“Progressives” Are Neanderthals

The use of the term “progressive” as a description of advocates of Left-wing policies derives from Marxism. Marxism claimed that socialism is the ideal economic system and thus that movement toward it constitutes progress and that those advocating such movement are progressives.

The truth, of course, is that socialism is not an ideal economic system or even any kind of economic system at all. It is nothing but the destruction of capitalism. It is merely the negation of capitalism.

In much the same way, socialism is not a system of economic planning. It is a system of the PROHIBITION of economic planning. Under socialism everyone is prohibited from engaging in economic planning who is not a member of the Central Planning Board.

Unfortunately for socialism, however, the successful functioning of the economic system depends on the thinking and planning of all of its participants, whose separate individual plans are harmonized, coordinated, and integrated by the price system.

In imposing a monopoly of a handful of government officials on the thinking and planning required to run the economic system, socialism commits an error comparable to demanding that the legs of the officials be able to carry the weight of all mankind.

For it demands that the brains of the officials take the place of the brains of all mankind.

This is not progress but destruction. It is the willful, forcible suppression of thinking and planning, which can result only in destruction. Socialists, “progressives,” in their forcible suppression of thinking and planning, are throwbacks to our savage ancestors.

All they know is to use force and violence to get what they want: stealing other people’s property and then compelling others to work to feed them. They should be called Neanderthals rather than “progressives.” Thieves and slavers, torturers and murderers, is what they are.

Scores of millions of dead bodies lie at their feet, the accomplishment of socialism in the 20^th Century.

To learn more, buy and read these two titles, which are available at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ:

Mass Death But Never Trump

Today’s Democratic Party is the party of Marxism, Socialism, and Environmentalism. Yet “Never Trumpers” seem to prefer the possibility of our country being run by that party rather than by Trump.

Don’t they know that what stands behind these philosophies and the “Green New Deal” that reflects them is the goal of mass murder and death?

Don’t they know that the record of Marxism/Socialism is scores of millions of deaths and that the environmentalists openly call for reducing human population from 7 billion-plus  to as little as 100 million, and meet no criticism from their comrades when they do so?

Don’t they know that the only thing wrong with the coronavirus pandemic, according to the logic of environmentalism, is that it’s not strong enough to kill people on a sufficiently massive scale?

In sum, given the real-world situation, are the “Never Trumpers” out of their minds?

Washington and Jefferson, Slavery and Marxism

Do not believe the claim made by the media morons that statues of Washington and Jefferson have been toppled because these Presidents owned slaves. Their statues have been toppled because they advocated freedom and created a country based on freedom.

In contrast, the Marxists/Socialists engaged in this desecration are advocates of slavery, out to create a totalitarian dictatorship. At the same time, as part of the same phenomenon, they claim that slavery exists all around us, in the very nature of capitalism.

They claim that the employees of capitalists are slaves: “wage slaves,” they call them. They do this on the basis of their lunatic belief that capitalists gain from the employment of wage earners in the same way that a slave owner gains from the ownership of a slave.

Namely, from the fact that a slave or wage earner is able to produce in a day more than is required to keep him alive and able to work the next day. The existence of this excess or “surplus,” they believe is the explanation of profit.

Thus, capitalists allegedly exploit wage earners in exactly the same way that slave owners exploit slaves.

This may no doubt come as a shock to many multi-millionaires and billionaires busy contributing to Marxist/Socialist terrorist organizations in the belief that doing so buys them protection. There is no protection except to expose these vermin.

And one simple and effective way to do that is to read and publicize this book, which is available in both Kindle and paperback versions at https://amzn.to/2N44uTu.

Among other major subjects, it explains the productive role of businessmen and capitalists and the actual foundations of profit.

Riots Are Riots Even Though the New York Times Calls Them "Protests"

The New York Times has described the Minneapolis police force as peaceful and non-violent for the most part———OOPS! MISTAKE!!! MISTAKE!!!

The New York Times has described the “PROTESTS” as peaceful and non-violent for the most part (putting aside the mass looting and destruction of stores in major cities across the US, including the US’s best-known department store, Macy’s at Herald Square in NYC).

Insurance companies in contrast have accurately described the protests as belonging in the category “riot and civil disorder event,” which is a category representing at least $25 million in damage.

Here’s an example of the “peacefulness” and “nonviolence” accompanying the protests: https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/72C23D5A-A5CE-11EA-9237-EF7B9133097E

Such destruction was not the result of each and every protest but just of a significant fraction of them, enough to cause not only many millions in losses but also the loss of several lives too.

