Can You Speak the Truth without Punishment?

“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” — John Adams, 'Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,' December 1770.

In today’s climate of political correctness people are being punished for speaking the truth — even when they have the facts on their side.

Before I continue let me once again explain the theory of cognitive dissonance that often explains apparent irrational behavior. In a nutshell, this theory holds that people are uncomfortable when holding two opposing ideas or beliefs (this is called dissonance). To reduce discomfort, people will achieve consistence by such tactics as denying one view or avoiding situations that expose contradictions. The classic study is Leon Festinger's When Prophecy Fails, where the day of an end-of-the world UFO cult's exact prediction of the world's demise came and passed, but they nevertheless reinvigorated their prediction rather than admit foolishness.

By all accounts, today's college campuses grow more intolerant by the day. We move closer to the old Soviet Empire, where political dissidents risked the gulag for even joking about Marxism. In the U.S., however, the hate crimes concern anything that touches on race, ethnicity, gender differences, diversity, and sexuality (see here). Even an old-fashioned ethnic joke almost guarantees mandatory counseling.

According to Greg Lukianoff writing in the Wall Street Journal — The Justice and Education departments issue a dangerous new speech code for colleges:

“The scandals roiling Washington over the past two weeks involve troubling government behavior that had been hidden—the IRS targeting of conservative groups and the Justice Department's surveillance of the Associated Press, among others. Largely overlooked amid the histrionics has been a shocker hiding in plain sight. Last week, the Obama administration moved to dramatically undermine students' and faculty rights at colleges across the country.

The new policy was announced in a joint letter from the Education Department and Justice Department to the University of Montana. The May 9 letter addressed the results of a year-long joint investigation by the departments into the school's mishandling of several serious sexual-assault cases. The investigation determined that the university's policies addressing sexual assault failed to comply with Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

But the joint letter, which announced a "resolution agreement" with the university, didn't stop there. It then proceeded to rewrite the federal government's rules about sexual harassment and free speech on campus.

If that sounds hyperbolic, consider the letter itself. The first paragraph declares that the Montana findings should serve as a "blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country." After outlining the specifics of the case, the letter states that only a stunningly broad definition of sexual harassment—"unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature"—will now satisfy federal statutory requirements. This explicitly includes "verbal conduct," otherwise known as speech.”

Skeptics need only look at the pervasiveness of campus speech codes, coerced sensitivity training, the mandatory injection of multicultural propaganda into courses, and other top-down censorship. Even an exposed hate crime hoax has become a "teachable moment." None of this existed in the 1950s and 1960s

Nevertheless, just when you thought that imposing the PC orthodoxy could not get any worse, it does. The latest example concerns the firing of Jason Richwine from the Heritage Foundation. Richwine's heresies can be found in his 2009 Harvard dissertation, not anything he said or did while employed at Heritage. He asserted that racial/ethnic groups differed in genetic-based IQ and then suggested that U.S. immigration policy might recognize these differences when dealing with immigration from Mexico.

Here is part of what Patrick Buchanan wrote in Townhall.com regarding Richwine’s firing from Heritage:

“Jason Richwine, the young conservative scholar who co-authored the Heritage Foundation report on the long-term costs of the amnesty bill backed by the "Gang of Eight," is gone from Heritage.

He was purged after The Washington Post unearthed his doctoral dissertation at the JFK School of Government.

Richwine's thesis:

IQ tests fairly measure mental ability. The average IQ of immigrants is well below that of white Americans. This difference in IQ is likely to persist through several generations.

And the potential consequences of this?

"A lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market."

Richwine defended his 166-page thesis before Harvard's George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser and Christopher Jencks, who once edited The New Republic. But while his thesis was acceptable at Harvard -- it earned Richwine a Ph.D. -- it has scandalized the Potomac priesthood.

Our elites appear unanimous: Richwine's view that intelligence is not equally distributed among ethnic and racial groups, and is partly inherited, is rankest heresy. Yet no one seems to want to prove him wrong.

Consider Richwine's contention that differences in mental ability exist and seem to persist among racial and ethnic groups.

In The Wall Street Journal last month, Warren Kozak noted that 28,000 students in America's citadel of diversity, New York City, took the eighth-grade exam to enter Stuyvesant, the Bronx School of Science and Brooklyn Tech, the city's most elite high schools. Students are admitted solely on their entrance test scores.

Of the 830 students who will be entering Stuyvesant as freshmen this fall, 1 percent are black, 3 percent are Hispanic, 21 percent are white -- and 75 percent are Asian.

Now, blacks and Hispanics far outnumber Asians in New York. But at Stuyvesant, Asians will outnumber blacks and Hispanics together 19-to-1.

Is this the result of racially biased tests at Stuyvesant?

At Berkeley, crown jewel of the California university system, Hispanics, 40 percent of California's population and an even larger share of California's young, are 12 percent of the freshman class. Asians, outnumbered almost 3-to-1 by Hispanics in California, have almost four times as many slots as Hispanics in the freshman class. Another example of racial bias?

The 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, which measures the academic ability of 15-year-olds worldwide, found the U.S.A. falling to 17th in reading, 23rd in science, 31st in math.

Yet, Spain aside, not one Hispanic nation, from which a plurality of our immigrants come, was among the top 40 in reading, science or math.

But these folks are going to come here and make us No. 1 again?

Is there greater "underclass behavior" among Hispanics?

The crime rate among Hispanics is about three times that of white Americans, while the Asian crime rate is about a third that of whites.

Among white folks, the recent illegitimacy rate was 28 percent; among Hispanics, 53 percent. According to one study a few years back, Hispanics were 19 times as likely as whites to join gangs.

What about Richwine's point regarding "social trust"?

Six years ago, in "E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century," Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone," wrote that after 30,000 interviews he found that ethnic and racial diversity can be devastating to communities and destructive of community values.

In racially mixed communities, Putnam wrote, not only do people not trust strangers, they do not even trust their own kind.

"People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down,' that is, to pull in like a turtle ... (to) withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."

With the immigration bill granting amnesty to 12 million illegals, an open door to their dependents and a million new immigrants each year, almost all from the Third World, America in 2040 is going to look like Los Angeles today. Yet, it was in L.A. that Putnam found social capital at its most depleted and exhausted.

If Richwine is right, America in 2040 will be a country with whites and Asians dominating the professions, and 100 million Hispanics concentrated in semiskilled work and manual labor.

The issues Richwine raises go to the question of whether we shall survive as one nation and one people.

If our huge bloc of Hispanics, already America's largest minority at 53 million, is fed by constant new immigration, but fails for a couple of generations to reach the middle-class status that Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians and Poles attained after two generations, what becomes of our "indivisible" nation?

Rather than face this question, better to purge and silence the Harvard extremist who dared to raise it.”

It's pointless to debate this issue here, but let's just say the scientific evidence for this assertion satisfied his dissertation committee (which included the well-known liberal Christopher Jencks). Clearly, Richwine is not a crackpot, and the IQ/immigration nexus might warrant academic study.

