Author: philbryson@gmail.com

It is not clear to me, at the end of 2023, whether the United States are in the last throes of a successful socialist takeover, or whether we are in the last throes of the socialist threat before it disappears from the United States.  On the one hand, we have moved so close to a socialist takeover, an Obama-like “complete transformation” of our system, that it often seems on the verge of success.  On the other hand, the movement has been subject to rather harshly insane policies and propaganda, and it could be that we are but one election away from a slippery slope back to sanity.  So much depends on the coming election.

People are growing very weary of woke policies, an educational establishment interested mostly in glorifying and promoting gender changes for our children, an administration that encourages developing countries to open their jails and insane asylums to send all their inmates to our open borders. Within our own borders, many are exceedingly weary of local democrat governments who believe our jails should be emptied and our police emasculated. The victims of crime are without interest to the woke indoctrinated; they are convinced the criminals are the victims and they refuse to recognize the growth of crime in our cities is mushrooming with the incentives they provide for lawlessness.  People are growing weary of the results of the insanity, but most still don’t follow politics closely enough to reject the propaganda of the “media” and vote

against insanity. With a current president who lost his mind when he devoted his affection and his life to his boss, Barak Obama, most democrats are willing to retain idiocy and power no matter how bad life in the United States becomes.

So will Joe Biden be reelected after having proved himself demented and indoctrinated?  Will Democrats notice that he has totally changed his views on individual political and governance problems since he became a toady of Barak?  Will they reelect Joe so his policies can continue to provide funding for Iran to funnel on to their terrorist proxies of the Middle East?

Joe became the last minute Democrat nominee for the presidency when the party establishment panicked because Bernie Sanders was about to seize the nomination for the 2020 election, and the democrat establishment wanted the socialist takeover to be achieved through stealth rather than through a ballot box revolution.  So they ousted Bernie and put in Joe.  Now that Joe is recognizably demented, the party is terrified that he could lose the election, and who doesn’t believe they are ready to pull another last-minute switch to assure the success of their single-party takeover.

Yes, we are on the verge of a socialist takeover that will solidify the absolute control of our country in the hands of actors whose hatred and loathing are evident in their callous corruption of the Department of Injustice, the FBI, the IRS, and the nearly innumerable intelligence agencies.  For half a dozen years the smear campaign has been more than relentless by the democrats and their perverse media against Donald Trump.  Most people who don’t follow politics have also become convinced, simply by the relentless repetition of the lies and smears so ubiquitous from our voluntary propaganda ministry (Trump’s “fake news”), that Trump must be a hideous, inhuman, criminal beast.  Hitler and Stalin were convinced that they controlled the masses by their propaganda;  they were rank amateurs compared to the contemporary American socialists.  I speak, of course, of the American political left’s “information” arm, the political media.  The media  are complemented by the politically disinterested – many of whom want simply to avoid the rancid, toxic political discussion. Their answer to the pettiness and toxicity of the political discussion is simply to turn away from all things political.

In the meantime, consider what has become of our country:

1. Great business enterprises have proclaimed that their leadership should not be characterized by skill, professionalism, and integrity. It is alleged that leaders and employees should be sought who represent diversity,

   

   inclusion, and equity. Our once noble universities are guided not by brilliant scholars, but by people who represent “oppressed” minorities, previously unknown genders, and individuals of diverse contemporary sexual orientation.

2. Many of our schools are factories for the production of illiteracy. One is concerned about pronouns and gender alteration for young children, rather than reading, arithmetic, and history.  Contemporary liberal “educators” do not want to see pornography banned from school libraries.
3. There is a general belief in our governing circles that all problems can be solved by the printing and expenditure of money. President Biden gives away money (note his recent promises to Ukraine) without worrying about the attitudes or actions of congress.  He is convinced that any self-respecting dictator can manage his own budget. He has never given a thought to the absurd, terrifying size of our national indebtedness.
4.  We have opened our borders and publicly invited and advertised our determination to take care of any citizen of the world who is willing to come to the United States. The administration is not concerned whether terrorists or criminals or spies have ready access to residence in the United States.  Nor is it concerned about the flow of deadly drugs coming through our open borders, which is costing many thousands of lives of our citizens.
5. Crime in the country is out of control. In the summer of rioting and looting and burning which followed the George Floyd suicide, we set a new standard for violence.   (That’s right, George Floyd killed himself when he knew the police were coming; he swallowed all the pills he had on his person to avoid a drug arrest and that action was the cause of his death, according to the autopsy. Note that it was not from strangulation.) Floy’s legacy  is that “protestor” violence, looting, and burning is perfectly acceptable to the American left, and there is to be no enforcement of laws so long as only leftist radicals are rioting.
6. In foreign policy, we are to provide reinforcement to Russia and the terrorist forces by abandoning the production of oil and natural gas. We grant foreign powers an oligopoly in the energy field so that supportive funds can be supplied to Russia and Iran’s terrorist surrogates.  Then, we can print a lot of money supporting the nations they attack.  The current administration believes that Europe need not worry about the costs of being protected; the US can take care of that, since we know how to create money after we have used up all our tax revenues.
7. Since unemployment, poverty, and drug addiction are all promoted by “liberal” policies, the suppression of police activities, and the attitudes of the courts, the mild western climate of our country has made homelessness the first choice of a growing host of homeless addicts. The problem will continue to grow, since our schools are unable to convince children that there are other rewards in life other than getting high.
8. The political belief that “climate change” is the worse thing clouding our ineluctable future has led to irrational policies that exacerbate our future even more than what actual climate change could bring about. When fanatical, non-scientific individuals take control of our lives, outcomes are even worse than would otherwise be the case.  Science-based common sense with a cost/benefit approach to policy would be a great boon to this country.  It is nowhere in sight as American socialism takes root.
9. “Justice” belongs to democrats and is not to be shared with other groups. A congressional kangaroo court declared that January 6 was a worse day for America than the Civil War and 911 combined. Yet the only death associated with that event was the murder of an American veteran at the capitol to encourage our representatives to acknowledge the irregularities of the 2020 election.  The Democrat Party declared that any question about the validity of the stolen election was a conspiracy theory and that the unsecured capitol on January 6^th was violated by insurrectionists. They subsequently locked up numerous “conspirators” (without the benefit of theory) with no concern for fairness, justice, or constitutional rights, carefully covering up what really happened on that infamous day.  The assassination of Ashli Babbitt was brushed over quickly when an overzealous police officer killed her needlessly.
10. President Nixon, after the primitive Watergate break-in, claimed not to be a crook, which was technically not true. But at least he had shame for acts that, compared to the travesties perpetrated by the DOJ and FBI against President Trump, seem comparable to the offense of jay-walking.  And now we do have a crook in the office of the presidency!  We do not have all the details yet, but having listened to our political leaders, I am sure that he is a crook because Joe Biden has not paid his “fair share” of tax.  What he has not paid has not been reported to the IRS, because he was not willing to share the source of his foreign “earnings”.  In any case, we can be sure that at least he passed on his Biden integrity to his son.  We don’t have a laptop for Joe Biden, and we also don’t know what all the documents were that he filched from the government during his tenure as the president of vice.  But I’m sure Hunter would vouch for the integrity of the president, so our minds can be at ease.
11. The available media have adopted the technique of the great lie. When referring to the 2020 election, they pursue a policy of simply asserting that the widespread ballot-stuffing and numerous “irregularities” that went on didn’t happen.  With every mention of the election, they cry “no evidence!,” and mention “conspiracy theories,” and insist that it has been “debunked” without any reference to detail (who debunked it, by what evidence, and when this occurred). They expect that the Republicans will keep silent, and they know there are many Democratic judiciary agents willing to deploy their powers to combat Trump for political purposes.  Along with the never-Trumpers who still claim party membership, people seem to forget the many sincere poll-workers who presented strong evidence nightly on TV after the election of what they had personally witnessed.  They were prepared to sign affidavits about the deviations they personally witnessed in the stolen election.
12. We learn from the Israeli war against Hamas terrorism, that our youth are subject to indoctrination by irrational political beliefs. Having been taught the hatred and loathing of socialism for “oppressors,“ who are seen as racists, the young protesters need simply be told that Jews are oppressing the terrorists (who bomb Israel every day and massacre Jewish women, children and babies), and… voila! You have a whole new generation of fascistic anti-semites. The left is particularly effective at inculcating loathing and hatred.

