Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

The Deep State Started In 1883, And Has Become Progressively More Dangerous Every Year Since Then.

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Every presidential administration finds some degree of internal resistance. That which has confronted the Trump Administration, however, seems to be the most active and aggressive ever. From “Anonymous”, to a record number of leakers, to physically hiding documents from the President, a large and active bureaucratic resistance is at work to stymie many of the Executive branch’s goals. Everything from secret military plans to embarrassing aspects of daily life in White House has been made public.

Indeed, the deep state (as the President and his defenders brand it) has been relentless. Nor is this purely partisan. The same deep state which is dogging Trump also prevented Obama from closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But where did the American deep state come from? Has it always been there?

In fact, the evolution of the deep state (and this choice of term, “evolution” as opposed to “creation”, will be explained later) is — some might say ironically — found in a nearly 140-year old  anti-corruption “reform” measure; one that was explicitly focused upon depoliticizing the civilian component of the United States government.

Let’s first describe what is called the deep state. It is the unelected part of the state that is professionalized to the point that it can be secure in its place and power regardless of political trends. It has the well-earned habit of ignoring political comings and goings, confident in its mastery of its realm. It knows the system better than any elected interloper, and it also knows its interests: survive and flourish even in the midst of upheaval.

A Fertile Soil

In the decades before the Civil War, a miniscule civil service corps was staffed via what would seem perfectly corrupt by today’s standards: the “spoils system.” Positions were doled out to individuals who had actively supported candidates or raised substantial campaign donations contributing to the victory of the newly-incumbent political party. With the defeat of the party in power, previous appointees would leave government employment and be replaced by the favored and distinguished supporters of the new administration. Needless to say, the federal bureaucracy was highly, explicitly politicized; but it was also tiny, bore few powers, and in any event almost completely overturned every four years.

With the onset of the Progressive Era came the movement to introduce “science” to many previously independent or loosely organized endeavors, and the spoils system soon came under attack. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act (1883) created a merit-based system of examinations and other requirements, and a salaried class of government employees.

Design flaws

In a massive, highly structured organization — in particular, one in which both the benefits of long-term service and uncommon protection from termination are present, incentives to protect the status quo loom front and center. Despite what we must assume the best intentions of the civil service reform movement were — to professionalize government bureaucracies, remove the inefficiencies associated with positions held for the duration of political cycles and (something else) — three flaws in the design of the reforms would set the stage for the next phase of evolution in the American civil service. One was structural, two were misjudgments.

The structural error was building a provision into the Pendleton Act allowing the President to increase the size of the civilian employment of government at will. While in many such accounts it was in the course of the New Deal or during the Cold War that such growth was exploited, this one was immediately evident: indeed, Grover Cleveland, the successor to Arthur, expanded the civil service from 16,000 to 27,000.

The first of two misjudgments was a failure to appreciate how the size and structure of the government itself might change. With more departments, agencies, commissions, boards, and the like, more sensitive military and intelligence functions, and a wide spate of other technical positions, the potential for activism within the civilian component rose commensurately.

And where at the time of the Act’s passage it covered approximately 12% of government employees, it now covers well over 90%. Further, a large state staffed with increasing numbers of experts necessarily competes with private interests in the employment market, and thus over time must offer compensation and benefits that rival those of firms.

The architects of the reform also failed to recognize that individuals who are hired are no less likely to have political inclinations than those awarded the same position out of sheer patronage. And where those who held positions in the spoils system were washed out of office in four years, a corps of (essentially) permanent bureaucrats facing the prospect of pensions and positions of greater influence amid zero public accountability are likely to be outwardly demure while no less political than their forebears.

So what happened?

The tremendous edifice that is the US civil bureaucracy — currently numbering somewhere around 2.85 million individuals — is, like any other huge organization, subject to both imposed and emergent orders. There are explicitly assigned executives and managers, labyrinthine organizational charts, job descriptions, pay grades, areas of responsibility, manuals of every sort, and every other standardization that informs (and hinders) the modern workplace.

But as the size of the bureaucracy has swelled it has also acquired a dissociated but consistent “consciousness”: a spontaneously-ordered, unstructured but undoubtedly focused and effective mechanism. Its major functions are to thwart political measures it collectively deems unpalatable, and to vigilantly protect the existence of the greater body within which it thrives.

No orders are issued, and there is no chain of command. It communicates by example: leaks reported in the news beget more leaks, anonymous tips spawn a rash of new tipsters. No lofty conspiracy theories are necessary; a massive army of bureaucrats in an era of free/highly affordable burner phones, file sharing services, and document scanning apps are more than sufficient to gum up the wheels of executive action.

There are no secret codes, no dead drops, and no shadowy agents meeting in parking garages in the dead of night: perhaps more dauntingly, the deep state coalesces from among a seemingly incalculable number of nondescript men and women with families and homes in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C. It receives a salary every two weeks, drawn upon the United States Treasury. Its atomic elements — individuals — coach Little League, go to Zumba classes, and generally have mainstream opinions. Many, no doubt, dismiss the very notion of a deep state. Even when they send an anonymous email, shred a document intended for other eyes, or impishly pass a tip to someone with a second- or third-hand relationship in the media, most of them probably see the deep state as something larger, above and beyond themselves.

Yet they are the deep state.

(There is another, often overlooked outcome of the establishment of a fixed civil bureaucracy. Awardees of government jobs under the spoils system were usually expected to donate to, and raise funds for, their favored party’s candidates. With the elimination of what were euphemistically called “assessments” — essentially fees and donations paid by individuals for requested or desired (while virtually always temporary) appointments — the modern era of campaign finance was set in motion. In place of payment for favors, political access and influence was thereafter, and increasingly, driven by wealthy individuals, interest groups, and large corporations.)

Lingering Issues

Two larger issues loom. Much of the world around us, and perhaps most of it, is shaped not by the planning of experts, but by the unintended consequences arising of their plans. And these side effects aren’t necessarily obvious from the start; some take decades to materialize. Others arise not exclusively as byproducts of a given initiative, but in the course of interacting with other plans or their byproducts. Acknowledging that complexity should temper not only the ambitiousness of planners, but the manners and acuteness employed in watching for them.

Second, political discourse typically pivots around solutions: neat, distinct remedies which, as they are imagined, quickly and seamlessly address problems. Less frequently discussed are the wider range of imperfect solutions which present trade-offs in the short- or long-term, but may hold less surprises in the longer term. Some of the trade-offs are immediately obvious; others don’t appear for years. The corruption of the pre-Pendleton Act period seemed undesirable enough that nearly any replacement would be superior: better yet that “science” and merit should be employed in a successor system.

A bigger question is whether the deep state is, even as an unintended consequence of the Pendleton Act, a “feature” or a “bug”. Do unelected government employees play a critical role in restoring equilibrium even in a nominal democracy, or do they represent an insidious, potentially worrisome repository of accidental power?

The idea that the Federal bureaucracy was staffed by the favorite or highest-bidding individuals was remarkably distasteful to the public in the 1870s; replacing it with a merit system certainly sounded like a preferable, tidier solution. It definitely appealed to the burgeoning desire for “scientific” solutions which littered the American policy landscape between the 1880s and the end of World War I. But virtually no one could have anticipated the colossal growth in the size of the U.S. government over the subsequent 140 years and the accompanying explosion in the size of the civil service. Add to that legislative creep, whereby the President was permitted to expand the ranks of protected government employees at will, and we are faced with the present.

