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We’ve Lost Hollywood, The Media And The Universities To The Hard Left. Can We Win Them Back?

June 27, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

As Americans take their politics to the street, comparisons abound with 1968. It is worth recalling a less kinetic showdown in that summer of urban strife and protest.

In a now inconceivable piece of broadcasting, the ABC network set the writers William Buckley and Gore Vidal against each other in a saga of debates. Buckley, the prince of organised conservatism, drawled the case for order and tradition. Vidal, a hedonist if not a progressive, defended the changes of the day. In retrospect, the two shared much, not least the high-born airs that are more overt in New England than England. Still, theirs was an ominous contrast of world views, prefiguring 50 years of culture war.

Whoever was “right”, the evidence that liberalism won continues to amass. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled to extend LGBT rights. It also frustrated President Donald Trump over the treatment of young undocumented migrants. And this is after the right’s Long March through the judiciary, masterminded by the Federalist Society and other campaign groups. Away from the recent cases, which dealt with statutes, the call for the strictest possible adherence to constitutional text has the romantic aura of all lost causes.

The failures do not end there. Take immigration. When conservatism hardened into a movement in the mid-20th century, 5 per cent of the US population was foreign-born. Now the level is near an all-time high at 14 per cent. Or take the status of gay people. Public opinion on same-sex marriage has flipped from two-to-one against to two-to-one in favour since the millennium.

There have been consolations along the way. The military is more revered than during the Vietnam war, when returning troops donned civilian clothes before braving the streets. Out-and-proud atheists are still amazingly scarce in frontline politics. The abortion rate is at its lowest since it became legal.

In the round, though, “movement conservatism” is most notable for the gap between its political success and actual outcomes, at least in the realm of culture. Its organisational flair, its ecosystem of journals and think tanks, even its elected presidents have stood athwart history, yelling “stop!”, as Buckley suggested. If anything, history sped up. The recent statue-felling is just the outward expression of decades of social change.

The best the movement can say is that, lacking a control experiment, we cannot know how much more liberal the US would now be had the New Right never emerged. As an argument, I suppose it will have to do.

None of this is written with a Vidalian smirk. Even we who tend to his view on things must see that conservatism has bleak truths to impart: about the fragility of order, the perverse consequences of well-meaning change, the loss of the individual in the push for group rights. Zealots for change who give no quarter to conservatism’s insights are prone to over-reach. In fact, it is not obvious on which side a strict liberal, in the old sense, now belongs.

The point here is not to crow, then, but to record the ultimate failure of a movement that has appeared so formidable. And also to explain where it went wrong. It is not teleological inevitability, after all, that societies become more liberal over time. Two mistakes stand out.

First, starting with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, social conservatives threw in their lot with free-market economics. Capitalism is miraculously good at lots of things. Fostering stable communities, a sense of national belonging and deference to the sacred are not among them. Not only did Vidal’s agenda win, then, but, by egging on the supply-siders, Buckley was complicit in his victory.

Second, politics turns out to be far downstream of culture. Doctrinal conservatives stormed the three branches of government handily enough, but not Hollywood, the publishing industry, academia and other trades that form our habits of mind without our knowing it. The best the right did was set up parallel bodies, such as Fox News, and even these often address true believers.

Conservatives resent the infusion of universities with critical theory and other relativist lines of thought. If it matters that much, the burden is on them to clamber into the arena and compete. It is a glacial turnaround job, yes, but only because it was decades neglected in favour of more obvious spheres of power. The movement does not want for lawmakers or jurists. It wants for professors.

Watching back now, Vidal was more lethally epigrammatic, Buckley a shade better in deep debate. In the studio, the culture war was closely fought. Outside, ever since, the same cannot be said.

This article first appeared at ft.com.

Photo by Ahmet Yalçınkaya on Unsplash

Entrepreneurship Is The One Institution We Can Rely Upon To Maintain A Prosperous And Civil Society.

June 26, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

In this time of social unrest, Americans’ confidence in our institutions is in decline. A sample from Gallup’s frequent annual poll includes these selected comparisons between 2019 (latest available data) and 2000.

% Confidence in Institutions (Great Deal + Quite a lot)
	2019	2000
Congress	11	24
Big business	23	29
Newspapers	23	37
Banks	30	46
Small Business	68	57

Relatively few Americans declare confidence in political institutions, as represented by Congress. Roughly twice as many – but still less than a quarter of Americans – express more confidence in big business and banks. Newspapers, similarly, command only low levels of confidence. All the poll data from 2019 are lower than those from 2000, indicating across-the-board declines of confidence in institutions in general.

The Institution Of Entrepreneurship

Except for small business. Two thirds of Americans declare confidence in this institution, and that number is higher than in 2000. We can easily look beyond the structural definition of small business – which is, after all, defined by government statisticians gathering employment data – into the institution of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs are those individuals who shoulder the task of making things better for the rest of society. They are society’s optimists. They recognize current conditions for what they are – and then imagine a future in which conditions are better. Then they sacrifice themselves to bring that future about, expending capital and labor now for the prospects of revenue in the future. That future is uncertain – entrepreneurs do not know if their initiative will be as well-received by customers as they hope it will. They press on anyway, their goals being discovery and achievement and making a difference, more than profit.

In this sense, entrepreneurs perform the kind of social function that is badly needed in a time of lost confidence in institutions. Having little time for the rear view mirror and gazing intently through the windshield at the road ahead, they substitute sanguine imagination for everyone else’s dissatisfaction and disappointment with the status quo. They don’t dwell on past injustices, as so many young people seem inclined to do today; they’d rather concentrate on what is possible in the future. When they see barriers they dismantle them.

Solving The Problems Of Others

Entrepreneurs are problem solvers – and the problems they solve are those that their fellow citizens (all potential customers) deem most pressing. If you’re looking for a solution to a problem, seek out an entrepreneur rather than an elected official or bureaucrat.

Entrepreneurs’ problem-solving technique combines empathy with rigorous cause-and-effect thinking. Empathy is the entrepreneur’s tool to understand why people – why society – feels a certain way. What does dissatisfaction stem from? Why do people feel uneasy the way they do? Entrepreneurs take society’s pulse and measure society’s level of pain. From this input, which is largely emotional, they try, as rigorously and logically as they can, to reverse-engineer a cause-and-effect chain. If dissatisfaction and pain are the outcomes, what are the causes? Entrepreneurs are not policy-makers like politicians, whose aim is to appease. They are obliging and accommodating collaborators whose aim is to please.

