The United States is currently attempting to determine the meaning of the attack on the capitol in Washington D.C. one year ago today. The Democratic managers of the congress and the lockstep media have declared the “attack” to be insurrection. Of the 725 hitherto charged for their participation, none of them has been charged with insurrection or terrorism. For trespass, some have been held in banana republic conditions for nearly a year without having been convicted of anything. Some of them, doubtless, deserve to be tried, then reimbursed for the excessive punishment already received.
The “attack” was modest by Antifa/BLM standards.
This attack had nothing of the Antifa and BLM violence that swept through America’s cities through 2020 and which reappears occasionally even to the present. This attack showed no looting, no “burn it down” arson common in our Democratic metropolitan centers. There was, of course, too much vandalism without which one could honestly proclaim the attack to be a “peaceful protest.” Only one person was murdered in this event, but this Air Force veteran of fourteen years was among the protesters, not the police. She was executed at point blank range without warning for attempting to bypass chairs stacked up by a vigilante to keep the mob from accessing the speakers’ hall.
Let us begin by asking the question: what is insurrection?
“The following is a case law defining Insurrection: Insurrection means ‘a violent uprising by a group or movement acting for the specific purpose of overthrowing the constituted government and seizing its powers. An insurrection occurs where a movement acts to overthrow the constituted government and to take possession of its inherent powers’” [Younis Bros. & Co. v. Cigna Worldwide Ins. Co., 899 F. Supp. 1385, 1392-1393 (E.D. Pa. 1995)]”*
The real insurrection arose from the Democrat Party’s earlier declaration of “resistance” expressed by Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi when President Trump took office. They declared they would resist everything that President Trump attempted to do. It was not an issue of strenuously opposing those policies and actions not in the interest of democrats; rather, it was everything that President Trump would attempt to accomplish in his presidency, much of which was extremely favorable for diverse groups of citizens. It also implied, for example, that Pelosi and Schumer would ultimately reject the vaccines for Covid 19 which were pursued, promoted, expedited, and made available very early by President Trump.
Floyd George
The real insurrection arose from the violent actions of radical left extremists across the country after the death of Floyd George, who died as the result of a drug overdose. After an encounter with the police, to avoid arrest he swallowed all the drugs in his possession, so that he would not be arrested for that violation. An autopsy did not determine that strangulation was the cause of his death, although the nation had been appalled at the sight of a police officer kneeling on his neck in the course of his arrest.
An Antifa “peaceful protest”
The “peaceful protests” organized after the death of Floyd George through 2020 and beyond by the insurrectionists of the Antifa and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) were more like real insurrection, insomuch as they attacked government institutions, engaged in violence with looting, burning city centers (and forests?), and violence far worse than any in the attack on congress of January 6, 2021. The attack on the capitol involved protesters of the actual insurrection of November 3rd in which serious election fraud was committed by agents of the Democratic Party to alter election results. The attack also involved agents of the Antifa and BLM movements interloping in the attempt to turn the protest violent.
Both gentlemen talk of “transforming” America.
The real insurrection is one that began with Bernie Sanders and his colleagues whose popularization of socialism among our children and youth began years ago. It was promoted by the Obama/Biden administration in their attempt to “transform” our democratic, free enterprise system. It continued as Obama weaponized his security and justice agencies to subvert the presidency of his successor in office. The triumph of this movement and the ultimate insurrection was achieved in the subversion of the 2020 presidential election through a massive attack by many who brazenly violated state election laws to assure the defeat of a president who had achieved some remarkable progress in many areas. Many feel he deserved defeat, even some Republicans: they saw him as arrogant, always claiming to be the world’s best; he was mean to some of the people who spent 24 hours daily deriding him, cursing him, loathing him and plotting against him, and some felt him less worthy in a religious sense than Peter or Paul of the New Testament.
Along with the few extremists on both ends of the political spectrum which participated in the protest at the capitol on the 6th, the massive majority of the visitors to the capitol were totally peaceful citizens who stayed on the grounds without entering the building. Of those who entered the building, some commented on the fact that the police had the guns and they had none. The media perpetrated the myth that there were fatalities among the police, but had to recall their error.
President Biden, a year later, repeated the falsehood that there had been police fatalities as a result of the attack. The only individual actually murdered on January 6th was Ashli Babbit, an Air Force veteran who entered the capitol to ask congress not to confirm the election results. (See my post on Ashli.) She was unarmed, but wanted access to the congress deliberating about confirming election results. She wanted to tell the congress only to count legitimate ballots, not all of the ballots submitted by non-registered, illegitimate “voters.” This was Congress, all right, but they were also her representatives. Congress protected themselves from any damage this unarmed citizen could do by her execution without a hearing. Police around her were numerous just before she was shot, but rather than arrest her, they hurried away, presumably so her assassination could proceed without interference.
We should’t expect radical violence to end. It should continue!
The left-wing extremists feel they are the vanguard of the Democratic Party in their attempt to overthrow the racist government of the United States of America, replacing the constitution and the American democracy with a Marxist, socialist “democracy.” They are also viewed as such by many of the leaders of the Democratic Party, such as by Kamala Harris current, illegitimate Vice President of the United States; Vice President Harris stated on television before her election that nobody should expect the insurrectionist violence of the riots across the country in 2020 attacking American political symbols, demanding the “defunding” of the police, and destroying the properties of many small businesses through arson and looting to cease with the passing of the summer months or with the election. It would not cease and it should not cease!!
Those who burned Washington’s Statue now want the Capitol to be deified.
Is it not interesting that the Democrats, so anxious to destroy our cultural emblems, monuments and statues of the political heroes of our history, suddenly wanted after January 6 to elevate the home of our congress to the sacred status of a temple. It seems obvious that we should hold such institutions in respect, and the congress should be protected from invasion. Presumably that would hold even if the members of congress tend to become very rich after their election, to assure for themselves (as in the example of Social Security) more benefits than the citizens they represent, and even if they fail to stop the plagues (of aliens bearing drugs and breathing Covid), and people (gang members and criminals) who are currently invading our country through Biden’s open borders.
This January 6 issue has been both politicized and propagandized by the Democratic Party and the traditional publications media in the United States. These two institutions have demonstrated over a period exceeding four years that their hatred remains and that they are desperate to destroy President Trump. Their outrageous prevarication and mismanagement of the “news” reflects frantic irrationality. They continue to pursue the strictly partisan warfare that “impeached” President Trump twice and which now seeks to eject him totally from American politics and, if possible, to incarcerate him. This media propaganda extravaganza is really just another in the long line of Democratic nasty tricks to subvert justice for President Trump.
The congressional police under Speaker Nancy Pelosi have been complicit with her in covering up what really happened in the January 6 attack and why. Many questions remain about the nature of the “attack” on the capital, because the event has been from the outset no more than an effort to smear President Trump and his supporters.
