“The one thing the Left will never do is solve a problem”
The Issue Is The Revolution
The uncivil strategy for offensive Leftism
The Left foreshadowed their ongoing street theatre of harassing leadership and throwing up phoney charges at the opening of the Kavanaugh hearings. Audience members jumped up shouting and wailing in a calculated and prolonged demonstration, made to appear like random testaments, to insert themselves into, and destroy the hearing process – egged on by phoney procedural delay attempts from their Leftist Senators.
It was all planned, and it raised a big middle finger to the American people who tuned in to learn something about their government.
The Left cannot permit reason to control. Under reason, they lose. But the rule of law is no match for the rule of the mob. Civility can’t compete with barbarity. Consent means nothing in the face of force.
The Left moved the bar to shouting, property destruction, procedural disruption, and all things uncivil. Without civility, what remains to check human impulses? How long until they start shooting?
That’s how previous Leftist movements all ended up. The fascists, communists, and socialists always end up imposing violent repression because citizens don’t usually voluntarily give up their freedom. Freedom gets taken surreptitiously. It’s stolen quietly, a bit at a time.
Like now. Our Supreme Court nomination process has been taken from the people and put under the force of Leftist dominion. Our Republican leadership seems oblivious to the theft.
Antifa, BLM, the Indivisibles, the Resist movement, the DSA, all the Soros-funded groups, etc., want their violent escalations to end up in revolution. No way are they moderating themselves.
Resist the resisters
Indivisibles, resisters, Democrats, Leftists, ANTIFA, BLM, whatever flag they wave on a given day, get the cart before the horse. Adversity is the game they play with any issue, any personality, and any physical or mental manifestation. Objects take many forms, and they can all be used in the struggle.
Present the object in a light most unfavorable to their opponents, and most favorable to themselves. Pound the issues, pound the law, pound the table! Take the adversarial theatrics from the courtroom and apply them in every other room in America under the innocuous labels of “dialog,” “demonstration,” and “protected speech.”
As employed by the Left, the accurate term is “dialectics,” right out of Marxism. It is process untempered by reason.
In the courtroom, a jury of reasonable people decide which adverse position is most reasonable and which is most unreasonable. The loser pays, goes to jail, or desists, and the process ends.
But the dialectics applied by the Left don’t respect the outcome of a vote, and don’t have an ending. A vote against the Left just signals it’s time to amp up the adversity. The beat always goes on. Look around. Non-stop opposition media propaganda makes it pretty hard to miss.
It’s easy to get caught up in the emotion of the Left. The tragic images they present scream injustice and cry out for resolution. But the images rarely withstand much scrutiny. Closer inspection always ends up debunking the image. And there’s always another image waiting in the wings.
It is unnatural to be changeless, to stay the same way, and have the same answer, all the time, for all situations – except when it comes to the Left. Perhaps this is the ultimate irony – the group that consider themselves progressive, never seem to progress.
Obama swung the pendulum far Left
“[T]hose who remain faithful to Marxism are getting reinforcements from all sides. They no longer pretend that Communism as an economic system was good in itself, in the absolute sense, nor that it remains an ideal to be concretized. Communism’s merits are gauged in relation to the execrated capitalist system, the old adversary against which it wages eternal warfare. Thereby it has gained this definitive advantage: it does not have to exist in order to be true.”
“The American campus phenomenon, which extends also into some American newspapers, magazines, radio and television channels, is a reminder that the Marxist mentality can flourish and have considerable effect on public debate even in nations where Communism did not succeed in forming a party with electoral clout or influence in the unions. Communism can be an ideological presence even where it has never been a political player.
