Sunday, November 21, 2021

How Fox News Can Better Counter The Leftist Networks

Commentators on Fox News have rightly said that the various leftist networks make a major contribution to rioting and civil unrest by creating a false narrative on important events, which is then disappointed, seemingly with no explanation but some nonsense such as “white racism.”

Fox can do something about this. For one thing, it should post on YouTube such decisive commentaries as its showing how the prosecutor in the Rittenhouse case actually made the case for the defense.

Amazingly, he called one witness after another who testified that Rittenhouse was the victim of aggression, not the aggressor.

Fox should also post on YouTube all of its series of snippets showing one after another of the leftist commentators using the identical key words in their commentaries, as though they had all been briefed beforehand by the Ministry of Propaganda.

Finally, Fox should consider advertising on the other networks by showing how it differs from them, in not following a leftist party line, and catching them up in their lies, such as creating the impression that the men Rittenhouse shot were black.

Sunday, November 07, 2021

Some Questions About Income Tax Audits

 

An income tax audit is essentially a search. Why, consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, doesn’t it require a search warrant signed by a judge?

Since income-tax audits sometimes lead to criminal prosecutions and jail sentences, why is it not a requirement that anyone whom the IRS wishes to audit, first be given a “Miranda Warning,” with its notification of the right to remain silent and to have an attorney present?

Why isn’t the 5th Amendment to the US Constitution and its protection against self-incrimination a routine basis for the refusal to submit to an audit, thus requiring the IRS to make its cases without the cooperation of citizens forced to help in their own incrimination?

 

Friday, November 05, 2021

What Using the Pronouns Chosen by "Transgender" People Means

Please explain the difference between using the pronouns chosen by “transgender” people and working as an unpaid extra in someone’s sexual fantasy.

Thursday, November 04, 2021

How “Men” Can Give Birth.

Start with a woman. Get the woman to declare that she “identifies” as a man. So now, according to the prevailing view in “intellectual” circles, this woman is a man.

So, if she (“he”) becomes pregnant and gives birth, we supposedly have a case of a man giving birth, because the woman has been mislabeled as a man.

In this way, its’s possible to explain how a “cat” can bark like a dog, and how fish can fly and birds can swim. It’s all a matter of fraudulent labeling and then feigning shock when the mislabeled thing behaves in accordance with its actual nature.


 

Sunday, October 10, 2021

COLUMBUS DAY IS COMING

Education is the transmission of civilization from previous generations to the rising generation. By the end of it, children have become civilized adults and see themselves as members of the civilization in which they have been educated.

Columbus discovered America from the perspective of those who are members of Western Civilization, including descendants of the American natives who greeted him. As educated people, they are no longer indigenous natives but modern “Westerners.”

To the extent that they do not identify with Columbus but with their primitive ancestors, they have not been educated.

To learn more, see my Kindle book Contemporary Education’s Racist Road to Barbarism, available at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00P4IT3JC/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i7



Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Murderous Marxist Morons

Candidate for a bumper sticker: “Murderous Marxist Morons.”

A challenge to Murderous Marxist Morons: Explain what you or anyone else would have to do to centrally plan the economic system. Where would you start? what would you have to know? Could the planning be subdivided without immediately becoming a chaos?

Socialist central planning would require that each member of the Central Planning Board be able to hold in his mind all of the factories, pieces of equipment, and all other means of production, where they were, what they were capable of accomplishing, and when, for a generation.

Capitalism is full of economic planning—on the part of all the individual participants in the economic system. If you go shopping with a shopping list, you have an economic plan: you’re planning to buy what’s on your list. 

Wage earners, consumers, and businessmen make countless plans with respect to all aspects of their operations. Murderous Marxist Morons are too stupid to realize this. They think capitalism is a planless chaos first awaiting planning by them. 

The alleged planning of the Murderous Marxist Morons is an empty wish list of goals that they announce every five years (the Soviets’ Five-Year Plans) or every four years (the Nazis’ Four-Year Plans). 

Meanwhile, under capitalism, all parts of the economic system are continually planned and re-planned in response to changes in individual profit and loss calculations.

The planning of virtually all aspects of capitalism by its individual participants is harmonized, coordinated, and integrated by the price system, which rests on the profit motive and the freedom of competition, which in turn rest on private ownership of the means of production.

The Murderous Marxist Morons know nothing of this. Their contribution to production and civilization is nothing other than the destruction of capitalism and its price system and thus of rational economic planning The result is chaos, poverty, suffering, and death.

To learn more, read chapters 6-8 of my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, available on Amazon under "George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics".



Monday, September 20, 2021

140th Birthday Tribute to Ludwig von Mises

September 29, 2021 is the 140th Birthday of Ludwig von Mises, the greatest economic defender of capitalism in the 20th Century. Here is Reisman's Tribute to him written in 1981, on the occasion of Mises's 100th birthday.

Ludwig von Mises:
Defender of Capitalism
*  

By

George Reisman**



September 29, 1981, is the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, economist and social philosopher, who passed away in 1973. Von Mises was my teacher and mentor and the source or inspiration for most of what I know and consider to be important and worthwhile in these fields—of what enables me to understand the events shaping the world in which we live. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to him, because I believe that he deserves to occupy a major place in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.

Von Mises is important because his teachings are necessary to the preservation of material civilization. As he showed, the base of material civilization is the division of labor. Without the higher productivity of labor made possible by the division of labor, the great majority of mankind would simply die of starvation. The existence and successful functioning of the division of labor, however, vitally depends on the institutions of a capitalist society—that is, on limited government and economic freedom, private ownership of land and all other property, exchange and money, saving and investment, economic inequality and economic competition, and the profit motive—institutions everywhere under attack for several generations.