A year after the attack, President Biden spoke at the capitol. Biden, who is an authority on the “big lie” has assured his supporters that if you repeat the most outrageous lies frequently enough, they will be believed. His advocacy of this Stalinist principle might qualify him as the Grand Wizard of the Big Lie (GWotBL, pronounced “Gwatt-bull”). Nearly all the lies that have been repeated (rather than demonstrated or substantiated in any way) about the fraudulent election and the January 6th attack were repeated by President Biden on January 6, 2022. By that time, Biden was essentially an empty suit, but he stands as the symbol of those who are the real threat to our democracy, the socialist movement. Note the objectives of the radicals who are striving diligently to pack the supreme court, to increase the number of states to supply democratic representatives to congress, to legislate change to voting protocols so that their agents and voters can more conveniently submit invalid ballots, vote anonymously, switch to massive use of mail-in-ballots in elections, facilitate voting for non-citizens, count votes for republicans as votes for democrats, use programmable computer programs to flip votes, and implement the other many subversive and documented tactics by which 2020 illegitimate ballots assured the victory of the current “president.”
The seventeen also wrote: “Because this agenda invests in long-term economic capacity and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressures.” This is, of course, not about a forercast of future economic developments, but only a concllusion expected to follow on the basis of certain assumptions.
“Eased Longer-term Inflationary Pressures” Versus Actual Inflation over the next five years.
Ireving Fisher gave us the Equation of Exchange
For the reader who had no macro principles course in college, or who forgot what was taught there, consider the simple economics of inflation. The basic principles involved have been well understood by great minds from the days of Adam Smith. J.S. Mill didn’t use the so-called Equation of Exchange, but would have been comfortable with its message. The form of current usage of the equation we owe to Irving Fisher and it dates back to 1911. It reads MV=PT. In that equation, M represents the total quantity of money in circulation in the economy, V is velocity or the rate at which money circulates from “hand to hand,” P is the price or the price level, and T represents the number of transactions in a given period. To keep it simple, the bottom line is that if the money supply expands greatly through government expenditures without an equal increase in taxes (i.e., if the government expands the money supply beyond the amount required to pay for the current national output of goods and services) there will be a proportionate increase in prices.
Milton Friedman championed monetary theory
Professor Friedman’s solution to long term financial stability was to increase gradually the money supply over time just enough to pay for a modest annual increase in the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) or the annual growth in available commodities and services. In its time the Equation of Exchange was a landmark theory, and many still consider it to be an important mathematical description of a nation’s monetary life.
Understanding inflation goes way back. John Stuart Mill wrote about it.
As far back as John Stuart Mill, political economists (as economists were then called) grasped the fundamentals of the equation of exchange. A single paragraph from Mill’s Principles of Political Economy demonstrates the principles involved in an expansion of the money supply through government activity. He wrote:
“But it is a significant fact that even after all the evils inflicted on our country by over-issues, in spite of the temptation to misuse paper money if it is in any way permitted, in spite of all the warnings of history, there seems to be a dangerous acquiescence in the presence of government paper money in our currency. It is an open pitfall, tempting to evils whenever sudden emergencies arise. It ought not to be allowed to remain any longer.” (Principles Of Political Economy By John Stuart Mill [New York: D. Appleton And Company, 1885, p. 420]
The most famous example of hyperinflation seems to be the German case. After World War I ended, the allied powers declared Germany to have been the cause of the war (an arbitrary insult, since Hitler hadn’t yet appeared and the Germans were not markedly more sinister than the other bellicose powers involved) and the victors insisted that the Germans pay large reparations. The Germans, of course, did not say “OK, OK, we were wrong, so come ahead and loot our shops.” Instead, they decided simply to print the money they were expected to pay. They turned on the printing presses and the prices obediently shot up, Biden style. Before long they were into a hyper-inflation that made the price of a loaf of bread roughly equivalent to a wheelbarrow full of cash.
The monetarist theory was popularized by Milton Friedman, who ultimately won the Nobel Prize for his work. Friedman shows that the money supply is the primary factor in determining inflation/deflation in an economy. Monetary policy, controlling the growth of the supply of money in circulation in the economy, is a more effective means for stimulating the economy or, on the other hand, slowing down the rate of inflation than fiscal policy is. Fiscal policy attempts economic management through government expenditures and tax policies. Monetarism is the main policy alternative to macroeconomic theory or Keynesian economic theory; monetarists favor limited government intervention in the economy, while Keynesians argue for active intervention through government expenditures and taxation.
The seventeen signees of the “Approbation for Joe” document have long been employed as professors at the nation’s top universities. They include Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s husband George Akerlof, Sir Angus Deaton, Peter Diamond, Robert Engle, Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Hart, Eric S. Maskin, Daniel McFadden, Paul Milgrom, Roger Myerson, Edmund S. Phelps, Paul Romer, William Sharpe, Robert Shiller, Christopher Sims, Robert Solow, and Joseph Stiglitz.
Placing them in random order, consider some of the main thrusts of their research.
George Akerlof, asymmetric information and the market for lemons; Peter Diamond, unemployment, social security, and taxation; Daniel McFadden, discreet choice, and random utility theory; Joseph Stiglitz, globalization and inequality; Paul Romer, economic growth theory, innovation and “Mathiness” (you’ll have to ask Romer what that is); Paul Milgrom, ethics, agency theory, and economics, organization and management; William Sharpe, finance and capital asset pricing; Robert Solow, sustainability, economic growth; Edmund S. Phelps, Statistical theory of racism and sexism, monetary policy and rational expectations; Robert Shiller, finance, efficient markets; Daniel Kahneman, happiness (he should know about this, he’s an economist), thinking, and behavioral economics; Sir Angus Deaton, health and mortality, development, and globalization; Christopher Sims, Econometrics of Macroeconomic and Monetary Policy; Oliver Hart, Contract Theory; Robert Engle, econometrics of climate change and financial stability; Eric S. Maskin, auctions, uncertainty and soft budget constraints; Roger Myerson game theory, and corruption.
As one may assume for all Nobel Laureates, these men are brilliant, wonderful scholars blessed with gifts of creativity and discernment.
They are also people. They are people who have mostly chosen to be engaged only minimally in political matters or politics (perhaps the reason why Paul Krugman was not included on this list?). They have doubtless borne as a part of their mindset the general sentiments of democrats for many years. Most academics are interested above all in their scholarly pursuits. To them, politics are a matter of secondary importance and they are generally disinclined to spend much time thinking about them. They do want to keep their hand in the topic enough to be recognized as authorities; after all, they are experts in their field, which is closely related to politics.