For a very long time, Americans have had the odd feeling that elections don’t matter nearly as much as the media hoopla surrounding them would imply. It’s true, and one reason why has everything to do with fundamental changes in the way we hire and fire within the federal bureaucracy. The emergence of the deep state is by design a buffer on democracy itself, with the cost of a less adaptable regime and growing public cynicism concerning who really is in charge.

Peter C. Earle is an economist and writer at AIER.org, where this article first appeared.

Don’t Try To Change The World. A Better Strategy Is To Go Home And Hug Your Kids.

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It is a peculiar characteristic of modern man to think in terms of changing the world, either in triumph over our sinful past or in some grand return to better days.
In a world dominated by the political, when all things are related in one way or another to public institutions managed and upheld by the social-administrative nature of Western government—and especially its narratives—so many have a tendency to push toward improvement at a universal scale. As the political extends to the globe, so does the framing of our problems and search for solution.
Whether seeking to overcome the prejudices and cultural inclinations of yesterday, or seeking to re-instill them, our thinking is geared toward colossal shifts that must happen in order to achieve the improvements which we imagine. Our vision is cosmic and there is no hope except in contributing consciously and readily to the unfolding of progress in our time. Man is thrust into the grand and epochal battle for the future of the world, always needing to hone and craft his ideology for the sake of victory over the present conditions of insecurity and tension.
Indeed, man feels an obligation, a pull, to jump into the mix and “do something about it.”
Thus, as we sit on the precipice of the Western socio-political framework in decline, there is a constant and implicit demand that we offer an ideological replacement to fill the void created by the Neo-liberal social order (with not only its political structure, but its overall social milieu and interpretive framework). The question constantly asked is: “how do we achieve the successful implementation of our vision?”
We each believe that if the world could adapt, however slightly, our own suggestions, the future might indeed be saved. In a social environment of strife and upheaval, where the animosity and social hostility felt comes via media of entertainment, news, formal education, social media campaigns, and even the narratives that dominate corporate culture, it is becoming obvious that the state is not our only problem. While the managerial state in the West played—and plays— a core role in the transformation of society, the fact remains that it has, undeniably, transformed society itself.
The question therefore is increasingly not merely how do we roll back the influence of the progressive state, the question is what are the causes of a healthy and stable society? In this sense, the answer is not to be found in a loud chorus of ideas offered, understood, and accepted. Civilizations, I’ve said so many times of late, are not phenomena rising out of the application of mutually agreed upon ideological frameworks.  The individuals who make up society at large have rarely (perhaps examples can be found in certain religious sects) in history consented to live peacefully among themselves on the basis of a shared ideological vision.Moreover, the birth and development of sound civilizations are not projects that span the lifetime of a single reformer, whether or not he is fully dedicated to his cause.
Western civilization and all its institutions and cultural contributions was the result of over a thousand years of crisis, struggle, and maturation; it was not the result of the intended goal of constructing a brilliant vision for the future.  Even more profoundly, the roots of European civilization, which nestled in at the collapse of the Roman Empire, were not the product of revolutionaries seeking to set forth a plan of concerted action.
Throughout American (and European history), the majority of real, everyday, people did not operate their lives in terms of a some fight for liberty; they barely thought about it. The politicization of our thinking has coincided not with the buildup of a strong society, but as it has come at the expense of attention on more important, non-political things, the politicization of our passions and mental bandwidth has been a key element of the growth of the state and the fracturing of social continuity. Robert Nisbet describes this social breakdown as follows:

It has become steadily clearer to me that alienation is one of the determining realities of the contemporary age. . . By alienation I mean the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility. The individual not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it. For a constantly enlarging number of persons, including, significantly, young persons of high school and college age, this state of alienation has become profoundly influential in both behavior and thought.”

In a recent review of Patrick Deneen’s book on the failures of Liberalism, (a book which may not be agreeable in total), Sam Goldman concludes:

Deneen is probably right that the demand for an ideological replacement for liberalism is not only distinctively modern, but actually part of the problem. In seeking out a course beyond liberalism, we may find ourselves in a position that more closely resembles that of the ancients, who did not possess—and did not generally seek—a comprehensive political and moral doctrine.

Whether one finds fault with the difficult-to-define project of “liberalism,” the point still stands: constructing a socio-political framework for our human future is not the sole way out. This makes the mistake of presuming that the health of society is a result of a comprehensive and shared vision. In truth, naturally arising social context must come first, it is the soil in which the fruit trees can grow. In the words of Robert Nisbet (Quest for Community):

The family, religious association, and local community—these, the  conservatives insisted, cannot be regarded as the external products of man’s thought and behavior; they are essentially prior to the individual and are the indispensable supports of belief and conduct. Release man from the contexts of community and you get not freedom and rights but intolerable aloneness and subjection to demoniac fears and passions.

Society, Burke wrote in a celebrated line, is a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn. Mutilate the roots of society and tradition, and the result must inevitably be the isolation of a generation from its heritage, the isolation of individuals from their fellow men, and the creation of the sprawling, faceless masses.

What we learn from all this is that our strategy may be found in the opposite of our modern inclination. Consider the following suggestion: we may not need a mere mob of more voices on behalf of a better ideology at the expense of the actual development of the roots that are required for civilization to rest on solid ground.

The social mood of our late stage democratic progressivism puts a particular emphasis on the primacy of political involvement, politicized chatter, and the sham of making “your voice be heard.” There is a general atmosphere that encourages one to think in terms of creating a movement, of overcoming the power elite, of rallying the proverbial militia, of changing hearts and minds of the world around us.

But imagine, if you will, the sheer audacity of traveling back in time to the degenerative collapse of the Roman world and rallying a handful of people to tell their neighbors about the Good News of Lockean-style private property rights. What is being posited here is certainly not a plea to ignore ideas, but rather, to direct and preserve them in more meaningful, even self-fulfilling ways.

One must consider finding fulfillment and satisfaction in a completely different civilizational role than that of a visible hero. To echo Warren Harding’s campaign speech on a slightly different context, we need, at a personal level, to “return to normalcy:”

America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise;

Such a return to normalcy must be motivated in a change of personal perspective. We must learn to love the everyday; to cherish the mundane; to appreciate the regular; to invest time and happiness in the ordinary. This is the long-lasting and measurable path forward. A people that find their sole identity in the fight against the zeitgeist will so often find that the fight came at the expense of the truly meaningful elements of our person. And the negative effects of non-meaningful political identities have negative effects on those that come after us, long after we draw our last breath.

Indeed, as Nisbet writes:

the major moral and psychological influences on the individual’s life have emanated from the family and local community and the church. Within such groups have been engendered the primary types of identification: affection, friendship, prestige, recognition. And within them also have been engendered or intensified the principal incentives of work, love, prayer, and devotion to freedom and order.”

Each of us tend to flatter ourselves that we will follow in the footsteps of Cato the Younger or Ron Paul, yet the odds are unfavorable that this is the role for our personal taking.  Thus, it is high time that we come to terms with the suggestion that we might take up a similar function of the Celts in those dark years in the vacuum of Rome’s former glory.

Rather than a pursuit of some vague agenda of saving the world, the Irish monks, as told in Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization, took the path of restoration and preservation on the home front— their scribes took it upon themselves to collect, copy, and preserve the literary contributions of a world that was quickly slipping away. In an age of barbarianism, anti-intellectualism, and revolt against civilization, the role of St. Patrick and the monks he inspired was to act as a silent medium through an era of cultural darkness.