When von Mises appeared on the scene, Marxism and the other socialist sects enjoyed a virtual intellectual monopoly. Major flaws and inconsistencies in the writings of Smith and Ricardo and their followers enabled the socialists to claim classical economics as their actual ally. The writings of Jevons and the earlier “Austrian” economists—Menger and Böhm-Bawerk—were insufficiently comprehensive to provide an effective counter to the socialists. Bastiat had tried to provide one, but died too soon, and probably lacked the necessary theoretical depth in any case.

Thus, when von Mises appeared, there was virtually no systematic intellectual opposition to socialism or defense of capitalism. Quite literally, the intellectual ramparts of civilization were undefended. What von Mises undertook, and which summarizes the essence of his greatness, was to build an intellectual defense of capitalism and thus of civilization.

The leading argument of the socialists was that the institutions of capitalism served the interests merely of a handful of rugged “exploiters” and “monopolists” and operated against the interests of the great majority of mankind, which socialism would serve. While the only answer others could give was to devise plans to take away somewhat less of the capitalists' wealth than the socialists were demanding, or to urge that property rights nevertheless be respected despite their incompatibility with most people's well-being, von Mises challenged everyone's basic assumption. He showed that capitalism operates to the material self-interests of all, including the non-capitalists—the so-called proletarians. In a capitalist society, von Mises showed, privately owned means of production serve the market. The physical beneficiaries of the factories and mills are all who buy their products. And, together with the incentive of profit and loss and the freedom of competition that it implies, the existence of private ownership ensures an ever-growing supply of products for all.

Thus, von Mises showed to be absolute nonsense such clichés as “poverty causes communism.” Not poverty, but poverty plus the mistaken belief that communism is the cure for poverty, causes communism. If the misguided revolutionaries of the backward countries and of impoverished slums understood economics, any desire they might have to fight poverty would make them advocates of capitalism.

Socialism, von Mises showed, in his greatest original contribution to economic thought, not only abolishes the incentive of profit and loss and the freedom of competition along with private ownership of the means of production, but makes economic calculation, economic coordination, and economic planning impossible, and therefore results in chaos. For socialism means the abolition of the price system and the intellectual division of labor; it means the concentration and centralization of all decision-making in the hands of one agency: the Central Planning Board or the Supreme Dictator.

Yet the planning of an economic system is beyond the power of any one consciousness: the number, variety and locations of the different factors of production, the various technological possibilities that are open to them, and the different possible permutations and combinations of what might be produced from them, are far beyond the power even of the greatest genius to keep in mind. Economic planning, von Mises showed, requires the cooperation of all who participate in the economic system. It can exist only under capitalism, where, every day, businessmen plan on the basis of calculations of profit and loss; workers, on the basis of wages; and consumers, on the basis of the prices of consumers' goods.

Von Mises's contributions to the debate between capitalism and socialism—the leading issue of modern times—are overwhelming. Before he wrote, people did not realize that capitalism has economic planning. They uncritically accepted the Marxian dogma that capitalism is an anarchy of production and that socialism represents rational economic planning. People were (and most still are) in the position of Moliere's M. Jourdan, who never realized that what he was speaking all his life was prose. For, living in a capitalist society, people are literally surrounded by economic planning, and yet do not realize that it exists. Every day, there are countless businessmen who are planning to expand or contract their firms, who are planning to introduce new products or discontinue old ones, planning to open new branches or close down existing ones, planning to change their methods of production or continue with their present methods, planning to hire additional workers or let some of their present ones go. And every day, there are countless workers planning to improve their skills, change their occupations or places of work, or to continue with things as they are; and consumers, planning to buy homes, cars, stereos, steak or hamburger, and how to use the goods they already have—for example, to drive to work or to take the train, instead.

Yet people deny the name planning to all this activity and reserve it for the feeble efforts of a handful of government officials, who, having prohibited the planning of everyone else, presume to substitute their knowledge and intelligence for the knowledge and intelligence of tens of millions. Von Mises identified the existence of planning under capitalism, the fact that it is based on prices (“economic calculations”), and the fact that the prices serve to coordinate and harmonize the activities of all the millions of separate, independent planners.

He showed that each individual, in being concerned with earning a revenue or income and with limiting his expenses, is led to adjust his particular plans to the plans of all others. For example, the worker who decides to become an accountant rather than an artist, because he values the higher income to be made as an accountant, changes his career plan in response to the plans of others to purchase accounting services rather than paintings. The individual who decides that a house in a particular neighborhood is too expensive and who therefore gives up his plan to live in that neighborhood, is similarly engaged in a process of adjusting his plans to the plans of others; because what makes the house too expensive is the plans of others to buy it who are able and willing to pay more. And, above all, von Mises showed, every business, in seeking to make profits and avoid losses, is led to plan its activities in a way that not only serves the plans of its own customers, but takes into account the plans of all other users of the same factors of production throughout the economic system.

Thus, von Mises demonstrated that capitalism is an economic system rationally planned by the combined, self-interested efforts of all who participate in it. The failure of socialism, he showed, results from the fact that it represents not economic planning, but the destruction of economic planning, which exists only under capitalism and the price system.

Von Mises was not primarily anti-socialist. He was pro-capitalist. His opposition to socialism, and to all forms of government intervention, stemmed from his support for capitalism and from his underlying love of individual freedom and conviction that the self-interests of free men are harmonious—indeed, that one man's gain under capitalism is not only not another's loss, but is actually others' gain. Von Mises was a consistent champion of the self-made man, of the intellectual and business pioneer, whose activities are the source of progress for all mankind and who, he showed, can flourish only under capitalism.