What is surprising is their rush to shore up the Biden administration’s policies, which I believe most economists would not wish to stake their reputations on.
Few of these 17 are deeply into monetary theory. If Milton Friedman were on the seventeeners’ list, it would be much more impressive. Many of them are Nobel Laureates not because of their discovery of new forces at work in economics, but because of their powerful skills in mathematics and econometrics. Many are really applied mathematicians or applied statisticians, if not both.
With regard to their general observations of the economy, they are much like other economists. Many such are interested in maintaining their credentials as good academics, so unless they are adherents of Friedman, the Austrian school, part of the growing Public Economics crowd, or are fans of the Chicago School, or of conservatism in general, they will be prepared on occasion to speak up in behalf of the democrats which have been their political home since early in life, long before they were famous Nobel laureates.
The Bidenomics of the Inflation Issue
Joe Biden says only the rich will be affected by the tax increases inherent to the proposed “Build Back Broke” legislation. The seventeen appear to take him at his word on this issue. But when one speaks of trillions of dollars of increased government expenditures, it is nonsense to say that the billionaires will pay for them. As I and others have shown elsewhere, there are simply not sufficient numbers of billionaires to cover these incomprehensibly large expenditures, even if you confiscated their entire incomes rather than simply taxing a large share of it.
Those who have reported on the expenditures involved here indicate that the legislation proposes large sums for new programs, but those sums are large enough merely to get programs initiated. Once they are initiated, additional huge sums will be required to keep them going. When Biden says all the costs will be covered, he is being disingenuous beyond his awareness.
It is a completely different issue to make the Biden claim that subsidies will reduce costs for individual families. He explains why these “social expenses” will no longer burden American family in a facetious manner; he should have taken some high school economics or engaged in a little common sense. When the government pays out subsidies so the recipients get a freebie, they are spared the expense because the government pays the bill. It doesn’t mean there is no bill for the subsidies. The actual bill is paid for by taxpayers, of course, along with the waste and fraud attached to such programs.
The inflationary problem arises when taxpayers do not pay; rather, deficit expenditures are, at least for the time being, not paid for by anyone at all. Our children and grandchildren will pay the bill (or suffer) later.
In inflationary conditions there is more money in the system than commodities and services for which the money is spent. The extra cash in the system is then spent by those lucky enough to hold it, as they try to outbid other consumers to win the too-scarce commodities for sale. Naturally, the process is all facilitated by sellers who will mark up their prices, knowing that those with cash will willingly relinquish it rather than go without the inflated item. The sellers can’t always be blamed for increasing their prices, since the prices they face in production or in purchasing commodities in wholesale markets are also rising. Everyone is affected by inflation.
Overactive printing presses produce hyperinflation
So no, Joe, when the government is paying the bills, it doesn’t mean there are no costs for government and that inflation won’t happen.
The seventeen make intentionally vague claims that Joe’s development plan will increase the national economic capacity. How clearly we remember the last massive spending bill of the Obama administration, which doubtless serves as the model for Joe’s BBB plan. The massive expenditures under Obama/Biden were not used productively at all. Obama explained that they didn’t find any “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects to spend a trillion dollars on in their effort to “stimulate” the economy. The money dissolved in pork expenditures to bail out political allies from their fiscal mismanagement; it also provided government agencies with such things as new fleets of cars, new computers, etc. My book, Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline and the Attempted Revival in the United States provides a thorough review and analysis of the Obama fiscal legislation.
The seventeen write: ““Because this agenda invests in long-term economic capacity and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressures.”
The question is: how much increased capacity will we see from the social expenditures and the climate change spending of the socialist administration?
Moreover, there are important structural questions involved here. When the private sector develops the economy, subsidies are sometimes used to supplement the private investments derived from the wealthy. But the markets guide the investments and there is a demand for the products arising from the development. Where the government is in charge of the investments, as in the central planning of the Soviet Union, the consumer is far removed from seeing tangible changes in his consumption possibilities.
When the government confiscates the management of investments and development, as in the proposed Green New Deal, the results cannot be expected to have the same efficiency as is sought by private firms that must be profitable or perish. Of course, we must concede that the Green New Deal (totally eliminating air travel with its environmental impacts) would accomplish very reasonable train fares for the consumer’s travel to, say, Hawaii.
If, as the seventeen suggest, government’s investments do achieve expanded long-term economic capacity, they contend that it will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy. The question is, where will they find the Americans willing to participate productively in the economy? Currently, there is a major shortage of workers in the US economy. And socialism is just beginning! From the small number of trillions already spent, we have many who would rather enjoy leisure time at home rather than return to work. What will happen to incentives when we keep right on spending (without costs or inflation, of course) the five or six trillion dollars on social programs that the congressional fiscal gurus expect will be the final outcome of Biden’s proposed legislation? Socialists have traditionally provided people with strong incentives to slack rather than sweat. Biden and his seventeeners appear unlikely to avoid this pitfall.
Many of us are unsettled as we see protesters in the street chanting for cops to be shot, or because we see political promises not being kept. Some are a little frustrated because they want to respond according to their own convictions and not according to someone else’s. The uncertainties about which candidates are honest ones or about which party is less threatening, can take a lot of joy out of political participation. You shouldn’t feel badly if you find it difficult to sort out legitimate political assurances from routine political hype.
The White House
The Purpose of this Website
This website is designed to bring knowledge and peace to those unsettled with today’s political landscape. Both parties have their inadequacies and failings, but one has pursued a growing flirtation with socialism. The democrats who have withstood or avoided that tendency, unfortunately a relatively small share of the party, are doing fine. But having made a career-long study of socialism’s theories, history, and implementation, I can warn you that socialism presents issues that have proved disastrous in numerous countries.
The book, Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline and the Attempted Revival in the United States is all about the economics of socialist society, how it is organized and how it functions. The book is over 800 pages because it addresses all aspects of socialism. It first reviews the original ideas, sometimes ancient ones, in socialism’s history before and after Karl Marx. It also investigates the countries that have adopted socialist or Marxist-Leninist theories – the Soviet Union, some of the Soviet bloc countries, India and China.
It also reviews the attempt to establish socialist economies in the democratic countries of Western Europe in the century after Marx, down to the time that nationalization of industry and the centralization of economic decision making proved ineffective and an abject failure. It was then that socialism as an economic system disappeared.
Finally, the book investigates socialism in the United States, discussing the reasons why it always failed at the ballot box; Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced a number of socialist policies and such policies were revisited with the presidency of Barack Obama. One can laud the good intentions of socialists, but this book explains why socialism has never succeeded and why it cannot succeed in the real world.
Reviews. The book’s reviews were very positive and are found on this website.
The Berlin Wall. Combined with then available technologies, it kept people in.