If the Bible is not authoritative, and if some secular “philosophy” or Weltanschauung is not accepted by a society as the popular semblance of truth, “authority” or social consensus may be lost.  At such a point, as we have seen in our own history, what “science” prescribes may be the whim of a simple, thoughtless person or group; it can then become the fancy of the mob.  There is then no authority, and what is patently insanity may well become the common perception, the common view of truth and reality.

In our society, a leftist decision has been made to pursue a revolution in the spirit of Marx. Having witnessed the failure of the Marxian revolution to bring about positive, sustainable social change, however, something had to change.  In a country without class distinctions (as in the United States in contrast to the European class societies), promoting revolution required that another

socially divisive strategy should be developed to pit the social “have nots” against the social “haves.” It was deemed appropriate to take advantage of American history, including slavery, and of its lingering proclivity to produce a fairly trivial number of durable racists and a general racial divide throughout the nation.  A permanent split between blacks and whites could be produced through the appropriate racial propaganda to generate blind hatred among the “oppressed class.”

Why did slavery come to America?  It came for the same reason it has come to most societies in the history of mankind.  It came because there were organizers who could profit from it. And why were the victims always black?  Of course they were not.  Many different groups were.  And one should not overlook the fact that there were also black slaveholders. The history of slavery has hardly been uniformly of blacks oppressed by whites. In our own history, blacks were enslaved and many whites knew this was unjust.  They labored to achieve justice and freedom for the slaves; it took a long time to overcome the democrats, long located largely in the southern states, who throughout our history worked against the freedom and the pursuit of opportunity for blacks.

In a separate blog I have addressed the legacy of the democrat party with regard to slavery, Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, and the contemporary disaster of democrat welfare and education policies in our city centers to keep blacks in oppressive conditions.  Current abortion policies, incidentally, were initiated by some who viewed abortion as a sort of genocide for American blacks, who have been far more victimized by the practice than have the whites.

Numerous groups were oppressed in early American history, not merely the blacks.  The Irish immigrants, the Mormons, native Americans, Asians, and others were oppressed and persecuted, driven from their homes or, as the Irish, forced into desperate working conditions in mines and enduring extreme poverty. People came to America seeking freedom, but some of the people immigrating brought their tastes, their politics, and their prejudices with them, just as today’s contemporaries fleeing California and New York threaten their new neighbors with the politics the immigrants import. Those groups and those whom they influence are the reason that social injustice can persist in a country.  The surprise is that in spite of the presence of such negative influences, progress toward justice for the American black has been surprisingly swift from a historical perspective since Abraham Lincoln.  Of course we would love to see progress come more quickly, but the evidence of good will toward our black compatriots is everywhere.

Unfortunately, the race baiters who see a division of our country along ethnic lines are working with all their strength to radicalize and indoctrinate American blacks into a racist tribe ready to carry out the revolutionary intentions of their indoctrinators.  These America haters are numerous and powerful enough to convince many blacks that persecution is endemic and inevitable among whites, and even to convince some whites that they are personally guilty of the suffering of the blacks. Some who willingly portray this guilt are simply expressing an opportunistic political position, of course.

The introductory thoughts expressed above expressed that when a nation’s perception of obvious truths becomes distorted, usually through the breakdown of the traditional carriers of socially accepted realities, the most insane propositions can be pawned off as truth and there is no haven for intellectual stability or good sense. People can then express senseless ideas with perfect seriousness.  In normal times, when the forces of indoctrination are not out of control and idiocy still appears to most people as idiocy, such nonsensical notions would simply be embarrassing.

The notion that most clearly characterizes our age of insanity is that of paying reparations to blacks for all their ancestors suffered.  We usually try to compensate those who did the suffering, so in an attempt to sound more justified, advocates will assert that they have “genetic issues” stemming back to the suffering of their enslaved ancestors. It may be that those making such a claim actually do carry some mental residual from slavery, since even expressing that claim makes one wonder whether they may be mentally impaired.

It would be rather difficult to determine all the individuals whose ancestors suffered from the sometimes harsh conditions characterizing America’s early history.  There were numerous groups.  As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I would perhaps be prepared to receive the $5 million dollar reparations suggested recently for those whose ancestors were black slaves.  My great great grandmother was driven from her home in Nauvoo Illinois in the middle of winter by a frenzied mob.  At an age when one could retire today, she drove a team of horses across much of the country to enter what ultimately became the state of Utah at a time when there were no amenities for pioneers, who were confronted by Indians and uncultivated, arid lands, and with many other difficult conditions to overcome. Those pioneers struggled and suffered much more than some of the blacks who chanced to be more fortunate and whose masters were faithful and kind Christians. There were actually some such slaveholders who made sure their slaves lived in conditions better than the working class of England described by Charles Dickens during the early industrialization of that country. Finally, it should be noted that the slave population was certainly not treated worse than the native Americans who fell subject to America’s “manifest destiny” that saw the Indians experience sufferings that might be compared to those who experience genocide.

As a descendant of immigrants from Scotland and Europe, and who went straight from the Midwest to Utah, there was no history of slavery in my family, so I expect to be dismissed from the obligation to pay reparations to the great great grandsons of former slaves. I suspect there are a few (million) other Americans who are not actually guilty of having ever enslaved anyone.  Perhaps the issue would never have arisen if we all had still read occasionally in the Bible or if we had all successfully learned to read anything at all before our beloved country became insanely “woke.”

From Population Growth to Declining Birth Rates.

The Population Bomb, a 1968 blockbuster book by Paul Ehrlich, presented the view that society’s biggest threat and harm was the geometric growth rate of the population. According to Ehrlich there were too many births – too many people – for the good of the environment and the economy.  The modern era, beginning somewhere around the 1950s has been one of limiting family size. Many believe, like Ehrlich, that the population is too large. Today, although population growth continues for the time being, a long-standing trend of declining birth rates brings new concerns for humanity.

There are several main reasons why birth rates have begun to decline.  Families had been large in the previous, largely agricultural era, since children could be farm laborers and were viewed as a positive.  In the new era, children began to be viewed as a negative; they had to be entertained, cared for, and educated.  The arrival of feminism taught that children were a hindrance to the self-development of mothers, who should really be in the labor force.  The availability of prophylactics meant that for the first time in history, couples could avoid having unwanted children, and many did just that.  The sexual revolution had similar causes and effects.  Sexual satisfaction became decoupled from both marriage and human reproduction.  Cohabitation and promiscuity were no longer inhibited by the potential hazard of the arrival of an unwanted child.

For the child still arriving unexpectedly, the later phenomenon of mass legal abortions has been seen as a means of constraining population growth.  But now the birth rate has fallen below the rate required to maintain the population at the current level. We have come to the recent recognition of demographers and social scientists that populations not only grow with geometrical rapidity, but also decline the same way. Today, the advanced countries have birth rates too low to offset deaths and national populations have begun to decline.

I can remember forty years ago teaching that in a century from that time, the German nation will have declined from about 80 million to 10 or 15 million, all of which would be descendants of the Turkish people who had come as guest workers to Germany. On March 17, 2017, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called on Turkey’s European citizens to increase their rates of procreation and have five children each. He insisted that a booming Turkish population would be the best answer to the EU’s “vulgarism, antagonism, and injustice” (so reported the UK’s Telegraph). He is convinced that within a few decades Europe will belong to the Turks.

The Economic Problems of Demographic Winter

Consider just a couple of problems that will arise with falling populations.  The housing market can accommodate families considerably larger than the one or two children standard of the recent past.  Houses have been built for a substantial population, but what will happen when the baby boomers of the post-World War II era and the declining population to follow them want to downsize and put their larger than convenient homes on the housing market? In the future there will be a large glut of such homes on the market as there will be increasingly smaller cohorts of buyers to purchase them.

When social security was introduced there were about sixteen people in the labor force to provide the goods and services for one retired person. Social security is not an insurance program in which one’s continual contributions are set aside as savings for that person’s retirement.  It is simply a transfer program in which the money people pay (if not confiscated by politicians for other purposes) is transferred directly to people currently retired.  With a declining population we will discover that we now have only three or four people contributing to the retirement of each retiree. In the future we will see yet fewer contributors for each retiree. Ever fewer workers will not be able to sustain the growing number of retired persons they would need to support.