Entrepreneurial Creativity

Entrepreneurship is a profoundly human, social and creative activity that changes our world for the better. In contrast to the destruction that our current social justice warriors seek to impose, entrepreneurs create new economic value via a transformative act of human imagination. Their ingenuity is limitless.

What are the entrepreneurial actions that result from this creative societal problem-solving disposition? Entrepreneurs start firms, grow businesses, research and introduce innovations, lower customers’ costs and increase customers’ convenience. Their guiding principle is that whatever customers want, customers can have. The responsibility to improve life is given to the customer, in that they are tasked with communicating, as clearly as possible, what needs to be done and what needs to be provided and what needs to be changed to make them feel better. Entrepreneurs put their own private property at risk to create customer benefits that add up to social benefits for all. The customer is sovereign in this exchange – what they want is what is produced. If they stop wanting it, entrepreneurial production ceases.

Contrast this with political action. Politicians put none of their own private property at risk. In fact, they steal property from some citizens, through taxation and debt (which is a tax on future citizens), in order to redistribute it in some new form to a different set of citizens. They appease one group of citizens with the property of another group. Where the entrepreneur’s collaborative deal with customers is win-win (entrepreneurs make profits when customers approve their initiatives), the politicians’ deal always involves loss. The politician achieves office when an opponent loses an election, and makes policy that imposes loss on some part of the population. Politicians deal in losses, entrepreneurs deal in benefits.

Individual Action, Social Benefits

Society would be happier and healthier if we turned to entrepreneurs for all our solutions, and to politicians solely to protect the system of private property and freedom of contract that makes entrepreneurship possible. It would be healthier still if we were to encourage the spirit of entrepreneurship in a larger group: the spirit of service to fellow-citizens through innovative technological problem-solving. The measure of success for this system is what historian and economist Deirdre McCloskey calls “trade-tested betterment”. What she means by that is the customer-determined improvement in the quality of life (i.e., betterment) validated by customers buying or not buying what entrepreneurs offer as potential solutions to their problems and their pain (i.e. trade-tested).

If those who protest and complain today were themselves to adopt the entrepreneurial spirit in their own lives, they would find that they could not only build better platforms for progress, but also introduce more purpose, meaning and autonomy into their own lives. The entrepreneurial life is purpose-driven (solving others’ problems), a source of meaning (solving problems is more meaningful than carrying protest signs or throwing rocks) and the ultimate autonomous lifestyle (discarding dependency on employment wages or welfare payments).

Entrepreneurship is an American institution. Every immigrant who ever came here brought an entrepreneurial spirit: life will be better for me and others if I escape from the limitations of my current situation and join this open, betterment-demanding, property-protecting, innovation-welcoming country and see what I can do. The institutions that grew up with our innovating immigrants and their offspring are now largely decayed and decrepit. But entrepreneurship is one institution that there is no need to abandon. In fact, it’s necessary that we revive it.

Atlas Shrugged’s Strike by Active Minds Composes The Requiem for Seattle’s Mindless Grungelords

June 25, 2020/in Articles /by Mark Shupe

Not so long ago, someone told us “You. Can’t. Say. Anything.” This is America in 2020. Those who speak outside the narrative established by a hard-left mob that has marched through our institutions are blacklisted. If we fail to mount a forceful resistance, there’s a grim future awaiting us.¹

The story mentioned no names. “Inequalities still exist among us,” the newspapers were saying, “and cheat us of the benefits of our enlightened age. We fear an outbreak of violence,” the newspapers kept repeating.²

We’ve seen this coming. The casualty list has been growing for years. The purge is now white hot. What was a non-controversial statement last week is grounds for a death sentence tomorrow. It seems every day we see someone caving in with a groveling apology, declaring they suddenly have a lot to learn, swearing they’re looking forward to the moment they can meet with their hostage-takers and work toward a resolution that will appease them.¹

Their faces had a look of fear and cunning, the look of blackmail through virtue which he had learned to understand, as if they hoped to get away with it by means of nothing but his pity. They had counted on his pity and dreaded his anger; they had not dared consider the third alternative.²

No manifesto exists to guide the shock troops through their revolutionary occupation of our society. But recently, on the day Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy was forced to ask forgiveness for the sin of wearing a One America News t-shirt, praising the network, and criticizing the mainstream media, a maniacal Twitter storm from a leftist blogger laid out the belief system that under-girds the movement.¹

What he saw in her eyes was terror – not the helpless terror of struggling and failing to understand, but the terror of being pushed toward the edge where to avoid understanding would no longer be possible.²

Got that? Those who hold different views are deranged. They’re criminals. Dangerous. They shouldn’t be allowed to hold jobs where they might have some influence over others. They need to be forced into hard labor and sent to re-education camps, where they will be brainwashed to ensure they will engage only in Orwellian goodthink.¹

You keep pressing us for answers when we haven’t any answers to give. You keep beating us with logic – what’s logic at a time like this? What’s logic when people are suffering?²

The purge should have never been allowed to come this far. But the elitists who control universities, school boards, corporations, the media, sports leagues, have surrendered rather than stand on principle, as have a good number of high-profile individuals.¹

The boy’s teachers had delivered him to the thugs gun. As the soft, safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrusted to their care.²

Is there not one provost or school president or dean in higher education, one public school superintendent, one corporate CEO, one publisher or editor who will resist? Who will say that expressing thoughts that challenge the narrative is not grounds for banishment and dismissal? Who will say that no apology is needed for speaking freely?¹

Yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.²

It’s an increasingly common form of bullying, one that goes to the very heart of what defines us as a free nation. A society in which only pre-approved speech can be uttered is not healthy. It’s a tyranny, rancid and terror-filled. The only choice is to resist.¹

Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence, he had hobbled and groped through a brief, doomed effort, he had screamed indignant, bewildered protest, and had perished in his first attempt to soar on mangled wings.²

How did anti-conceptual slogans become proof of intellect? Why does joining a mob pass for courageous self-expression? When did the threat of violence and mass looting of innocent lives become justice?³

He saw a lout scurrying across a patch of lamplight, swinging a lethal pipe at a wall of glass panes, battering them down with animal relish, dancing like a gorilla to the sound of crashing glass.²