The Author, Phillip J. Bryson. In 1961 I was living in Berlin when the wall was built! I saw the concrete, the barbed wire, and read of the people shot trying to escape to West Berlin and freedom. I went home to the United States to continue my studies, hoping to find out why a country must build a wall to keep its people from fleeing. I took courses in Marxism as an undergraduate, and studied comparative economic systems, then went on for a PhD in economics at Ohio State. I became a professor at the University of Arizona where I taught economic systems, and international trade and finance. Twenty years later I transferred to the Marriott School at Brigham Young University. Over that forty plus years of my career I researched socialist systems, spent sabbaticals and research time living in West Berlin, in communist East Berlin (Karlshorst), and in Marburg, Munich, and Duisburg Germany, Vienna, London, and Moscow.
Parts of the wall received notoriety for their graffiti.
In November of 1989 I attended a conference in West Berlin on German Unification in the 1800s. During the week of the conference, the Communist Politbuero in East Berlin announced on the radio that the Wall open. So I was present at the construction of the Wall and almost thirty years later for the opening and the subsequent demise of the Wall.
The second task of socialism is to tax money away from those who have it and to give it to those who do not. These twin methods of nationalization and income redistribution constitute socialism. But historically, when nationalization failed to work, there was nothing left for socialism but redistribution. Nationalization and economic planning and centralization attempt to replace millions of individual, private economic plans with one over-reaching, overly ambitious government plan that becomes a bureaucratic nightmare unable to account adequately for the innumerable economic variables involved in an economy’s functioning. Socialism thus exhausted its unique economic initiatives, since the other, non-socialist political parties also adopted income redistribution and welfare policies. Nothing original remained for the socialists to advocate in the field of economics except pushing redistribution to the extreme of financial failure.
The Huge Financial Problem that Socialism Ignores. Socialism provides many subsidies, but there will never be enough funds to take care of all social needs over the long haul– the funds required to take care of a whole country from cradle to grave are far more than the total incomes of all the rich. lf we taxed away their entire incomes, receipts would not be enough to fund “Medicare for all!”, let alone all the proposals (including the “Green New Deal”) socialists will promote henceforth. For detailed evidence of the assertions I make here, scroll down from “Welcome, Friends” to the list of blogs that have been posted. There, see “Socialist Spending Plans and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)” and “The Seventy Per Cent Income Tax of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”
Venezuela: Once a Beautiful and Rich Country
National Fiscal disaster waits at the end of the socialist road. But there are additional unintended consequences of socialism. Dependence, frustration, and the loss of dignity and freedom are also the consequences of the tyranny required to establish and maintain control of the socialist system over time. A look at Venezuela today shows that socialism’s consequences can include poverty, hunger, hyperinflation, tyranny and violence.
Today, Venezuela is a battleground between a starving populace and an oppressive regime.
Chavez and President Obama. Both hoped to transform their countries.
Why Redistribution Stops Economic Growth and produces an equality of poverty. Society’s very wealthy and even its relatively affluent households are continually saving for their future, for retirement and to leave something for their children. These savings are a pool of money available to individuals and firms wanting to invest in new industrial equipment, new innovations, new technologies, and the things that produce new jobs and economic growth for the whole economy. If society decides to confiscate through socialistic taxation all those savings for the purpose of free education, a universal income for those unwilling to work, and new, green housing, etc., all the funds available for investment and growth are simply consumed. They disappear. It’s like eating the seed corn! The resources consumed in socialist programs totally eliminate savings and investment for new innovations, new firms, new technologies, new factories and equipment — and growth screeches to a halt. In the meantime, consumers, who get what they need through subsidies, no longer have an incentive to work hard, get training and education, save, and build for a bright future. They are prepared to relax and share an equality that turns out to be one of stark poverty.
Borrowing Money for Current Socialist Expenditures. But that’s not all! In the United States, if there is not enough money for a social project, the government simply borrows in the Obama fashion, spending more than they could possibly pay back. But we reach a point where people and countries do not trust the U.S. Treasury and they will only loan to us at high interest rates. Gradually, most of our budget goes for paying the interest on our loans, which amounts currently to about $500 billion per year, and when the government can no longer meet its payments, the whole financial system collapses.
Printing Money If the government follows the American socialist idea of simply printing money, as Venezuela has done, you soon find that you have to pay a million dollars for a loaf of bread. This we call hyperinflation. On occasion the European Union has nightmares about this outcome as countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Ireland start to drift toward insolvency and financial collapse. Venezuela is even further down the socialist financial path than Europe.
Humanity has always longed for freedom.
Consider now the loss of Freedom in socialism. In the rebuilding period in Europe after the Second World War, Friedrich Hayek and others observed how the socialist attempt to implement economic planning and tight control over their formerly market economies leads to a loss of freedom. The Nobel Prize winning Hayek called this The Road to Serfdom.
Brutal oppression is necessary to avoid protests and riots once socialists are in power.
Socialists take over because of their loathing of markets and capitalists. They confiscate the property and wealth of the so-called bourgeoisie, the wealthy and affluent, then they install an economic planning regime in which a large government bureaucracy makes all the decisions. A dictatorship of the proletariat has the task of maintaining control and preventing a counter-revolution by those who don’t want to give up all their wealth, property and businesses to the government. People also complain about the arbitrariness and extreme inefficiency of the central economic planning. Then, when the party’s media have to control thought and speech, we find ourselves on the way to a virulent dictatorship. In the United States this will be a little different, since even before the revolution (or coup) the media have given themselves over to be a voluntary propaganda ministry for the socialist party. This occurred even before the main broadcasting stations and newspapers devoted themselves to full-time Trump hating.
The world has experienced tyranny before. Europe’s was nothing compared to that of Stalin, Mao, and other socialists.
If you observe the attitudes of socialists, their body language and their public statements, in their resistance of the office of the President of the United States today, you cannot help but see the hostility and hatred they exude. Can you doubt that such individuals will fail to use power, if they can get it, to enforce their own will without compromise – dictatorially?
What is my objective?
I would like to give encouragement to the talented and creative young people struggling with student debt and many others who are often discouraged about their future prospects. Many have been struggling with joblessness and low wages. But there is hope in this wonderful country as employment opportunities have increased surprisingly under President Trump. It will also become increasingly possible for people to get education and training and to qualify for jobs. Many are striving to seize the opportunity to work and to make something of their lives. Socialism offers to subsidize us with someone else’s money and with government goodies to take care of us. I want people to realize that happiness does not come from a handout – it comes from having worked and succeeded in making something of our lives. And Americans want that. As the economy has recovered in the past couple years, people have been fleeing the welfare rolls, anxious to go back to work.