Von Mises demonstrated that competition under capitalism is of an entirely different character than competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition for scarce, nature-given means of subsistence, but a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth, from which all gain. For example, the effect of the competition between farmers using horses and those using tractors was not that the former group died of starvation, but that everyone had more food and the income available to purchase additional quantities of other goods as well. This was true even of the farmers who “lost” the competition, as soon as they relocated in other areas of the economic system, which were enabled to expand precisely by virtue of the improvements in agriculture. Similarly, the effect of the automobile's supplanting the horse and buggy was to benefit even the former horse breeders and blacksmiths, once they made the necessary relocations.

In a major elaboration of Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage, von Mises showed that there is room for all in the competition of capitalism, even those of the most modest abilities. Such people need only concentrate on the areas in which their relative productive inferiority is least. For example, an individual capable of being no more than a janitor does not have to fear the competition of the rest of society, almost all of whose members could be better janitors than he, if that is what they chose to be. Because however much better janitors other people might make, their advantage in other lines is even greater. And so long as the person of limited ability is willing to work for less as a janitor than other people can earn in other lines, he has nothing to worry about from their competition. He, in fact, outcompetes them for the job of janitor by being willing to accept a lower income than they. Von Mises showed that a harmony of interests prevails in this case, too. For the existence of the janitor enables more talented people to devote their time to more demanding tasks, while their existence enables him to obtain goods and services that would otherwise be altogether impossible for him to obtain.

On the basis of such facts, von Mises argued against the possibility of inherent conflicts of interest among races and nations, as well as among individuals. For even if some races or nations were superior (or inferior) to others in every aspect of productive ability, mutual cooperation in the division of labor would still be advantageous to all. Thus, he showed that all doctrines alleging inherent conflicts rest on an ignorance of economics.

He argued with unanswerable logic that the economic causes of war are the result of government interference, in the form of trade and migration barriers, and that such interference restricting foreign economic relations is the product of other government interference, restricting domestic economic activity. For example, tariffs become necessary as a means of preventing unemployment only because of the existence of minimum wage laws and pro-union legislation, which prevent the domestic labor force from meeting foreign competition by means of the acceptance of lower wages when necessary. He showed that the foundation of world peace is a policy of laissez-faire both domestically and internationally.

In answer to the vicious and widely believed accusation of the Marxists that Nazism was an expression of capitalism, he showed, in addition to all the above, that Nazism was actually a form of socialism. Any system characterized by price and wage controls, and thus by shortages and government controls over production and distribution, as was Nazism, is a system in which the government is the de facto owner of the means of production. Because, in such circumstances, the government decides not only the prices and wages charged and paid, but also what is to be produced, in what quantities, by what methods, and where it is to be sent. These are all the fundamental prerogatives of ownership. This identification of “socialism on the German pattern,” as he called it, is of immense value in understanding the nature of present demands for price controls.

Von Mises showed that all of the accusations made against capitalism were either altogether unfounded or should be directed against government intervention, which destroys the workings of capitalism. He was among the first to point out that the poverty of the early years of the Industrial Revolution was the heritage of all previous history—that it existed because the productivity of labor was still pitifully low; because scientists, inventors, businessmen, savers and investors could only step by step create the advances and accumulate the capital necessary to raise it. He showed that all the policies of so-called labor and social legislation were actually contrary to the interests of the masses of workers they were designed to help—that their effect was to cause unemployment, retard capital accumulation, and thus hold down the productivity of labor and the standard of living of all. In a major original contribution to economic thought, he showed that depressions were the result of government-sponsored policies of credit expansion designed to lower the market rate of interest. Such policies, he showed, created large-scale malinvestments, which deprived the economic system of liquid capital and brought on credit contractions and thus depressions. Von Mises was a leading supporter of the gold standard and of laissez-faire in banking, which, he believed, would virtually achieve a 100% reserve gold standard and thus make impossible both inflation and deflation.

What I have written of von Mises provides only the barest indication of the intellectual content that is to be found in his writings. He authored over a dozen volumes. And I venture to say that I cannot recall reading a single paragraph in any of them that did not contain one or more profound thoughts or observations. Even on the occasions when I found it necessary to disagree with him (for example, on his view that monopoly can exist under capitalism, his advocacy of the military draft, and certain aspects of his views on epistemology, the nature of value judgments, and the proper starting point for economics), I always found what he had to say to be extremely valuable and a powerful stimulus to my own thinking. I do not believe that anyone can claim to be really educated who has not absorbed a substantial measure of the immense wisdom present in his works.

Von Mises's two most important books are Human Action and Socialism, which best represents the breadth and depth of his thought. These are not for beginners, however. They should be preceded by some of von Mises's popular writings, such as Bureaucracy and Planning For Freedom.

The Theory of Money and Credit, Theory and History, Epistemological Problems of Economics, and The Ultimate Foundations of Economic Science are more specialized works that should probably be read only after Human Action. Von Mises's other popular writings in English include Omnipotent Government, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, Liberalism, Critique of Interventionism, Economic Policy, and The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics. For anyone seriously interested in economics, social philosophy, or modern history, the entire list should be considered required reading. [All titles of von Mises currently in print can be ordered on this web site.]

Von Mises must be judged not only as a remarkably brilliant thinker but also as a remarkably courageous human being. He held the truth of his convictions above all else and was prepared to stand alone in their defense. He cared nothing for personal fame, position, or financial gain, if it meant having to purchase them at he sacrifice of principle. In his lifetime, he was shunned and ignored by the intellectual establishment, because the truth of his views and the sincerity and power with which he advanced them shattered the tissues of fallacies and lies on which most intellectuals then built, and even now continue to build, their professional careers.