The cultural civil war that has been simmering underneath the surface is now boiling. Consider that as much as the protests can largely be described as peaceful, they have now led to more than a dozen deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage and theft.ˆ

He had seen, in a final image, the soul and essence of his enemies: the mindless face of the thug with the club. It was not the face that made him draw back in horror, but the professors, the philosophers, the moralists, the mystics who had released that face upon the world.²

The ‘abolish the police’ movement is the final piece needed to replicate the mentality of the New Left in the late 1960s–positions so crazy that only people completely out of touch with reality can advocate them with a straight face.ˆ

She watched them through the reports about bullet riddled cars, dismantled tracks, attacked trains, besieged stations, the futile doomed outbreaks, prompted by nothing but despair, ending in nothing but destruction.²

The images of woke white protesters brought to their knees across the country, apologizing to the mob for sins they did not commit, is jarring and disturbing. At the heights of elite power – in the corporate board rooms that have decided to blast us with emails touting their payment of indulgences to cement their status as allies.ˆ

Then announcing their secession from the country, as if fighting murder with suicide: went on to seize all property within their reach, to declare community bondage of all to all, and to perish within a week. Their meager loot consumed, in the bloody hatred of all for all, in the chaos of no rule save that of the gun, to perish under the lethargic thrust of a few worn soldiers sent out from Washington to bring order to the ruins.²

Do not apologize for what is important – your personal happiness, ability, and achievement. The looters in government, media and city streets demand our acceptance of unearned guilt because its all they have.³

¹ Center for Individualism – Woke Society in America Will Not Allow You To Be Conservative Anymore

² Atlas Shrugged, Part III, Chapters 6 and 7

³ Center for Individualism – John Taylor Gatto Coached the Natural Individualism and Independence of His Students

ˆ Center for Individualism – In This Cultural Civil War We Must Kneel To Ask Forgiveness For Sins We Did Not Commit

The Bourgeois Virtues of Poetic Justice Warrior Deirdre McCloskey

June 24, 2020/in Articles /by Mark Shupe

The Adventures of Superman was a syndicated television series that ran for six seasons. Running from 1952 – 1958, its opening catch phrase was Truth, Justice and the American Way. Because they are abstract concepts, they require critical thinking. Because they are virtues, they deserve concrete understanding.

As social justice would have it, these virtues are also in short supply. As Poetic Justice would have it, renowned economist and author Deirdre McCloskey has taken the supply-side challenge, and produced her marvelous trilogy of books – Bourgeois Dignity, Bourgeois Equality, and Bourgeois Virtues.

So who or what is bourgeois? Superman’s regular characters were news journalists for the fictional Daily Planet, and it was situated in a stylized version of New York City called Metropolis. Each episode was the standard good guys vs. bad guys fare, and the reporters portrayed journalistic integrity as a common attribute. They are also members of the bourgeoisie, as are bankers, retailers, attorneys, manufacturers, and teachers.

Truth

Essentially, the bourgeoisie are middle class urban dwellers who live by the classical liberal values of personal responsibility, equality of legal justice, nurturing families, and free market opportunity. In other words, they lived independently from the coercive authorities as described by McCloskey,

The intelligentsia became alienated from the bourgeois world from which it sprung. In painting, music, and philosophy, it wished to make everything difficult and technical, and it succeeded. It is prideful overreaching to think that social engineering can work.

Exemplars of first half 20th century journalistic character include Garet Garret and Henry Hazlitt, but soon after the Superman series ended, a new brand of journalism emerged in America. In the 1960s and 70s, New Journalism could no longer abide the bourgeois demands for objective news reporting based on events, facts, and results. Truth’s absolute is reason applied to reality, but New Journalism replaced facts with their subjective “truth” as writers immersed themselves into the story they covered.

It is no coincidence that their truths, collectively, are designed to bury the biggest story in the history of the (Daily) Planet. What McCloskey has honored as the Great Fact is the estimated, and marvelous, 3000% improvement in the human condition we all enjoy. Millions of Ignorati hold the Great Fact in contempt, while the benefits affect all socioeconomic classes, particularly the destitute. Newfound respect for the primacy of the individual is the Great Fact’s moral justification and catalyst.

This revolution occurred during an extremely short time period, and began in 18th century northwest Europe. Since then, many great minds have endeavored to come up with reasonable explanations, and McCloskey is no exception. It seems our celebrated economist may have invoked Occam’s Razor – the simplest explanation is the most likely. If today’s intellectual elites prefer Complexity Worship, the answer must be the elegance of Bourgeois Dignity,

The change in rhetoric has constituted a revolution in how people view themselves and how they view the middle class – the Bourgeois Revaluation. People became tolerant of markets and innovation.

Justice

Predictable in the Superman series was a police department overwhelmed by clever villains whose lifeblood is unwitting victims. To fit the requirements of a 23 minute television show, they were symbolized by a small group of destroyers operating outside civilized norms. However, in our postmodern world, police departments are overwhelmed by a much larger group of destroyers who operate as the ultimate insiders, and whose lifeblood is also unwitting victims.

In many jurisdictions, there is a cynical hierarchy of governors, mayors, and police chiefs who pander to the idea that human nature is flawed, property rights are optional, and justice is to be assigned according to identity group affiliation. In contrast, McCloskey’s book Bourgeois Equality promotes the idea that the human mind, endowed with reason, will naturally choose life-enhancing action when left free to do so,

What led to our voting rights, our plumbing, our primary schools, were fresh ideas that flowed from liberalism. A new system of encouraging betterment and a partial erosion of hierarchy.

As Deirdre brilliantly explains, “the Great Fact is not to be explained by material matters of race, class, gender, climate, culture, religion, genetics, geography, institutions, or nationality.” Those are the domain of collectivist hierarchies. In contrast, McCloskey’s individualist networks unleash the power of reason, encourage lives of purpose, and inspire confidence in our futures. This is the stuff of Poetic Justice, it rewards action in the pursuit of rational values. As McCloskey teaches in Bourgeois Virtues,

Justice insists on private property honestly acquired. The justice to pay willingly for good work, to honor labor, to break down privilege, to value people for what they can do rather than who they are. To view success without envy, making capitalism work since 1776.