With regard to Communist crimes, the American moral dilemma differs fundamentally from that of Europe. In the United States, the deeds of Stalin and Mao never drew the active complicity or the massive approbation that Europeans bestowed on them. Today, in the American circles where the Marxist delusion still flourishes, it is for the most part theoretical and abstract, or the posture of a minority of “liberal” intellectuals.”
from: Jean-François Revel, Last Exit to Utopia
The above was published in 2000 and Revel passed away 10 years ago, prior to the resurgence of Communist and Marxist ideas mainstreamed by the Obama administration. Let’s not kid ourselves that the current state of the nation at the beginning of the Trump administration is in some political balance. America went far Left under Obama. The signs abound–street actions, speech suppression, wilding thugs, government occupation of the healthcare market, entitlements off the charts, a Leviathan regulatory monster over head, and the Left fighting tooth and nail lest any of it get rolled back.
Election Day
So, U.S. market futures will rebound today. The 24/7 news business will run an UP narrative day. There will be more smiles and optimism as history and predictions all reflect a more sunny outlook. To contrast, the DOWN narrative soul searching of the last couple days was so serious and gloomy.
The long term predictive value for future behavior, and the information potential to explain history, in daily market swings, is minimal – analogous to the determinative potential that a few grains of sand have to shape the beach. Sure, there’s an effect, but let’s not read too much into it.
Under the determinist Marxist norm, news is never in short supply – all history and all future events are knowable because human behavior is determined by causes that Marxists control. The consequences that can be deterministically hypothesized from any given event are limited only by the Marxist’s imagination. And they’re very imaginative.
The practicing Marxist sees a stimulus and says people will line up with a determined response. Except when they don’t – like what happened last week when a majority of British defied the predictions, defied those wagering on the outcome, and went the other way. But anomalies in human behavior from the determined proper outcome don’t really penetrate the Marxist’s vision.
They just regroup and start marching to force the outcome their determinism had predicted should occur. Because of course they’re right. That’s always beyond question. And they don’t hesitate for a moment to write laws, statutes, zoning codes, and plans to enforce their unquestionable visions.
In sum, the Marxist system is basically, things will happen their way, because if they don’t, they’ll make sure they do. That’s the nature of totalitarianism. They control the outcome.
But Marxism is a completely unrealistic model for human action. Left alone, in their self interest, people will adapt and create incredible inventions and behaviors, unforeseen and unanticipated by the totalitarians.
The practicing Marxist preempts a lot of potential value from accumulating in our lives in the pursuit of their totalitarian power. People who must live under the practicing Marxist lose value, lose empowerment, lose their livelihoods, and often lose their lives. Yet they seem to keep signing up for more totalitarianism.
Except on those rare occasions when they don’t!
Hopefully, on this election day in Elbert County, the totalitarian planners will get to experience a bit of British individualism.
militancy without end
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Leftists and political Muslims share a successful strategy of umbrage politics – “Agree with me or I’ll get upset.” Each day news reports come in about the riots, demonstrations, occupations, marches, boycotts, and class actions underway by upset beneficiaries. You’d think that’s all that ever happened in America.
Leftist reporters saturate the media with reports about the struggles. The struggles never end as the numbers of beneficiaries and Muslims continue to grow. No degree of social justice, religious obedience, or equality can satisfy them, as if these things could even be quantified. No fixed amount of entitlement benefits can sustain an enlarging population. The struggles are designed to be unsatisfiable, unsolvable, unwinnable, and unending.
Liberal politicians keep putting more money on the table and unscrupulous beneficiaries keep lining up to collect. You can’t legitimately call either the politicians or the beneficiaries citizens because citizenship implies duties that neither one cares much about. They are gamers – gaming the system for personal benefit, be it preferential law or public money – and gaming the system for votes.
Who even discusses economic and political theories, reasoning, science, education, or even metaphysical foundations anymore? Why bother with intellectual baggage when numbers in the streets will get favorable laws written, favorable court cases decided, entitlement money allocated, criminal prosecutions foregone, constitutional protections denied, the power of the Leftist state and Muslim Sharia increased, and votes?
Conservatives are chasing their tails with volumes of sound and persuasive analysis about these social pathologies, but the groups who trade in power demographics don’t care about what conquered people have to say, except to the extent it identifies more opportunities to exploit.