It was my great privilege to have known von Mises personally over a period of twenty years. I met him for the first time when I was sixteen years old. Because he recognized the seriousness of my interest in economics, he invited me to attend his graduate seminar at New York University, which I did almost every week thereafter for the next seven years, stopping only when the start of my own teaching career made it no longer possible for me to continue in regular attendance.

His seminar, like his writings, was characterized by the highest level of scholarship and erudition, and always by the most profound respect for ideas. Von Mises was never concerned with the personal motivation or character of an author, but only with the question of whether the man's ideas were true or false. In the same way, his personal manner was at all times highly respectful, reserved, and a source of friendly encouragement. He constantly strove to bring out the best in his students. This, combined with his stress on the importance of knowing foreign languages, led in my own case to using some of my time in college to learn German and then to undertaking the translation of his Epistemological Problems of Economics—something that has always been one of my proudest accomplishments.

Today, von Mises's ideas at long last appear to be gaining in influence. His teachings about the nature of socialism have been confirmed in the first-hand observations of honest news reporters with extensive experience in Soviet Russia, such as Robert Kaiser, Hedrick Smith, John Dornberg, and Henry Kamm. They are being confirmed at this very moment by the actions of millions of angry workers in Poland.

Some of von Mises's ideas are being propounded by the Nobel prizewinners F.A. Hayek (himself a former student of von Mises) and Milton Friedman. They exert a major influence on the writings of Henry Hazlitt and the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education, as well as such prominent former students as Hans Sennholz. Von Mises's monetary theories permeate the pages of recent best-selling books on personal investments, such as those by Harry Browne and Jerome Smith. And last, but certainly not least, they appear to be exerting an important influence on the present President of the United States, who has acknowledged reading Human Action and has expressed his admiration for it.

Von Mises's books deserve to be required reading in every college and university curriculum—not just in departments of economics, but also in departments of philosophy, history, government, sociology, law, business, journalism, education, and the humanities. He himself should be awarded an immediate posthumous Nobel Prize—indeed, more than one. He deserves to receive every token of recognition and memorial that our society can bestow. For as much as anyone in history, he labored to preserve it. If he is widely enough read, his labors may actually succeed in helping to save it.


*Copyright © 1981, 2021 by George Reisman. All rights reserved.

**George Reisman, Ph.D., is professor of Economics at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management and is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996). 

  

 

 

 





Thursday, September 16, 2021

My Doctor Is Crazy Joe, the Gangster

I can’t think of a better reason to avoid vaccination against Covid-19 than Biden’s attempt to force it.

His absurdly illogical performance in evacuating from Afghanistan, in which he withdrew our troops before our civilians and Afghan allies and $83 billion of weapons, marks him as a mental basket case.

He also established a public record as an extortionist, i.e., his public statement that he got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired by threatening to cut off a billion dollars of aid if the prosecutor were not fired within the few remaining hours of Biden’s trip to the Ukraine.

Follow Biden’s “medical advice” (orders) only if you’d like a doctor who puts his shirt, slacks, and shoes on before putting on his underwear and socks and who’ll make your life miserable if you don’t obey him. 

Monday, September 13, 2021

Hardcopy of Capitalism 50% Off; Answer to an Ignoramus on Socialism

The hardcopy edition of my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is now on sale at half price: $47.50, down from $95. This is the book that proves, among countless other things, that capitalism is characterized both by class harmony and by racial harmony.

For my answer to an ignoramus on socialism, go to https://twitter.com/GGReisman/status/1437569442632716289?s=20

Saturday, September 04, 2021

Capitalism Is A System of Class Harmony

Capitalism is a system of class harmony, in which the accumulated wealth of the capitalists, i.e., their capital, is the source of the supply of products and the demand for labor, and progressively enriches wage earners. For proof, see my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.

The result is that today the average wage earner in a capitalist country has a higher standard of living than did the kings and emperors of the past, such as Augustus  Caesar, Louis XIV, and Queen Victoria.

Again, for proof, see my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, available in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover formats at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=capitalism+a+treatise+on+economics&crid=22C1FCIAIQYIZ

Thursday, September 02, 2021

Biden’s Ministry of Truth and Some Actual Truth on A Deeper Subject.

Just as the reduction in the chocolate ration in 1984 from 30 grams a week to 20 was heralded as an increase to 20 grams, so Biden’s catastrophic failure in Afghanistan is being described as a success by our Ministry of Truth.

*****

This is my response to the tweet at https://twitter.com/TurtleOtter/status/1433400329123532803?s=20

You seem to think that the wealth of the rich is in the form of consumers’ goods, like mountains of spaghetti, the eating of which makes them monstrously fat, while their overworked, exhausted employees are lucky if they can get a handful of beans to eat.

The truth is that the wealth of the rich is overwhelmingly in the form of MEANS OF PRODUCTION, including the funds with which to pay wages. As such, it is the base of the supply of goods and the demand for labor. The greater it is, the higher is the general standard of living.

The more the government takes from the rich, the less is the supply of capital goods, the demand for labor, and the general standard of living. For further discussion, see my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, available at 

Amazon.com: capitalism a treatise on economics




Tuesday, August 31, 2021

"The Wages of Sin" Is Biden

“The wages of sin is death,” declares the Bible. Just so, the reward of election fraud is Biden and the disasters and deaths stemming from his mental incapacity and the corruption of his mind by far-left lunacy. 