For, as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature—everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed.

Without this service of the scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable. Without the mission of the Irish Monks, who single-handedly rebounded European civilization throughout the continent in the bays and valleys of their exile, the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one—a world without books. And our own world would not have come to be.

And Kenneth Clark, in his chapter “The Skin of Our Teeth,” in his own Civilisation writes:

Looking back from the great civilizations of twelfth-century France or seventeenth century Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite a long time—almost a hundred years—western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.

Their objective was far from hoisting a civilized society back on to the then-dead Roman society, it was rather to be faithful in the small things; to accomplish some obtainable and something accessible. In the scheme of things, the Irish saved civilization because they became the living preservation of the elements of goodness taken from Rome in decay.

From their activities of preservation came forth the eventual outward growth and spread of these memories via an impressive chain of monasteries from Ireland back through continental Europe and blossomed into the roots of the soil of what would one day be European civilization. Literature, art, religious writings, history, records, all the recordings of Roman life were transferred across time via the Irish monks.

This is all analogy, of course. We do not need to run for the caves, build fortresses in the mountains— but the analogy is obvious: in a world of politicization, the most prudent use of our time is not to be another voice in the crowd. Even Jesus said as much: “Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.”

What, in our context, might it look like to hunker down and hold to a mentality of preservation, to “save the books,” rather than reshape the present world? One thing in particular would be to restore, in our personal lives, the social primacy of the family. This is immediate, it is measurable, it is meaningful, and it is long-lasting. It is quite remarkable that such suggestion might come off as a bland and out of fashion in our age of individual liberation.

And yet, the idea of family—the idea of a partnership between those who have passed on, those currently living, and those yet to be born—this is itself a proven model that can act as a via media, or a conduit, if our goal is the preservation and promulgation of the goodness of civilization. These goods, what TS Eliot and Russell Kirk called “permanent things,” must be passed on in a world dominated by the enemies of permanent things.

In our time, our strategy must be to turn back toward the home, a shelter from the broken and loney world around us. In a world of upheaval, there is solace and meaning in the activities of raising a family. The greatest legacy that many of us will pass on are those of our own flesh and blood.  The opportunity that we get to impart our own memories and passions, wisdom and insight, habits and prejudices, to the next generation is made manifest in the raising of a family. In a Progressivist world that downplays the importance of the family and sings the praises of alternative arrangements, few things are more important—but certainly not political activity— than just being a dedicated spouse and parent.

Far from defeatism, there rests a very real sense of hope in walking away from the primacy of the political and tending to the care and development of one’s children. To be a voice in the crowd will likely change no one; to be parent is to homestead a living being that can embody the very things worth passing forward to the world unknown. Our friend Nick Hankoff recently offered pushback against a particular phenomenon among libertarians, writing a piece in the Daily Caller titled As Long As Libertarians Reject Traditional Institutions, They’re As Doomed As America:

The only way to correct the inevitable failure of the libertarian movement is through a deeper appreciation and love for family, church, community, and nationality. For too long, these centers of civic life that strengthen the individual and diminish the state have been neglected.

To the detriment of their cause, some libertarians sneer at these social structures and retreat to more familiar ideological territory. The individual owns himself and has natural rights, yes. But he is also the product of his family, religion, and communities.

If you want to have a role on the future, something measurable and something identifiable to your own hand, stop trying to change the world. Go home and hug your kids. If you don’t have any, get married and make some. Homeschool them, if at all possible. Enjoy them. Teach them. Impart the memories and customs of your past—their past—onto their soul, that they might bring them forward to posterity. Make them read— most kids can’t; make them write—still fewer know how.

Raise boys to be men. Raise girls to be women. This is the new counter-cultural. But it is the foundation of culture.

Don’t envision yourself as a hero of world change and bringer of hope to the world. Be a father or mother. Be a hero to your family. Gramsci had his long march through the institutions. It’s time for our long march through Main Street.

To leave a legacy, first look homeward.

It must be remembered that we the living are the catalyst bringing the past to the future.

We must be vigilant to treat this duty with care, for we are our children’s present and tomorrow we will be their past.

 

C.Jay Engel is the founder and publisher of Bastion Magazine.

The Real Reason Nobody Takes Environmental Activists Seriously.

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Environmental activists are weird. Filled with a deep-rooted desire to do good, to save the world from imminent destruction, and to preach the ecological gospel to anybody (un)willing to hear it, they wield a surprising amount of influence — in the media if not in the halls of power. They get a lot of cred and admiration for their efforts, but perhaps they shouldn’t.

Most people agree with their creed: humans greatly impact our environment, perhaps to the detriment of fundamental ecological systems, and we ought to reduce that. Few of us accept their unrelenting extremism and unwillingness to accept trade-offs. What bothers the opponents of environmental activism is not the environmentally conscious goals or even facts presented, but the activists’ blatant hypocrisy and aura of sanctimonious religiosity.

In the activists’ eyes, every action is classified as “good” or “bad” if it has easy-to-understand first-order environmental benefits or harms: recycling plastic is good, littering is bad; planting trees is good, one-use takeaway bags are bad; heating your house with “renewable energy” is good, burning gasoline is bad; etc.

The trouble begins when these individually good actions are coupled with bad ones. What if I drove my gasoline-gobbling car to the tree-planting site? What if recycled plastic, as in the U.S., ends up in the same landfill as the other trash, neutralizing my “good” efforts? What if I discard (or lose) my sustainable metal straws before I’ve used them enough times for the CO2 emissions to break even compared to single-use plastic?

The inability to see these chains of decisions is a qualifying criterion for becoming an environmental activist. For the rest of us, it is too much to stomach a sermon about the essential virtue of reducing one’s climate impact while knowing that the preacher, in other domains of their life, completely negates the minor climate benefit of whatever action they implore us to take. The hypocrisy is real.

Illustrative Anecdotes Abound

Mike Munger’s writing on recycling is a splendid example, concluding that for most commodities, recycling is a religious ritual, done for feel-good reasons rather than actual impact. Stories like these show the cognitive dissonance of do-gooders:

“I once watched a young woman in Vitacura, Chile, wait in line in her idling auto for more than 10 minutes so she could park and put two two-liter plastic bottles into a recycle bin. That’s not economics, that’s a religious ceremony. Without scale, most recycling harms the environment.”

If we need to reduce our climate impact to save the environment (it’s always unclear what the environment is, and what exactly we’re saving it from), it is the sum of our impacts that matters. If we do enough “bad” in some part of our lives, we shouldn’t applaud ourselves for doing some “good” elsewhere, especially if the impact of the bad completely dwarfs the impact of the good.

Even the celebrated wonderchild St. Greta falls prey to this. In pledging not to fly because of aviation’s outrageously large emissions (per-person emissions, mind you, not in aggregate, where aviation only accounts for 3 percent of global emissions), she famously took a high-tech wind-powered sailing boat across the Atlantic to speak before the UN. The only trouble was that she outsourced the flying emissions to the boat’s crew, several of whom flew back across the Atlantic after delivering St. Greta to the UN’s doorsteps, where she continued to lambast the world’s emitters of climate gases. The total emissions of Greta’s highly politicized non-carbon journey were, in other words, much higher than had she simply bought a standard plane ticket.