The reporters and editors of The New York Times are all Marxist-educated and thus unwilling or unable to report the news objectively. They simply do not bother to report much of what they dislike and they twist and “spin” much of the rest.

Indeed, our culture and its educational system have deteriorated to the point that for several generations almost everyone has been taught to believe the teachings of Marxism in economic theory and political philosophy.

If you’d like to start flushing this poison from your brain, you need to read the works of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. My writings available at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ provide a good introduction to their ideas and also present some further contributions of my own.

Socialized Medicine:A Mailed Fist in a Velvet Glove.

 Posted yesterday on Twitter at @GGReisman

Socialized Medicine is a mailed fist in a velvet glove. The velvet glove is the promise of “free” medical care. The mailed fist is the reality of medical care limited to what the government deems it can afford while prohibiting you from spending your own money on your own care.


The prohibition of people spending their own money on their own medical care is implied in the very expression “Single-Payer System.” Those words mean that the government is the only payer. The individual citizens are prohibited from being payers.


Indeed, the government cannot leave people free to spend their own money on their own medical care, because their doing so would draw resources from the socialized system. The better doctors and hospitals would cater to those with higher incomes and greater spending power.


Here is a temporary, compromise solution for medical care. Let the government continue to provide financing for the care of the indigent. Let everyone else have access to the government’s system at rates that cover, or more than cover, its costs, if such care is what they prefer.


At the same time, allow the development of a new medical system that will be free of all government regulation or control. This system will be exempt from licensing requirements, FDA approval, whatever. Those frightened by such freedom can take refuge in the government’s system.


Expect radical cost reductions, bringing more and better medical care within reach of more and more people.

Marxism/Socialism... Introduction

Copyright ©2018 by George Reisman. All rights reserved, except that this post may be reproduced and distributed electronically, but only in full, including graphic(s), and with notification to the author at greisman1937@gmail.com.

Order the book at https://amzn.to/2J7bZYC

(Previous Post: Table of Contents)

Introduction

On April 30 of this year [2018], The New York Times ran an op-ed piece titled “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!”[1] In view of the fact that the implementation of Marx’s philosophy in the Soviet Union and in Communist China resulted in general economic chaos, including shortages, rationing, interminable waiting lines (14 hours a week just to buy food), and multiple families having to live in the same apartment, plus forced labor, concentration camps, show trials and periodic purges to shift the blame for it all, a reign of terror, famines, and as many as 62 million murders in the Soviet Union and 76 million in Communist China (including those killed by the government-caused famines)[2]—in view of all this, congratulating Marx on being right boggles the mind. Marx could be right only if one’s standard of right was human misery and death. Only someone utterly depraved could make such a statement. Only an utterly depraved, despicable newspaper could endorse such a statement, and the feather-weight rationalizations offered in support of it, by printing the piece.

In every essential respect, the philosophy of Marxism/Socialism is a philosophy designed for sociopaths—for people who attempt to appear merely as seeking to do good, by posturing as friends of the poor and of humanity at large, but who have no respect for the individual rights of others, who have no awareness that others have independent minds and think and plan on their own initiative, who denounce such thinking and planning as “anarchy” (an “anarchy of production”) and try to squelch it, who regard others as mere objects to be willingly or unwillingly manipulated in the achievement of the Marxists’/Socialists’ grand plans for the human race, and whose response to the suffering and deaths of millions is along the lines of “to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.” Marxism/Socialism is a philosophy for the depraved, for those of a warped intellectual and moral capacity and thus capable of appearing now as morons and now as murderers. It is a philosophy designed for a special breed of such vermin: for those who, despite often thinking at the level of morons, nevertheless believe that they are more intelligent than other people, so much more intelligent in fact, that they know better how to run other people’s lives than those other people themselves do and are entitled to use force to impose their will on them. Marxism/Socialism is the philosophy of a breed of mental cases whose ignorance is exceeded only by its arrogance and viciousness.

The Times’ endorsement of Marx was not an isolated event. In June, a New York State Democratic congressional primary was won by a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that has grown rapidly since the presidential candidacy of the self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. Sanders’ candidacy has been followed by a resurgence of socialism both on college campuses and in the Democratic Party. It has gone so far in the Democratic Party that former FBI Director James Comey, a current supporter of the Democrats, has believed it necessary to tweet, “Democrats, please, please don’t lose your minds and rush to the socialist left.”

The resurgence of Marxist/Socialist ideas should not be surprising. Despite the fall of Communist regimes around the world, the essential ideas of Marxism/Socialism remained, and still remain, largely untouched and unchallenged. These ideas pertain to the relationship between capitalists and wage earners, and they are accepted by the great majority of people in the United States and throughout the world.