If a soldier or marine voluntarily gave his weapon to the enemy, he would be court-martialed. This standard should apply to Biden and the whole General Staff of the Army and Marine Corps—to anyone who could have fought our gift of $83 billion of weapons to the Taliban but didn’t. 

Nothing could be a clearer example of giving aid and comfort to the enemy than this massive gift of weapons. 

In failing to evacuate them, Biden and his regime have sentenced an unknown number of American citizens and Afghan allies to torture and murder by religious fanatics. They have given our country a reputation for unreliability and dishonesty that it will carry for decades. 

Friday, August 20, 2021

A Few Words on the Trapped Americans

Where were Joe’s keepers when he committed the Afghanistan fiasco? Could any of them have been working for Kamala Harris and seen an opportunity to open a path towards her replacing him? Ugh. (Beyond her lies Nancy Pelosi. Deep doo?. It doesn’t’ get any deeper.)

Hopefully, the thousands of Americans and their Afghan helpers still trapped behind Taliban lines will get out, alive and unharmed.

If they do not, moral responsibility for their possible torture and murder will rest with the print and online media, whose policy of deliberate news suppression in October, 2020 covered up the Hunter Biden story and made possible Biden’s election. 

Thursday, August 19, 2021

A Woke Solution for Americans Trapped in Afghanistan

Here's a woke solution for Americans trapped in Afghanistan: buy a painting by Hunter Biden. That, minus a substantial commission, would allow for a still significant payment to the Taliban, and thus free an American.

Matters could be speeded up if Joe, the rest of his family, and the members of his Cabinet could temporarily be made students of Hunter and thus learn to paint as well as he does. They, in turn, could have students of their own, which would increase paintings output by a further multiple.

Soon canvases would appear signed by such notables as “Student of Jen Psaki,” “Student of General Mark Milley.” In short order, sufficient funds might be raised to free all the Americans and all their Afghan allies as well.

Of course, such an arrangement would bear no resemblance to the United States of old, when Pres. Jefferson refused to pay tribute to the Barbary Pirates and, instead, defeated them in war.

But Jefferson has been discredited, because he owned slaves, the intellectual foundations of which institution he totally destroyed in The Declaration of Independence.

He’s been discredited by Marxists/Socialists/Communists, whose entire philosophy and program rest on slavery, which they plan to impose now, today, in the present-day world, as soon as they take power.

Such people have virtually no standing to discredit anyone. They themselves are at the bottom of the rungs of hell.

Most people do not know this, because they are largely uneducated. They have no knowledge of history, or very much knowledge of anything else. Thus, they cannot see what has happened to our country.

Monday, July 05, 2021

General Milley Must Go

In recent testimony before Congress, General Mark A. Milley, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in attempting to justify the teaching of "critical race theory" to the military, described how he had read, among others, Marx, Mao, and Lenin.

I believe that General Milley is, indeed, widely read in the works of the philosophical enemies of the United States and agree with him that such familiarity is actually something worth achieving.

However, this is true only in a context in which one is at least equally well read in the works of the philosophical supporters of the United States and capitalism, i.e., has read and studied the works of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, and is thus in a position to answer Marx et al.

Let the works of Mises and Rand be taught throughout the educational system and Marxist propaganda will be no threat. However, this is not the case today. What we have is massive Communist propaganda and virtually no genuine education whatever in the nature of capitalism and individual rights.

What General Milley’s testimony has shown is that he is better qualified to be a Russian or Chinese general than an American general and that he is actually utterly unqualified to be in charge of the defense of a capitalist country, or, indeed, play any significant role whatever in that defense.

Saturday, June 12, 2021

This Blog’s Subscriber Service Is Changing Soon

The Feedburner subscription service, which automatically sends you new posts to this blog, will stop sending them in July, 2021. As a result, in a few days, subscriptions to this blog will be transferred to another such service, called follow.it.

If you are an e-mail subscriber to this blog, you will receive a message from follow.it, saying that you have been signed up for their service. If you would like to continue receiving Reisman's blog in your email, please click on the “confirm” link in that message. You will then receive an email asking you to reply. Please do. You will be taken to a site with ads, which you can ignore.

Feedburner will remain in place during this process, meaning that you may get two emails for each of Reisman's posts during this transition period. Your understanding of this situation is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time and for your continued subscription to Reisman's blog.

Thursday, May 27, 2021

Today’s Democrats: The Party of Poverty, Pain, and Punishment


Today’s Democratic Party, with its Green New Deal, is the Party of Poverty, Pain, and Punishment. Reminiscent of the Soviet Communists, it seeks to impose massive human sacrifice on the living for the alleged sake of the unborn. Indeed, it is worse than the Soviet Communists.

The Soviet Communists impoverished and killed for the alleged sake of promoting prosperity and life in the future. Today’s Democrats and Greens seek to impoverish and kill for the sake of promoting more impoverishment and death in the future—a permanent state of poverty and death.

For example, they demand that people give up gasoline, electricity, and red meat today in order to limit the rise in the global mean temperature and sea levels in the year 2300.

While the Soviets were ready to kill for the alleged sake of industrializing, the Dems/Greens are ready to kill for the sake of deindustrializing. The former claimed to want the Industrial Revolution; the latter want to destroy it. Economically, intellectually, and morally, they seek a new Dark Age.

The pretext of excess CO2 emissions is a lie. Any possibility of CO2 being a problem could easily be solved by switching to atomic power. That would be a workable solution. But the Dems/Greens are phobic when it comes to atomic power.

The psychological problems of the Dems/Greens don’t stop with a phobic reaction to atomic-power and a willingness/readiness to cause mass impoverishment and death. Many of them also deny one of the most obvious facts of reality: the biological differences between men and women.