International travel, too, is cherished by the very people whose ideals should preclude them from visiting places much further away than their neighboring villages. In a wholly representative picture of the righteous environmentalist traveler, I recently met a vegan girl who carried her own non-plastic straw, tablet-format toothpaste, and wooden toothbrush so that she could avoid the horrors of plastic. The irony had not dawned on her that her microscopic climate impact from these efforts was completely swamped by the emissions needed to make possible her five-week vacation across the Atlantic.

Roughly estimated, the emissions of her round-trip flights add about 3.3 tons of CO2 equivalents to her climate footprint, increasing her average annual German per capita figure by more than one-third — or an entire year’s worth of CO2 emissions for the average person in Botswana. In comparison, eating a plant-based diet saves about 0.8 tons of carbon-equivalent emissions a year according to the Guardian’s rundown.

Taking the most extreme carbon life-cycle-analysis figure for plastic, and presuming that my travel companion’s toys used no resources, her annual climate savings likely amounted to about 800 grams (minus the energy and resource cost going into her toys). Had she stayed home, she could have safely consumed plastic as usual for something like 4,000 years before reaching her emissions from this one round-trip flight. Put differently, it takes about 4,000 years for her reduced plastic use to pay off the climate damage of her five-week Caribbean adventure (or much more if we take into account the energy use and resources going into producing new toothbrushes and straws when they wear out and/or need cleaning).

In another instance of this extraordinary doublethink, I had a flatmate that defended her twice-a-year trip across the Atlantic, London to Vancouver, with some serious mental accounting. Since she would have studied abroad in this phase of her life regardless, the emissions were a sunk cost, as if the environmental damage caused by her behavior were somehow mitigated by her rationalization. Like the vegan traveler above, the meager attempts of biking, reducing plastic use, and eating plant-based foods were entirely swamped by her frequent air travels.

With environmental activists, we can do this all day. A German friend of mine working for DHL, a partly government-owned postal and delivery service, frequently observes criticism about the company’s CO2 footprint — ignoring, of course, that had their customers individually driven to brick-and-mortar stores instead of making their purchases online, the amount of emissions would most likely have been much higher.

Yesterday, like most days during turtle hatching season, volunteers with the ASVO marine preservation organization in Montezuma, Costa Rica, eagerly helped 50 or so newborn turtles into the Pacific. Almost literally rolling out a red carpet — raking the sand to even it out — for these apparently endangered turtles, a handful of mostly European volunteers and a few dozen foreign spectators enjoyed the wonders of seeing these adorable creatures crawl toward their first swim.

The moment the first turtle reached the alluring waters of the sunset-colored waves, a bird of prey swooped down and ate it. So much for a helping human hand: evolution 1; environmentalist do-gooder 0. The artificial concentration of turtles had created a feeding frenzy for predators. The first of many, it seems, as something like only one in every thousand turtles will avoid predators and reach adulthood.

An info brochure from Tambor Bay Turtles proudly states that they have released over 15,000 turtle hatchlings over the last three years. Countless human work hours, eagerly provided by Western environmentalist activists, were spent in ensuring — at best — a permanent increase of the world’s adult turtle population by around 15 animals. All that, purchased with some exorbitant number of flights across the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean.

I don’t know what the biodiversity benefit is from 15 extra adult turtles, but I imagine that it’s less than the damage from even a single flight across the Atlantic. Safe to say, if these activists truly cared about the environment as they claim, they would refrain from these sorts of sanctimonious activities. But they don’t. And they feel good about themselves and require praise from their peers.

What angers most people about climate activists is not their goals, but their elaborate system of doublethink, their profound cognitive dissonance, and the truly fascinating ability to rationalize their own behavior; they ignore their own seriously harmful actions while praising themselves for the meager and largely inconsequential benefits of their climate activism.

They view themselves as part of the solution. Perhaps they should reconsider.

Joakim Book is a writer, researcher and editor at aier.org, where this article first appeared.

A Bleak Future? Young Americans Should Be Worrying About Entitlement Liabilities Rather Than Climate Change.

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On January 31, 1940, Miss Ida Fuller received a check for $22.54. She was the first person to retire under the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) scheme, better known as Social Security. At the time of her retirement in 1939, she had paid just $22 in Social Security taxes. Ms. Fuller lived to be 100, cashing over $20,000 worth of Social Security checks.

How Social Security Is Funded

If she had only paid $22.54 in contributions, where did the $20,000 Ms. Fuller received in Social Security payouts come from? It came, as it does now, from the taxpayers of the day. As of 2019, your employer deducts 6.2 percent of your wages up to $132,900 a year, matches this amount, and sends it to the Social Security Administration (SSA). The SSA deposits this with the Treasury, which spends it and receives Treasury bonds in return. This is the fabled trust fund that guarantees Social Security.

But these Treasury bonds are simply IOUs redeemable against the income of tomorrow’s taxpayers. When one of the Treasury bonds held by the SSA falls due for payment, the Treasury can only get the funds to meet this liability by taxing, borrowing (taxing the taxpayers of tomorrow), or printing money (imposing an inflation tax). In each case, what really guarantees Social Security is not the money you paid in but the earnings of today’s or tomorrow’s taxpayers.

Such a pay-as-you-go scheme could chug along well enough as long as there were lots of workers relative to retirees. When the program began, every 100 workers were supporting three retirees.

This favorable ratio encouraged politicians to be more generous. Originally intended to cover only about 50 percent of all workers, Social Security was expanded even before Ida Fuller received her first check to provide benefits for dependents of retired workers and surviving dependents. In the post-war years, Social Security grew further. Disability benefits, payable as early as age 50, were added in 1956, and during the 1950s coverage was extended to other previously excluded workers, making it essentially universal. Congress passed across-the-board benefit increases of 7 percent (1965), 13 percent (1967), 15 percent (1969), 10 percent (1971), 20 percent (1972), and 11 percent (1974). In 1972, benefits were tied to the Consumer Price Index, yielding an annual “cost of living adjustment.”

In 1965, Medicare was signed into law, establishing a heavily subsidized federal health care program for the elderly. Former President Harry Truman and his wife received the first Medicare cards without paying a cent in Medicare taxes.

Like Social Security, Medicare is financed by a payroll tax of 2.9 percent split between employer and employee, up from 0.7 percent in 1966. Like Social Security, that money gets paid right out to meet current expenses, which were vastly expanded by passage of Medicare Part D in 2003. And like Social Security, such a pay-as-you-go scheme could chug along well enough as long as there were lots of workers relative to retirees.

Two things derailed that. US birth rates fell from births 3.65 births per woman in 1965 to 1.80 in 2016, and life expectancy rose from 68 in 1950 to 79 today. Together, this meant ever more retirees relative to the workers supporting them. By 2017, 100 workers were supporting 25 retirees.

These shifting demographics have shredded the solvency of the “trust funds.” Social Security is estimated to run out of reserves in 2034, after which benefits would have to be reduced by about 25 percent to keep spending within available annual revenue. Over 75 years, Social Security has an unfunded liability of $13.9 trillion.

The Medicare hospital insurance trust fund will run out of reserves in 2026. Medicare’s second trust fund, for physician and outpatient services and for prescription drugs, is permanently “solvent” because it has an unlimited call on the general fund of the Treasury—the incomes of future taxpayers. Premiums paid by the beneficiaries will cover only about 25 percent of program costs; the rest of the spending is unfinanced. Medicare’s overall unfunded liability over 75 years is more than $37 trillion.

The taxes levied to fund Social Security have already risen drastically. In 1937, the Social Security tax rate was one percent on earnings up to $3,000 ($53,449 in 2019 dollars) to be matched by the employer. By 1971 it was 4.6 percent on earnings up to $7,800 ($49,411 in 2019 dollars). It now stands at 6.2 percent up to $132,900.