Other Problems of Declining Populations

The economic problems won’t be the worst of societal difficulties once an increasingly rapid population decline begins to bite within few decades. According to social scientists, children who do not enjoy the benefits of the nuclear family are subject to developmental issues.  They do not gain the concern for others, the normal development of skills valued in the market place, or the cognitive stimulation and development that occurs in families. Many different kinds of statistics describe serious problems that children without siblings encounter in their development.  When they fail to gain the social and developmental skills needed, many are unable to contribute productively to society and become candidates for welfare statism.  One of my recent blogs on the increasing death rate of whites over 25 years of age indicates the issues already arising for much of the American middle class.

Jesus Christ prophesied of our time when He said “the love of many shall wax cold” (Matthew 24:12). Those who use their sexuality only for personal gratification and who live only for their own personal goals and aspirations can easily be alienated from other people.  Siblings of families learn to care for others; even if they sometimes don’t get along as well as their parents would hope, they later become parents and care for their own children.  Cold hearts will mean loneliness for many children.  Those who develop poorly view governments only as institutions to provide for their personal needs. They may easily find socialism appealing because it permits them to think they are championing the interests of others. But they feel no personal urge actually to give back or to be involved in service to those around them. They often seem more interested in being on governmental recipient lists.

Socialism is the personal philosophy growing out of the economic and cultural conditions developing in Western society.  It gives lip service to the welfare of everyone, but hearts of people are locked on their own incomes and future prospects for income and wealth.  Socialism is mostly self- concern. In the United States, socialist policies have promoted many of the activities and attitudes that have resulted in declining birth rates.  Promotion of abortion, of denigration of women choosing motherhood rather than labor force participation, and promotion of the idea that environmental damage is a function of excessive population are common ideas for socialists.

Part I: Socialism and Science

As a PhD who spent over 40 years in the academy, I would be the last to deny the great and enduring benefits to society of man’s successful application of the scientific method. What mankind has achieved through science and technology has been truly awesome. There is, of course, still much to learn and anyone who knows anything about science is aware that our scientific efforts are hardly perfect.  Our knowledge, growing admirably, is still limited. Our methods of gaining and applying knowledge still need time to grow.

Over the past century or so, many in society have bartered their trust in religion for an academic hope in science; in doing so, they may have lost for themselves and for mankind more than they have gained. I take up this issue because socialism has adopted a proclivity to reject religion out of hand and seek for humanity’s redemption from ignorance and incapacity in the realm of science. I wish to address this issue and examine its relation to socialism. To do so, I shall review four cases in which science failed us miserably. I want to

The Future of the Minimum Wageaddress some of the implications of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, the science of climatology’s early annunciation of an ice age, some of the facets of global warming or “climate change,” and the very current opioid crisis.

The Impact of Politics on Science

Case I:  Limits to Growth.

The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 to address problems of our planet’s resources and their use. In 1970 a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology undertook an analysis of the implications of continued worldwide economic growth. They examined the basic factors determining and limiting growth on our planet: growing population, agricultural production, depletion of nonrenewable resources, industrial output and pollution. They concluded that numerous of our vitally necessary raw materials were about to

disappear. Extrapolating from the known quantities and deposits of vital resources and the rates at which they were disappearing, they were able to calculate with their computer models that on some given date, say 1985, we would pull our last pound of copper from the ground. I was impressed when reading these findings approaching fifty years ago, so I don’t remember the exact dates of the disappearance of critical resources, but the format was as shown with copper. And on July 17, for example, at 2:36 pm in 1988 we would pull our last aluminum out of some mine. The disappearance of petroleum would follow on the heels of other precious resources at a very specific time that has now long since passed, of course.

Can you guess that as time passed their dire predictions did not prove accurate? Since they consulted with no economists, apparently, they could not deal with some imponderable, awesome complexities such as the following: As the use of gasoline begins to deplete the total quantity of crude oil available, the price of gas rises. As the price rises, suppliers are motivated to search the world for new sources of supply and develop new technologies to get oil harvested and marketed. Buyers look for substitute products when the price of an important one begins to rise. In this case, they would look for alternative sources of energy and they would carefully conserve energy by trying to get more mileage out of each gallon of gasoline. We see from the failure of the MIT scientists even to come close to the reality of resource depletion in this example that scientists, who are also just people, don’t always successfully manage an analysis of problems through time. This is especially true when extant market forces drive production, sales and consumption of scarce products and the scientists involved know little if anything, apparently, about the economics pertaining to this issue.

Case II: Predicting an Ice Age

In an article by Betty Friedan, “The Coming Ice Age,” Harper’s Magazine announced in its September, 1958 issue that the onset of a new ice age had been predicted by climate scientists. Geophysicist Maurice Ewing, Director of Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory, and geologist-meteorologist William Donn claimed to have found why the giant glaciers had advanced and retreated over the earth in the last million years. It was their conclusion that the world was heading into another Ice Age as part of a process that had already begun.

Contemporary climatologists assure us that this is now well understood as a forgivable mistake. The science of climatology was young then and more work needed to be done. But here were two leading scientists of the time making claims that were published widely for a short period of time.

Part II: Science Politicized

As mentioned above, the past century or so has seen many barter their trust in religion for an academic hope in science. Many have shown a proclivity to reject religion out of hand and seek for humanity’s redemption from ignorance and incapacity in the realm of science. I wish to relate the issue of secularism to socialism. To do so, I have reviewed two cases in which science failed us miserably. I addressed above some of the implications of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and the science of climatology’s early annunciation of an ice age. In this part I want first to discuss some of the facets of global warming or “climate change,” then I shall turn to the very current opioid crisis.

Case III: Global Warming

We are informed that the debate over global warming is over. Scientists now agree uniformly, it is alleged, that man’s carbon footprint has irrevocably changed our climate and will play an ever-more-debilitating role in the future. Since I am not a physical scientist I am not in a position to evaluate the science underlying these predictions or forecasts. As an economist, however, I am convinced that regardless of the rate of warming, previous policies in the United States have been shortsighted. Specific economic policy measures undertaken in response to an actual crisis of global warming would need to be subjected to more realistic benefit/cost analyses. If global warming is in fact occurring, the U.S. will have a far less negative impact on it than will China and India. If those countries were to continue to industrialize with the same environmental serenity that the U.S. did when we were at their stage of industrial development, there is nothing we could do to avert some of the disasters that have been predicted. Nevertheless, such a scenario would call for a policy of accommodation rather than panic.

What I wish to address here, however, is how to develop a skeptical view of the science that drives the panic in our country. As I indicated at the outset, science is wonderful, and science is great.  But science is a crowd of people that are still learning and changing long-held perspectives and beliefs as they do.  The objectivity science is supposed to display suggests the necessity of finding reasons to revise our perspectives as research discovers new facts and principles.  But some perspectives bring classes of people windfall gains that they do not wish to relinquish to changing views. In current science, we have thousands of professors at universities who gain their living and their reputations by their published findings. Many of these are full of integrity; others would sell their mother’s soul to increase the likelihood of future income and prestige. They are perfectly willing to do what they feel they must do to gain tenure and promotion, income, and prestige. That includes getting grants to do research. They insist in their research applications that they are going to bring new light to the current dogma, which gradually takes on all the glitter rendered by the politically correct interpretation of current scientific dogma. They learn quickly that “climate change deniers” generally do not receive grants.

Some university scientists promote global warming just as liberal political indoctrination is promoted by their non-scientific colleagues. There are some scientists with excellent reputations who have been attacked by their more orthodox colleagues because they were not in line with the official doctrine. One of the two smartest individuals I have ever known personally in a long academy career is a nuclear physicist. His research has been on physics rather than climate science, but he has taken time to review the literature and the mathematical models underlying the conclusions of global warming science. Those models, he insists, are simply flawed and he doesn’t buy their conclusions at all. We have seen from the history of the Club of Rome as well as from the viewpoint of climate scientists back in the 1970s that scientists can be dead wrong, especially those who have been dead for a while.

Part III: A Medical Science Tragedy

Case IV: The Current Opioid Crisis

The opioid crisis (or epidemic) refers to the rapid increase in the use of prescription and non-prescription opioids in the United States. Overdose deaths, especially from prescription drugs and heroin, have reached epidemic levels. In 2015 of the total of 52,000 American deaths from all drug overdoses, two thirds (33,000) were from opioids. In 2017 there were more than 72,000 deaths from opioids. Those deaths exceeded the total number of deaths in the Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined.  The New Yorker writes that by 2010 the U.S., with around five per cent of the world’s population, consumed 99 per cent of the world’s hydrocodone (the narcotic in Vicodin), eighty per cent of the oxycodone (in Percocet and OxyContin), and sixty-five per cent of the hydromorphone (in Dilaudid).