Finally, all of us need to learn what socialism is and the hazards it presents to our nation’s treasury, to our personal freedoms, and to our prosperity.
The market economy produced the American dream for the American family.
Friends, as you can see from the menu at the top of the page, this website has a link to “Order a Copy” of the book. I turned down a prestigious publisher, who offered to publish my work as three separate volumes and charge $120 for each volume (or $360 for the whole set). Instead, I published all three volumes as one massive book with Xlibris so you could buy an electronic copy at a very low price. Check it out. If you buy, your friends may think you are a genius.
The book addresses every aspect of socialism and documents its serious issues. The pages of the website introduce various aspects of the book. Also included in this website are a series of essays I have recently written about current policies and problems in the public discussion. These include the following:
“Hard” socialism eliminates human freedoms, spreads mass poverty, and murders many of its citizens after they discover they must live with tyrants. Everywhere it has been the same where people deceived themselves or were deceived by socialist and communist parties that established totalitarianism to achieve social equality and eliminate poverty. Unfortunately they achieved only the equality of general, widespread poverty. It has always been the same, so far, but let us consider just three examples of this social phenomenon.: Venezuela, East Germany, and the Soviet Union.
Theoreticians, ideologues, philosophers and economists have long hoped for the arrival of a socialist utopia of justice and equity, triumphantly achieving a complete elimination of poverty. Karl Marx on the left of the political spectrum and Josef Schumpeter on the right, both felt that the ultimate destination of our social progress would be the achievement of a socialist economy. Marx thought it would come through a complete failure of capitalism, although he acknowledged that system to have been a great historical success in growing people’s incomes and improving their material conditions. But there had been too much of a downside in the exploitation of workers as capitalists pursued profit. Marx foresaw that the ultimate result would be a proletarian revolution which would bring the destruction of the bourgeoisie, the triumph of the working class, and the establishment of socialism.
Josef Schumpeter was not fond of socialism, but thought its arrival was inevitable.
Josef Schumpeter, a deservedly famous Austrian economist, saw that the continuously evolving capitalist system, which had done so well historically, would gradually mature into a bureaucratized system (and socialism is notably bureaucratic). In the course of its social development, capitalism would lose the support of society. Academics, who are isolated from market forces and their cultural implications, are inclined to criticize and repudiate markets. Along with non-economists, they are no longer impressed with the freedom, incentives, and responsibilities associated with the market economy.* Thus, Schumpeter opined, over time we will simply and inevitably drift into socialism.
Karl Marx
Many observers are concerned that socialism, whether the result of revolution or ballot-box naiveté, will not yield happy results. Socialists are too often more like Marx than Bernstein. When the government has not only all the challenges of governance, but burdens itself with planning and managing the entire economy as well, the over-reach turns out to be destructive. Under capitalism, everyone is motivated by the need to succeed and even to get ahead in the “ordinary business of life.” Everyone – consumers, workers, and business managers – has an economic plan. Under Socialism, the government cancels all those plans and must develop its own humongous economic plan (like Stalin’s five-year plans). Socialists have never yet succeeded in managing and implementing such a plan successfully.
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*See Josef Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3rd Edition, (New York, Harper & Row, 1950).
The intent here is to investigate the results of the attempt of nations to tell every worker where they are to work, how much they are to be paid, what to produce, in what cities that output is to be sold, and everything else that is to happen in millions of firms, with millions of workers, in all of the nation’s cities, and all that is to happen between the firms of that country with all the other countries of the world in international trade.
Let us now consider three examples of this problem. We consider first, Venezuela, then go to the German Democratic Republic, which (in)famously built the Berlin Wall to keep East Germans from escaping from their hundred thousand square kilometer prison to the very successful capitalist country next door, the Federal Republic of (West) Germany. The third example of socialist life will be Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, the first Marxist-Leninist socialist economy. Few people really understand how life looks and has looked in current and past socialist countries.
Life in Contemporary Socialist Venezuela
The U.S. Department of State has published various Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. We will be interested in their report on Venezuela;* the following is taken from the Executive Summary of the Venezuela Country Report.
Caracas, capital of the once rich country of Venezuela.
Venezuela is legally a multiparty, constitutional republic, but for more than a decade, political power has been concentrated in a single party with an authoritarian executive exercising significant control over the judicial, citizens’ power (which includes the prosecutor general and ombudsman), and electoral branches of government, and standing up a parallel, illegitimate legislative body alongside the existing elected one.
In Venezuela the rule of former president Nicolás Maduro was to end on January 10, 2019. He did not willingly relinquish power, however, claiming “victory” in the 2018 presidential elections. Those elections had been generally condemned as neither free nor fair. The democratically elected National Assembly (AN) rejected the claim. On January 23, Juan Guaido, as president of the National Assembly, officially assumed the role of interim
president on January 23rd, according to provisions of the constitution related to vacancies. President Maduro, however, supported by hundreds of Cuban security force members, refused Quietly to retire from office. He and his forces prevented interim president Guaido from exercising authority in Venezuela.
Inflation under Maduro is out of control. A chicken’s cost is shown in the photo. Socialists spend without a budget constraint and destroy the currency’s value.
We have observed the once prosperous country fall into many of the economic problems that destroy the hopes and optimism of socialist advocates. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, fiscal incompetence, and inept policies have brought the country hyperinflation, shortages, declining production and rapidly increasing poverty. The populace is now suffering from the effects of food and medicine shortages, the failure of companies, unemployment, declining productivity, authoritarianism, human rights violations, gross economic mismanagement and excessive dependence on oil.
Picture of a socialist spending plan.
Socialists invest a great deal in seizing power and taking control of the economy. They establish institutions that must remain viable if the socialist regime and the single-party political system is to remain in control, so they are not bashful about strict enforcement of authoritarian policies. So-called colectivos (regime-sponsored, armed security forces) have been responsible for forced disappearances of individuals, torture of victims, arbitrary detention; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions and the implementation of their own political policies. In Venezuela, significant human rights issues are observable. These include unlawful, sometimes arbitrary killings as well as extrajudicial killings by the security forces of the Maduro regime prisoners; and lack of judicial independence. The former Maduro regime restricted free expression and freedom of the press by blocking signals, interfering with media operations, or shutting down privately owned television, radio, and other outlets. “Libel, incitement, and inaccurate reporting” were subject to criminal charges. The Maduro regime used violence to repress peaceful demonstrations and freedom of assembly. Members of the congress (AN) were subjected to intimidation, harassment, and abuse, including denial of due process and parliamentary immunity.
With the collapse of Venezuela’s socialist economy, protests followed.