This is only going to get worse. According to Census Bureau projections, by 2030 each 100 working-age Americans will be supporting 35 retirees, and this could rise to 42 by 2060. Another way to think of this is to calculate the number of retirees each worker must support. In 1946, the burden of one retiree was shared between 42 workers. Today, according to the SSA, roughly three workers cover each retiree’s Social Security and Medicare benefits. By 2030, however, there will be only two workers supporting each retiree.

In other words, a working couple will have to support not only themselves and their family but also someone outside the family thanks to Social Security and Medicare.

To make Social Security solvent again, the payroll tax rate would need to be hiked immediately from 12.4 percent to 15.2 percent, or Social Security benefits would need to be cut on a permanent basis by about 17 percent. According to economists Roger LeRoy Miller, Daniel K. Benjamin, and Douglass C. North:

[F]or Social Security and Medicare to stay as they are, the payroll tax rate may have to rise to 25 percent of wages over the next decade. And a payroll tax rate of 40 percent is not unlikely by the middle of the twenty-first century.

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg recently made international headlines with an impassioned speech to the United Nations in which she complained that her future had been stolen by inaction on climate change. An American Ms. Thunberg’s age could say the same about entitlement spending on Social Security and Medicare.

By the expanding eligibility for and hiking the benefits of a pay-as-you-go system while at the same time having fewer children to fund it, the generations preceding that child have left a fearsome financial obligation. Either taxes will go up sharply for the workers of tomorrow, lowering their standard of living, or benefits will go down for the retirees of tomorrow, lowering their standard of living. One group is going to feel pretty angry.

These problems were foreseen even as politicians were hiking payouts. In 1978, the economist Paul Samuelson wrote:

[O]ur Social Security system is also an actuarially unfunded system…there is no obligation for this generation to have children at the same rate as did previous generations. Therefore, when those born during the baby-boom period of the ‘50s reach retirement age in the next century, their stipends will be felt as more of a burden by the thinner ranks of the then working population

We are on the brink of inter-generational strife. We have the political shortsightedness of decades past to thank for that.

John Phelan is an economist at the Center of the American Experiment

This article first appeared at fee.org.

The Poetic Justice Warrior Who Eternalized the Great Terror Behind the Berlin Wall – Anna Akhmatova

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Thirty years ago this week the Berlin Wall came down. The catalyst was Soviet Premier Gorbachev ordering armed guards away from the wall. He had deluded himself to believe that socialism could exist without fear. The event was international news for several days, and it led to the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany. Of course Poland’s courageous Solidarity labor movement led by Lech Walesa, the work of Pope John Paul II, and the extraordinary partnership of Britain’s Lady Margaret Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan (who implored Gorbachev in a 1987 speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate – “tear down this wall!”), were also essential figures.

But for many people in the United States, this was a ho-hum course of events. For America’s intelligentsia and their ignorati, Reagan was still a B movie actor and socialism was the dominant philosophy of America’s national media and universities. Josef Stalin’s Great Terror in Soviet Russia was not taught in schools, and neither was Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China. Only Hitler’s Final Solution was well known, and that is because Nazism was rebranded by western intellectuals as right wing fascism so western socialists could distance themselves from the 20th century depravity they shared with their comrades.

It is upon this anniversary that we introduce the Poetic Justice Warrior who witnessed, and personally experienced, the Great Terror. She swore to its victims that their story would be told for future generations to know and understand. She is the great Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova.

Requiem

In 1940, Akhmatova wrote a collection of poems titled Requiem. They eloquently express her personal raw emotions and those of the women whose husbands, sons, brothers and fathers became the subjects of Stalin’s mass imprisonment. They were artists, poets, and publishers after all. For example, her son had been arrested on numerous occasions for alleged “counter-revolutionary activity,” and she would cue for many hours, many times, in an attempt to deliver food to him and plead with his captors.

By 1938, Akhmatova had become a well known poet in Russia, and on one of these occasions outside a St. Petersburg stone prison she met a woman:

One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said: ‘I can.’ Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

This became Akhmatova’s inspiration and motivation for writing Requiem, but she dared not publish it. Instead she memorized it and shared it only with close friends. Requiem was finally published in 1963, without her consent, in Munich, Germany. This was two years after the construction of the Berlin Wall.

In hindsight, Requiem may not have survived to foretell the Berlin Wall’s ominous presence, or celebrate its glorious crumbing, if she had published it instead of memorizing it. In 1993, it was revealed that Akhmatova had been under investigation by the intelligence agencies of the deep state. They had bugged her apartment and kept her under constant surveillance. Stalin’s spies had created a dossier that totaled 900 pages of “denunciations, reports of phone taps, quotations from writings, and confessions of those close to her”.

In this excerpt from Requiem, she expresses a few of the emotions that surrounded her in 1938. These included disbelief, rationalization, stunned grief, agony, deep mourning, and perseverance. All of which Akhmatova cycles through this set of poems.

For seventeen months I have been screaming,
Calling you home.
I’ve thrown myself at the feet of butchers
For you, my son and my horror.
Everything has become muddled forever –
I can no longer distinguish
Who is an animal, who a person, and how long
The wait can be for an execution.

Anna’s close friend, Lydia Chukovskaya, was also a dissident author and poet, and wrote about the tactics of their small trusted circle of friends who would create poetry and distribute it. The ritual was for them to write poems for each other on a scrap of paper, read it, memorize it, and burn it in a stove. Oral circulation was their mode of publishing, or as Chukovskaya describes, “It was like a ritual. Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.” This was done while casually conversing in code for the electronic eavesdroppers and quieltly memorizing:

Silent flows the river Don
A yellow moon looks quietly on
Swanking about, with cap askew
It sees through the window a shadow of you
Gravely ill, all alone
The moon sees a woman lying at home
Her son is in jail, her husband is dead
Say a prayer for her instead.

In Akhmatova’s own words, Requiem was “One hundred million voices shouting through her tortured mouth.” And “A poem without a hero.”  All for the inhuman ideals of socialism.

Requiem’s Hero

As poetic justice would have it, Requiem was published for the first time in Russia in 1987, two years before Berlin’s monument to fear was torn down. It’s existence had proved that the Soviet empire was not founded on a Marxist ideal for a better society. There’s no such thing, Lenin and Stalin knew it, that was merely a ruse for western intellectual suckers. Nobel prize winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz also proves it in his book about the mental anguish suffered by Soviet propagandists, The Captive Mind.

Lenin never visited his proletarian workers at their factories and Stalin’s ideal was the ratting out of everyone by everyone. In today’s China, the ruling elite’s reverence for so-called Marxist ideals is as insincere and unbelievable as America’s Democratic leadership’s reverence for Constitutional principles and Christian values. The idea that their democratic socialism can be implemented without the fear of violence cruelly avoids reality.

After regularly reading to Russian soldiers in military hospitals during World War II, Akhmatova was condemned in 1946 by Stalin’s Central Committee, along with others, for bourgeois, individualistic writing and expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers.

From Requiem’s section titled The Verdict:

The word landed with a stony thud
Onto my still-beating breast.
Never mind, I was prepared,
I will manage with the rest.

I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again. . .