How did doctors, who pledge to do their patients no harm, let the use of prescription narcotics get so out of hand? Until recently, American doctors prescribed narcotics almost exclusively for short-term pain (to recover from surgery, or for cancer victims soon to become terminal).  But some time ago medical journals published two short accounts that helped promote an expanded role for prescription narcotics. The first of these, a 1980 report in the New England Journal of Medicine, claimed that less than one per cent of patients at Boston University Medical Center who received narcotics in hospitals became addicted. The second, a 1986 study in the journal Pain found that for non-cancer pain, narcotics can be prescribed “with relatively little risk of . . . opioid abuse.” The authors advised caution, and called for longer-term studies of patients on narcotics. The New Yorker pointedly observed that they hadn’t found any such studies.

The main manufacturers of narcotics –Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson, and Endo Pharmaceuticals thereafter aggressively marketed their products through ads in highly regarded publications, and through medical continuing-education courses. Once doctors knew that other doctors were supplying opioids to about anyone requesting help for pain, the use of these prescription drugs skyrocketed. Today, thousands are dying from overdose every month. It is now more dangerous to ask a doctor for pain relief than to travel on our highways.

An update of this blog requires mention of the effects of the Big Guy Biden’s policy of open borders.  The flood of drugs into the United States following the election of Biden has been horrendous, although not considered worthy of mention by the radicalized media of the United States.  Especially the drug fentanyl, a favorite of the drug cartels, need be ingested only once to be fatal.  Dressed up to look like skittles or other American candy, young people have been especially vulnerable to its fatal charms.  Around 110,000 Americans have died of fentanyl overdoses during the Biden presidency (as of spring, 2023)

Part IV: Socialism and Science Today

Back around the First World War, the western world and its culture, especially in large urban centers, began quite rapidly to reject the Christian religion and to promote a purely secular society. Karl Marx and his socialist followers had already rejected belief in God and their atheism was seen as “scientific,” just as Marx’s socialism was deemed to be “scientific socialism.” Academic and urban types were anxious to replace religion with science.

On the farms and in many families, Bible reading was a daily practice of believers. The Bible can open people’s eyes to the natural and spiritual realities of our lives. When one does not open one’s eyes to the many miraculous things around us, one can begin to see life as a sequence of random happenings that can’t be explained well. The presence of “scientific theories” relieves us of the necessity to think about what the purpose of our lives might be. The New Testament gospels, written by honest, sincere, and intelligent people, report that many of their contemporaries were eyewitnesses of the living Savior, Jesus Christ, after he was resurrected. But Bible reading gradually ceased.

Such reading and study was not replaced, of course, by the primitive theories of Darwin. The world didn’t read his Origin of Species, so nobody seemed to notice an issue that Darwin knew could destroy his theory.  The slow process of evolution, from the providential, or rather, fortunate mutation through the survival of the fittest species, failed to litter the planet with billions of skeletal remains of intermediate species between mutations and new species. Those who notice this are unwilling to give up the rationale it provides for being an atheist. Thus, one simply doesn’t discuss this problem, or several other major issues with the theory of evolution, in the public realm.

Part V: Weltanschauung, the New World View

Science gradually became the new deity for the human race, and scientists sometimes feel obliged to sustain the belief that we need no God to live happily. There were many fine philosophers both before and after the onset of the renaissance, but none of their philosophies has served as a general philosophy of life or as a world view to serve as the foundation of our post-religious era.  It would take much space and some expertise I lack to document properly the gradual evolution of our contemporary attitudes and culture in post-modern or other philosophical terms.  But it is quite apparent that the philosophy that has served the role of underpinning much of our culture’s biases was the work of an economist philosopher, Karl Marx. He was the driving force of socialism, which has prevailed since the time of Marx, although people have ceased to read the holy writings of Capital.

We have ceased to understand most of the elements of Marx’s philosophy, which are treated at length in my book, Socialism. The world’s greatest minds on that topic would make it easy for us to reject socialism root and branch. I reviewed in detail their analysis and cited their conclusions in the book.  In spite of the flaws and inadequacies in theoretical Marxist economics, many have nevertheless retained Marx’s hatred for capitalists, corporations, markets, and the freedom that under-girds all of the institutions of the market system. Anger that some people have less of life’s material goods than others, whether that results from lack of education, lack of motivation, lack of creativity, lack of persistence, lack of health, or just simply lack of good fortune, is the heritage of Marx’s hatred.

The persistent pursuit of socialist solutions has spawned social experimentation, social tyrannies, and perverse social outcomes that divide societies and generate new hostilities.  We have failed to understand the natural benefits of market systems, as explicated by Adam Smith. Nor are we cognizant of the developments of science and technology which have enhanced market developments where they are not choked out by socialist ideology.  And because of socialist suspicions and animus we have lost much of the spiritual and humane side of life.

A previous blog showed that modern societies are in the secular, very long-term process of disappearing. That can occur quite naturally as population growth ceases and as birth rates fall below replacement levels. Socialists, who teach women they have value only in competition with men in the work force and in management positions, seem to leave the future of humanity in the hands of the diminishing number of people who love children and families. Those are usually religious families. Thus, from the standpoint of humanity as a whole, the religious groups of the earth have definitely lost culture battles, but are certainly in a position to win the cultural war of survival as their adversary group strives diligently in the long term to become extinct.

Socialism’s Beginnings as a Movement of Love

Many young people are attracted to socialism because socialists are known for their strong advocacy for social equality and for the elimination of poverty. That’s how socialism got started as a social movement a couple centuries back. The first socialists with a political platform were moved in part by the secular absorption of the teachings of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, pleading with people not to forget the downtrodden and the poor. These socialists were known as “Utopian Socialists” because they envisioned a perfect society which would be set up by the voluntary action of those motivated by their love for their fellow man. They advocated the formation of small, communitarian societies, which later became very popular in the United States.

My book Socialism has a long chapter devoted to the various kinds of communal groups which organized privately in the United States. They called on those who wished to be a part of such an organization to join them and live with “all things common” as Christians did in the New Testament (See Acts, chapter 4). The beauty of this approach was that it only involved those who wished to be involved, whereas the socialist system as a national economy constrains all citizens to live under its tyranny whether they want to or not.

The Movement Changed Completely when Marx Appeared on the Scene.

But Karl Marx was appalled by the lack of efficiency and by the lack of power of these socialists who wanted to form a movement of love. Marx advocated violent overthrow of those whom he blamed for poverty and inequality.  He insisted on a society which constrained all citizens, whether they liked sharing or not, to live in a socialistic order. He hated capitalists and waited anxiously for the workers to make the whole social class of property owners, the bourgeoisie, extinct. It was Marx who turned the movement of socialism into a movement of hatred.  To keep the property owners from trying to regain power after the Marxian revolution, he advocated the formation of a “dictatorship of the proletariat (working class)”.  This vanguard of the communist party would organize the government, plan the economy, and rule with an iron fist.

To understand why Marxian socialism is bitter and negative, one should understand Marx’s life. Somewhat surprisingly, it was founded upon a secure childhood. Since he never held a job, Marx was never an exploited worker. As a student he studied philosophy and religion, but thought very little of religion. He married Jenny von Westphalen, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen, but there was little class struggle in the marriage.

Because of his radical views, he was not able to become a professor, so he went into journalism. Because of the opposition he tended to provoke, he spent time moving to and living in various places in Germany, France and England. For quite some time, Marx’s unwilling parents supported him and his family. As a library researcher, writing radical tracts and tomes on economic theory, he usually had no income at all, but he in addition to help from his parents, he received help from his friend and colleague, Friedrich Engels. Engels’s father was a textile capitalist and his textile factory and its exploited workers provided some financial help. From them Marx received a pittance; unfortunately, however, it was insufficient for all his family to survive.