Pure democracy is literally devouring America. Leftists and Muslims are leading the short walk to the end of our constitutional society. The tyrannies of the minorities are on the march while liberal vote-buying politicians eagerly fund and enable them.
The overwhelming majority of Americans who provide the real value to America that predatory Leftists and political Muslims feed on, are apparently too busy to stop it.
The Copernican Revolution in Economics
We’re Still Haunted by the Labor Theory of Value
Why are so many students convinced that they should receive better grades for the papers they’ve spent so much time writing? It’s not a belief about the quality of those papers; it’s a belief about the hours and hours spent working on them.
This fundamental misunderstanding about the value of labor is at the center of the Marxist critique of capitalism.
The Center of Everything
For thousands of years, humans were sure that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun revolved around it. With the advent of systematic inquiry, scientists had to develop more and more complex explanations for why their observations of the universe did not fit with that hypothesis. When Copernicus and others offered an alternative explanation that was able to explain the observed facts, and did so more clearly and concisely, the heliocentric model triumphed. The Copernican revolution changed science forever.
There is a similar story in economics. For hundreds of years, many economists believed that the value of a good depended on the cost of producing it. In particular, many subscribed to the labor theory of value, which argued that a good’s value derived from the amount of work that went into making it.
Much like the geocentric view of the universe, the labor theory of value had some superficial plausibility, as it does often seem that goods that involve more labor have more value. However, much like the story in astronomy, the theory got increasingly complicated as it tried to explain away some obvious objections. Starting in the 1870s, economics had its own version of the Copernican revolution as the subjective theory of value became the preferred explanation for the value of goods and services.
Today, the labor theory of value has only a minuscule number of adherents among professional economists, but it remains all too common in other academic disciplines when they discuss economic issues, as well as among the general public. (The labor theory of grades is, as I noted above, particularly popular among college students.)
The Specter of Karl Marx (and Adam Smith)
One reason the theory is still the implicit explanation of value in many other disciplines is because they rely on the theory’s most famous adherent for their understanding of economics: Karl Marx. Marx was hardly the only economist to hold this view, nor is the labor theory of value unique to socialists. Adam Smith believed in a somewhat weaker version of the theory as well.
Without the labor theory of value, it is not clear how much of Marx’s critique of capitalism remains valid.
For Marx, the theory was at the center of his view of the problems of capitalism. The argument that capitalism exploited workers depended crucially on the view that labor was the source of all value and that the profits of capitalists were therefore “taken” from workers who deserved it. Marx’s concept of alienation focused on the centrality of labor to making us human and the ways in which capitalism destroyed our ability to take joy in our work and control the conditions under which we created value. Without the labor theory of value, it is not clear how much of Marx’s critique of capitalism remains valid.
Part of the problem for Marx and others who accepted the theory was that there were so many seemingly obvious objections that they had to construct complex explanations to account for them. What about the value of land or other natural resources? What about great works of art that were produced with a small amount of labor but fetched extremely high prices? What about differences in individuals’ skill levels, which meant that there would be different amounts of time required to produce the same good?
The classical economists, including Marx, offered explanations for all of these apparent exceptions, but, like the increasingly complex explanations of the geocentricists, they began to feel ad hoc and left people searching for a better answer.
The Austrian Revolution
In economics, that answer came when, much like Copernicus, several economists realized that the old explanation was precisely backward. This point was clearest in the work of Carl Menger, whose Principles of Economics not only offered a new explanation for the nature of economic value but also founded the Austrian school of economics in the process.
What Menger and others argued was that value is subjective. That is, the value of a good is not determined by the physical inputs, including labor, that helped to create it. Instead, the value of a good emerges from human perceptions of its usefulness for the particular ends that people had at a particular point in time. Value is not something objective and transcendent. It is a function of the role that an object plays as a means toward the ends that are part of human purposes and plans.