The American Way

Admiration and respect for individual, productive behavior is central to the Superman series, and fundamental to the American Way. Here, McCloskey applies more critical thinking and understanding to the abstract concepts truth, justice, and education.

The leading bourgeois virtue is the Prudence to trade rather than to invade, to calculate the consequences, to pursue the good with competence. Another is the Temperance to save, to educate oneself in life and business, and to listen to the customer.

Accordingly, economist and Poetic Justice Warrior Donald Boudreaux acknowledges McCloskey’s achievements in his review of Bourgeois Dignity,

Appointed to faculties of English, history, and communications in addition to economics, she is above all an economist. Her contributions to our understanding of the modern world rank second to none among scholars from whichever fields you might name.

It was in this seismic cultural shift toward respect for entrepreneurship that McCloskey discovered the key to civilization. First proving itself in 17th century Holland, profit became the mother of all poetic justice as profit-seeking merchants and industrialists were held in high esteem. From her new book Historical Impromptus,

If capital accumulation or the rule of law had been sufficient, the Great Fact would have happened in Mesopotamia in 2000 BC. Why did it start in Holland about 1600 and England about 1700? The answer is liberty. Liberated people it turns out are ingenious.

This led Boudreaux to coin a new term for McCloskey’s moral justice, the Dignity Return. Where criminal justice punishes vice, and social justice punishes virtue, moral justice rewards action that enhances human life.

Because people are social beings, Boudreaux further explains this contribution to our understanding of Western Civilization, “Less were the relative amounts of dignity meted out to those who specialized in slaughtering people in battle or in idling about in manor houses counting the hectares on which peasants toiled. The dignity return to bourgeois activity rose relative to that of other occupations, so predictably, too, did the amount of bourgeois activity. People do respond to incentives!”

As Alberto Mingardi summarizes at fee.org, “McCloskey’s are uncommon books in that they are easily readable by non-specialists. Her rhapsodic style, in Bourgeois Equality as well as in its predecessors, is engaging and accessible to the layman. Here’s an economist who can write, and who is worth reading, too.”

We’d Have Been Better Off Reading A “For Dummies” Book Than Listening To Our Stupid Politicians.

June 23, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

We’ve lived through the most bizarre experience of human folly in my lifetime, and perhaps in generations. Among the strangest aspects of this has been the near universal failure on the part of regular people, and even the appointed “experts” (the ones the government employs, in any case), to have internalized anything about the basics of viruses that my mother understands, thanks to her mother before who had a solid education in the subject after World War II.

Thus, for example, are all governments ready to impose new lockdowns should the infection data turn in the other direction. Under what theory, precisely, is this supposed to help matters? How does reimposing stay-home orders or mandating gym closures mysteriously manage to intimidate a virus into going away? “Run away and hide” seems to have replaced anything like a sophisticated understanding of viruses and immunities.

Woke Society In America Will Not Allow You To Be Conservative Any More.

June 22, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

Not so long ago, someone told us “You. Can’t. Say. Anything.” This is America in 2020. Those who speak outside the narrative established by a hard-left mob that has marched through our institutions are blacklisted. If we fail to mount a forceful resistance, there’s a grim future awaiting us.

We’ve seen this coming. The casualty list has been growing for years. The purge is now white hot. What was a non-controversial statement last week is grounds for a death sentence tomorrow. It seems every day we see someone caving in with a groveling apology, declaring they suddenly have a lot to learn, swearing they’re looking forward to the moment they can meet with their hostage-takers and work toward a resolution that will appease them.

But it will never be enough. Apologies and appeasement only encourage the bullies. The Woke mob never sleeps. It lives to cancel the lives of others. We are warned: Conform or else.

No manifesto exists to guide the shock troops through their revolutionary occupation of our society. But recently, on the day Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy was forced to ask forgiveness for the sin of wearing a One America News t-shirt, praising the network, and criticizing the mainstream media, a maniacal Twitter storm from a leftist blogger laid out the belief system that undergirds the movement:

Mike Gundy cannot remain the OK State head coach. Too influential of a position in society. Fire him, unless he agrees to get extensive psychological help.

It’s time we acknowledge that conservatism isn’t just some political view. It means you’re the very bottom rung of society, dangerous and deranged. Some conservatives are trying to become better people. Great. But people who flaunt their conservatism are psychotic.

Conservatism means you don’t believe in equality. It means you want it all for yourself, and you’re willing to destroy other groups of people to take it all for yourself. That’s not a crime against the law. But it’s a crime against humanity – and we must acknowledge as much.

Conservatives CANNOT be teachers, police officers, doctors, lawyers, coaches, or bosses. It’s constitutionally unfair to others who are subjected to the conservative’s deranged judgment. Conservatives can do menial work, until they’re ready to join the human race.

We shouldn’t be cold hearted about this. But having a conservative as police officer, for instance, isn’t much different from having a KKK member as a police officer. It’s just not something that a civilized society can ever, ever tolerate.

We should rehabilitate any conservatives who are willing to try. We should pay for them to undergo therapy and retraining so they can understand the world around them. But first we must get them out of positions of influence, because they’re infringing on the rights of others.

Got that? Those who hold different views are “deranged.” They’re criminals. Dangerous. They shouldn’t be allowed to hold jobs where they might have some influence over others. They need to be forced into hard labor (“menial work”) and sent to re-education camps, where they will be brainwashed (“therapy”) to ensure they will engage only in Orwellian goodthink.

It’s not just conservatives who are being canceled, either. Some on the left are also being driven from their jobs and their former lives of status and privilege for not being sufficiently extreme.

The purge should have never been allowed to come this far. But the elitists who control universities, school boards, corporations, the media, sports leagues, have surrendered rather than stand on principle, as have a good number of high-profile individuals.

Is there not one provost or school president or dean in higher education, one public school superintendent, one corporate CEO, one publisher or editor who will resist? Who will say that expressing thoughts that challenge the narrative is not grounds for banishment and dismissal? Who will say that no apology is needed for speaking freely? Will anyone lift their head above the crowd and say “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”?

The Twitter storm printed above is no anomaly. It’s an increasingly common form of bullying, one that goes to the very heart of what defines us as a free nation. A society in which only pre-approved speech can be uttered is not healthy. It’s a tyranny, rancid and terror-filled. The only choice is to resist.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

The Chinese Communist Party Is Hard At Work Buying Influence In The Capitalist West And With Global Corporations.