His most famous writings were The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, the latter being a three-volume critique of capitalism. The first volume of Kapital took him ten years to complete and the next two volumes were published posthumously by Friedrich Engels. Critics tend to believe the postponement of the publication of Das Kapital beyond Marx’s death was a result of the author’s dissatisfaction with his own attempt to resolve the incongruities in his theory of value. He never could free the theory of contradiction. To understand Marx’s theoretical problem requires a few moments of concentration.  The interested reader is invited to consult my book, Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline and the Attempted Revival in the United States, which treats the problem at length and in detail.  The book also addresses Marx’s economic theory in general and the supporting philosophical/political theories. It also elaborates on the abject failings of the Marxian theory of exploitation which condemns capitalism without understanding the basic theory of markets.

Marxism never got over Marx’s personal hatred. When Lenin, a great admirer and teacher of Marxism, took over Russia’s Bolshevik government after the revolution of 1917, he immediately set out to establish Marxian institutions to manage the economy.  After Lenin’s early death, Stalin completely took over the Soviet economy, which cost millions of the peasants and workers their lives as he forced them into agricultural communes and state farms. He ruthlessly eliminated all opposition to his confiscation of their private property, their lands and their animals. Opponents were killed or sent off to Siberia into forced labor camps.

 Post-Marxian Hatred That Lingered.

Marxists today still loath those who advocate private property and personal liberty. The Marxian influence has been around so long that many people on

the left uniformly hate those who are affluent, those whom they perceive as political enemies, business corporations, managers, laborers who don’t vote for union policies, and on and on. It’s the kind of loathing that one sees today in many who had planned on the electoral victory of Hillary Clinton. They made it clear how they hated those who refused to get on board with the radicalization of the Democratic Party. The Party had enthusiastically supported the protests of the ‘Occupy Wall Street” movement, the ideology of which was strongly socialistic. Nor was the “Black Lives Matter” a movement of love. (I address such activity in my book Socialism so I can keep the story brief here.)  Later, the party accused President Trump of holding political rallies that encouraged violence. In actual fact, the Clinton emails later revealed that Clinton campaign funds had paid for hooligans to attack Trump rallies.

The massive Democratic protests of the election results demonstrated the love of the contemporary left. There were also incidents of violence and lawlessness, which were supported not very subtly by Democratic leaders who mandated resistance on the streets and demonstrated irrational opposition to everything the Trump administration did.  Trump voters were the “half” of the American society labeled by Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as a “basket of deplorables.”  A primary Democratic campaign strategy is simply name-calling. They do it so long and so loudly that many come to believe the slurs.  Billions were spent by the Clinton campaign and by the media who volunteered their manpower and resources to smear President Trump during the campaign and after his election.

The book Socialism shows that even the expression of love is aided by wise policy. There are ways by which, conceptually, we could take care of the poor, for example. Anti-poverty policies would put greater emphasis on voluntarism. Social welfare policies would put emphasis on helping low-income families and reducing subsidies for the middle class and others with higher incomes. It takes some time to explain and justify such policy suggestions, however, so I recommend you acquire the book at the very nominal prices for which copies are available.  Check out the “Order a Copy” page.

Charles Nordhoff studied and visited the communes of his day. Writing before the end of the 19th century, his description of the social aspects of communal life was widely known. He found that those communes were often better organized than individual farms in the overall economy, with a more complete division of labor and a more thorough work plan. Nordhoff expressed surprise at the business and mechanical skill extant in every commune, and the ease and certainty with which the brains came to the top. His significant conclusion was that the fundamental principle of communal life was that individuals must subordinate their will to the general interest: practically, that requires unquestioning obedience by the members toward the leaders of the society.

In Nordhoff’s view, the character of the communal leaders affects the development of the society over which they preside. The leader’s force and ability form the habits and even the thought of his followers. The communes of Nordhoff’s era were usually “quite democratic” with no member playing the role of a servant. Often, practicing managers were elected to be in charge of business dealings.

On occasion he saw the democratic aspect of the communes as a liability. Nordhoff referred to the community members as “communists,” for the word had not yet taken on the implications it assumed when communist parties were organized in Europe. He found his communists clean and tidy, if not fashionable. As neighbors, they were honest, reliable and good workers. As one would expect, they were as humane and charitable as their generally religious orientation suggested. Their animals were better cared for than those of many of their neighbors. Communal members enjoyed good longevity, eating well, retiring early, and refraining from alcohol (only Germans used wine and beer). When they were ill or grew old, they were tenderly cared for. They often lived to eighty or ninety years and remained robust and active. Communal life provided greater variety for daily labor, enhancing their versatility and abilities. They enjoyed a wider range of wholesome entertainments and leisure time activities with greater restraints against “debasing pleasures.” Nordhoff praised that life because it gave the participants independence, inculcating prudence and frugality. Self-sacrifice generally restrained selfishness and greed; increasing the happiness which comes from the moral side of human nature. Participants were shielded from the dread of misfortune or exposure in old age.

Nordhoff found the cultural interests and opportunities in the communes unnecessarily restrictive. Communes should own the best books, have music, eloquent lecturers, pleasant landscapes and fine architecture on their grounds. Too many were puritanically sparse with cultural refinements. Nevertheless, he concluded that the communist life was much freer from care and risk, easier, and much better in all material aspects. He sincerely wished the communitarian life would enjoy further development in the United States.

Another important scholar of communitarian life, Arthur Bestor, pointed out that the communitarians themselves, even the religious ones, liked to describe their proposals in terms of experimentation. He cites the view on experimentation of William Maclure, colleague of Robert Owen at New Harmony. According to Maclure, each township might experiment on everything that could enhance their happiness and comfort, so long as it did not interfere with the interests of their neighbors. Thus this great diversity of political, moral, and religious experiments could add to the facility and utility of their manufactures and useful arts. Any failed experiment could only hurt the designers and implementers of the speculation, nullifying their mistakes and eliminating their errors.

The Marxists also pointed out this distinction, writing about it unfavorably, of course. They contrasted it to their own revolutionary approach, which they saw as superior. Thus Friedrich Engels wrote that the utopians attempted to wrest the solution of social problems arising from economic conditions from the human brain. For Marxists, it seemed necessary to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda. Bestor concludes that the communitarian’s faith in social harmony (as opposed to the Marxian class warfare) was obviously the preference of Americans in general. Communitarian emphasis on voluntary action corresponds exactly to the American conception of freedom. The experimental aspect of communitarianism had great appeal for a nation of experimenters, which viewed even itself as an experiment. And sensing no class warfare, American communitarians could fit into organizations with which they could identify with little difficulty.

We must recognize, of course, that successful, small scale experimentation may not transfer seamlessly to success at the national level. The small communal institutions may supply some inspiration, and even some instruction, but would successful leadership at the communal level have the same characteristics as national leadership in a socialistic country? Would the membership, work force, and voting-level citizenry in a successful commune have the same characteristics as those in a socialist nation? Are the financial, social and political characteristics of a successful communal organization identical to those of the socialist state? We sense after a review of the communal utopias of the past that we are better equipped to think about socialism at the national level; we know a lot more than we would have known if the utopias had never existed at all. The major issue remains, of course, the voluntarism of the commune as opposed to the governmental enforcement of national-level socialism. There is certainly a place for experimentation in governance questions.

Some of the experiments began with strong advantages: charismatic leadership, devoted and diligent followers, cultural, ethnic, and lingual unity, and the compelling and uniting force of faith in a benevolent Deity. But the united effort produced initially was difficult to sustain. Experiments without these benefits were difficult even to get started. Thus, the utopias did not

prove to be a means for the reshaping of the world or of bringing about a society that might supplant the market system. If that is so and if the task of building a social system is difficult on a small scale, we are constrained to ask how a huge society’s economic experiment with socialism can be perceived to be as simple a task as winning an election and calling the party faithful to action. Asking an entire nation to work to sustain a system that requires huge taxes and sacrifice for one large segment of the social fabric and offers entitlements that ostensibly allow the cessation of personal labor, sacrifice and taxation for another large segment of the population may not be as simple as implementing legislative chicanery to pass a healthcare law.

Conclusions

The United States are a huge country of very diverse population; its religious points of view are divergent, its social unity shattered by the exploitation and magnification of ethnic differences by the very politicians who abhor unity while decrying its absence. Let us conclude by noting some of the more significant differences between local and national socialism, the former being some variant of the communitarian organizations we have been discussing.