Thanks to the smashing of the Berlin Wall thirty years ago, the people of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, East Germany and the rest of the Soviet orbit have the opportunity to teach themselves to live again. The self-reliance of the bourgeois individualists idealized in the poetry of Poetic Justice Warrior Anna Akhmatova are Requiem’s heroes. They are the ones victimized by the force of socialism in Soviet Russia and the freedom fighters armed with reason, purpose, and pride who ripped away the iron curtain. When celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is imperative to know and understand the people and events behind it.

 

Eastern Europe Sees Liberal Orthodoxy As Just As Tyrannical As Communist Orthodoxy, Charts Its Own Path.

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BERLIN—Thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, ending the Cold War in Europe, new political divisions are rising between East and West.

Despite the economic success of German reunification and the triumph of democracy across Eastern Europe, the two regions are drifting apart again in a clash of values that is threatening the cohesion of the Western alliance and the European Union.

In most of the West, mainstream parties, while increasingly challenged by insurgent politicians, are largely sticking to a postwar consensus forged around liberal values, the rule of law, fundamental human rights and time-tested institutions.

Much of the East is a mirror image, where nativist parties that favor more authoritarian rule and reject immigration, ethnic and religious diversity, gay rights and feminism as signs of weakness and moral decadence are either in power or on the ascent.

Some Eastern European countries that once fought against Soviet oppression, such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, are now ruled by governments that vehemently reject some liberal Western values.

Even some former East German democracy activists are now marching against the establishment with far-left or far-right movements, including the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party or AfD, now among the country’s largest.

Vera Lengsfeld, a German author, academic and former legislator, received the Federal Cross of Merit, Germany’s highest peacetime honor, for battling the totalitarian regime of the former communist east. She was imprisoned after her husband, a poet, informed on her to the secret police.

But three decades after she watched the Berlin Wall crumble, Ms. Lengsfeld is unsheathing her quill for a new fight: against the liberal government of Chancellor Angela Merkel that she once supported.

Ms. Lengsfeld says she rejects the AfD, but she shares their criticism of Ms. Merkel’s generous asylum policy, and has campaigned against mass immigration. She says political correctness is threatening free speech, leading to her views being dismissed as extremist.

“I think the West has forgotten what democracy means,” she said. “The gap between the governments and the governed is widening, and the former despise the latter.”

In a series of interviews last week in German media, Ms. Merkel said such claims made in a free democracy like Germany were strange, and warned that freedom of expression doesn’t constitute the right to have one’s opinion unchallenged.

To be sure, the divides in Europe aren’t clear-cut. Some parties in Italy, France and Austria have rejected immigration and Islam, while eastern countries like Slovakia have chosen liberal governments. Recent elections ushered in a crop of liberal mayors to countries run by nativist parties, including Hungary and Poland.

Citizens of the former East Germany say they are less satisfied than those in the West, and are more likely to support the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party.

In his recent book, “The Light That Failed,” Ivan Krastev, a Vienna-based Bulgarian academic, explores how the two parts of Europe embraced each other, only to diverge again. Mr. Krastev cites studies about how despite the East’s economic surge, majorities who say they are satisfied with their lives still vote for antiestablishment nativists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Mr. Krastev said Mr. Orban and other self-proclaimed illiberal leaders pander to voters who rebel against what the academic calls the “replacement of communist orthodoxy with a liberal orthodoxy.”

In Mr. Krastev’s view, the dictate of communist apparatchiks in the East was replaced by the patronage of the EU and other international organizations who presided over painful economic overhauls.

Millions of people have left Eastern Europe for the West since 1989, robbing entire regions of their educated elites. In the former East Germany, which has lost nearly four million people since reunification, the AfD is particularly strong in places where more people have left.

The view of emigration as a threat to fragile communities also in part explains widespread opposition to immigration in the region, say some experts, Mr. Krastev says.

Eastern Europe, once among the world’s most diverse regions, was carved up by the Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian and German empires until those multinational states perished in the wars of the 20th century. The forced exchange of populations that followed yielded homogenous societies.

Branko Milanovic, a New York-based economist from Serbia, said the revolutions of 1989 were struggles of national emancipation more than a broad democratic uprising. Even as 1989 offered democracy followed by EU membership and rapid economic growth, Eastern nations never embraced ethnic diversity, Mr. Milanovic said.

Ironically for a region where citizens were banned from freely traveling during the Cold War, a study by Mr. Krastev for the European Council on Foreign Relations found that 50% of Poles and 49% of Hungarians favored making it illegal for their own citizens to leave for long periods as a policy response to migration.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Poland’s ruling party, has asked the U.S. to abandon the process of lifting visa requirements for Polish citizens for fear it could further fan emigration, according to two officials. Aides eventually persuaded him to give up his resistance to the visa waiver, which was then seen a diplomatic coup of his administration.

The Polish and Hungarian governments have both been accused in the West of curtailing freedom of the press and capturing the courts and other institutions of state. Both have been remarkably successful at the polls.

In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis has stoked similar controversies. Pavel Telicka, a former ally of Mr. Babis who left the prime minister to form his own, liberal party, said he became disillusioned by the populism of his old ally. But he admits that politicians like Mr. Babis have successfully tapped into economic angst and frustration.

Despite strong growth, the former communist regions—including east Germany—haven’t caught up with Western income levels. And the cradle-to-grave state support of the Soviet era is gone.

“The inability of traditional political parties to provide solutions to people’s problems has maybe helped the rise of populism,” said Czech Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek. He cited the EU’s failure to resolve the eurozone and refugee crises as a cause for disillusionment in his country.

Witold Waszczykowski, Poland’s former foreign minister, said the definition of liberalism changed within the West itself, expanding to include values such as ethnic diversity and LGBT rights after politicians embraced what he calls left-liberal democracy.

Helmut Kohl, the late German chancellor and architect of German and European reunification, foresaw the current backlash, according to Daniel Biskup, a photojournalist who documented the fall of the Wall and its aftermath in three books.

Mr. Biskup took a now iconic photograph of Mr. Kohl as he promised 100,000 people in the eastern state of Thuringia in 1990 to turn the impoverished land into “blooming landscapes.”

“He knew there could be trouble. He told me the blooming landscapes would only come if everyone—especially the West and its industry—pulled together,” Mr. Biskup said. “But that didn’t happen. We left market forces do their work.”

In October this year, the AfD won nearly 24% of the vote in Thuringia and became the second-biggest party, behind the radical left.

Back in East Berlin, Ms. Lengsfeld, the former dissident, said the social change that she herself helped bring about has now made her think about emigrating.

“If I were younger, I would emigrate myself. Maybe not to Prague, it’s overrun by tourists, but perhaps somewhere further East,” she said.

By Bojan Pancevski at wsj.com
Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

Climate Activist Mayor Gets On The Wrong Side Of The City’s Own Workers.

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Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto has faced a fierce backlash since he announced at last week’s Climate Action Summit that he opposes any new petrochemical companies coming to Western Pennsylvania. Labor unions, civic leaders and even the mayor’s closest political ally have taken him to task.

“When you make a comment that can clearly hurt the advancement of a region and their ability to feed their family and have a better life, that’s when it becomes an issue for us,” said Darrin Kelly, the city firefighter who heads the Allegheny County Labor Council. “I’m going to be very vocal on behalf of the working men and women to protect them, OK? . . . If they’re attacking our way of life, I’m going to come after them.”