Richwine's heresy has been widely (though often unfairly) condemned, but one such attack demands extra-special scrutiny, for it shines light into just how far campuses now go to burn witches. Here is part of a statement issued by 23 Harvard student organizations regarding Richwine's dissertation:

“Central to his claim is the idea that certain groups are genetically predisposed to be more intelligent than others. We condemn in unequivocal terms these racist claims as unfit for Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard University as a whole. Granting permission for such a dissertation to be published debases all of our degrees and hurts the University's reputation. Even if such claims had merit, the Kennedy School cannot ethically stand by this dissertation whose end result can only be furthering discrimination under the guise of academic discourse.”

In other words, though Richwine might be factually correct, his research should be condemned, since it tarnishes the Harvard degree and reputation and will only promote discrimination by giving it an academic veneer. Being offended now trumps intellectual freedom. Note well, the dissertation is already online, and there is zero chance of it being removed from the Harvard archives, so all of this denunciation is just speech-making, taking "a stand" against "hate." This is tantamount to Pope Urban VIII refusing to believe Galileo Galilei’s theories of heliocentrism because they believed that the planets revolved about the earth (geocentrism) because this what the Pope and Church always had believed and preached and the thought of people losing confidence in their dictum drove them to discredit Galileo. This is why he was punished. This is a perfect example of cognitive dissonance!

Ironically, absent this publicity, the dissertation would have remained obscure. Moreover, what harm will occur as a result of Richwine's assertions, regardless of veracity? Will the finally uncovered facts instigate violence? Will Hispanic workers be denied employment (or even fired) since employers now finally recognize their below-average. In short, other than getting a Harvard Ph.D. fired, this outrage accomplishes nothing.

How did this happen? Surely the 23 organizations are aware of academic freedom and the First Amendment. And surely they could read Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve and the rejoinders before condemning Richwine. Obviously, something is very wrong when Harvard students are so easily roused to stamp out Orwell’s 1984 thought crimes.

Here's how cognitive dissonance applies to these book-burning Harvard students. From kindergarten onward, every one of them undoubtedly encountered firsthand some minority students who performed less well academically (including in classes at Harvard). Most also read about the academic problems of these minorities, including the billions spent on failed programs like Head Start. They likely also encountered the disproportionate achievements of Asian and Jewish classmates, an inescapable firsthand reality that closely matches Richwine's data.

Simultaneously, their teachers often told them the very opposite: all groups — blacks, Asians, Hispanics, men, and women — possess equal intellectual abilities, and "diversity makes us strong." In effect, youngsters are told to disregard a plain-to-see reality — trust only what your teachers and textbooks tell you. Yes, test scores and professional attainment are unequal, but these just reflect environmental advantages. Better yet, race really doesn't exist; it is just a social construct.

How is this conflict between an unavoidable reality and school learning to be reconciled? The solution, as we suggest, is to fervently denounce any evidence contradicting the political orthodoxy. Recall the Soviet Union circa the 1980s — don't fall for the capitalist propaganda about life being better in the West.

There is even an older example of this cognitive dissidence in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s allegory he presented with a group of men chained to a wall in a cave facing a large, blank wall. Behind them a fire burns. People and animals pass in front of the fire casting distorted shadows on the wall. When one of the men is released and goes out of the cave and witnesses the real world he is astonished. When he returns to tell the men in the cave what he has seen they refuse to believe him. They are more comfortable with their environment and the whole of their society depends on the shadows on the wall.

This allegory, another example of cognitive dissidence, is what our public education and university system is fostering on the students of today.

Such cognitive gymnastics are not easy, so every contradictory fact has to be hounded down and destroyed. Constant vigilance is necessary, and as tension grows, the greater the necessary exertion. It is insufficient to just opine, "Well, I disagree." Obliterating infuriating evidence demands public approbation and hyperbole lest anyone doubt one's commitment to the PC orthodoxy. Condemnation is not about Richwine per se; it is about sustaining a belief that plainly differs from reality. Recall the infamous Two Minutes Hate of Orwell's 1984. Anything less fervent might permit a bit of doubt to survive, and who knows? Like a cancerous cell, it might metastasize and lead to Klan membership.

Thus understood, the condemnation of Richwine by Harvard undergraduates and his dismissal from the Heritage Foundation cannot be softened, let alone reversed, by lecturing them on academic freedom or the value of intellectual honesty. It is equally pointless to explain that vulnerable Hispanics are safe from a heretofore obscure Harvard dissertation (or that the federal government is better-suited to protecting them). Rather, outrage reflects a crisis of faith, an ever-widening chasm between the PC orthodoxy and an indisputable reality. The parallel might be a Harvard undergraduate who believes in Socialism taking a course on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This would be tantamount to the prisoner in the cave.

This indignation suggests that such assaults will only worsen, and, correspondingly, fewer and fewer researchers will venture into career-ending territory. After all, there seems no end to futile budget-busting efforts to bring about an egalitarian fantasy while educators continue the propaganda. Millions of youngsters will continue to hear about the joys of racial/ethnic differences while personally witnessing a world of ethnic strife. Stamping out heresies to solidify the faith will also intensify as universities hire yet more "anti-hate" specialists who discover yet more heresies.

I recall one seeing university president in a TV interview who, when asked if he had read The Bell Curve, said that not only had he not read the book, but he would not even think about reading it. Such is today's life of the mind. What's next? Requiring all college freshmen to sign a loyalty oath promising to expunge all bad thoughts? In this sense they will all be prisoners in Plato’s cave.

The Intolerance and Bigotry of the Left

"Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." — George Washington (Farewell Address, 1796)

Today we live in a society where morality is considered relative to the times. In many cases there are no absolutes when it comes to morality and those who believe that religion and morality go hand in hand, as George Washington did, are considered to be either intolerant or racist. This is the mantra that the Left tosses around on a daily basis in the mainstream media and our TV and films.

The latest example of this appears in Salon Magazine in an article by Mary Elizabeth Williams writing about Olympic Gold Medalist Gabby Douglas and her expression of Christian faith. Rather than simply ignoring Ms. Douglas’ comments on her religious faith when she tweeted; “Let all that I am praise the LORD; may I never forget the good things he does for me” Ms. Williams felt compelled to write a negative article ridiculing Douglas’ expression of faith by stating:

“I’ve often wondered what it is about Christians like Douglas that unnerves me so. The closest I’ve been able to figure it is that Douglas and her ilk seem to espouse a faith based on what is commonly referred to as “The God of Parking Spaces.” It’s the deity that grants wishes to those who ask nicely. Douglas is a girl who has described God as the figure who’s “waking me up every morning and keeping me safe in the gym every day.”

There was no need for Williams to make such statements about a 16-year old girl who won a gold medal and expressed her believe in God and Jesus Christ. Williams could have written about numerous positive aspects of Douglas’ life but instead she had to take a whack at her Christian beliefs. Why?

Evidently, quite a few liberals amongst us are just as patriotic as the rest of us; unless our athletic avatars tarnish their medals with the stain of faith. According to Salon sourpuss Mary Elizabeth Williams. I understand the reasons for watching the Olympics extend well beyond the usual jingoistic expressions of sports fandom. Anyone who has seen Usain Bolt rocket through the 100 meters like a gazelle on amphetamines knows what I mean. Just as art can be appreciated for its own sake, so can athletic accomplishment.

So, who are these miserable curmudgeons like Williams? They’re the people who sneer at us for chanting “U-S-A,” but don’t bat an eyelid when the Europeans bellow their way through most of Wagner’s Ring Cycle while watching a 1-0 soccer match. They’re the people who just can’t bring themselves to be patriotic; even for a moment. We know who they are; we also know how they vote. To paraphrase Ms. Williams: they’re “commonly referred to as “liberals.”