The Maduro-aligned security forces have enjoyed impunity for their pervasive corruption. In other national and state offices, including those at the highest levels of the regime, there has been trafficking in persons; violence against indigenous persons; and the “worst forms of child labor,” which the Maduro regime made minimal efforts to eliminate before the 2018 elections. As the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor of the Department of State indicated:
There were continued reports of police abuse and involvement in crime, particularly in the activities of illegally armed groups, including illegal and arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, and the excessive use of force, but the former regime at the national, state, and local levels took no effective action to investigate officials who committed human rights abuses, and there was impunity for such abuses.
The Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman provided no information on human rights violations alleged to have been committed by police and military personnel. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have observed that many victims failed to report violent crimes to police or other regime authorities. This was doubtless because they feared retribution or lacked confidence in the police, especially after the Maduro regime, backed by Cuban security forces, refused to cede power, thus preventing the interim government from taking action.”
Life in the German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or DDR) was a state in central Europe from 1949 to 1990. It arose from the division of Germany by the Allied Powers after 1945. After East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) was formed in the Soviet Occupation Zone as a dictatorial government. It existed until the peaceful revolution in the fall of 1989. The official national ideology was that of Marxism-Leninism.*
Social justice in the GDR was, according to the Marxist conception of the State, an independent construct. Rights of individuals to their own political viewpoints were neither protected nor tolerated by the government. Torture or “disappearance,” the administering of bodily and psychological pain and suffering were daily business until the end of the SED regime in 1989. The GDR also conducted from the beginning a more or less adversarial policy against the churches. Christians were systematically expelled from governmental institutions, from the media, and other public places. Finally, the GDR violated fundamental rights of liberality and of life. Between the thirteenth of August, 1961 and the 9th of November, 1989, at least 98 people lost their lives in the attempt to traverse the Berlin Wall. Another 30 people lost their lives at the Wall without having any intention of escaping over the wall.**
Few escaped over the wall, but this lucky East German soldier selected the right moment to flee.
What Life was Like in the GDR.
The Wall affected everyone in Berlin, separating all East Germans from all West Germans, including many families. It separated Easterners from their freedom.
Many East Germans were cut off from their family, relatives, and friends once the wall was built. Travel was only with the permission of the state, and it was not given to travel in West Berlin, West Germany, or other capitalist countries to visit relatives. It was possible to travel to other communist countries in the East for a vacation, but even that required permission. The state determined where East Germans lived, where or if they attended school, the rent they paid, where they worked, what they earned, and on and on. Because there was a general uprising of the population against the communist regime early on in 1953, Walter Ulbricht had imposed strict limitations on political activity, especially on speaking out against the SED. One could have no contact with westerners, nor was one permitted to listen to West German radio or watch West German TV.
The economy and its poor performance imposed severe limitations on the general well-being of East Germans. International currency markets valued the East German Mark as of little worth, since there was little foreign demand for East German products. Their best products were shipped off to the west so the state could acquire some hard currency, thus the East Germans had no access to those things produced of value in the GDR, but which were produced only for export.
Some queues can go all around a shop. In the GDR they could go all the way around the block.
There were shortages of many, many products. The stores were basically empty, so you had to be in a store when some product was brought in and put on the shelves. If that happened, a long line would immediately form. “What are we waiting for?” the people in line asked each other. Once in October I had such an experience. It turned out that some winter gloves had become available. I got in line because I wanted to see what the quality of the gloves was; unfortunately, they sold out before I got to the front of the line. Because desirable products were so rare, people carried excess cash. If they had the good fortune to find something worth buying, they would keep the sizes of children and relatives stashed in their pocket or purse and would buy not only for themselves, but take the advantage of buying for several others as well when the rare opportunity presented itself. It would have been embarrassing for a good,
GDR beginnings were a disaster stemming from the end of the Second World War. Of course it took years to rebuild.
socialist state-owned firm, I presume, to hang out a sign saying “One per Customer,” so the unexpected appearance of a desirable purchase was always accompanied by its expected immediate disappearance. Many queue participants ended up frustrated after their fruitless wait. Here I could write a lot more about the consumer’s life, were there space for it. I once did a year-long study of this problem.*
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*See Phillip J. Bryson, The Consumer Under Socialist Planning: The East German Case, (1984, Praeger, New York)
In both the East German and Soviet economies, productivity was low because workers couldn’t really work a full day. In the afternoon, they would simply leave to go browse through the shops hoping to find something to buy. Their bosses would have doubtless forced them to stay on the job and put in an honest day’s work, but alas, the bosses needed to get to the stores and shop too. When Yuri Andropov became the First Secretary of the Communist Party he had been known as strict and austere; he had previously served as the leader of the KGB. He ordered people to be arrested if they were wandering around town away from their workplace on unofficial business. For a month or two, productivity soared and it appeared that productivity would really improve. But ultimately, productivity dropped back to normal as the workers had their supervisors fill out papers that claimed the workers were on official business away from the plant when they were doing their shopping.
Standing in long lines for everything didn’t usually make life easy or consumers happy. This queue is in a department store like the one that had no gloves for me.
Just about everything a person did in East Germany by way of work, travel, study, participate in cultural or sports activities, be involved in politics, buy a home (a rarity experienced only by the elites), receive medical care, or whatever else, it was only with the approval of the state or the (Communist) Party. Toward the end of the East German history, the state became more lenient. The government was insecure, because the leaders and the bureaucracy knew that the East German people were not generally committed socialists. They would have loved to join the citizens of West Germany and to share in the prosperity that they enjoyed. The East German government did what it could to improve the economy and make life better for their citizens, but it was never even close to enough to satisfy the people. Along with the shortages and lack of technical progress in information technologies and most other kinds of technical progress, there were serious ecological problems with rampant pollution, and at the end, after the government had quit trying to stop the citizenry from tapping into West German television, there was a morale problem when East Germans could see that their loss of freedoms was linked to a loss of the benefits of a modern (i.e., capitalist) economy. In the final analysis, socialists know they must keep their followers in line. The East German version of the KGB was the Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service) or “Staasi.”
In all the Marxist-Leninist countries of East Europe and in the Soviet Union, these secret police zealously kept order by spying on and sanctioning people who viewed life differently and could not be relied upon to conform. They employed people to help the Staasi keep track of people and their activities. A file was kept on just about everyone and information collected about their interests and activities. (A file was also kept on me, since I lived and did research in East Berlin and attended occasional conferences on the GDR economy.) People all over the Soviet Bloc were alienated from their neighbors and remained tight-lipped about their interests, viewpoints, and hopes, since secret police were always listening. People did not want visitors coming to their apartments, except for family and close friends of long standing.
The principal political party was the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutchlands, SED), which made the political rules and supplied the personnel for the government agencies and ministries. A small number of other political parties existed, but they followed the SED rules. The government provided a Civil Law Code that spelled out people’s “rights,” which were just those that the SED was willing to let them have. Clearly, there were many civil rights and human rights that were restricted.* Alexandra Richie has described the GDR as a 100,000 square kilometer prison.