The battle is a microcosm of what is happening nationally: Big-city Democratic mayors are aligning themselves with leftist local officials and environmental activists to renounce disfavored industries. It also exposes the Democrats’ deep challenges with blue-collar voters. In both Western Pennsylvania and the Scranton area, the shale industry is opening up prosperity not seen for two generations—and inflaming climate zealots. “A Democrat cannot win Pennsylvania without voter support from those two regions,” said Mike Mikus, a strategist who consulted for Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s re-election campaign last year. “And you can’t win the presidency as a Democrat if you lose Pennsylvania.”

The oddity of the latest dustup is that there are no petrochemical plants in Pittsburgh. The build-out in the area is in Beaver County, to the northwest, where the massive $6 billion Shell Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex is under construction and where Exxon may build another nearby. Building the Shell plant is expected to create 6,000 jobs in construction, engineering, chemistry, information technology and geology. Once it opens, industry analysts expect it to employ 600 people permanently and to support twice that number of jobs elsewhere in the local economy. The governor calls it a “game changer” for the region.

Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, Mr. Peduto’s closest ally, is flabbergasted by the mayor’s opposition. He bristles at the suggestion that one can’t favor fracking and mitigating climate change. “I believe in climate change,” he says. “I think it is absolutely real. Anybody who denies that I think is not looking at the science. What natural gas has done has been one of those great additions to lower our carbon footprint.” Natural gas emits 30% less carbon than oil and 45% less than coal.

“No city in America has benefited more from the shale revolution in the last dozen years than Pittsburgh,” Mr. Fitzgerald continues. “We were one of the only regions in the country that did not experience the Great Recession back in 2008, because that’s when we discovered the Marcellus Shale.” He says of Mr. Peduto: “I also think it gets very tricky when somebody who represents one-eighth of the metro region to try to speak for the 2½ million people that represent the 10-county metro region.”

Pittsburgh International Airport last month announced a first-in-the-country microgrid that will power the entire airport using natural gas, drilled on-site by CNX Resources, as well as solar generation. Nick Deluliis, CEO of CNX, says the mayor’s approach to energy would make such a project impossible: “I think people need to understand what the mayor is saying represents a very small minority of people in this region and oftentimes he is operating in a bit of an echo chamber. So his views I don’t think are the working man’s view. It’s not the building trades’ view, it’s not manufacturing’s view, and it’s really not a rational fact-based view.”

Pittsburgh mayors have usually been Democratic pragmatists, concerned above all with making sure the streets are safe, the snow gets plowed and garbage picked up, and civic leaders are able to develop the city. Last week a sinkhole in a city street swallowed a bus as it idled at a red light. A passenger was treated for minor injuries, but the mayor’s reputation was also bruised. The moment became a local metaphor for Mr. Peduto’s emphasis on ideology at the expense of the unpretentious problems of governing.

“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” President Trump said in 2017, when he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. Mr. Peduto balked at the comparison, yet many locals see him acting as if he were the mayor of Paris and not Pittsburgh.

Mr. Kelly said that since he took on the mayor, he’s been overwhelmed by calls of support from labor. “We are not backing down.”

Ms. Zito is a reporter for the Washington Examiner, a columnist for the New York Post and a co-author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.”

Africa’s Socialism Is Keeping It Poor.

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It has been widely, vividly, but nonetheless wrongly believed that socialism is the appropriate system to improve the living standards of Africans. Worse yet, it has been misleadingly claimed that socialism is compatible with African culture because African culture is fundamentally a collectivist culture. However, one fact remains indisputable: socialism has failed wherever it was tried, and the African countries that have experimented with socialism were not exempted from its failure.

The undeniable fact remains that Africa has the lowest living standard of all continents after Antarctica. The reason why the living standard of the majority of African countries is so low compared to the rest of the world, is because socialism has impoverished the African continent. At the outset of the post-colonial era in the 1960s many African countries — such as Tanzania, Angola, Mali, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Egypt, Senegal, Guinea, Congo and many more — have embraced socialism as their economic and political system.

These countries that have embraced socialism became significantly worse off by the 1980s. For example, Tanzania was one of the fast-growing economies in East Africa until Julius Nyerere implemented the “Ujamaa,” which means socialism and brotherhood in the Swahili language. Before the implementation of the Ujamaa; Tanzania had a GDP similar to South Korea . Subsequently to the implementation of Ujamaa, economic growth became unsurprisingly stagnant. The policy of collectivization impoverished the Tanzanian people. Food production fell, and the country’s economy suffered . This decline in productivity has made Tanzania one of the poorest countries on the continent. In Ghana, under the rule of Kwame Nkrumah, one of the foremost African political leaders of the post-colonial era; socialism was also implemented as the economic system of the country. Socialism, as a domestic policy in Nkrumah’s seven-year development plan, was to be pursued toward “a complete ownership of the economy by the state.” A bewildering slate of legislative controls and regulations were imposed on imports, capital transfers, industry, minimum wages, the rights and powers of trade unions, prices, rents and interest rates. Private businesses were taken away and nationalized by the Nkrumah government. The result has also been unsurprising. Resources were mismanaged, inflation rose, and economic stagnation occurred in Ghana. Zimbabwe has also suffered from the myths of African socialism under Mugabe’s rule. Mugabe collectivized the means of production in the late 1980s when he became Zimbabwe’s strongman. Rampant corruption, huge budget deficits, and mismanagement of resources have dragged the economy, hyperinflation, 60 percent unemployment, and a desperate shortage of hard currency. These examples clearly demonstrate how socialism had utterly stagnated the economies of these countries until a market economy was once again reinstated.

But the question remains as to why Africans deeply believed in socialism and embraced it in the 1960s. In Africa, socialism was presented as an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist ideology while capitalism was perceived as the ideology of the oppressor, the colonizer, and of profit. Africans strongly believe in socialism because they think that socialism is compatible with African culture since African culture is a collectivist culture. African culture values the group over the individual. It values the concept of sharing, solidarity, and altruism. Of course, all these moral virtues are well-intended, but they play no substantial role in the improvement of the living standard of people. What improves the living standard of people is the ability to retain private property, to voluntarily exchange with one another what we own in order to create capital. Some African countries in the post-colonial era resisted the socialist temptation; notably countries like Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and South Africa.

For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, Côte d’Ivoire was the most economically advanced country in West Africa. While its neighbors were embracing socialism, Côte d’Ivoire opted for a market economy. Despite having an authoritarian political regime, like all African countries during that time; the Ivorian people were, nonetheless, economically free. They had the freedom to create businesses, and to expand private property. From 1960 to 1979, the GDP in Côte d’Ivoire grew at 8.1 percent per year, which means that in real terms capita, it increased from $595 to $1,114. Cote d’Ivoire’s economic expansion during that period was called “The Ivorian Miracle” because the country was exporting agricultural goods to the neighboring countries have had a shortage of food production due to their socialistic policies. The Ivorian Miracle made Côte d’Ivoire the most prosperous nation in West Africa between 1960 and 1980.

What Africans have failed to grasp about capitalism and the free market is that, it is not a system intrinsic to Western culture. It is a system intrinsic to human nature regardless of race, ethnicity, or the local culture. Socialism has failed in Africa as it has failed in Eastern Europe, India, China and in South America. Even if Africa is culturally collectivist, it is important to comprehend that a group is a collectivity of individuals whereby each individual within the group is stimulated by the pursuit of his own interests. The pursuit of one’s self-interests is an intrinsic factor of human nature that no central authority can change regardless of the goal of the common good. Despite the collectivist nature of African culture, African culture is not exempted from that natural law of human nature. Coercing human nature to do something that is not in harmony with the nature of human understanding, will result in failure. That is why socialism, wherever it is tried, will always fail.