First, socialism of the communitarian type is chosen by the participant, who can opt out. Socialism of the national type is chosen by the voters or the leader of the revolution and imposed on all other citizens. Individual communitarians

are permitted to abandon a communal organization, but citizen socialists would have to flee the hosting nation to do so. Second, communitarianism is financed by the participants. If practiced today, the communitarians must pay for their own community, not to mention the taxes paid to fund the financial projects and activities of state and federal governments as well. That is to say that state socialism would be expected to “crowd out” attempts to participate in communitarianism, which is local socialism. Third, communitarians desire to demonstrate a better way for a society to live. Socialists are convinced that they already know the better way and wish to impose it upon their fellow citizens. Fourth, communitarians generally expect to contribute to their living by participating in some kind of work. Socialism has eliminated work requirements for citizens; those citizens who work very productively however, will be heavily taxed in the American model. This contrasts with the Scandinavian model of social welfare capitalism, which holds that all citizens should share in bearing the burden of taxation. Fifth, communitarians may opt for a purely secular lifestyle or a more religious lifestyle, depending on the particular organization they choose to join. Citizens of a socialist nation may only choose to be a part of a secular community. At this juncture, they may still choose to associate with a private religious group of their choice.

Many utopian communities have been established in America since the 18^th century. A number were formed by groups that had fled persecution in Europe. They were often based on religious views by religious groups looking for a better way of life that would lead to personal salvation. Their leaders hoped their religious systems would play an important role in the redemption of mankind. Other important utopian communities were viewed as laboratories of social experimentation motivated by secular and social purposes.

Whether formed for sectarian or secular purposes, some of these groups were more revolutionary than the larger, working-class movements of Europe. The communitarians were different from Europe’s working class movements in that they attempted to withdraw completely from mainstream society rather than openly revolt against it. They attempted to build ideal commonwealths so that the world might follow their example. They sometimes tried to eliminate sex or ethnic discrimination, and they sought to abolish private property; they sought to base human relationships upon fair-dealing and respect for their neighbors, as well as upon scrupulous craftsmanship in their business transactions.

But history demonstrated more failures than successes among such communities. Only three or four of them lasted longer than a hundred years. Many vanished within a few months of their founding.  These communes were early considered a “communitarian” movement because the community was at the heart of their plans. Communitarianism was seen as collectivistic, not individualistic; it was resolutely opposed to revolution, and was impatient with gradualism. The experimental communities aspired to be capable of accomplishing an immediate, thoroughgoing reform, and they hoped society at large would be capable of adopting the discoveries of successful experiments.

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*This blog is a summary of a long chapter on communitarian organizations in the history of the United States. I refer here to important studies of the communitarian societies. For the references and the details of such studies, see my book, Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States, Chapter 7, “Utopian Socialism in Communitarian America.”

The book Socialism reviewed a number of the most frequently reported examples of communitarianism in a substantial chapter on the topic. The interested reader is invited to learn more about Ephrata; the Shakers; the German Inspirationists at Amana, Economy, and Zoar; George Rapp at Economy, at Zoar; Amana; Robert Owen in America; Mormons and the “United Order;” Brook Farm, prelude to the phalanx; Fourier; Oneida; the Bishop Hill Commune, Cabet and the Icarians; the Hutterites; Cyrus Reed Teed; Henry George; and Roosevelt’s New Deal Communities as reported in my book. The communitarian groups are of abundant diversity, so a great deal can be learned from each case about how groups have functioned historically in various situations. Obviously, one can hardly make sweeping generalizations about how the experiences of those groups might provide insights into the functioning of socialist nations.

We can observe, however, that socialism at the federal level requires the coercion that can overcome the opposition to income redistribution, to the confiscation of private property and businesses in nationalization schemes, to the elimination of various liberties associated with market economies, and so on. The communitarian schemes were important because they were seeking a way to permit individuals and groups to live communally without forcing an entire nation to adopt a sweeping form of collectivism. As already mentioned, however, the histories of the communitarian experiments seemed to demonstrate more failures than successes, for most groups failed to last more than a few months.

One must keep in mind the huge differences between local and national socialism. The desire of communitarians is to demonstrate a better way for a society to live. Socialists are convinced that they already know the better way and hope to recruit by any possible means sufficient voters or revolutionaries to impose their desired way of life upon their fellow citizens. (Historically, they have often been willing to impose their views at the point of a gun.) Members of communitarian groups can opt out, but if the socialists can achieve a successful revolution or take over the ballot box, they can impose their will on society as a whole, except for those who can flee the country.

For more than a couple centuries the United States was almost uniformly convinced that market freedoms and individual liberties would best serve human happiness and prosperity. If a socialist regime had come to power only to demonstrate the standard liabilities of socialism, voters would have thrown that government out of office with dispatch.

Today, given the numbers of those who seek entitlements, subsidies, and the fruits of social activism, the power to impose the will of minority groups upon the majority appears to be increasing. That growth may be enough to place in doubt the political viability of those who prefer individual liberties and an environment that provides the reward of prosperity for learning and labor. In the past, individual communities could withdraw from society to organize according to their own preferences. But under any future socialism under contemporary conditions of global economic integration it would not be possible for groups of other persuasion to withdraw to form a small, independent market community.

Scholars have rather arbitrarily agreed that a communitarian organization (such as a commune) can be considered a success if it lasts at least 25 years. From a sociological perspective, the survival of a commune depends on a value system shared by the members, as well as a number of other factors, especially the organizational leadership and the transmission of the society’s culture to children and converts.

In the United States, the driving motivations for communal organization have been religion, social reform, and escapism. If communes are to endure, they must retain shared values and must demonstrate economic adaptability to maintain effective, organized governance. One study observed that In Danish communes, where there is considerably less social opposition, failure of communes is much more frequently due to internal communal factors, e.g., the personal motives of individual members, their internal personal conflicts, their excessive individualism, the lack of effective communal organization and poor planning.

Another study analyzed communal success in the United States in 281 cases from 1683 to 1937 as being functionally dependent on (i) being a pietist religious sect, (ii) leadership that successfully induces commitment, (iii) allowing some private property, and (iv) with some qualification, having anarchic governance. Political anarchism involves voluntary association of cooperative groups rather than normal, centralized governmental institutions. It is generally felt among scholars that success in communal endeavors depends on the commitment of the participants. Additionally, the likelihood of success is enhanced when leaders make some concessions to egoistic concerns of participants.  It was found that when continuance, cohesion, and control strategies are applied to solidify commitment, personalities are bound to social systems and their functions. When those strategies were employed, 19th century American utopian communities were generally successful, i.e., enduring.

When members of a communal organization are asked to sacrifice, i.e., to give up something as a price of membership, their motivation to remain will increase. Membership becomes more “sacred,” more valuable and meaningful if such sacrifice is made. Communion is defined as becoming an integral part of the self with the group. Homogeneity was also achieved through the general acceptance by the participants of the same communal conditions and the leadership’s demands for sacrifice over a period of time. Factors likely to produce homogeneity included, for example, common religious background; similar economic, educational status; common ethnic background; prior acquaintance of members; communistic sharing; property signed over at admission; signed-over property received while a member; the community as a whole owned land; the community as a whole owned buildings; the community as a whole owned furniture, tools, equipment; the community as a whole owned clothing, personal effects; communistic labor; no compensation for labor; no charge for community services; no skills requirement for admission. These are only part of the factors that can structure communal life in such a way as to enhance the feelings of commitment participants have for their communal situation.

One hears frequently of the leftist indoctrination of college students in the United States, whose recruitment to the ranks of progressives and, more recently, socialists, is apparent.

Opinion polls show the approval of socialism among millennials at just over 50%.  I presume that in the liberal arts and humanities this indoctrination occurs in history, political science and related classes somewhat systematically, and in other courses by random observations of socialist professors. In the case of business students, I am fully aware of the indoctrination process, having taught for many years in business schools.

For many years I assumed that the exposure to economics in college and having been the victims of regulatory measures once they begin careers in business, businessmen would be natural advocates of laissez-faire capitalism and the market system. With the introduction of systematic indoctrination in business schools, however, one can find all sorts of indoctrinated socialists in business and, perhaps especially, in financial firms. This essay will address the nature of the indoctrination of business students.

The corporation has always been vilified by its socialist detractors – those who ignore the fact that corporations are the producers of the goods we consume and the provider of jobs. They are the institution that develops and applies new technologies, and gives us investment opportunities for our 401K plans. But according to “stakeholder theorists,” who provide systematic indoctrination of our future business leaders, the corporation has the potential for doing some good, but academics must train students to overcome the corporation’s history of evils and abuses.