They are accepted not as being descriptive of the way conditions actually are in the United States or in any other advanced country of the present day, but as descriptive of the way conditions would be in the absence of major government intervention. And they are accepted as both descriptive and explanatory of the way conditions were in the nineteenth century.

Thus, people believe that in the absence of government intervention in the form of pro-union, minimum-wage, maximum-hours, and child-labor legislation, and laws regulating working conditions, the capitalists, in their greedy pursuit of profits, would drive wages down to, or even below, minimum physical subsistence, lengthen the hours of work to the maximum possible, force small children to work in factories and mines, and make working conditions unbearable for all. All that allegedly stands in the way of this nightmare-world ready to be unleashed by the unrestricted operation of capitalism and the profit motive is legislation inspired by Marxism/Socialism. This view of things appears to be held¸ and to have been held for more than a century, by virtually all Democrats and perhaps half or more of the Republicans.

The refutation of these and many other major errors about the nature of capitalism, along with a demonstration of the destructive and totalitarian nature of socialism, is the subject of this essay. To connect these remarks to the title of my essay, let me say that Marxism/Socialism is a philosophy conceived in gross error and ignorance about the nature of capitalism, above all about the nature of the relationship between capitalists, profits, and wages. Socialism is little more than a violent rejection of capitalism, based on this combination of errors and ignorance, and which, once having managed to destroy capitalism, results in economic chaos, enslavement, terror, and mass murder. Socialism and its consequences can be likened to the assault of a barbarian tribe become enraged at the relative prosperity of a civilized land. After destroying the fields, the livestock, the roads, and the aqueducts of the civilized land, it finds itself with nothing but a few remaining scraps over which its members kill one another. That is the essential situation of today’s socialist barbarians, inspired by Marx to hate capitalists and the civilization that they have built.

What the socialist barbarians destroy is private ownership of the means of production, the profit motive, private saving and capital accumulation, competition, and the price system. In destroying them, these barbarians have no idea that in doing so they are destroying the foundations of material civilization, in which they have shared and could continue to share. It is the purpose of this essay to teach those of them that both know how to read and have not yet reached the point of burning the writings they fear, the actual nature of capitalism and of Marxism/Socialism, in the hope that they will then become defenders, rather than destroyers, of capitalist civilization.

Next Post: I. 1. The Essential Nature of Socialism: The Need for Armed Robbery to Establish It

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[1] See https://nyti.ms/2r9pP4k.

[2] R. J. Rummel, Death By Government (New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Publishers, 1994), n. 1.

Comments in Response to Marxism-Inspired Article in New York Times

The main article on page one of today’s (February 10, 2014) New York Times is inspired by Marxism. The article attempts to deny that raising wages reduces employment. The substance of its denial is the mere fact that employers make this claim. The Times’ position is that if capitalists claim something, it can’t be true—because it is capitalists who claim it. The Times and its staff are wedded to the proposition that capitalism is a system functioning exclusively in the interests of a handful of capitalist exploiters and against the interests of the overwhelming majority of mankind (think of the “1%” vs. the “99%,” which is the current popularization of this dogma). This belief is assumed to be true beyond any possible question and any attempt to challenge it, it is believed, can only reflect dishonesty on the part of whoever dares to do so and should immediately be ignored as soon as the slightest connection can be found to the interests of capitalists.

I have tweeted on the article on Twitter.

More importantly, I’ve managed to get The Times to publish two comments of mine relevant to the article. My comments appear on The Times website, accompanying the online version of the article. Each comment can be found by clicking on its title.

My First Comment that can be found on The New York Times website:

One of the most fundamental principles of economics is that, other things being equal, the higher is the price, the lower is the quantity demanded. Applied to wages, this means that, other things being equal, the higher is the wage, the smaller is the number of workers employed.

The truth of these propositions is not diminished in any way by the fact that interested parties use them. In this case the interested parties are using a scientific truth, just as a patient with an interest in saving his life relies on the scientific truths established by medical science.

Empirical studies showing wage increases without decreases in employment, indeed, wage increases accompanied by actual increases in employment, do not invalidate the fact price (wage) and quantity demanded are inversely related. The relationship holds OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL. If over the same period of time that wages rise, the quantity of money and volume of spending in the economic system also rise, the same or a larger number of workers can be employed. However, if their wages did not rise, or rose by less, the number of workers employed would have increased by still more. In this case, the unemployment that results from a higher wage is to be understood as being in comparison with the greater amount of employment that would have existed in the absence of the wage increase.
A fundamental fact to keep in mind is that any given amount of spending can buy more the lower are prices/wages. This is a fact of arithmetic.