June 21, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

The Chinese Communist Party is waging information warfare to shape American public opinion and influence our economic and government policy to their benefit.

The CCP doesn’t shape public opinion by buying billboards and TV ads. That kind of persuasion is far too American for them.

Instead, they co-opt our leaders and buy entire companies.

China’s methods are more sophisticated and insidious than simply passing off envelopes stuffed with cash to American agents of influence. Often, the agents don’t even know they’ve been recruited.

The CCP manipulates the self-interest of its targets, making them unwitting recruits.

Rarely do you hear one of these influencers say, “That Communist Party of China sure is great—we ought to let it run the show! Everyone get on board!”

Instead, they’ll say something along the lines of “doing business with the CCP is good ol’ free market capitalism,” or “we need a peaceful and harmonious world,” or “this is what any reasonable person would advocate.”

But everything they say and do—or don’t say and don’t do—advances the aims of the CCP.

Some of these influencers have a vested interest in the status quo.

Disney, the parent company of ABC News, owns a theme park and distributes films in the People’s Republic. Ditto NBC (Universal theme park/studio), CBS (Paramount Studios), and CNN (Warner Brothers theme parks and studio). Hollywood needs permission from China’s government to distribute its movies, so it gives the Communists in Beijing the “final cut.”

For decades, American businesses in China have been declining to speak up even when the CCP hacked their computers, stole blueprints, and produced knock-offs of their own products. Not only did they not file complaints against trade law violations, but they also went further and advocated continuing the same lopsided dysfunctional relationship that has empowered Beijing. They feared offending the regime that had absolute control over their business in China. They knew China could withhold or revoke permits, impose restrictions, and even confiscate their factories.

Wall Street financiers earn billions doing business with China’s Communist government. Beijing has given billions of dollars to Bridgewater Capital, a private equity fund run by Ray Dalio. Naturally, you will often see Dalio on TV telling us all how China’s Communist system is superior to our own.

Hank Paulson headed Goldman Sachs when he wasn’t U.S. Treasury Secretary. He and his fellow Wall Street bankers have been reliable partners in advancing the Chinese Communist Party line promoting globalism-über-alles. Wall Street is in it for the money and they either don’t realize or don’t care that they’re selling out the United States. Commerce has weakened their spirit of patriotism.

Wall Street has pushed hard to invest American pension and index funds in Chinese government-controlled companies. This not only shovels money to the dictators, but it also threatens to turn millions of ordinary Americans into Chinese agents of influence as they will be loath to stand up to the CCP lest their pensions and stock portfolios be endangered.

Beijing has directly paid McKinsey & Company management consultants, and McKinsey in turn tells its clients—including top companies and politicians—what a great and responsible business partner the CCP is.

Then there’s the import lobby. Everyone from Walmart and the Footwear and Apparel Association (really the footwear and apparel importers association) to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable depend on cheap imports from China. They lobby against tariffs on China, which coincidentally, is exactly what the CCP wants them to do. Note that many newspapers depend on advertising revenue from these importers and the retailers who carry their goods.

When these vested interests say it’s in “the national interest” for us to continue down the current path with China, they mean it’s in their own business interest.

The Chinese Communist Party understands the corrupting influence of foreign business entanglements. Financial journalist and author Eamonn Fingleton explains how the Chinese empire threw itself open to foreign capital in the 19th century.

“The foreign investors formed alliances with the local elites, who in effect became lobbyists for the foreign capital. Foreign money quickly suffused government and largely disabled independent policymaking. Soon the local elites came to identify with the foreigners,” he writes.

The Chinese Communists learned from that history and now run the same play, only in reverse. They bought American elites and use them as their lobbyists in Washington. The elites have come to identify their interests with the CCP’s interests. American businesses became Beijing’s apologists and lobbyists.

The CCP uses this same tactic around the world.

Germany, France, and Great Britain also have global corporations eager to drink from the river of CCP money. The European Union and Germany have been largely silent as Beijing crushes Hong Kong. Diplomats in Brussels and Berlin took their cue from corporations that don’t want to disrupt business with Beijing.

Remember this the next time you hear “we can’t go it alone, we must work with our allies” to take on China.

The CCP is adept at peeling off allies. It exploits the weaknesses of its targets to enlist them in its cause.

Businessmen like money, so Beijing offers lucrative commercial opportunities. Politicians need money, so the CCP has campaign donors to work its will on our political leaders. Policymakers need to believe they are big thinkers and strategic masterminds, so the CCP cloaks its nationalist agenda in the language of “globalization,” “globalism,” and “a post-national future.” Reporters are susceptible to groupthink and conventional wisdom. They self-censor in their intellectual insecurity and suck up to their powerful sources on Wall Street and in Washington, so the CCP plays to these weaknesses.

The CCP corrupts everything and everyone it touches—in our culture, in our economy, and in our government.

This article first appeared at American Greatness.

Minority-Owned Businesses Were Hit Hardest By Government Lockdowns, While Corporate America Raked In Windfall Cash.

June 20, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, minorities have disproportionately suffered from the virus’s health effects. A new study reveals that the government-mandated economic lockdowns have also hit minorities hardest.

In response to the outbreak and under the guidance of federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, state and local governments imposed quarantine orders and mandated shutdowns for many businesses deemed “non-essential.” Whether one supports lockdowns as a public health measure or not, they undoubtedly resulted in tens of millions of Americans and counting filing for unemployment and a sharp economic downturn.

Like all government interventions into the economy, the unprecedented shutdown has not affected everyone equally. The government’s response to this crisis contained clear carve-outs and favoritism for politically connected large corporations, yet imposed disproportionate negative impacts on less politically influential minority-owned small businesses.

A new paper from Professor Robert Fairlie of the University of California, Santa Cruz exposes this reality for all to see.

“The number of active business owners in the United States plummeted by 3.3 million or 22 percent over the crucial two-month window from February to April 2020,” Fairlie found in his analysis of nationally representative government survey data. “The drop in business owners was the largest on record, and losses were felt across nearly all industries and even for incorporated businesses.”

This is a troubling economic observation in and of itself, yet the data are even more concerning when broken down along racial lines.

“African-American businesses were hit especially hard experiencing a 41 percent drop. Latinx business owners fell by 32 percent, and Asian business owners dropped by 26 percent,” the professor reports. For context, white business owners only faced a 17 percent drop.