I was raised in an extended family that voted for the Democrat no matter who he was. They considered themselves to be progressive and liberal and believed the Democratic Party was the party of the working people and would bring them the most benefits, especially when it came to unions. The exception to this was my father, who while professing to be a progressive did not like unions and was not a member of one.

These progressive family members and many of our middle-class neighbors who held similar beliefs were also intolerant of other nationalities, races, and ethnic heritages. Yet they considered themselves to be “liberal”.

Somewhere along the way I broke with this tradition of “liberalism” and progressive ideology and became a conservative — a Constitutional Conservative who was more in tune with the philosophy of our Founders, The Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution than the oft failed schemes of the progressives and their big government ideology. Perhaps this is due to the fact that I became a professional who was not beholden to a union and was an entrepreneur who started and successfully ran a professional engineering consulting business for over thirty years.

It was during this time that I was able to travel the world and see the damage done by progressives with their socialistic policies and the tyranny they imposed on the people. I was also able to develop some theories about liberals and progressives and how they group think. You can see is these theories have any validity by watching TV news shows, reading liberal publications and listening to liberals speak.

American progressives hold these truths to be self-evident:

All cultures and religions are equally meritorious (except for Christianity)

There is no objective truth (until and unless progressives declare the truth)

You cannot legislate morality, therefore everything is "moral" — except Christian morality.

Progressives celebrate diversity and are tolerant, inclusive, and accepting of all fellow humans — except conservative, white and Christian people)

Progressives are intelligent, thoughtful, reality-based, and benevolent

Objective? Diverse? Inclusive? Thoughtful? Reality-based? Benevolent? Not really. Progressives and liberals are the worst offenders of their own axioms when they talk about the "evils" of those who dispute liberal versions of facts, policy, or, especially, morality. The bigotry liberals direct toward those with whom they merely disagree is staggering.

Liberals believe in free speech, unless it offends someone's tender sensitivities (meaning only that liberals disagree with it). They protest the "wealthiest 1%," but exempt from their condemnations billionaire liberals and wealthy movie and rock stars, most of whom share the same ideology. Many liberals believe corporations and capitalism to be evil, even though the capitalist system and many of the corporations of which they disapprove have created the products and standard of living liberals enjoy.

But the American left reserves its ugliest bigotry for Christians. When liberals speak or write about practicing Christians, especially evangelical Christians and, in this presidential election year, Mormons, no slander is unacceptable and no religious custom is off-limits. America's most prominent liberal has condescendingly denigrated Christians as "bitter clingers" to guns and religion. Liberals have seriously asked: "Do All Evangelical Leaders Believe Gays Should Be Put to Death?" They worry about reports that evangelicals are voting in record numbers. And they invent scenarios which question whether religious convictions resonate in the political arena. Every Christian, of any age or gender, is fair game for liberal animosity — or left-wing redefinition. Liberals bash Christians with impunity; because Christians are Christian, and behave in a Christian manner from which liberals fear no reprisal. Ironic, huh? And opportunistic, too.

Thomas Jefferson believed in something called the “American Mind.” It was Jefferson who said, our Constitution was the product of “the American mind” and was made with the same purpose as the Declaration—to establish a regime where the people are sovereign, and the government protects the rights granted to them by their Creator.

The basis of Jefferson’s beliefs, and those of our founders, was the philosophy of classical liberalism (not to be mistaken for today’s liberal thinking) of economic and social writers such as John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke. They believed in small government, free markets and personal freedom. The classical liberals advocated policies to increase liberty and prosperity. They sought to empower the commercial class politically and to abolish royal charters, monopolies, and the protectionist policies of mercantilism so as to encourage entrepreneurship and increase productive efficiency. They also expected democracy and laissez-faire economics to diminish the frequency of war.

However, liberalism in the United States shifted between 1877 and 1937 from laissez-faire constitutionalism to New Deal statism, from classical liberalism to democratic social-welfarism. Another regularly asserted contrast between classical and modern liberals. Classical liberals tend to see government power as the enemy of liberty, while modern liberals fear the concentration of wealth and the expansion of corporate power. Classical liberalism has grown into two divergent philosophies since the beginning of the twentieth century: social liberalism and market liberalism.

So what do today’s liberals believe in if they do not subscribe to the ideology of tradition classical liberalism as expressed by John Locke and our Founders. After observing thousands of interviews with liberals over the years here is my take on the “Liberal Mind.”

Liberals believe they can change human nature.

Sure, human beings can be shaped and molded to a certain extent. Any parent who has spanked a child can tell you that. However, most people care more about what they're having for lunch today than an earthquake that kills ten thousand people on the other side of the world. We're just built that way and no amount of sensitivity training, preschool classes, or Michael Moore documentaries is going to "fix" it.

Our Founders knew that human nature was flawed and that the best way to counter the ambition of one group was to place it in opposition to the ambition of an opposing group or as James Madison stated to pit ambition against ambition. Madison stated in Federalist No. 10:

“The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well as speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”

Madison wrote on Human Nature in Federalist No. 51:

“It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

No race or class of supermen, who can govern us, exits. There are no masterminds. There are no Philosopher Kings as Plato describes. Madison believed that man had a nature to abuse power: “If given the opportunity human beings will violate each other’s rights. The protection of individual rights is the primary purpose of government. Without government there is no effective security for our rights.

Liberals believe we can talk everything out with our enemies.

One of the weirder quirks of liberalism is their belief that many of our bitterest enemies have rational reasons for disliking us and that can easily be talked away if they realize we're good people. Hence, the common liberal refrain of, "Why do they hate us?" The reason this is a particularly odd belief is that liberals don't even believe this about conservatives in the United States. The average liberal thinks that if we're nice enough, we can reach an understanding with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can't be reasoned with.

Throughout the last 100 years history liberals have been wrong. They have been wrong about Nazi Germany when Neville Chamberlain and his European ilk believed they could negotiate with Adolph Hitler over the fate of Europe only to find out that they were being used by the Nazi dictator. Liberals were wrong about Ronald Reagan when he took on the Soviet Union in a direct and powerful manner. Liberals were wrong when they felt Castro was a liberator of Cuba. In fact liberals have a problem dealing with problems head-on. They would rather talk than act. As most liberals are so closely tied with academia they would rather talk than. If today’s liberals (not the classical liberals of the sixteenth and seventh centuries) were in the majority in 1776 we would never had had the Declaration or Independence and we would still be subjects of the British Monarchy. Liberals just can’t face up to tyranny. If you don’t believe this just think about the masses of liberal European Jews that believed they could deal with Hitler and the Nazis.

Transforming questions of fact into questions of intent has been the great achievement of twentieth-century totalitarians. It is a dangerous achievement which has survived the collapse of both fascist and Communist empires and has become a hallmark of much of the Western intelligentsia.

Liberals have no respect for our culture and traditions.

To liberals, our cultural, economic, and political norms were formed by backwards troglodytes making arbitrary decisions based on superstition and racism. Unfortunately for them, as a general rule, that's not so and proceeding as if it is, will often lead to exactly the same difficulties that our ancestors already dealt with in times past. No matter how smart we are, as Thomas Sowell would say; "For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.”