These differences are comparable in their sharpness to the difference between day and night, left and right, front and back, up and down. Yet our culture is being destroyed by a virtual epidemic of mental incapacity to recognize such obvious facts.

We have become a society without genuine intellectuals. Today’s fraudulent intellectuals should be ignored. Anyone in quest of truth must turn to the past, especially the last two centuries and the writings of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. My Capitalism is a good introduction.


Saturday, May 01, 2021

Rights Are Not Privileges

The fact that the individual rights of blacks have often been ignored in the United States while the rights of whites have generally been respected does not reduce the rights of whites to “privileges.” The actual logical inference is that the rights of all must be respected.

Reducing the rights of whites to “privileges” means that they can be revoked at the whim of government officials. The American Revolution was fought precisely in order to prevent such a thing.

Today, there are whites and blacks with privilege. Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden are examples. They apparently have the privilege of engaging in illegal behavior without legal consequences.

The members of BLM and “Antifa” have the privilege of robbing and looting stores, setting buildings on fire, and assaulting and killing police officers, without suffering legal penalties.

If I had privilege, which I do not, I would use it to slap the face and kick the rear of anyone who told me that my unalienable individual rights were mere privileges that mobs and/or politicians could justly revoke.

To learn more, read my essay “Capitalism: The Cure for Racism,” available for 99¢ at https://amzn.to/3fL4xoK 



Monday, April 05, 2021

“White Supremacy”

What is “white supremacy,” besides being an expression I had virtually never heard of until a few months ago when it was shoved into the world as an allegedly powerful and dangerous force?

Is it a belief, a doctrine, a political movement? What are its sources? Who are its leaders? What is its leading book(s)? What is its program? Is it real or a manufactured bugaboo designed to frighten people who have the mentality of small children?

What can it possibly do in the way of harm to anyone that is not already fully prohibited by existing laws, such as those against murder, robbery, extortion, arson, and rape?

Is “white supremacy” intended to serve as a pretext for vigorous law enforcement against a phantom phenomenon, thereby counterbalancing the lack of law enforcement against real, highly destructive movements such as BLM and “Antifa”?

To learn more about the subject of racism, see Reisman’s Capitalism: The Cure for Racism, available for 99¢ at https://amzn.to/3fL4xoK







Thursday, March 25, 2021

Two Tweet-Threads on Gun Control

Capitalism Magazine has retweeted much of my thread on gun control as properly applying to the GOVERNMENT! (See https://twitter.com/CapitalismMag/status/1374753384612397065?s=20)

The Bill of Rights is a set of gun controls on the government. Each of the rights enumerated implicitly says that the government shall not use its guns to violate that right.

The Democratic Party, with its program of ever-increasing government power is the party of ever-growing gun violence.

Bernie Sanders and all other socialists are necessarily advocates of massive, limitless “gun violence.” Try to imagine socialism with the government deprived of the power to use guns or other weapons to seize and control the use of property. Next, imagine a square circle.

To learn more, see my essay, “Gun Control: Controlling the Government’s Guns,” 99¢ at https://amzn.to/2nVAVfM

From December 12, 2013.

Everything a government does rests on the use of force. No law actually is a law unless it is backed by the threat of force.

Every law, regulation, ruling, edict, or decree rests ultimately on the threat to kill you if you disobey it, even a parking ticket.

Unpaid parking ticket: arrest warrant; resist arrest—get clubbed over the head; resist with a weapon—get killed.

Behind a fine is a club and the threat of jail; behind the threat of jail is a gun and the threat of death.

“Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen.”— Ludwig Mises

“The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning.”—Ludwig von Mises

Government is an institution of destruction, injury, and death, fit to be employed only against common criminals and aggressor governments.

Government is a dangerous beast that needs to be shackled, caged, and constantly guarded.

The Founding Fathers of the United States recognized the dangerous nature of government when they wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights and Constitution are designed as shackles and a cage for the US government.

The Bill of Rights restrains the government. The Constitution confines it.

The welfare state is financed ultimately on a foundation of death threats that force you to pay the taxes that support it.

“Do-Gooders” do their alleged good at the point of a gun.

Gun Control: the government relies on its guns in everything it does. Real gun control means limiting what the government can do.

Guns in the hands of citizens serve as a check and balance on the guns in the hands of the government.

The psychopath Adam Lanza killed 26. 3,000 psychopaths employed by the government of Nazi Germany shot and killed 2 million.

If the 2 million Jews shot and the 4 million gassed had had guns, far fewer of them would have been killed.

 


Monday, March 08, 2021

Class Harmony, Not Class War

The discontent and unrest that followed the 2020 presidential election was, at least in major part, one of the innumerable destructive consequences of an almost 250-year-old error in economic theory made by Adam Smith: namely, the belief that profits are a deduction from wages. (See the first eight paragraphs of chap. 8 , bk. I, of The Wealth of Nations.)

This error is the basis of the Marxian exploitation theory, which holds that profits are stolen from wage earners by a comparative handful of capitalist exploiters who, under a system of unhampered, full-bodied, laissez-faire capitalism, reap enormous profits by compelling the masses of wage earners to toil eighteen hours a day for subsistence wages under brutal and dangerous working conditions that apply even to the labor of small children, whose work is necessitated by the insufficiency of the earnings of their parents. It is present, at least implicitly, in practically all debates about tax, spending, and labor and social legislation. (All references to Marx are to vol. I of Das Kapital.)

This view of things is the foundation of demands for the “expropriation of the expropriators” and the establishment of socialism, which will allegedly give back to the wage earners what the capitalists have stolen from them and continue to steal from them.