“Simulations indicate that industry compositions partly placed these groups at a higher risk of losses,” Fairlie continues. “Immigrant business owners experienced substantial losses of 36 percent. Female-owned businesses were also disproportionately hit by 25 percent.”

(Source: Robert Fairlie, University of California, Santa Cruz)

Remember that these abstract figures represent millions of actual people whose livelihoods were destroyed by the COVID-19 response. And as revealed in new reporting from the New York Times, the massive government programs passed as COVID-19 “relief” and “stimulus” efforts—we’re set to add a whopping $8 trillion in debt—are failing to help many of those who are most in need.

“Black-owned businesses also appear to be benefiting less from federal stimulus programs,” the paper reported. “Only 12 percent of black and Hispanic business owners polled between April 30 and May 12 received the funding they had requested.”

“It’s unfortunate that the businesses that need the funding, help and assistance the most are not receiving it,” the owner of a hair salon in the Bronx told the Times. “It’s like the Titanic. Where was the water coming up first? It was coming from the bottom. The people on the bottom were drowning first.”

Meanwhile, wealthy corporations are benefiting mightily from tax carve-outs in the congressional COVID-19 relief bill that was passed, the CARES Act.

Companies will receive more than $155 billion in benefits. This includes a whopping $862 million tax refund for the massive multinational corporation Boeing.

“The tax breaks were supposed to help ease companies’ red ink and keep paychecks flowing for workers,” Axios reports. “But most of the companies mentioned above, for example, have either furloughed employees or are pushing for buyouts.”

The lesson here is quite clear. When the government launches massive interventions into the economy and then passes 300+ page bills to “fix” the problem it helped create, political distortions will result in costs disproportionately borne by disadvantaged groups in society and benefits that skew toward the well-connected.

“I believe crony capitalism—the alliance between business and government—is the biggest problem of our age,” said economic historian Robert Higgs. “Crony capitalism, unfortunately, has a very active, organized, well-funded, and vocal constituency. It is the greatest threat to our prosperity and our freedom.”

“A free-market thwarts lobbying by taking the power that corporations seek away from government,” former Libertarian presidential candidate Mary J. Ruwart once said. “The only sure way to prevent the rich from buying unfair government influence is to stop allowing government to use physical force against peaceful people. Whenever government is allowed to favor one group over another, the rich will always win, since they can “buy” more favors, overtly or covertly, than the poor.”

The facts offered by this new paper and emerging COVID-19 data confirm theoretical predictions and offer a warning as to the unequal costs associated with mandating another lockdown if a “second wave” of COVID-19 emerges.

“Since bills keep piling up even when revenue isn’t coming in, many of these small [minority-owned] businesses face an uphill climb as it is,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board notes. “If they’re now getting back to work, and if they think they’ve taken the necessary precautions to do so safely, then the last thing they need is a politician ordering them to close shop for another month or two.”

Government lockdowns amid public health crises are ultimately a question of cost-benefit analysis. Whether one supports future pandemic lockdowns or not, we should all keep in mind that Americans do not bear the consequences of big government equally.

Brad Polumbo is a journalist and the Eugene S. Thorpe Writing Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education, at whose website this article first appeared.

It Is Class, Not Race, That Divides America.

June 19, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

Nothing is stranger in these tense days than the monotony of the inexact and non-descriptive mantra of “white privilege” and “white solidarity”—as if there is some monolithic white bloc, or as if class matters not at all.

In truth, the clingers, the deplorables, the irredeemables, and Joe Biden’s “dregs” have very little in common with those who so libel them, but superficially share supposedly omnipotent and similar skin color.

In the past, we saw such tensions among so-called whites in CNN’s reporting of the allegedly toothless rubes at Trump rallies, in the Strzok-Page text trove about Walmart’s smelly patrons, in the callous coastal disregard for the five-decade wasting away of the American industrial heartland, in the permissible elite collective disparagement of Christian evangelicals, and in the anthropological curiosity about and condescension toward such exotic, but presumably backward, Duck Dynasty and NASCAR peoples.

As a result, we have reached the surreal point at which the nation’s privileged whites on campuses such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, in the top echelon of politics, and the corporate and entertainment worlds, all deplore in the abstract something they call “white privilege” in others who have never really experienced it.

Of course, whatever such a thing is, they possess it in abundance but give no hint they have any intention of giving it up other than rhetorically or through the medieval concept of hair-shirt penance and Twitter confessionals. On the other hand, they are furious that middle-class whites do not join their theatrics of bending the knee and offering abject apologies for original sins.

Progressive, affluent whites run most of the blue states that oversee the big blue cities who hire the liberal police chiefs and their unionized officers. So how strange it is for liberal elite white people to damn supposed white privilege for the logical sins of their own ideology and governance.

Little in Common Culturally and Socially

Across the hollowed-out rust belt, in Appalachia, throughout California’s foothills and Central Valley, or in the rural South there are millions of white Americans who fail in terms of income, longevity, suicide rates, dependence on government assistance, and drug dependence statistically compared to nonwhite ethnic groups such as Punjabi immigrants, or Asian-Americans in general, and elite black and Latino minorities.

But more importantly, I can attest after living my entire life near the rural nexus of Fresno, Kings, and Tulare Counties, ground zero of the 1930s and 1940s Grapes of Wrath Oklahoma diaspora, that many whites by no stretch of the imagination could be defined as “privileged.” They are also not deplorable, irredeemable, or clingers to their guns and religion, much less dregs. Whatever they may be, they are not the beneficiaries at birth of any intrinsic advantage. They certainly did not enjoy the affirmative action of the white elite, defined by familial networks of like professionals, alumni influence, money, quid pro quo interning, incestuous leveraging, and good ol’ boy favoring.

So they have little culturally or socially in common with the elites of predominantly white coastal corridors from Boston to Washington and La Jolla to Seattle. The indifference of one to the other is mutual. There is no shared concept of “It’s a white thing, you wouldn’t understand.” Again, the white underprivileged feel about the white privileged about the same as the latter feel about them. In that sense, the generic “white” means very little.

Class matters, not superficial commonalities of race. Lower-middle-class or poor whites are more likely to live among poorer minorities than are elite, high-income whites whose experience of the Other is often confined either to career contacts with wealthy minority professionals of like tastes, education, backgrounds, and values—or their asymmetrical brief conversations with their own gardeners, housekeepers, and nannies.