Once, people like people like John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie were derided for their business practices and their negative impact on the public welfare.  But they gave away huge amounts of money to fund philanthropic causes. Nevertheless, stakeholder advocates maintain that those in society who understand ethics and proper managerial behavior must transform corporations into “socially responsible” institutions.  Our large corporations must show concern not only for the stockholding owners of corporations and their profits. No, they must consider and respond to the needs and desires of all the groups and organizations which are affected by the functioning of corporations.  All such groups who have a stake in the outcomes of corporate activity – the “stakeholders” of the corporation must be a part of the corporate leaders’ concerns.

Moderate stakeholder theorists, if I may use a distinction made by a stakeholder theorist among my business school colleagues, are simply individuals who wish to teach ethics to prospective managers. The more radical among business school faculty advocate more forceful methods of imposing stakeholder principles on corporations. This latter type of stakeholder advocate hopes to impact the functioning of corporations by applying “social controls” to corporate management. Some might be willing to be satisfied with teaching corporate leaders their corporate social responsibility (CSR), but others would like to take further, more extreme measures to make sure that CEOs rigorously apply the stakeholder principles they learned as undergraduates.

 

One might notice the asymmetry of the stakeholder theory. All corporate activity imposes external costs on the society. Those thus impacted are thought to have a claim on the corporation. But corporations produce both costs and benefits. For example, corporations pay taxes and perform other positive functions. Perhaps those who benefit from the existence of a given corporation whom they do not patronize should be considered “beneficiaries”, rather than “stakeholders”, and provide revenues in some form for their beneficiary social responsibility (BSR), which would be remitted to all socially acceptable corporations.

Those corporations performing helpful social functions, such as would bring happiness to any state chosen to be the headquarters of such a corporation, should probably also have an agent serve in the upper echelons of the tax administration of such states, if not in the IRS in Washington, D.C. This notion, of course, will not attract any positive response from socialists (“stakeholder theorists”) in our business schools.

It is hardly difficult to find persuasive refutation of stakeholder claims from the perspective of economics. According to stakeholder advocates, their objective is to make “values” necessarily and explicitly a part of doing business. Managers are to be indoctrinated and trained to share the wealth the corporation creates with their core stakeholders.

“The Corporate Objective,” the highest stakeholder value, is that “truth and freedom are best served by seeing business and ethics as connected.” The notion of intervening in private commerce to achieve social justice originated, of course, in the public sector. Stakeholder advocacy merely extends the process of “pursuing social justice” to the private sector. We are accustomed to perceiving the public sector in terms of politics and political action. Aside from the public corporation, only governments – federal, state, and local – can generate resources on a large scale. In a sense governments also have shareholders, citizens who pay taxes and provide services such as voting and volunteering for public projects. Strictly speaking, we do not separate ownership and non-ownership in governance, since the founders perceived an equal creation of all the governed. Those not in a position to contribute to the generation of wealth, however, are akin to the stakeholders of governments. They are franchised to use the public infrastructure, receive subsidies, enjoy public health services, educational programs, and so on. Legislatures have recognized their entitlement, which is by community agreement separated from ownership.

Stakeholder theory comes along much later and places its focus on the private sector, advocating an expansion of the services received by private stakeholders and demanding increasing private provision for their needs and claims. But those needs and claims are more clearly the business of the public sector. Society as a whole, in the form of representative government, agrees to expand the benefits of legitimate stakeholders – low income recipients, the poorly educated, the physically handicapped or chronically ill, and others unable to provide for themselves. This is done to express the community’s preferences for justice and equity and includes taxation of the private sector to secure the essential welfare funds.

Market advocates have long held that more efficient and effective care of social stakeholders would occur if the private sector were concerned strictly with taking care of the ownership and allocation of private resources. If returns are maximized and efficiency prevails in the private sector, large amounts of resources are generated for redistribution of funds transferred to and through the public sector. Moreover, as we learned from the socialist experience in the Soviet Union and East Europe, the generation of public resources is not unrelated to the state of private incentives. If the provision of resources is taken over completely by the state, the resultant incentive incompatibilities guarantee a much diminished national product, much reduced taxation flows, and a much lower level of living in general.

The socialization of the private sector is not an efficient way to generate resources for the underprivileged. Teaching prospective managers that they may consider themselves the “owners” of the corporation’s resources (because they need no longer feel any responsibility to the shareholders, who are the actual owners of the property) and because those resources should be used for social claims is certainly a poor idea from the standpoint of justice or efficient resource allocation. Although managers may engage in moral hazard (using resources in their personal interest, in this case to enhance the position of stakeholders, far and near, rather than create wealth for the firm’s owners), this diversion from efficient management will lead them into unproductive pursuits that shrink the capacity for wealth creation. This diversion of resources from the owners, the shareholders, imposes upon them one more set of redistribution demands through a form of private or “quasi” taxation. And this is performed in the name of ethics?

Advocates are apparently unwilling to perceive that business activity already takes place in a world in which there are numerous laws and regulations on corporations to account for social interests. Calling on business leaders to impose additional, self-administered measures to enhance additional income redistribution at the expense of the firm’s owners can only be the result of over-reach. Thus, Milton Friedman is quoted as saying that stakeholder advocates are “preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.”

Stakeholder advocates rely on sweeping generalizations about the fiduciary and social obligations of corporations. They promote the notion that any individual or organization that “invests” in corporations has the right to some return on the investment, i.e., to some of the fruits of the firm’s productivity. They do not usually elaborate on the idea of what kind of return they might expect from their “investment,” the nature of which is likewise vague. In the current economy, one may rest assured that if any individual or organization has a claim on any specific firm for any specific “investment,” the demand for such a return will already have been pressed in the courts. In any case, all the stakeholders in American corporations having a legitimate claim on a return are already receiving it.

It has occurred to some theorists that stakeholder-oriented companies possessing any monopoly power have lower output and higher prices. Firms in this situation may choose voluntarily to be stakeholder oriented, because they are in a position to charge higher prices (akin to adding a tax). That benefits stakeholders because higher prices are required for firms of this type to produce revenues not only to cover current costs, but also for stakeholder causes.

We need not pursue the analysis of a government tax imposed on an imperfectly competitive firm here. The government already taxes such firms to finance the usual social programs. This tax, generally of the excise type, will be passed along to the consumer. Thus, the stakeholder quasi-tax burden combines with the normal tax burden already imposed by the social-welfare state on the consumer. The imposition of higher taxes is not likely to be seen as a disadvantage to the average stakeholder advocate, but it should serve as a warning signal to other citizens and business people.

Finally, the adoption of a thoroughgoing stakeholder model would transform the corporation from its original situation of focusing on the simple matter of maximizing profits. It would have to focus on all the other “investors” and claims on the earnings of the corporation. It would become like a government agency, no longer worrying about the bottom line. It would only have to transfer any available funds to the diverse causes célèbre of stakeholders far and near. Becoming a government bureaucracy, it could not be expected to exhibit greater efficiency than the I.R.S. or the V.A.

For a more thorough and detailed treatment of these stakeholder issues, I invite the reader to see the much longer and completely documented exposition in two chapters of my book, Socialism.         

House Representative Ocasio-Cortez has proposed a Green New Deal, and although that has not gained traction in the congress, most of the main budget items for which expenditures have been proposed are still on the table.  The radical left, as well as those progressives standing by and permitting a socialist takeover of their political party, are still proposing massive expenditures and praising the Biden administration for the reckless, out-of-control expenditures of the last couple years.  Let us consider briefly the primary expenditures proposed and the prospective revenues yet to be derived by insisting that of the very wealthy Americans (Big Guy Biden excepted) they pay their “fair share” of taxes.

First, the IRS says that families earning more than $600,000 annually compose the richest 0.9 percent of American families, so let us use that statistic for the richest 1 percent. In 2016, this richest 0.9 percent earned about $1.7 trillion in taxable income and paid about $530 billion in taxes. In a noteworthy article in the Washington Post (January 5, 2019) Jeff Stein wrote “Ocasio-Cortez wants higher taxes on very rich Americans. Here’s how much money that could raise.”