Thus, according to the subjectivists, land had value not because of the labor that went into tilling it, but because people believed that it could contribute to the satisfaction of some direct want of their own (such as growing crops to eat) or that it would contribute indirectly to other ends by being used to grow crops to sell at the market. Works of art had value because many people found them to be beautiful no matter how much or how little labor went into producing them. With value being determined by human judgments of usefulness, the variations in the quality of labor posed no trouble for explaining value.
Indeed, economic value was a completely separate category from other forms of value, such as scientific value. That’s why people pay money to have someone give them a complete horoscope reading even though astrology has no scientific value whatsoever. What matters for understanding economic value is the perception of usefulness in pursuit of human purposes and plans, not some “objective” value of the good or service.
Turning Marx Upside Down
But the real Copernican revolution in economics was how the subjective theory of value related to the value of labor. Rather than seeing the value of outputs being determined by the value of the inputs like labor, the subjective theory of value showed that it’s the other way around: the value of inputs like labor were determined by the value of the outputs they helped to produce.
The high market value of well-prepared food is not the result of the value of the chef’s labor. Rather, the chef’s labor is valuable precisely because he is able to produce food that the public finds especially tasty, beautiful, or healthy.
On this view, labor gets rewarded according to its ability to produce things that others value. When you then consider the ways in which labor combining with capital enables that labor to produce goods that humans value even more, which in turn increases labor’s remuneration, Marx’s whole worldview is suddenly turned on its head. Capital does not exploit labor. Instead, it enhances labor’s value by giving labor the tools it needs to make even more of the things that humans value.
Understood correctly through the subjective theory of value, capitalism is fundamentally a communication process through which humans try to sort out how best to make use of our limited resources to satisfy our most urgent wants. Exchange and market prices are how we make our subjective perceptions of value accessible to others so they can figure out how best to provide us with the things we value most.
We Have More Work to Do
For economists, the labor theory of value holds roughly the same validity as the geocentric view of the universe. For that reason, Marx’s whole theoretical apparatus, and therefore his criticisms of capitalism, are equally questionable.
Unfortunately, many people, academics outside economics and the public alike, are simply unaware of the Copernican revolution in economics. Knocking down the labor theory of value remains a labor-intensive and valuable task.
Steven Horwitz is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University and the author of Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective, now in paperback.
Elbert County morning
Went looking for a picture of Pikes Peak this morning but the fog did not lift. Settled for a curious horse and donkey, a country lane, and a hare.
Marxist mobs throughout the U.S., not only in Baltimore, may suspend rioting long enough to scare up another ideological grievance, only upon hearing convictions of the Baltimore police.
Normally, a judge must make a conclusion of the existence of probable cause before an arrest can occur, however in Baltimore, they let a prosecutor make the call. A prosecutor is not a disinterested party in the enforcement of criminal law. That’s one problem.
The second problem is proving beyond a reasonable doubt all of the charges, to get convictions to mollify the Marxist mobs, which seems unlikely to occur on the facts of the case currently revealed.
I expect Baltimore may have bought itself, and the country, a little breathing room, but that the Marxist mobs will barely break stride in their long march to impose American communism.
environmysticism
“Nothing like a predefined optimal state of the world exists that we should, for some reason, preserve and protect. The state of the world is the result of spontaneous interactions of a great number of cosmic, geological, climatic, and other factors, as well as of the effect of living organisms, which always look for the best conditions for their reproduction. The equilibrium that exists in nature is a dynamic one.
The environmentalists’ attitude toward nature is analogous to the Marxist approach to economics. The aim in both cases is to replace the free, spontaneous evolution of the world (and humankind) by the would-be optimal, central, or–using today’s fashionable adjective–global planning of world development. Much as in the case of Communism, this approach is utopian and would lead to results completely different from the intended ones. Like other utopias, this one can never materialize, and efforts to make it materialize can only be carried out through restrictions of freedom, through the dictates of a small, elitist minority over the overwhelming majority.”
Vaclav Klaus, Blue Planet in Green Shackles, 2007.