The German composer Carl Orff once said; Tradition is the glue that holds a society together.” It is tradition that holds families, communities and nations together; it is also something liberals frown upon. To a liberal morality is relative to the times and not absolute. There are three things that make a people into a nation — borders, language and culture. Without these three items a nation cannot exist. Today’s liberals despise all three. They want open borders where anyone can cross with impunity. They don’t want one language in our schools, government, and businesses. And they believe in multiculturalism, something that the Europeans are drifting away from as they have found out the problems and class separation it has caused in nations like France, Germany, and The Netherlands.

Liberalism is a fundamentally immoral political philosophy.

Ironically, given all their talk about "shades of gray," liberals have a very moral dualism view of the world. They consider their fellow travelers to be on the side of the angels, while the people who disagree with them are treated as evil. This leads to an "anything goes" mentality when dealing with their foes: ignoring the law via a "living constitution," politically based prosecutions, shouting down opposing speakers, and treating lying about their agenda or opponents to be moral. On the other hand, liberals will support other libs, no matter how corrupt, sleazy, or vile they are as long as they're politically useful to the left. See Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, John Murtha, and Robert Byrd for examples of that. In other words, as Margaret Thatcher has said of the Left, "For them, the end always seems to justify the means."

Today’s liberals believe there is no absolute morality. They believe morality is relative to the times and situations. Liberals believe that the killing of the unborn is not immoral when it comes to women’s rights, but they have a right to withhold baby formula from a new mother if she does not want to beast feed. They believe there are no sin and no judgment.

Fay Voshell writes provocative article in American Thinker about the mind of the progressive when it comes to religion and morality.

Liberals believe merely being liberal makes them good people.

Liberals who're obsessed with money think they're compassionate because they give away other people's tax dollars. They believe they care more about the earth than other people, even as they fly around in private jets, because they babble on about global warming. They can be dumb as a rock, but believe they're smarter than most other people because they're liberals. In other words, in the minds of most liberals, liberalism is an all-purpose substitute for actual virtue instead of just another political philosophy.

Liberals believe conservatives and free-market capitalists are evil because they believe in free-market solutions, individual freedom, and personal responsibility. I think Frédéric Bastiat said more eloquently then I could have when he stated in his treatise on the Law when talking about the mind of the socialist:

"Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain."

You must remember that in Bastiat’s day “liberals” were of the classical type and socialist were considered those masterminds who believed in big government, as today’s liberals do.

Liberals have too much faith in government.

Even most liberals would admit that government regularly fails the people. If you don't believe that, just ask them about the Bush Administration and they'll give you an earful. However, liberals tend to believe that with the right person in charge and with enough of other people’s money, government won't be so slow, stupid, inefficient, and badly run. Human history proves that they're wrong about that deal.

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

The secret to the power and success of the United States has been in the family, entrepreneurs, and morality. Our Founders knew this from the get go. They believed government had only one purpose and that was to protect the rights and property of its citizens — not to become the nanny state the liberals so desire. People such as Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller did not rely on government for their success — they relied on their ideas and faith in those ideas. When they failed they simply tried again and again until they achieved success.

Once again as Sowell states:

"The presumed irrationality of the public is a pattern running through many, if not most or all, of the great crusades of the anointed in the twentieth century--regardless of the subject matter of the crusade or the field in which it arises. Whether the issue has been 'overpopulation,' Keynesian economics, criminal justice, or natural resource exhaustion, a key assumption has been that the public is so irrational that the superior wisdom of the anointed must be imposed, in order to avert disaster. The anointed do not simply happen to have a disdain for the public. Such disdain is an integral part of their vision, for the central feature of that vision is preemption of the decisions of others."

Liberals have minimal interest in whether the programs they support work or not.

To most liberals, whether a government program betters people's lives is completely irrelevant to whether they'll support it. A program that doesn't work and costs billions, but sounds compassionate and helps Democrats politically is a huge success in the eyes of the Left. Once you understand that liberals think this way, their baffling support for programs that make no "common sense" is much easier to understand. As Thomas Sowell stated:

“In their zeal for particular kinds of decisions to be made, those with the vision of the anointed seldom consider the nature of the process by which decisions are made. Often what they propose amounts to third-party decision making by people who pay no cost for being wrong--surely one of the least promising ways of reaching decisions satisfactory to those who must live with the consequences.”

How many liberal programs costing trillions of dollars have failed over the past century? The list is long. The New Deal failed. The War on Poverty failed. The onerous regulatory policies of the EPA have failed. Just consider how many African children have died from Malaria when DDT was banned by masterminds who did not consider or care about the consequences of their actions. They were playing to unfounded fears, flawed and biased academic reports and the media.

It was government intervention that was the root cause the crash of the housing bubble by forcing banks to make loans to people they knew would not be able to pay them back. Government intervention into the college loan business is the main contributor to the inflationary rise on the cost of college today.

In their haste to be wiser and nobler than others, the liberal anointed masterminds have misconceived two basic issues. They seem to assume (1) that they have more knowledge than the average member of the society and (2) that this is the relevant comparison. The real comparison, however, is not between the knowledge possessed by the average member of the educated elite versus the average member of the general public, but rather the total direct knowledge brought to bear though social processes (the competition of the marketplace, social sorting, etc.), involving millions of people, versus the secondhand knowledge of generalities possessed by a smaller elite group of academics and masterminds. A farmer in Nebraska has far more knowledge and a vested interest in the land they farm than any ten masterminds in Washington.

Why are the horrors of Nazism so well-known and widely condemned but not those of socialism and communism? What goes untaught — and possibly is covered up — is that socialist and communist ideas have produced the greatest evil in mankind's history. You say, what in the world are you talking about? Socialists, communists and their fellow travelers, such as the Wall Street occupiers supported by our president, care about the little guy in his struggle for a fair shake! They're trying to promote social justice." Let's look at some of the history of socialism and communism so touted by liberals.

What's not appreciated is that Nazism is a form of socialism. In fact, the term Nazi stands for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler's Nazis pale in comparison to the horrors committed by the communists in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China. Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, China's communists, led by Mao Zedong and his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history's most murderous regimes is documented on University of Hawaii Professor Rudolph J. Rummel's website here, and in his book "Death by Government." According to Rummel 262 million people have been killed by government in the twentieth century with the bulk be exterminated by so called “liberal” socialist or communist regimes. Rummel states:

“Just to give perspective on this incredible murder by government, if all these bodies were laid head to toe, with the average height being 5', then they would circle the earth ten times. Also, this democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century. Finally, given popular estimates of the dead in a major nuclear war, this total democide is as though such a war did occur, but with its dead spread over a century.”

How much hunting down and punishment have there been for these communist murderers? To the contrary, it's acceptable both in Europe and in the U.S. to hoist and march under the former USSR's red flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle. Mao Zedong has long been admired by academics and leftists across our country, as they often marched around singing the praises of Mao and waving his little red book, "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung." President Barack Obama's communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes.

Whether it's the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children's Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined.

Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.

Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.

The unspeakable horrors of Nazism didn't happen overnight. They were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for "social justice." It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans — who would have cringed at the thought of genocide — who created the Trojan horse for Hitler's ascendancy. Today's Americans are similarly accepting the massive consolidation of power in Washington in the name of social justice.