The Spending Menu

And how much will we need for the socialist vision of our ideal, green society? Raising enough to fund “Medicare for all” has been estimated to increase government outlays by about $30 trillion over a decade (while also zeroing out premiums and deductibles paid by Americans) our $3 trillion/year. Add to that the plan of Bernie Sanders to provide free college tuition ($800 billion or $47 billion per year), then fund President Barack Obama’s plan to get close to universal prekindergarten ($75 billion over a decade), forgive more than half the student debt in America ($1.4 trillion) cover Democratic leaders’ plan for boosting teacher pay and school funding ($100 billion), or come close to funding a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. According to an editorial for Investor’s Business Daily, moving the economy away from fossil fuels to 100 percent renewable energy will come “at a cost of about $5.2 trillion over 20 years” or $260 billion/Yr.

Total cost/yr:               Medicare for all                   $3 trillion

Free College Tuition                $47 billion

Forgive ½ student debt          $82 billion

Renewable energy                     $260 billion

Infrastructure                                $59 billion

3 trillion 448 billion per year for the next near two decades (3.448 trillion/yr).  The richest 1% earn a total of 1.7 trillion/yr.

Update.  This blog was written several years ago, but is being updated in February of 2023.  Just a few weeks before this was written, President Biden gave his State of the Union address.  He talked about “getting the job finished” that he has started by bringing the United States’ national debt to a crushing $31 trillion. Nikki Haley, announced her Republican candidacy for President in the 2024 election and said that Big Guy Biden’s SOTU could be summarized in six words: “tax…..spend…..tax……spend…..tax…..spend!”

In 2016, this richest 0.9 percent earned about $1.7 trillion in taxable income and paid about $530 billion in taxes. These Americans would have to pay an additional $320 billion every year in taxes if the top tax rate went up to 70 percent, according to calculations based on IRS data. Mazur, a former Treasury official, noted this estimate was probably high because the wealthy would probably find ways to try to shelter themselves from higher taxation, such as by buying tax-exempt bonds. In other words, they would use every possible loophole (which is sensible and legal) to avoid paying any non-required tax.

But there is another way to avoid taxation, rather than just minimizing the legal obligation.  As usually happens in socialism, the rich become aware that they will not be permitted to keep a generous share of what they produce, so they simply quit producing it, which saves them effort, stress, and time.  They end up with the equity society then produces, which is what makes everyone equally poor in socialism.  If we assume that we simply taxed away everything that the rich made (yes, if they pay everything they earn, that would presumably be “fair” according to AOC), they would still not nearly cover all the expenditures progressives can reimagine.

We conclude with an observation that is quite correct.  It is that the rich pay more than their fair share of federal income taxes. Federal income tax data for 2017 reported by the IRS shows that the top 1 percent of income earners pay 39.5 percent of all federal income taxes, nearly twice the 20.6 percent share of national income they earn.  The bottom 45% of U.S. income earners pay no taxes at all.

So far, the only concrete step Ocasio-Cortez describes to enact the Green New Deal is the formation of a House select committee to formulate specific goals. On the environmental side, these would include, among other things, expanding renewable-energy sources until they provide 100 percent of the nation’s power; building an energy-efficient “smart grid;” upgrading every residence and industrial building in the U.S. for energy efficiency, comfort, and safety; eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions for industry and agriculture; funding “massive” investments to draw down greenhouse-gas levels; and making the United States a leader in the use and export of green technology. After airlines are outlawed because of their carbon track, no one has yet estimated the cost of the fast rail bridge from California to Hawaii.

The Difference between Corporate and Governmental Bureaucracy

Because liberals/progressives/socialists believe that corporations create most of the evil in the world and that government is the source of salvation for humankind, one can expect that with the growth of government involvement in the economy, the government bureaucracy will generally be in growth mode. In a private sector economy, decentralization is effective because every firm and every consumer household will have its own economic plan. In socialism, the objective is to remove planning from the private sector and turn it over to a single, gigantic government plan designed and implemented by oversized agencies. In a true socialist economy, this is by definition what will be in process as long as socialists retain power.

Unfortunately, a study of bureaucracy must reveal to the objective mind and to human experience that overgrown human organizations unavoidably take on dangerous preferences, proclivities and powers. Such organizations work against the positive incentives of market systems, against the creativity of the private sector, against the productivity of the society’s workers, against the implementation of technical improvements, against the social harmony of diverse groups in the country, against the freedom and honesty of the press, and against human freedoms in general.

When confronted with complaints about the performance of bureaucratic agencies, socialists tend to assert that a little inefficiency is normal in the functioning of government agencies. They also inevitably aver that large business firms also have their own bureaucracies, so one should not fret about a little governmental red tape.  But there is a world of difference between governmental and corporate bureaucracies.  The latter are paid to perform tasks related to profit making.  Inefficiencies of the corporate bureaucracy impinge on profits, which is the driving force of firms that must compete in the market place. The governmental bureaucracy is not interested in profits or efficiency, but merely in achieving the tasks suggested by organizational goals. They are interested in creating new ideas and methods to control the environment which they are involved in managing.

The Nature of Agency Functioning

Business bureaucracies have projects too, but all of them relate to making profits. Since profits are generated through sales, the business bureaucracy must think of its customers. If it fails to be productive and relevant, the business itself will fail and the organization will become extinct.  The government bureaucracy, again, thinks of tasks, not people.  They aren’t interested in sales, efficiency, or profitability and the branches of government that should manage and oversee them are too busy or disinterested to do so. The IRS, for example, thinks of the revenues derived from taxes.  People who hold the money even become like the enemy, since the IRS has to take the funds from the people. The EPA has the project of protecting the environment; since people mess up the environment, an adversarial relationship quickly develops between the government bureaucracy and all us polluters in the private sector and citizenry.

Imagine several thousand clever minds thinking about environmental forces that they aspire to manage.  They have never had experience with a real world and its problems, but instead wish merely to create new rules which the actors in the real world must follow. Such rules may be of benefit to the public, but may also be strictly for the benefit of the bureaucrats themselves. In any case, they will be implemented at a cost.  It will cost the firm and its customers, not the bureaucrats, scarce resources to apply the rules. Firms will have to hire lawyers to help them understand and implement the bureaucratic regulations produced by the thousands of pages. Those regulations demand compliance with the force of law.  Such regulations have the effect of driving up production costs, driving down profits, and sometimes rendering the firm unable to compete effectively. Combine this business regulatory syndrome with the socialistic preference for extensive government participation in normal life, which also is costly and persuades socialists to support high taxes. The regulation and the taxes make firms look abroad for a new home, so that they can stay viable in the international business arena. Firms will take their jobs and go elsewhere.

President Trump, formerly a businessman, knew this world from the compliance side very well. He knew his colleagues were being regulated into high-cost oblivion. He saw them pull up and leave the United States and said we must do something about it if our workers are to retain their jobs and incomes. He saw the job of governmental regulation as a balance of keeping those regulations necessary to promote responsible corporate performance and of discarding regulations which added far more to public costs than to benefits.

Bureaucracies Can Affect Both Socialistic and Market Economies

My book, Socialism, has a full chapter on the nature of bureaucracies. The study of bureaucracy should be a part of every citizen’s curriculum. I address the organizational costs and benefits of the government agencies and also document throughout the book the fact that once a bureaucracy is installed, it lobbies vigorously for continually expanding its share of governance and government control of the economy and of society generally. Once bureaucracies were installed in the centrally planned economies like the Soviet Union, economic reform became impossible.  It became impossible to scale back the layers of government economic agencies and enhance the functioning of market-like activity to achieve the minimal efficiency necessary for the economy’s survival. The red tape and the government planning system

imposed ever greater inefficiencies until the economic system simply  collapsed. President Trump and his successors will find that it will be an awful challenge to inhibit further growth of the government agencies in the United States.

The book Socialism, reviews the organizational characteristics of governmental agencies, showing the forces driving the continual expansion of bureaucracies and of their regulatory impact on the firms that produce the nation’s goods and services. Of course the government must perform functions which require organization, but the tendency of such organizations is to continue to grow even after the original problems requiring such organization no longer exist. The negative characteristics and tendencies of bureaucracies have been known for a couple centuries, but socialists ignore them because they have been indoctrinated to distrust private firms and they put their faith in government to accomplish every essential task. They do so only because they have not personally experienced life under the ultimate bureaucracies of socialist regimes.