The white underclass lives, schools, and works among the supposed Other; the overclass not so much. As a result, in our increasingly polarized racial society, the white overclasses have constructed a psychological edifice to contextualize the paradox of their own de facto racial apartheid and segregation.

In rural Fresno County, for example, most poorer whites—in terms of the local public schools, friendships, and social outing—have far more in common with Mexican-Americans and Hmong minorities and are of the same class, than they do with the wealthier and professional white classes in the Bay Area.

One reason that many African-Americans are often suspicious of white liberal elites is that they sense their apologetics serve as cheap penance for their apartheid lives of privilege. No one has much respect for a chronic dissimulator, appeaser, and apologist, even if superficially ideologically akin. A great unexplored topic is the African-American disdain for the white elites who so easily are superficially obsequious, not out of authentic desire to be equals but to preen among one another of their condescending paternalism. Only in the irrational venom toward black conservatives, who warn of the white progressive elite, do we see the extent of the white elite liberal’s superciliousness.

Racial Demagoguery vs. Class Appeals

One of the reasons that the Left and the Democratic Party feared and hated the Trump movement was its emphasis on class rather than race, a more fluid and potentially more dynamic appeal, and one with the potential to unite rather than divide those of different tribes.

Indeed, much of the left-wing focus on Trump’s supposed “racism” emerged in response to the fact that, unlike past Republican bogeymen such as Mitt Romney and despite his billions, Trump was not so easily caricatured as an elite grandee who felt uneasy among the nonwhite.

Whatever Trump was, he talked to blacks just as he talked to everyone else—same accent, same mannerism, same vocabulary. He was not going to feign a black patois and pander in the Joe Biden style of “Put y’all back in chains” or “You ain’t black,” or reinvent himself in Hillary Clinton fashion as a civil rights veteran possessed of a phony drawl, “I don’t feel no ways tired. I come too far . . . ” Think of the logic driving these white liberal elites: “Blacks cannot understand my good English, so I will descend into their poor grammar, diction, and syntax to feign ‘y’all’ and ‘ain’t’ and ‘no ways tired.’”

In the context of promoting real national healing or efforts to ensure a more equitable society, Americans need to understand something about many of the Antifa protestors in the streets; the professors at the barricades; the New York and Washington grandees; and the Pelosis, Schumers, and Bidens of the world. Their abstract lectures about “privilege,” public prostrations on their knees in the Capitol with Kente cloths, self-interested promises of additional billions of dollars for blue-city bureaucracies, and narcissistic virtue signaling with other superficial bumper stickers of the revolution condemning white anything or privilege something—all of it—amounts to nothing more than day jobs to be turned on at 9 a.m. and switched off at 5 p.m. The show means little to most of them except the otherwise necessary price for feeling good about doing even better in their own eyes.

After Mitt Romney’s recent walk in a Black Lives Matter protest, an interview on television ostensibly displayed his caring for the black underclass. Do we recall prior left-wing hit jobs on him as a racist during his 2012 presidential bid? There were so many, but two ads stand out.

One was that now-infamous secretly recorded tape in which, to a receptive audience, Romney expressed his credo “there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president [Obama] no matter what” because they are “dependent upon government . . . believe that they are victims . . . believe the government has a responsibility to care for them . . . these are people who pay no income tax.”

Romney apparently no longer believes that or least would not again utter it even in the presence of a friendly audience. But at the time he seemed oblivious to the fact that some of those 150 million Americans did not make enough income to pay income tax, or were unemployed and wished to work, or were disabled or were sick or were on Social Security without any other private assistance.

And second, there was a vicious, but equally effective hit ad against him, a quite unfair one starring his empathetic black garbage man. He complained that Romney, supposedly unlike his other more humane customers, never greeted or talked with him. (“We’re kind of like the invisible people.”)

My point is not so much that the smear ads were unfair, only that such propaganda worked.

Why so? Not because Barack Obama, Romney’s opponent, was any more concerned with the underclass than was Romney. Indeed, the Obamas likely by now have a far greater income and perhaps even a greater net worth than Romney and may soon surpass his number of luxury homes. They probably live an even more segregated existence.

Rather, both ads suggested that the “caring” of the public Romney was demonstrative, while the private Romney, if the public could just get a glimpse of him, was not so interested in personal empathy or outreach. A cynic might add, in this age of loud virtue signaling, that had Romney just spoken to his garbage man, or told a private meeting of supporters that “the 47 percent” really could be reached and persuaded that new policies would help far better than fossilized programs, he might not have found himself in the position of much later needing to feel the need to march in front of a national audience in a fashion that will have little if any effect on anyone but Mitt Romney.

Separatism Won’t Heal the Racial Divide

If one is actually troubled—indeed, really concerned about the plight of the nonwhite underclass, about systematic violence in the inner city, about the abject failures of the public schools, about the insidious spread of microaggressive racism, about virtual immunity given rogue cops—then one should recognize that virtue signaling from the gated estate, public confessionals, and medieval penance to square the circle of private apartheid have done nothing and will do nothing to address these problems.

We need not hear any more sermonizing, even from the iconic Michelle Obama, who ventures out from her multimillion-dollar Martha’s Vineyard estate or Washington mansion to lecture black Americans—millions of whom are now locked in their inner-city homes, terrified by looting and arson, and not a policeman to be seen—that they cannot become “too angry,” all before venturing back inside her chateau rooms with a view.

Instead, why not commit to real change? Why do we not integrate Sidwell Friends with those schools of the inner-city and of lower classes? Why do not our actors, the Pelosi grandchildren, the scions of the Zuckerberg, Gates, and Bloomberg families, all vow to place their offspring into the public schools, to become personally engaged with the less fortunate, and to pledge that their own fates will hinge on those of others? One can write a check for millions to the anti-Semitic and racist Al Sharpton and his charity and thereby do far less than simply tutoring one inner-city teen or taking him on as a personal intern to advise him how one gets ahead in America.

Indeed, why not eschew the third home, the walled compound, the private-jet getaway, and instead have a second home in an inner-city or Latino suburb or among the rural hamlets of the Central Valley or Western Texas? People do not want tele-condescension but rather face-to-face dignity. And dignity comes from being treated as an equal and a partner, not as a cause.

