the concealed conflict between their aims.

Hayek's case against the objective truth of values leads me to two conclusions:

First, assuming Novella's summary of Harris's perspective is accurate and he believes that science can determine what values are universally superior, than Harris is committing scientism - using the trappings of science to make claims which are not scientific in nature.

As Hayek said in The Pretense of Knowledge:

There is as much reason to be apprehensive about the long run dangers created in a much wider field by the uncritical acceptance of assertions which have the appearance of being scientific as there is with regard to the problems I have just discussed. What I mainly wanted to bring out by the topical illustration is that certainly in my field, but I believe also generally in the sciences of man, what looks superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most unscientific, and, beyond this, that in these fields there are definite limits to what we can expect science to achieve. This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

So not only is Harris wrong, but he is playing with fire.

Second, the illusion that values can be objectively quantified and ranked is mandatory for anyone who believes in central planning. An individual who wants to march under a red banner with modern day Marxists must take Harris's side in the issue, for how could a central planner decide which elements of society to prioritize without a concrete, indisputable list of values?
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Criticism is not suppression

Inside Higher Ed ran a story in the past week about Timothy J. L. Chandler of Georgia's Kennesaw State University. Chandler was on his way to becoming provost when an op-ed piece in a local newspaper criticized his nomination, and cited a rambling paper Chandler had written in 1998 with Walter E. Davis, who later became a 9-11 troofer.

The infamous paper heavily quotes Marx and was sprinkled with academic jargon and clueless anti-capitalist gems like:

Although the close connection of capitalism to violence is easily shown, it is seldom acknowledged. The allocative resources, which are increasingly disproportionably possessed, were obtained by individuals and groups, at one time or another, by physical force, coercion.

That's an odd way to describe a system of voluntary cooperation, especially from a mindset that has always ended up replacing it with actual force and coercion.

What really bothered me about the spin this story is getting is that Chandler is being held up as the victim of an assault on academic freedom - that op-ed pieces and and blog entries critical of Chandlers nomination are an assault on free speech.

People - that's one of the worst free speech fallacies out there. Freedom of speech means you have the right to express ideas - it is not freedom from criticism or the consequences of expressing certain ideas. Popehat has a great running tally of cases where fools claim the free speech of their critics is tyrannical.

This issue has made me question my position in a post I wrote last year about "take them off the air" campaigns where sponsors are pressured into dropping advertisements for a targeted show, like what happened to Don Imus. I still don't approve of this tactic, but I no longer label it as solid anti-free speech behavior because it's hard to draw the line between lobbying to remove a venue for speech and criticizing a venue being used to express a certain view.

However, no one pressured university donors to pull strings and drop Chandler - all he got was a few editorials and blog entries critical of his appointment. Academic freedom has never meant freedom from the public's ridicule. That's not tyranny or suppression, it's a normal response. It doesn't matter if the criticism is warranted or justified - those concepts don't matter here.

Criticism itself is a form of speech and it needs to be respected too.

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"Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people"

I try to be careful and say that holding a stupid idea does not necessarily make someone stupid, but I still had a good laugh at a brief Moe Lane post when it read:

Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people – and, believe me: if you’ve got books by Stalin in your library and you’re using those books to look for ideas… yes, you are a stupid person.

I figured he was being unfair. Surely modern Marxists are tripping over themselves to dismiss the Soviet Union as not-real communism because "real communism has never been tried," a tired and dishonest claim because communism has been tried over and over again, it just doesn't produce what a primitive writer promised it would. The recipe is flawed.

But, sure enough, the Russia Today clip of a trendy New York City overwhelmingly-white Marxist clubhouse clearly showed books by Stalin literally sitting on the shelf.

I'm reminded of the amusing anecdote of what Robert Conquest suggested when he was asked to give a new title to The Great Terror. It had to be updated because his original estimates of 20 million murdered by the Soviet Union were too low. However, I have a strict blogging policy against vulgarity so I'm outsourcing that title to another blogger.

The modern advocates of Marxism are so frustrated with their own failures that they have to claim capitalist countries as success stories for socialism and move the goalpost to things like the literacy rate or claim gulag slave labor defeated unemployment.

When it's 2011 and the intellectual support for your belief has crumbled and the only advocates left are on the fringe, when you are one of the richest persons both in history and the world but still complain you don't have enough and when you seek answers from dusty half-developed recipe books responsible for a nine-digit body count, well, maybe that is enough to call you stupid.

Update: I hope most progressives will notice I'm not talking about left-wing views in general - I'm talking about Marxism in particular. This isn't about people who support, for example, government-run health care, it's about people who want to replace capitalism with central planning.

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