If you don't believe it, just ask yourself: Which way are we headed tiny steps at a time — toward greater liberty or toward more government control over our lives?

The Genesis Code

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” — Genesis, Chapter 1, Verses 1-3.

Last night my wife and I watched the Genesis Code on our cable pay-for-view. I had heard about this Christian themed film (both positive and negative) and I wanted to see for myself what the film was about.

The Story:

Kerry Wells (Kelsey Sanders), a college journalist and committed Christian with an effervescent personality, has been assigned to do a story on Blake Truman (Logan Bartholomew) the college’s newest and very popular hockey superstar. As a relationship between them begins to develop Kerry finds that Blake, who hides behind a tough and independent façade, is actually struggling through a difficult personal crisis and that he bears the cross of a secret he has kept hidden for years. Blake rebuffs Kerry's suggestion that prayer might help ease his burden; he is convinced that modern science completely disproves the Bible, especially the opening verses of Genesis. Kerry — who is herself suddenly confronted with a challenge to her faith on another front — sets out to prove that science and Genesis are not in conflict and her quest leads to a startling revelation. Could it be that what science teaches us about creation and the story as told in Genesis are both true! The Genesis Code takes on three current social and cultural issues: Evolution vs. creation, End-of-life decisions and perceived discrimination against Christians on the college campus.

Before writing this blog I read two on-line reviews and found critical opinions of the film from a pseudo-scientist (a dentist) and an Evangelical Christian Minister. Both reviews blasted the film, but for different reasons.

The Dentist, a graduate from the University of Michigan, review is critical based on his interpretation of Cosmology and physics. In his review he states:

“The real purpose of the movie, however, is to serve as a vehicle to promote the idea that science and the Bible can be reconciled, with particular emphasis on the creation account of Genesis. Of course, operational science (measurable, testable, and observable science) is a “friend” of the Bible, and when properly understood, we can use science to support the historicity of Genesis (see Creation: Science Confirms the Bible Is True). Unfortunately, this movie immediately gets off on the wrong foot by unquestioningly embracing, as indisputable scientific fact, the speculative claims of scientists regarding the age of the universe—that the universe is about 15 billion years old. The movie then tries to startle viewers with the revelation that there is a special “code” hidden in the Book of Genesis that roughly agrees with a long age of the universe.

The film has much discussion about the physics of time dilation: how the perceived passage of time is dependent upon the perspective of the observer, and how the passage of time can be affected by mass, acceleration, and the stretching of the fabric of space. Some of this is operational science, and can be experimentally verified, and it actually may well help biblical creationists explain how we can see light from distant stars in a young universe. But by taking extensive liberties with the interpretation of certain Hebrew words in the Bible, along with the use of time dilation and God’s perspective from heaven, the movie seeks to impose a billions-of-years, progressive-creation timeline into the Genesis account. The movie claims that this is a better explanation of what is observed in the rock layers and the fossil record as opposed to molecules-to-man evolution.”

The second review I read was from a Christian minister who was also critical for its loose interpretation of the Bible. He writes:

“The Genesis Code is a full-featured film that pits the biblical six-day creation against the big bang theory of origins. In this contest, the viewer will notice that The Genesis Code never contemplates that the Bible should govern science; rather its presupposition is reversed. It is ‘science’ that is established as a seemingly inerrant source of ultimate truth.

However, science (and there are multiple definitions of what science, and even the ‘scientific method’, actually is anyway) can never be a standard of absolute truth. The sort of science with which most of us are familiar involves watching things happen (observation), and using repeatable experiments. Call it operational, or observational science if you like. But, when we try to understand events of the past, we are asking an historical question, which means that ultimately we have to use historical, not scientific, categories (see ‘It’s not science!’ and Naturalism, Origins and Operational Science). This doesn’t mean science can’t contribute to historical questions, but only that science can never provide us with the final answer. And the science involved in such things is a different sort of science—we can call it historical, forensic or even ‘origins science’.

That sort of science, which is what cosmology (the discipline that proposes ideas such as the ‘big bang’) is categorically placed in, involves a great deal of speculation, because it attempts to determine events of the past based upon fragments we have in the present. Events from the past cannot be directly observed or experimented on, tested, or repeated in the same way as observational science can.”

In fact, one expert has recently gone even further by claiming that cosmology is not even science, period! A recent article in the prestigious journal Science stated:

“‘Cosmology may look like a science, but it isn’t a science,’ says James Gunn of Princeton University, co-founder of the Sloan survey. ‘A basic tenet of science is that you can do repeatable experiments, and you can’t do that in cosmology.’”

This film attempts to win over unbelievers through argumentation in the name of ‘science’, or rather, commonly understood scientific principles. But it really uses origins science instead; this misleads viewers into thinking that a historical science like cosmology can determine such things.

The story is driven by a growing relationship between college hockey star, Blake Truman, who is an unbeliever, and a college news reporter, Kerry Wells, who is a professing Christian who interviews him.”

I can only guess at the agenda of the dentist who used his knowledge of science to dispute the Bible, but the minister is using his knowledge of the Bible to dispute the film.

What both reviewers are missing is the point that this is a fictional movie not a documentary you would see on the History, Science, National Geographic, or the Investigative Discovery channels. If it were not many people would pay money to see it.

Movies are meant to entertain by telling stories and this movie tells a compelling story. I am not a Biblical scholar or a Cosmologist or Astrophysicist so I cannot critique the theology or science portrayed in the film. However, I have read the Bible and watched numerous documentaries on the origins of the universe and believe there are multitudes of interpretations of both. It was Albert Einstein who said; “God does not place dice with the universe.” Science is continuing to evolve as man gains more knowledge and understanding of the world we live in. The Bible, while being believed to be absolute truth has been debated by theologians for centuries.

The average person of faith (such as me) believes in both. As a person with a technical education I have seen scientific evolve from theory to fact over the years. When in high school many years ago our physics books stated that the atom was the smallest particle known to man. Of course the book was written before the Atomic Bomb was exploded.

Likewise our understanding of the Bible has increased over the years. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient texts have allowed Biblical scholars to gain a better understanding of the Aramaic language — the language it was originally written in.

Beside the contrast between science and the Bible the film touched on an issue that I do understand — he conflict between those of faith and the secular non-believers who dominate academia today. There is a scene in the film where Kerry meets with her academic advisor to discuss her potential for going on to pursue a doctorate paleontology — a subject near and dear o Kerry. The female advisor tells Kerry that she needs two letters of recommendation and that her “dogmatic” Christian beliefs should be tempered if she wants to go on. The advisor goes into a diatribe telling Kerry that is she wants to become a part of the elite intelligentsia and a member of the masterminds who will mold the “new world order” she needs to abandon the absolute morality of her Christian beliefs. The advisor believes we live in a world of changing morality based on relativism. To me this was one of the more important scenes in the film — something the reviewers did not touch on.

Jeffery Osontisch writes a very good piece on the Paradox of Secular Scientism in American Thinker. He writes:

“It has become an accepted tenet of conventional wisdom to begin all discussions about science and nature with the understanding that religion has no place in such debates and that, in fact, faith is diametrically opposed to reason and scientific thought. To this end the concept of classical education, including any mention of God has been thoroughly removed from all Western public schools and replaced with a rather drab and mundane scientism.