Why not have over to dinner those who make $50,000 rather than $500,000? Why not eschew giving a check to Black Lives Matter and instead quietly and privately help mentor African-American youth in the arts of business, or medicine, or law, and invest personal time in genuine devotion to those who do not have the tools and support network to ensure upward mobility? Or why not weld alongside, or hammer with someone you romanticize in the abstract as much as you avoid in the concrete?

The racial divide will not be healed by black separatist tribalism. It will not be bridged by the white apartheid guilt of the well off. It certainly will not end by this absurd medievalism of affluent, sequestered, well-meaning, white progressives championing black causes in ways that are loud and public, but ultimately selfish.

The next time we hear a lecture about caring from a woke Yale professor, or a sermon on systematic racism from a CEO, or more Hollywood confessional video drivel, we should pause and politely ask, “But where do your children go to school? And why do you live where you live? And dine with whom you dine?” Then remember class, not race, is what divides America—the truth that the upscale white progressive dares not utter.

This article first appeared at American Greatness.

The State Isn’t Going Crazy; It’s Going State.

June 18, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

15 years ago I published an essay entitled “The Thing Itself,” which argued that state power and “the law” were blunt instruments. I worried that we had lost sight of the limits of state capacity. The years since I made that claim have not been reassuring. The past six months have convinced me I need to reprise and refresh the argument, because we have clearly learned nothing.
The ”Thing Itself” is a reference to a mid-18^th century anonymous tract by Edmund Burke, in which he discusses “natural” and “artificial” government.

In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the Abuse! Observe, my Lord, I pray you, that grand Error upon which all artificial legislative Power is founded.

It was observed, that Men had ungovernable Passions, which made it necessary to guard against the Violence they might offer to each other. They appointed Governors over them for this Reason; but a worse and more perplexing Difficulty arises, how to be defended against the Governors? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

In vain they change from a single Person to a few. These few have the Passions of the one, and they unite to strengthen themselves, and to secure the Gratification of their lawless Passions at the Expence of the general Good. In vain do we fly to the Many. The Case is worse; their Passions are less under the Government of Reason, they are augmented by the Contagion, and defended against all Attacks by their Multitude.

The essay was a satire of Lord Bolinbroke’s argument about religion, and clearly does not reflect Burke’s mature perspective. But the argument now seems prescient: some people think government is the only possible solution to every problem that comes up. They “fall out only with the abuse,” saying that we need better people in office. If only we can elect “good” people, the argument goes, government itself will be good.

Others (and I am obviously of this view) would regard government as, at best, a difficult, dangerous, and exigent tool for accomplishing shared goals. Worse, once state power is invoked, there is no reason to expect government actors to limit themselves to “shared goals;” instead, the personal goals of the rulers dominate. Any government powerful enough to do what is desired must be expected to do more, and other, than desired.

One cannot escape the dilemma by reforms, the manipulation of structure. The monarch (“a single person”) becomes an oligarchy. But those few have the passions of the one, meaning that elites unite around their shared interests, and use the tax “commons” to finance their schemes.

It might seem that if we could only get power in the hands of “the people” we would finally have reached Nirvana. But “In vain do we fly to the Many, The Case is worse; their Passions are less under the Government of Reason, they are augmented by the Contagion, and defended against all Attacks by their Multitude.”

Wow: “they are augmented by the Contagion.” Burke is referring to populism, but the combination of populism and fears of a global pandemic fit the model pretty well.

In the essay I wrote, I told the story of a federal government scientist who entered a DC Metro station eating a candy bar. A DC Transit cop noticed this (they were passing on escalator, down vs. up) and admonished the scientist. Scientist nodded, ate the last bite of the candy bar, and headed toward the subway platform.

The cop hurried back down the escalator, and aggressively confronted the scientist. (Both cop and scientist were African-American women, if it matters). The cop roughed up the scientist, and then aggressively searched her, going so far as to put her hand up and feel around inside her bra.

Some people at the time thought the cop had just gone crazy. That view makes the mistake of “falling out only with the abuse.” This was not an abuse of the system; it is the system. To paraphrase Chris Rock, “That cop didn’t go crazy. That cop went cop!”

What I mean is that violence and literal enforcement of the law is not a distortion or perversion of state power, but is rather the essence of state power. The law said “no eating.” The person was eating. That person must be aggressively prevented from flouting the law. I’m not sure exactly what the scientist should have done, since she couldn’t spit out the candy bar. But when she ate the rest of the candy bar, after being told that eating was illegal, the state had to come down hard.

In the past few weeks, we have seen videos of police violence targeted at civilians. I started to say “innocent civilians,” but that’s not true. In an environment where a police order to “get off the streets, move away” has been issued, the failure to move away is very much like popping the rest of the candy bar in your mouth. The state, in the form of police violence, is asserting its power to control the population. Once you begin to see like a state, you recognize that failing to use violence to exert control would deny the nature, and in fact the very self-justification, of the enforcement power.

A government does other things also, of course, but the ability to survive and to use violence to force citizens to obey, is the core function of the state. Or, “the thing itself.” As Max Weber (1921)put it:

What is a ‘political’ association from the sociological point of view? What is a ‘state’? Sociologically, the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. There is scarcely any task that some political association has not taken in hand, and there is no task that one could say has always been exclusive and peculiar to those associations which are designated as political ones: today the state, or historically, those associations which have been the predecessors of the modern state. Ultimately, one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association—namely, the use of physical force…

…[A] state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence. Hence, ‘politics’ for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state. (pp. 396-7; emphasis added).

This brings us to the point, and to the problem. If you want to use the state to accomplish your goals, you cannot “fall out only with the abuses.” You have to recognize that it’s the nature of the state, the thing itself, to use violence against its own citizens.

Notice that I am not blaming the police, at least not directly. In my article 15 years ago, I pointed out that we had created a set of laws, not manners or cultural norms, but actual laws, that forced the police into the position of being baby-sitters and wardens of citizens. Once you recognize that the police in all those videos are focusing violence against citizens who have done nothing but disobey an order to disperse, you realize that “better police” is not the answer.

The only answer is “smaller state.” Because the excessively large state isn’t going crazy, it’s just going state.

Michael Munger is a Professor of Political Science, Economics, and Public Policy at Duke University and Senior Fellow of the American Institute for Economic Research.