This view has been the foundation of most of the major policies of the Democratic Party at least since the time of Woodrow Wilson and the “progressive” movement, with progress being understood as movement toward socialism. Today, it is prominent as never before in the far-left agenda of the Biden Administration. Its influence has become so great that it permeates the thinking even of the alleged capitalist exploiters themselves, many of whom apparently seek redemption by pouring fortunes into the financing of far-left causes and so present the spectacle of capitalist “exploiters” themselves acting as veritable communists, following in the footsteps of Friedrich Engels, the wealthy capitalist who was both the collaborator and the financial patron of Marx.

The fact is that capitalists do not deduct profits from wages or “exploit” wage earners. Capitalists do not create the phenomenon of profit. The existence of profit is logically prior to the existence of capitalists. Indeed, if there were no capitalists but only manual workers producing and selling products, as Smith and Marx claimed was the case in their respective imaginary constructions of “the original state of things” and “simple circulation,” the rate of profit would be infinite. The truth is that the existence of capitalists serves to reduce the rate of profit. Indeed, their saving and the expenditure of their savings in the form of wage payments and expenditure for capital goods has served in the industrial countries of the world both to reduce the rate of profit to just a few percent and progressively to raise the standard of living of the average wage earner to a level far surpassing that of kings and emperors of past ages.

However ironic this may be, a good way to understand the truth about profits is by using the distinction Marx makes between simple circulation and “capitalist circulation.” Simple circulation refers to conditions in which workers produce commodities, “C,” which they sell for money, “M,” that they then use to buy other commodities, “C.” Marx describes this sequence as “C-M-C.” Under capitalist circulation in contrast, the starting point is not the production of commodities by workers but the outlay of money by capitalists, who pay for the construction of factories, for the machinery that fills them, for supplies of materials, and the wages of workers while the commodities later to be sold are in process of being produced. Marx describes this sequence, that constitutes capitalist circulation, as “M-C-M.”

As I say, what the capitalists are responsible for is not the phenomenon of profit but the first “M” in Marx’s “M-C-M” sequence, that is, for expenditures for capital goods and wage payments. These expenditures all show up, sooner or later, as costs of production that are deducted from the second “M” in Marx’s sequence, representing capitalist circulation.

Now this second “M” is equally present in simple circulation. In both types of circulation, it is the money for which the commodities produced are sold. It is sales revenues.

In simple circulation, while there are sales revenues, there are no monetary costs of production to deduct from those sales revenues, because there have been no prior outlays of money to bring in the sales revenues, costs being the reflection of such outlays.

Thus, Marx’s simple circulation is a situation in which 100 percent of the sales revenues are profit. There is also no accumulated capital in the form of a monetary book value of land, plant, equipment, or inventory, for no such assets have been purchased. (Their having been purchased would require capitalist circulation, which is precluded by the requirements of simple circulation.) Thus, we have a situation, in which not only do profits equal 100 percent of sales revenues, but also the rate of profit is determined by the division of that amount of profit by a zero amount of capital invested. Division by zero, of course, results in infinity.

In simple circulation, only workers receive incomes, but the incomes they receive are profits, not wages. In simple circulation, there are no wages paid in the production of products for sale. Such wages, and the expenditure for capital goods, come into being only under capitalist circulation. And as capitalist circulation intensifies, something which can be expressed by dividing the first “M” by the second in Marx’s sequence for capitalist circulation, the economy wide profit margin declines. This is because the costs of production emanating from the first “M” grow as the result of its increase relative to the second “M,” which is sales revenues. And, of course, the economy-wide average rate of profit on capital invested declines even further as a larger first “M” in Marx’s sequence results in a book value of capital assets that is greater than sales revenues.

In conclusion, what capitalists are responsible for is not the phenomenon of profit, but the expenditures that include wage payments and that show up as costs of production to be deducted from sales revenues and correspondingly reduce the proportion of sales revenues that is profit. The capitalists’ expenditures are also responsible for the accumulation of the monetary value of property, plant, equipment, and inventory/work-in-progress, which serves further to reduce the average rate of profit, as a smaller economy-wide profit margin is divided by a larger capital base.

A further point: The capital accumulated by the capitalists is not used to fill their bellies, as commonly alleged in cartoon depictions of capitalists as men who are very fat. On the contrary, the capital of the capitalists is the source of the supply of products that everyone buys, including, for the far greater part, non-capitalists, and is also by far the main source of the demand for the labor that non-capitalists sell. In other words, the capitalists’ capital is the source of enormous general economic benefit. A classic example of this is Henry Ford’s accumulation of a vast personal fortune, which served to enable millions of ordinary people to have automobiles and tens of thousands to have gainful employment in producing them. Again, the capitalists’ capital is the source of the supply of products that non-capitalists buy and of the demand for the labor that non-capitalists sell.

And one last point: Capitalists work. Their ranks include the primary workers in the economic system: those who supply guiding, directing intelligence at the highest level in firms. This work is a labor of thinking, planning, and decision making, rather than manual labor. As such, their income tends to vary with the size of the capitals they employ. Just as a worker digging a hole with a steam shovel, is still the party who digs his vastly larger hole than a worker using a conventional shovel, because it is he who supplies guiding, directing intelligence to the steam shovel, so a capitalist with ten billion dollars of capital may produce ten times the output as one who has just one billion of capital. In both instances it is the capitalist who is the party who supplies the guiding, directing intelligence at the highest level. Thus, just as one says, it was Columbus rather than his crew members who discovered America (or did say this in the days when people identified with the ideas, values, and perspective of Western Civilization rather than the racial membership of their ancestors), so it is capitalists like Ford, Rockefeller, and their contemporary counterparts who should be named as the producers of their companies’ products. The employees are to be regarded as their helpers (the “help”) in producing their, the capitalists’ products.