This, however, need not be and was not always the case; in fact, Christian scholars had been on the cutting edge of scientific thought since the Middle Ages and the application of human reason to theological and later scientific questions has been a hallmark of Christianity since its very beginning - a fact which is evident to anyone who has read the work of Augustine and Aquinas, among others. How, then, did this notion of religion as the enemy of science first take root? And what are the dangers it poses to man and society?

The rise of radical secularism in philosophy and government first emerged as a formidable force in eighteenth century France and was characterized by an antipathy to objective moral standards and a belief in the perfectibility of man which spawned the humanist search for an egalitarian utopia and led to the horrors of the French Revolution. When this political philosophy was apparently validated by science, it proved to be a witches' brew which led directly to the bloodiest century in human history, the twentieth.

Its manifestation in science came about a century later with the publication, in 1859, of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. In this landmark book the British naturalist was the first to present a cogent evidentiary argument in favor of the theory he labeled natural selection - the theory that all life on earth evolved naturally - and quite by accident - from a single common ancestor over millions of years. This work and the strong feelings it inspired in its supporters and opponents alike marked the fork in the road which permanently split science from religion.

In his much vilified, yet misunderstood Papal address at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006 Pope Benedict XVI lamented this gradual severing, by Western academics, of faith from reason - a process he believes has done great harm to both theology and science. He also compared the secular left's adherence to relativism to Islam's concept of the nature of God as not bound by reason, contrasting these concepts with the Christian tradition (inherited, in part, from the Greeks) of a rational God in whose image rational man was made. Christian doctrine teaches that God in creating the physical universe bound it to immutable laws and thus there is a divine order to it that may be theorized upon, observed, and explained by man. To Christians proof of God's adherence to His laws may be deduced from His incarnation in the person of Jesus Christ for the purpose of the redemption of man before God. Were He so inclined and not bound by His own nature, God may have simply forgiven man for his rebellion without ‘putting on' human form to suffer and die on the cross. That He chose the latter is clear proof to Christians of the existence of a Divine order to the universe.”

With the recent shootings in Aurora, Colorado we are hearing a great deal about evil and why psychopaths like James Holmes do what they do. It is this age of relativism we live in today that lies at the root of these actions.

It was Ayn Rand in her book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, who said:

“The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.”

As Mr. Osontisch states:

“Clearly faith in God need not and should not be a disqualifier when discussing scientific questions. A proper foundation in the moral as well as the physical laws of God's glorious creation should be a requirement of a well-rounded educational curriculum. And the moral restraints placed upon science by faith need not be a hindrance to discovery and progress, but merely a rudder to help point progress in the proper direction. And if this means that certain core beliefs of the secular scientific community need to be re-evaluated this does not mean mankind is regressing to a past mired in superstition and unreason. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, if we have made a wrong turn somewhere along the line we will be no nearer our destination by stubbornly continuing on; it is truly progressive at such times to double back to where you veered off track and find the proper path.”

The conflict between those who only believe in science and the fundamental creationists will not be tempered by one film but is is a start. Hollywood is loath to produce films of this nature as they believe they will not be box office hits. My hat’s off to the producers, directors, actors, and writers for taking the risk to give us the Genesis Code. I suggest you view the film yourself and make your own decision on the value of the film.

Masterminds, Intellectuals, and Anti-Capitalists

"An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows." — -Dwight D. Eisenhower

As we approach November 6^th we will hear more about the evils of our capitalistic system, specifically Bain Capital, from Obama and minions in the media and academia. Intellectuals have a disdain for capitalism and free enterprise. You see they believe in “fairness” and free enterprise and capitalism is anything but fair — I know as a ran a business for over 30 years.

During this period I used to deal with university professors in my profession of civil engineering and land surveying. My firm gave generous scholarships each year to students based on their achievements and needs. We believed this was an investment in the future of the profession. When I discovered that professors were telling the students to work for government upon graduation I went ballistic. When I confronted these academics with their statements they tried to explain that they thought to private sector would not give the graduates a fair deal and their future would be better working for government. This is just one example of the thinking of academics and intellectuals when it comes to the private sector. They are terrified of working in an atmosphere where contribution means more than tenure or fairness.

In 1998 the Cato Institute published an essay by Robert Nozick on this issue, and essay that I found very much to the point in expressing my view of some intellectuals.

Robert Nozick is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and the author of Anarchy, State, and Utopia and other books. This article is excerpted from his essay "Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?" which originally appeared in The Future of Private Enterprise, ed. Craig Aronoff et al. (Georgia State University Business Press, 1986) and is reprinted in Robert Nozick, Socratic Puzzles (Harvard University Press, 1997).

“It is surprising that intellectuals oppose capitalism so. Other groups of comparable socio-economic status do not show the same degree of opposition in the same proportions. Statistically, then, intellectuals are an anomaly.

Not all intellectuals are on the "left." Like other groups, their opinions are spread along a curve. But in their case, the curve is shifted and skewed to the political left.

By intellectuals, I do not mean all people of intelligence or of a certain level of education, but those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors. It does not include those who primarily produce and transmit quantitatively or mathematically formulated information (the numbersmiths) or those working in visual media, painters, sculptors, cameramen. Unlike the wordsmiths, people in these occupations do not disproportionately oppose capitalism. The wordsmiths are concentrated in certain occupational sites: academia, the media, and the government bureaucracy.

Wordsmith intellectuals fare well in capitalist society; there they have great freedom to formulate, encounter, and propagate new ideas, to read and discuss them. Their occupational skills are in demand, their income much above average. Why then do they disproportionately oppose capitalism? Indeed, some data suggest that the more prosperous and successful the intellectual, the more likely he is to oppose capitalism. This opposition to capitalism is mainly "from the left" but not solely so. Yeats, Eliot, and Pound opposed market society from the right.

The opposition of wordsmith intellectuals to capitalism is a fact of social significance. They shape our ideas and images of society; they state the policy alternatives bureaucracies consider. From treatises to slogans, they give us the sentences to express ourselves. Their opposition matters, especially in a society that depends increasingly upon the explicit formulation and dissemination of information.

We can distinguish two types of explanation for the relatively high proportion of intellectuals in opposition to capitalism. One type finds a factor unique to the anti-capitalist intellectuals. The second type of explanation identifies a factor applying to all intellectuals, a force propelling them toward anti-capitalist views. Whether it pushes any particular intellectual over into anti-capitalism will depend upon the other forces acting upon him. In the aggregate, though, since it makes anti-capitalism more likely for each intellectual, such a factor will produce a larger proportion of anti-capitalist intellectuals. Our explanation will be of this second type. We will identify a factor which tilts intellectuals toward anti-capitalist attitudes but does not guarantee it in any particular case.

The Value of Intellectuals

Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel entitled to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals. Ludwig von Mises explains the special resentment of intellectuals, in contrast to workers, by saying they mix socially with successful capitalists and so have them as a salient comparison group and are humiliated by their lesser status. However, even those intellectuals who do not mix socially are similarly resentful, while merely mixing is not enough — the sports and dancing instructors who cater to the rich and have affairs with them are not noticeably anti-capitalist.

Why then do contemporary intellectuals feel entitled to the highest rewards their society has to offer and resentful when they do not receive this? Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution "to each according to his merit or value." Apart from the gifts, inheritances, and gambling winnings that occur in a free society, the market distributes to those who satisfy the perceived market-expressed demands of others, and how much it so distributes depends on how much is demanded and how great the alternative supply is. Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.