“The GDR was a totalitarian state. Like the Nazi regime before it, the communist government was highly centralized and every aspect of cultural life was planned and directed from Berlin. Nobody could make a film, publish a book, write a newspaper article or exhibit a painting without the express approval of the relevant official in the city and this control extended to the writing of history. In 1971 Honecker instructed historians to follow a ‘new course’; those who refused would lose their jobs. They were to cultivate the East German sense of identity, to foster individual initiatives and social engagement and love of the Vaterland… they created a version of history which proved that East Germans had not been involved in any of the terrible crimes of the Third Reich and that only those now in West Germany had any connection with Nazism. Of all the twentieth century attempts to rewrite history, this one must stand alone as the most ludicrous.” (pp. 734-735.) We have observed the same aspiration for the rewriting of American history, although in this latter case the objective is to denigrate history rather than glorify it.
The Berlin Gate. Here, President Reagan told President Gorbachev: “Tear down this wall!”
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*See Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin, (1998), Carroll and Graf Publishers, New York.
East Germans were not instructed by their historians that the bombing of their cities and civilians by the Allied Powers, including the United States, was undertaken well after the Nazis had initiated that practice earlier. So far as East Germans knew, only Germans were the victims of such suffering in the war. Moreover, “the persecution and murder of six million European Jews were virtually ignored in the East, despite the fact that the holocaust had been planned and directed from the very heart of Berlin.” (Richie, p.739.)
The Trials of Life in the Soviet Union
Human rights in the Soviet Union were severely limited. The Soviet Union was a one-party state until 1990 and a totalitarian state from 1927 until 1953 where members of the Communist Party held all key positions in the institutions of the state and other important organizations. Freedom of speech was suppressed and dissent was punished. Independent political activities were not tolerated, whether these involved participation in free labor unions, private corporations, independent churches or opposition political parties. The freedom of movement within and especially outside the country was limited. The state restricted rights of citizens to private property.*
The “Red Square” is a “Beautiful Square,” which is one of the more beautiful places in Moscow. But could it compensate for the freedoms lost in socialism?
According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, human rights are the “basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled”, including the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law. These also include social, cultural and economic rights, including the right to participate in culture, the right to food, the right to work, and the right to education.
Soviet conceptions of human rights were very different from those prevalent in the West. According to Soviet legal theory, the government is the beneficiary of human rights, which are to be asserted against the individual. Western law, of course, claimed just the opposite. Because the Soviet state was considered the source of human rights, the Soviet legal system regarded law as an arm of politics and courts as agencies of the government. Extensive extra-judiciary powers were accessed by the Soviet secret police agencies. In practice, the Soviet government curbed the rule of law significantly. The civil liberties taken for granted in the west – protection of law and guarantees of property – were considered no more than examples of “bourgeois morality” by Soviet law theorists such as Andrey Vyshinsky. According to Vladimir Lenin, the purpose of socialist courts was not to eliminate terror, but to substantiate and legitimize it in principle”.
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, millions of people suffered political repression, a frequently used instrument of the state from the time of the October Revolution. It culminated during the Stalin era, then declined, but it continued to exist during the “Khrushchev Thaw”, followed by increased persecution of Soviet dissidents during the Brezhnev stagnation, and it did not cease to exist until late in Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule when it was terminated under his policies of glasnost and perestroika. At times, the repressed were designated the enemies of the people. Punishments by the state included summary executions, sending innocent people to Gulags, forced re- settlements, and stripping citizens of their rights. Repression was conducted by the Cheka and its successor organizations, as well as by other state organs. Periods of increased repression included the Red Terror, Collectivization, the Great Purges, the Doctor’s Plot, and others. The secret police forces massacred prisoners on numerous occasions. Repression took place in the Soviet republics and in the territories occupied by the Soviet Army during World War II, including the Baltic States and Eastern Europe.
Red Terror in Soviet Russia was a campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. The Red Terror was officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended in about October 1918. Sergei Melgunov, however, applies this term to the repressions of the whole period of the Russian Civil War, 1918–1922. Estimates for the total number of people executed during the entire period range from 100,000 to 200,000.
Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy, pursued between 1928 and 1933, to consolidate individual land and labor into collective farms (kolkhozy). The Soviet leaders were confident that the replacement of individual peasant farms by the kolkhozy would immediately increase food supplies for the urban population, the supply of raw materials for processing industry, and agricultural exports generally. Collectivization was thus regarded as the solution to the crisis in agricultural distribution (mainly in grain deliveries) that developed after 1927 and became more acute as the Soviet Union continued its ambitious industrialization program. As all but the poorest of the peasants resisted the collectivization policy, the Soviets applied extremely harsh measures to force collectivization. In a conversation with Winston Churchill, Stalin gave his estimate of the number of “kulaks” repressed for resisting Soviet collectivization as 10 million, including those forcibly deported. Recent historians have estimated the death toll from six to 13 million under collectivization.
Previously secret reports released from Soviet archives in the 1990s placed the victims of Stalinist repression at roughly 9 million. On the basis of demographic analysis, some historians claim that the death toll was around 20 million. American historian Richard Pipes noted: “Censuses revealed that between 1932 and 1939—that is, after collectivization but before World War II—the population decreased by 9 to 10 million people. In The Great Terror (2007), Robert Conquest observed that exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, but at least 15 million people perished under the Soviet regime’s terrors. Rudolph Rummel in 2006 said that earlier, higher victim total estimates are correct, although he included those killed by the government of the Soviet Union in other Eastern European countries as well. Conversely, J. Arch Getty, Stephen G. Wheatcroft and others insist that the opening of the Soviet archives has vindicated the lower estimates put forth by “revisionist” scholars.
After Stalin’s death, the suppression of dissent was dramatically reduced and new techniques were employed. The internal critics of the system were convicted for anti- Soviet agitation, anti-Soviet slander, or as “social parasites”. Others were labeled as schizophrenics and mentally ill; they were incarcerated in “psikhushkas“, i.e., mental hospitals used by the Soviet authorities as prisons. A number of notable dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Andrei Sarkharov, were sent into exile.
Solzhenitsyn was born into a family of Cossack intellectuals and brought up primarily by his mother, his father having been killed in an accident before his birth. He attended the University of Rostov-na-Donu, graduating in mathematics. He also took correspondence courses in literature at Moscow State University. Fighting in World War II, he achieved the rank of captain in the artillery. He was arrested in 1945 for writing a letter critical of Joseph Stalin and spent eight years in prisons and labor camps, after which he spent three more years in enforced exile.
Solzhenitsyn, the only prophet produced by the Soviet Union.