Germinal G. Van is an author, political essayist and libertarian scholar, born in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa. This article first appeared at mises.org.

Urban Democrats Are Driving Jobs And Prosperity Out Of American Cities.

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Finance giant JPMorgan is considering moving its headquarters out of New York City and its gleaming skyscraper buildings. While the company is playing coy with these reports, it has already been slowly relocating many of its operations and jobs to lower tax locations in Ohio, Texas, and Delaware. The Lone Star State currently hosts 25,000 of its employees, and Texas will likely surpass the New York portion in coming years.

The resulting move will harm the middle earners of New York far more than that of the wealthy, who can easily move to a better tax climate. Not only is the state tax structure prohibitive, but Alexandria Ocasio Cortez may be responsible for the pink slips at JPMorgan, which anticipated thousands of educated technology workers to come to the area as part of the planned Amazon headquarters in Queens. But after the freshman lawmaker lobbied against the project, the retailer changed plans. Many good jobs and the growth they sustain at JPMorgan will likely follow.

The exodus is part of a trend sweeping traditionally Democratic states over the last several years. Whether it is the state and local tax deduction changes or burdensome regulations, the trend is becoming increasingly clear. General Electric pulled up stakes from Connecticut awhile ago, and Cigna is considering doing the same. A whopping 1,800 businesses left California in 2016 alone, while manufacturing firm Honeywell moved its headquarters from New Jersey to greener pastures in North Carolina.

None of this is news to businesses or to readers of my columns. However, there seems to be no learning curve among the liberal governments of these tax happy locales. So why are we looking to federalize this model? Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has proposed this tax model on steroids should she be elected next year. For her, along with many of the politicians in these blue states and cities, the planned taxes and regulations are meant to be targeted mainly at wealthy citizens.

However, the primary losers in this formula are middle class workers. Between the loss of jobs and revenue, these states and cities press even harder on millions of middle income taxpayers to make up the difference. There is a pervasive ripple effect of driving large companies from former business hubs. Not only does each corporation create thousands of jobs, but the business is a critical part of the local economic foundation.

What will happen when JPMorgan leaves Manhattan? The cumulative effects of rents unpaid, restaurants not frequented, and investment in the surrounding area will jeopardize much smaller businesses dependent on corporate employee dollars. JPMorgan will likely be the vanguard of the coming business exodus. It is not just a hypothetical situation, as changes in corporate taxes have had this effect before. Consider the effects of an anchor business leaving a city, just as the financial sector may consider darting New York under the tax plans of Warren or Bernie Sanders.

The loss of an industry harms the middle class far more than corporate stakeholders, as seen in Rochester, New York, when one of the largest employers, Eastman Kodak, hit hard times. Once a center of filmmaking technology, Rochester grew as Eastman Kodak did. At its peak in the early 1980s, the company employed more than 60,000 people in the area. Over the next few decades, it fought a losing battle with digital technology, employment costs, and the New York tax and regulatory scheme. After years of steep decline, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

Today, Rochester is in dire straits. The average household income is only half of the national average and its once burgeoning middle class is now a hollow shell of its former self. Its population has fallen by a full third since 1960. The city ranking as the 16th sharpest population decline between 2010 and 2017, according to census figures, It is also ranked as one of the worst cities to live in the country. The effects of the fall of Eastman Kodak cascaded into other businesses in Rochester. Pensioners dependent on the company face uncertainty. Restaurants, services, and real estate companies all languish as the local economy continues to sputter.

Many of the Democrats running for president, or who are in charge of the blue state economic models, do not see the next Eastman Kodaks. By making it impossible for businesses to operate, they will inevitably harm middle class workers they seek to help. Corporate boards can create golden parachutes for themselves or declare bankruptcy. A shift worker awaiting a corporate pension does not have the same financial luxury.

Politicians love to preach that their proposals will make the economy fairer by targeting the most productive members of their states and cities. However, the encompassing butterfly effect spells bad news for people like you and me. Every time you vote for a proposition or a candidate promising a repeat of bad policy, just remember that it will ultimately be the middle class that will pay the largest share. So much for fair taxes.

Kristin Tate is a writer and an analyst for Young Americans for Liberty. She is an author whose latest book is “How Do I Tax Thee? A Field Guide to the Great American Rip-Off.” 

A Little Bit Of Knowledge Sharing Goes A Long Way: Let’s Learn From Switzerland How To Administer A Healthcare System.

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Caught in a proverbial whirlwind of presidential politics, today’s complicated Medicare-for-all debate now focuses on who will pay for it and how. Some candidates say, perhaps grudgingly, that taxes will have to go up for the middle class. Others say no, heavy taxes are only needed for the wealthy and especially for corporations. Some say private health care insurance will become illegal; others say there will be private and public alternatives but that everyone will be covered.
As the debate intensifies, the how-and-who question becomes ever more complicated. Even the most dedicated policy wonks and candidates seem hard-pressed to provide a coherent answer. It’s rather strange that no one has introduced the Swiss health care experience into the debate. It’s also strange that we rarely hear mention of the U.S. experience with automobile collision liability insurance, which offers useful insights.
Consider the Swiss approach to health care. First, every person is required by law to purchase basic health care insurance from a private insurance company, of which there are some 80 in number. The premiums vary across the 26 Swiss cantons; In 2017, the individual average payment per person was $450 per month. Any payment in excess of 8 percent of income was tax deductible.Once insured, the policy holder has it for life, at the original annual premium, and can go to any doctor in Switzerland. There aren’t many impoverished Swiss, but they receive a state subsidy that pays for the insurance. The Swiss also have taxpayer-supported emergency room services, making it something of a blended system.Of course, the United States isn’t Switzerland, not by a long shot. In 2017, the Swiss population stood at 8.4 million people. Swiss per-capita GDP was just over $80,000, compared with just under $60,000 here. In 2014, Switzerland had just a half-million people living under the poverty line, or 6.6 percent of the population. In the United States, the 2014 share was 14.8 percent. It’s an exceptionally wealthy, smaller country.Even so, some version of the Swiss health care approach may deserve consideration. After all, it works, at least in the eyes of the Swiss people. And rather than a one-sized-fits-all approach, the program is loaded with opportunities for people to pick and choose coverage from private firms that have to compete to satisfy patients.

As far as overall costs, in 2017, Switzerland spent $8,009 per capita for health care, second highest among the 36 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. The United States was number one, at $10,224, or about 28 percent more than the Swiss.

Now, what does this have to do with the U.S. approach to automobile liability insurance?

Think about how people are compensated when they and their property are harmed in auto collisions. Do we have a national auto insurance plan? A system paid for with taxes so that everyone gets covered? High insurance taxes for rich people and no tax at all for the poor?

No. Our auto insurance system—like the Swiss health care program—is determined by each of the states.

47 of our 50 states require those who own an automobile to purchase insurance coverage from private providers. The required coverage varies, and people in each state can choose the insurance they will purchase. Three states—Arizona, New Hampshire, and Virginia—do not require coverage, but heavily incentivize people to buy it in other ways.

Somehow, it works! And there is no national debate about how to deal with the auto insurance crisis. Maybe it is time for one of our aspiring presidential candidates to refresh the health insurance debate. Health care might be a different animal, but not so different that we can’t pay attention to a few lessons that are right in front of us.

Bruce Yandle is a distinguished adjunct fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and dean emeritus of the Clemson University College of Business and Behavioral Science.

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