Why do wordsmith intellectuals think they are most valuable, and why do they think distribution should be in accordance with value? Note that this latter principle is not a necessary one. Other distributional patterns have been proposed, including equal distribution, distribution according to moral merit, distribution according to need. Indeed, there need not be any pattern of distribution a society is aiming to achieve, even a society concerned with justice. The justice of a distribution may reside in its arising from a just process of voluntary exchange of justly acquired property and services. Whatever outcome is produced by that process will be just, but there is no particular pattern the outcome must fit. Why, then, do wordsmiths view themselves as most valuable and accept the principle of distribution in accordance with value?

To Mr. Nozick’s point when I was reviewing resumes of candidates for professional employment at our firm I would see resume after resume focusing on the academic accomplishments of the candidate. There were bloviated passages on grades and academic awards. Very little was written about work experience, goals, or what the contributions the candidate could bring to the firm. I sometimes got the feeling that these candidates truly believed they were entitled to the position due to their academic accomplishments. While I would not consider this example truly confirming Nozick’s writings I do consider it an illustration of how the products of our academic institutions are being educated by intellectuals in a sense of entitlement based on their academic accomplishments and not on the realities of the marketplace.

To further illustrate this point I have seen interviews with members of the Occupy movement where they have boldly stated they were entitled to a six figure job due to their degrees.

Mr. Nozick continues:

From the beginnings of recorded thought, intellectuals have told us their activity is most valuable. Plato valued the rational faculty above courage and the appetites and deemed that philosophers should rule; Aristotle held that intellectual contemplation was the highest activity. It is not surprising that surviving texts record this high evaluation of intellectual activity. The people who formulated evaluations, who wrote them down with reasons to back them up, were intellectuals, after all. They were praising themselves. Those who valued other things more than thinking things through with words, whether hunting or power or uninterrupted sensual pleasure, did not bother to leave enduring written records. Only the intellectual worked out a theory of who was best.

The Schooling of Intellectuals

What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools. As book knowledge became increasingly important, schooling--the education together in classes of young people in reading and book knowledge--spread. Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher's favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better.

The schools, too, exhibited and thereby taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit. To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher's smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.

The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority "entitled" them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

In saying that intellectuals feel entitled to the highest rewards the general society can offer (wealth, status, etc.), I do not mean that intellectuals hold these rewards to be the highest goods. Perhaps they value more the intrinsic rewards of intellectual activity or the esteem of the ages. Nevertheless, they also feel entitled to the highest appreciation from the general society, to the most and best it has to offer, paltry though that may be. I don't mean to emphasize especially the rewards that find their way into the intellectuals' pockets or even reach them personally. Identifying themselves as intellectuals, they can resent the fact that intellectual activity is not most highly valued and rewarded.

The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated. By incorporating standards of reward that are different from the wider society, the schools guarantee that some will experience downward mobility later. Those at the top of the school's hierarchy will feel entitled to a top position, not only in that micro-society but in the wider one, a society whose system they will resent when it fails to treat them according to their self-prescribed wants and entitlements. The school system thereby produces anti-capitalist feeling among intellectuals. Rather, it produces anti-capitalist feeling among verbal intellectuals. Why do the numbersmiths not develop the same attitudes as these wordsmiths? I conjecture that these quantitatively bright children, although they get good grades on the relevant examinations, do not receive the same face-to-face attention and approval from the teachers as do the verbally bright children. It is the verbal skills that bring these personal rewards from the teacher, and apparently it is these rewards that especially shape the sense of entitlement.

Central Planning in the Classroom

There is a further point to be added. The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well.

It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the "anarchy and chaos" of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.

Our explanation does not postulate that (future) intellectuals constitute a majority even of the academic upper class of the school. This group may consist mostly of those with substantial (but not overwhelming) bookish skills along with social grace, strong motivation to please, friendliness, winning ways, and an ability to play by (and to seem to be following) the rules. Such pupils, too, will be highly regarded and rewarded by the teacher, and they will do extremely well in the wider society, as well. (And do well within the informal social system of the school. So they will not especially accept the norms of the school's formal system.) Our explanation hypothesizes that (future) intellectuals are disproportionately represented in that portion of the schools' (official) upper class that will experience relative downward mobility. Or, rather, in the group that predicts for itself a declining future. The animus will arise before the move into the wider world and the experience of an actual decline in status, at the point when the clever pupil realizes he (probably) will fare less well in the wider society than in his current school situation. This unintended consequence of the school system, the anti-capitalist animus of intellectuals, is, of course, reinforced when pupils read or are taught by intellectuals who present those very anti-capitalist attitudes.

No doubt, some wordsmith intellectuals were cantankerous and questioning pupils and so were disapproved of by their teachers. Did they too learn the lesson that the best should get the highest rewards and think, despite their teachers, that they themselves were best and so start with an early resentment against the school system's distribution? Clearly, on this and the other issues discussed here, we need data on the school experiences of future wordsmith intellectuals to refine and test our hypotheses.

Stated as a general point, it is hardly contestable that the norms within schools will affect the normative beliefs of people after they leave the schools. The schools, after all, are the major non-familial society that children learn to operate in, and hence schooling constitutes their preparation for the larger non-familial society. It is not surprising that those successful by the norms of a school system should resent a society, adhering to different norms, which does not grant them the same success. Nor, when those are the very ones who go on to shape a society's self-image, its evaluation of itself, is it surprising when the society's verbally responsive portion turns against it. If you were designing a society, you would not seek to design it so that the wordsmiths, with all their influence, were schooled into animus against the norms of the society.

Our explanation of the disproportionate anti-capitalism of intellectuals is based upon a very plausible sociological generalization.

In a society where one extra-familial system or institution, the first young people enter, distributes rewards, those who do the very best therein will tend to internalize the norms of this institution and expect the wider society to operate in accordance with these norms; they will feel entitled to distributive shares in accordance with these norms or (at least) to a relative position equal to the one these norms would yield. Moreover, those constituting the upper class within the hierarchy of this first extra-familial institution who then experience (or foresee experiencing) movement to a lower relative position in the wider society will, because of their feeling of frustrated entitlement, tend to oppose the wider social system and feel animus toward its norms.

Notice that this is not a deterministic law. Not all those who experience downward social mobility will turn against the system. Such downward mobility, though, is a factor which tends to produce effects in that direction, and so will show itself in differing proportions at the aggregate level. We might distinguish ways an upper class can move down: it can get less than another group or (while no group moves above it) it can tie, failing to get more than those previously deemed lower. It is the first type of downward mobility which especially rankles and outrages; the second type is far more tolerable. Many intellectuals (say they) favor equality while only a small number call for an aristocracy of intellectuals. Our hypothesis speaks of the first type of downward mobility as especially productive of resentment and animus.

The school system imparts and rewards only some skills relevant to later success (it is, after all, a specialized institution) so its reward system will differ from that of the wider society. This guarantees that some, in moving to the wider society, will experience downward social mobility and its attendant consequences. Earlier I said that intellectuals want the society to be the schools writ large. Now we see that the resentment due to a frustrated sense of entitlement stems from the fact that the schools (as a specialized first extra-familial social system) are not the society writ small.