My Second Comment that can be found on TheNew York Times website:

Whoever is concerned with raising the standard of living of the average wage earner needs to realize that that standard of living is not determined by the height of the worker’s money wages. What it is determined by is his wages RELATIVE TO THE PRICES he must pay as a consumer. Before the introduction of the Euro, every Italian worker earned millions every year—millions of almost worthless Lira. Despite being multi-millionaires, the standard of living of Italian workers was very low, because prices were extremely high.

The standard of living of all workers taken together is simply not increased by increasing their money wages. What increases money wages across the board is basically just an increase in the quantity of money and volume of spending in the economic system. But that same increase operates equally to raise prices, thereby preventing any rise in the general standard of living.

What allows the workers’ standard of living to rise is improvements in the output per worker. The same number of workers, or a larger number of workers, each on average producing more, implies an increase in the supply of consumers’ goods relative to the supply of labor, and thus, as far as it goes, a fall in prices relative to wages.

However counterintuitive it may be, the rise in the workers' standard of living comes about not by virtue of the workers earning more money, but by virtue of the rise in output per worker holding the rise in prices below the rise in wages.

The Fundamental Obstacles to Economic Recovery: Marxism and Keynesianism

In a previous article, I explained how falling prices, far from being deflation, are actually the antidote to deflation. They are the antidote, I explained, because they enable the reduced amount of spending that deflation entails to buy as much as did the previously larger amount of spending that took place in the economic system prior to the deflation.

Despite the fact that the freedom of prices and wages to fall is the simple and obvious way to achieve economic recovery, two fundamental obstacles stand in the way. One is the exploitation theory of Karl Marx. The other is the doctrine of unemployment equilibrium, which was propounded by Lord Keynes.

According to Marxism, any freedom of wages to fall is a freedom for capitalists to intensify the exploitation of labor and to drive wages to or even below the level of minimum subsistence. This dire outcome can allegedly be prevented only by government interference in the form of minimum-wage and pro-union legislation. Such legislation, of course, makes reductions in wages simply illegal in all those instances in which the legal minimum wage would have to be breached. It also makes reductions in wages illegal in all those cases in which carrying them out depends on the ability to replace union workers with non-union workers in defiance of existing laws or government regulations. The influence of labor unions on wages pervades the economic system, with government protection of labor unions serving to prevent wages from falling even in companies and industries in which there are no unions. This is because non-union employers must pay wages fairly close to what union workers receive lest their workers too decide to unionize. In that case, the firms would be faced not only with having to pay union wages but also with all of the inefficiencies caused by union work rules.

The Keynesian unemployment equilibrium doctrine claims that it would make no difference even if wages and prices were totally free to fall. In that case, say the Keynesians, all that would happen is that total spending in the economic system would fall in proportion to the fall in wages and prices.

Thus, say the Keynesians, if, in response to an economy-wide fall in total spending of, say, 10 percent, wages and prices also fell by 10 percent, then instead of 90 percent of the original total spending now buying as much as did the original spending, total spending would fall by a further 10 percent. As a result, say the Keynesians, no additional goods or services whatever would be bought; all that would allegedly be accomplished is to make the deflation worse than before, as sales revenues and incomes throughout the economic system fell still further.

In sum, while the influence of Marxism stands directly in the path of a fall in wage rates and prices, by blocking its way with laws and threats, Keynesianism aims to prevent any attempt to overcome these obstacles by allegedly demonstrating the futility and harm of doing so.

Both doctrines are fundamental obstacles in the way of economic recovery and must be deprived of influence over public opinion in order for economic recovery to take place. The prerequisite of this necessary change in public opinion is the existence of a powerful, demonstration of the utter fallaciousness of these doctrines that at the same time proves that a free market is the foundation both of full employment and of progressively rising real wages.

Happily, this demonstration already exists, in full detail. It can be found in my book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, in the 269 pages that comprise Chapters 11, 13-15, and 18, which are respectively titled “The Division of Labor and the Concept of Productive Activity,” “Productionism, Say’s Law, and Unemployment,” “The Productivity Theory of Wages,” “Aggregate Production, Aggregate Spending, and the Role of Saving in Spending,” and “Keynesianism: a Critique.”


Copyright © 2009, by George Reisman. George Reisman, Ph.D. is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996) and is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute. His web site is www.capitalism.net and his blog is www.georgereisman.com/blog/. A pdf replica of his book can be downloaded to the reader’s hard drive simply by clicking on the book’s title, above, and then saving the file when it appears on the screen.