I have certainly not answered in these few paragraphs every possible question concerning the justice and fairness of the profits earned by capitalists, but I believe I do so in my book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (see in particular, pp. 473-500 and 603-673.) So, I will simply stop here and hope that the reader will turn to those pages and read and study them. If enough people do so, that will be the end of Marxism and all of its destructive consequences resulting from its doctrines of exploitation and class conflict, for people will then realize that there is no exploitation of labor and no class conflict under capitalism and its economic freedom but rather a profound class harmony between capitalists and wage earners.

Sunday, March 07, 2021

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

The hardcover edition of Reisman’s Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is now on sale for almost 50% off, at $49.95. For more information, and to purchase, go to https://amzn.to/3qr0ijy







Tuesday, March 02, 2021

Stop Amazon from Banning Books

According to Tucker Carlson (03/01/21) and Ben Shapiro (http://binged.it/3b9qz1x) Amazon has started banning pro-right books and videos, calling them “hate speech.“

PROTEST: Call Amazon customer service at 888-280-4331 and ask to speak to a supervisor.

Ask if Churchill should not have spoken with hatred against Hitler and Nazism.

Ask if Amazon plans to ban Marx’s Das Kapital, a book so full of hate that it promotes class WAR and mass murder. (Amazon shouldn’t because, among other things, everyone should have ready access to an objective record of what Marx says.)

And please retweet to get the word out. If Amazon hears from a few thousand people, it may drop this vicious policy.

Monday, February 22, 2021

Washington's Birthday

Today is the birthday of George Washington, the Father of Our Country. In his time, the ownership of slaves was a widespread practice, and he owned some. But his principles and those of the country he founded guaranteed the end of slavery.

They did so by positing for the first time in human history the existence of individual rights to which laws and governments were to be subordinate

Far-leftists have no right to condemn Washington for owning slaves, for they advocate the fresh imposition of slavery, universal slavery, in the form of socialism. Under socialism, everyone is compelled by force to work for the government. Socialism is forced labor camps—Gulag.

Such camps are what those who tear down  the statues of Washington want to construct.


Saturday, February 20, 2021

NY Times Distorts the Facts about the Texas Freeze

See The New York Times article HowTexas’ Power Generation Failed During the Storm, In Charts - The New York Times(nytimes.com)

In an effort to get wind and solar power off the hook, the article blames the Texas power failure mainly on natural gas, claiming that “Natural gas production froze, and so did the pipelines that transport the gas.” It “was hit hardest.”

The Times needs to explain how natural gas can freeze in a surrounding environment of 90, when its freezing point is almost minus 3000.


Thursday, January 28, 2021

A Challenge to Communists, Socialists, and “Progressives” to Debate

Resolved: “Marxism/Socialism, Is A Sociopathic Philosophy Conceived In Gross Error And Ignorance, Culminating In Economic Chaos, Enslavement, Terror, And Mass Murder.”

For the affirmative: George Reisman, the Capitalist Professor.

For the negative: Bernie Sanders?, AOC?, any Communist, Socialist, or “Progressive” anywhere.

The affirmative position is available in written form in both Kindle and paperback versions at https://amzn.to/2N44uTu


Sunday, January 24, 2021

How House Republicans Can Launch an Offensive for Freedom of Speech

Nutsy Nancy is trying to impose a speech code on the House of Representatives. The code would bar words that indicate gender, such as father and mother, daughter and son, husband and wife, and replace them with gender neutral terms such as parent, child, spouse, etc.

Republicans can stop this nonsense by standing up one after another, hopefully all 211 of them, and announcing that they speak standard English not 1984 Newspeak, and so will go on using such words as mother and father…husband and wife, etc.

They should remind Nutsy Nancy that the First Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits Congress from making any law that abridges the freedom of speech, which this speech code clearly attempts to do.

And if it is not a law, because of its being prohibited by the Constitution, then it is without force and thus can be ignored, and will be ignored, at least by all House Republicans.

The Republican speakers should insist that their remarks be taken down and reprinted verbatim in all relevant Congressional documents, such as The Congressional Record.

If Republicans do this, and thus role back the anti-free speech movement in Congress, then perhaps others will be inspired to do the same thing on college campuses.


Friday, January 22, 2021

A Mouse Is Not A Lion: 1/6 Was Not 9/11

The frequently heard demand for a 9/11 type commission to deal with a mob’s vandalism at the Capitol on January 6 implies that these two events were commensurate. Such a claim is laughably absurd.

Almost 3,000 innocent people were killed on 9/11, most in two collapsing skyscrapers rammed by airplanes loaded with highly flammable jet fuel.

On 1/6, ONE innocent person was killed, in what appears to have been a scuffle between some rioters and a Capitol police officer, who died. One of the rioters was shot and killed by the Capitol police. Three people died from medical emergencies, such as a heart attack or stroke.

As for property damage, on 1/6 it was not what were the world’s two tallest skyscrapers at the time, plus part of the Pentagon, plus three commercial jet passenger planes, but some broken glass.

Nevertheless, on the basis of this absurd equivocation between 6/1 and 9/11, a cabal of radical Leftists in the House of Representatives rammed through the impeachment of the President of the United States. The House was turned into a lynch mob.

Those who claim that 6/1 was similar to 9/11 are unfit to disseminate the news or hold public office. They are intellectually and morally despicable. They deserve the profound contempt of all mankind.