Our explanation now seems to predict the (disproportionate) resentment of schooled intellectuals against their society whatever its nature, whether capitalist or communist. (Intellectuals are disproportionately opposed to capitalism as compared with other groups of similar socioeconomic status within capitalist society. It is another question whether they are disproportionately opposed as compared with the degree of opposition of intellectuals in other societies to those societies.) Clearly, then, data about the attitudes of intellectuals within communist countries toward apparatchiks would be relevant; will those intellectuals feel animus toward that system?

Our hypothesis needs to be refined so that it does not apply (or apply as strongly) to every society. Must the school systems in every society inevitably produce anti-societal animus in the intellectuals who do not receive that society's highest rewards? Probably not. A capitalist society is peculiar in that it seems to announce that it is open and responsive only to talent, individual initiative, personal merit. Growing up in an inherited caste or feudal society creates no expectation that reward will or should be in accordance with personal value. Despite the created expectation, a capitalist society rewards people only insofar as they serve the market-expressed desires of others; it rewards in accordance with economic contribution, not in accordance with personal value. However, it comes close enough to rewarding in accordance with value — value and contribution will very often be intermingled--so as to nurture the expectation produced by the schools. The ethos of the wider society is close enough to that of the schools so that the nearness creates resentment. Capitalist societies reward individual accomplishment or announce they do, and so they leave the intellectual, who considers himself most accomplished, particularly bitter.

Another factor, I think, plays a role. Schools will tend to produce such anti-capitalist attitudes the more they are attended together by a diversity of people. When almost all of those who will be economically successful are attending separate schools, the intellectuals will not have acquired that attitude of being superior to them. But even if many children of the upper class attend separate schools, an open society will have other schools that also include many who will become economically successful as entrepreneurs, and the intellectuals later will resentfully remember how superior they were academically to their peers who advanced more richly and powerfully. The openness of the society has another consequence, as well. The pupils, future wordsmiths and others, will not know how they will fare in the future. They can hope for anything. A society closed to advancement destroys those hopes early. In an open capitalist society, the pupils are not resigned early to limits on their advancement and social mobility, the society seems to announce that the most capable and valuable will rise to the very top, their schools have already given the academically most gifted the message that they are most valuable and deserving of the greatest rewards, and later these very pupils with the highest encouragement and hopes see others of their peers, whom they know and saw to be less meritorious, rising higher than they themselves, taking the foremost rewards to which they themselves felt themselves entitled. Is it any wonder they bear that society an animus?

Some Further Hypotheses

We have refined the hypothesis somewhat. It is not simply formal schools but formal schooling in a specified social context that produces anti-capitalist animus in (wordsmith) intellectuals. No doubt, the hypothesis requires further refining. But enough. It is time to turn the hypothesis over to the social scientists, to take it from armchair speculations in the study and give it to those who will immerse themselves in more particular facts and data. We can point, however, to some areas where our hypothesis might yield testable consequences and predictions. First, one might predict that the more meritocratic a country's school system, the more likely its intellectuals are to be on the left. (Consider France.) Second, those intellectuals who were "late bloomers" in school would not have developed the same sense of entitlement to the very highest rewards; therefore, a lower percentage of the late-bloomer intellectuals will be anti-capitalist than of the early bloomers. Third, we limited our hypothesis to those societies (unlike Indian caste society) where the successful student plausibly could expect further comparable success in the wider society. In Western society, women have not heretofore plausibly held such expectations, so we would not expect the female students who constituted part of the academic upper class yet later underwent downward mobility to show the same anti-capitalist animus as male intellectuals. We might predict, then, that the more a society is known to move toward equality in occupational opportunity between women and men, the more its female intellectuals will exhibit the same disproportionate anti-capitalism its male intellectuals show.

Some readers may doubt this explanation of the anti-capitalism of intellectuals. Be this as it may, I think that an important phenomenon has been identified. The sociological generalization we have stated is intuitively compelling; something like it must be true. Some important effect therefore must be produced in that portion of the school's upper class that experiences downward social mobility, some antagonism to the wider society must get generated. If that effect is not the disproportionate opposition of the intellectuals, then what is it? We started with a puzzling phenomenon in need of an explanation. We have found, I think, an explanatory factor that (once stated) is so obvious that we must believe it explains some real phenomenon.”

This article originally appeared in the January/February 1998 edition of Cato Policy Report.

The national media and intellectuals likes to present the left, even the radical left, as more or less mainstream, even as it depicts the Tea Party as a fringe movement. Politicians who espouse Marxist ideas, like Barack Obama, are treated as if they are centrists, well-suited to solve the crises that their own policies have created. As the liberal media see it, the debate is over. America has become a European-style social welfare state, and there is no going back. There is only going forward, or what Obama calls "forward," toward the hardcore communism of the past.

From this perspective, socialism is the normal and expected condition of mankind, and communism — the thuggish assault on liberty of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez or Bolivia's Juan Evo Morales — is simply a less genteel means toward the same end.

In every case, the media ignore the inevitable executions and gulags of the communist state and report instead on the purported advancements of health care and literacy. Early fellow-travelers like Theodore Dreiser, Andre Gide, John Maynard Keynes, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, among many others, visited the Soviet Union and returned with glowing reports of giant strides forward in industrial development. When it was pointed out that tens of millions had been murdered and that the purported developed was largely staged, these facts were ignored or dismissed. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of transformation from capitalism to a supposedly utopian communist state.

As Michael David-Fox writes in Showcasing the Great Experiment, one of the great ironies of modern intellectual history is the fact that "the height of Western admiration coincided with the most repressive phrase of Soviet communism" (p. 2). Edgar Snow did the same with his glowing reports of Chinese development under Mao, even as the Great Leap Forward claimed an estimated 30 million lives. And there was the communist journalist John Reed who was admired so much by Stalin he was buried in Red Square. American media did the same with the emergence of Fidel Castro, who was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow in 1959 at a time when Americans were not yet certain if Castro was friend or foe, and later by Barbara Walters, among others. More recently, a regular stream of network journalists have filed reports from Cuba suggesting that the American trade embargo is harming ordinary Cubans or that conditions on the island are not as politically repressive as once thought. These useful idiots are just following in the footsteps of Dreiser, Snow, and Reed, and of a host of American and British journalists and intellectuals who have found Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hugo Chávez, and every other communist tyrant acceptable because they, the journalists, shared the same ideology.

The Western media and their allies in government and academe share much of the blame for the tens of millions who have died under communism. Their approach is always the same: rush in at the beginning of each new Great Experiment, heap lavish praise on the leaders, selectively report on the "successes" of the regime while ignoring the failures, and walk away when the whole thing collapses. Then start all over when the next revolution crops up.

The media has not yet walked away from Obama's revolution, even though that revolution has failed. But journalists certainly lost no time in getting on board, reporting the "successes," and ignoring the failures. It is incredible that among the national media Obama's economic record remains largely unquestioned, even though the broader measure of unemployment shows 15.4% of Americans unemployed and the nation's labor participation rate at a modern-day low. By that measure, 88 million working-age Americans are not working — an all-time high.

But the media has no intention of abandoning Obama, even if the unemployment rate goes to 25% and 200 million Americans drop out of the labor market. The unwavering support of Western intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre for Stalin demonstrated that, for the left, no price is too high for the great dream of equality and fairness.