The most famous of his many works was The Gulag Archipelago, (1973–75), which is a three volumehistory and memoir of his life in the Soviet Union’s prison camp system. The word Gulag is a Russian acronym for the Soviet government agency that supervised the vast network of labor camps. Solzhenitsyn used the word archipelago as a metaphor for the camps, which were scattered through the sea of civil society like a chain of islands extending “from the Bering Strait almost to the Bosporus.”
The Gulag and the Target System
It would be far more difficult for American millennials to be socialists if they had lived in the age in which Solzhenitsyn was publishing his great works. Reading them lent the conviction that the world could have many more Stalins if more socialists were just vouchsafed the opportunity to become one. I have never forgotten Solzhenitsyn’s explanation of the use of targets and meeting the planning targets in the Gulag system.
In Soviet economic planning, state-owned firms were given targets for each production period. The target was a goal for the gross amount of production it could deliver in a plan year. It was broken down into months, so that each month the firm had to produce a given amount. In the course of the month, there was much malingering and shopping that would take place among the labor force of the state-owned firms. It was the general practice of such firms to request more workers than they actually needed for normal operations. They did so because most of the time, precious little work was achieved. Breaks, talking, going through motions was about the best that could be hoped for. No individual workers dared to work seriously in hopes of getting ahead, since that would bring down ridicule and persecution from the other workers. Afternoons, of course, it was necessary to go shopping for scarce goods needed at home.
At the end of the month, however, production could not be put off longer, so the “storming” period began about the last week of the month. In that week, because the firm’s managers had successfully negotiated a low target for the firm and because the workers were willing to work seriously for a week, enough could be produced so that officials were placated and bonuses could be earned. After the week of storming, everyone stayed at home for a few days to sleep off the extra effort before returning to the plant.
The people who ran the Gulags, like the workers in state-owned firms also had targets. The targets were the numbers of people needed to fill the ranks of workers needed in the Siberian work camps. Of course, the police and the courts provided almost enough victims for the “recruiters” to meet their targets. If the end of the month came and targets were still not met, however, recruiters would go out onto the streets or into the subway looking for people. If you were catching a subway home after a long day at the plant, two tall, strong gentlemen might walk up to you and, one on each side, accompany you to a train station where you would be loaded into a cattle car and find yourself on the way to Siberia. Voila! Target met! That was unfortunate for the “recruits” who were simply kidnapped and shipped out, of course. Solzhenitsyn described life and work in the Gulags and you may accept that it was not the preferable way to spend five or ten years.
Why Marxism-Leninism is authoritarian by its very nature.(Why Marxist-Leninist Socialism is “hard” socialism.)
Marxist-Leninist socialism (which we outsiders usually and erroneously call “communism” calls for a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” so yes, of course it is authoritarian. Marx called for the state to own the means of production, which means all business owners must have their property confiscated. Stalin started by telling the peasants they must turn their animals over to the state farms, but the peasants preferred simply to slaughter their animals instead. Stalin answered in kind, slaughtering the reprobate peasants.
The big worry for the socialists is that the people see their rights taken away and their property confiscated. The danger of a counter-revolution is stark, so of course socialists feel they must be very strict. The incentive incompatibilities built into the economic system result in a decline in production. There is much slacking, and workers leave their jobs in the afternoon to search for anything they can find on the usually empty shelves of the state stores. The Soviets originally tried to combat the negative attitudes of disillusioned workers and consumers by shipping people off to the Siberian labor camps for the slightest offense against the system. Gradually, they decided it wiser to make a tacit deal with the citizenry. If they would not speak and fight against the Soviets, but remain silent, people would not be sent off to Siberia for slacking. That promoted even lower productivity.
If a worker decides to pursue political or employment progress by working hard on the job, his fellow workers will enforce labor equality; they will ridicule and bully the diligent worker into submission and employment passivity.
A favorite slogan of the Soviet workers was: “They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work.” The socialists are not about to be voted out of power after having spent so much time and effort to establish a (disastrously inefficient and incomplete) national economic plan for their planning bureaucracy and establishment of state-owned firms, so they establish a one-party state with only communist party candidates appearing on the voting ballots. Any less authoritarian kind of socialism wouldn’t reflect the hatred of the Marxists-Leninists and could easily be voted out quickly. Lasting, “hard” socialism is usually a harsh dictatorship. It is authoritarian to say the least.
America’s Likely Dictatorial and Inflationary Socialism
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Is she proof that one should not study Economics at Boston University?
When socialism of the Marxist-Leninist variety is installed in a country, you are on your way toward a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that is vicious indeed. Some forms of “socialism” are not so dictatorial; they simply redistribute incomes and perform very poorly in economic terms. If they make no effort to nationalize and take over the private sector, they do not develop the anti-human characteristics you
Bernie Sanders: Independent Democrat and Democratic Socialist
experienced. But when a democratic country decides to give socialism a try and the socialistic leadership is already harsh and hateful (full of bitter, ideological people not unlike Adam Schiff, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Jerrold Nadler, Charles Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “Squad,” and Senator [and now IVP] Harris), that hatred can very soon translate into a nasty dictatorship. Dictatorship is more likely to be imminent if people are already out on the street burning, looting, and beating people up. Hello, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea! Hello Amerika?!!
AOC and her “Squad”
OId-timers Pelosi and Schumer are handing governance over to the younger socialists. All old-time democrats share the honor of standing out of the way and letting the socialists take over their party.
A softer socialism, such as IP Biden would readily embrace, simply wants to spend money to make people more prosperous and to “save our planet.” They have no notion of budget constraints. They never think about or ask where money for oversized projects is to come from. They want to take over massive projects that the market itself would perform efficiently and independently in time. The government’s super- and hyper-bureaucratization will waste much money and perform as inefficiently as it did in the Affordable Care Act from roll-out to the drastic increases in costs, charging people the Roberts “tax” if they had no insurance. They turn to the printing press, which has already been encumbered by huge bailouts from the Obama era to the even more dramatic expenditures of the Covid era. Nancy Pelosi still wants to use the excuse of the pandemic to spend additional trillions to bail out states that have mismanaged their finances, overspent, and put their politicians and civil servants on easy street with unfunded, more-than-generous pensions. No wonder financiers are predicting bad things for our economy. It has only grown worse since Biden’s confirmation. The socialists believe a Biden-Harris socialism will never become a dictatorial, Soviet-style regime. I’m not so sure. But even if Biden’s is a soft socialism, the kind of government waste and mismanagement we are experiencing as he follows his leaders and the inflation that follows might make your savings disappear and your paycheck basically valueless. In the summer of 2021 we can only take hope in the tightening gridlock in Washington, D.C. Many appear to be recognizing that political things are beginning to go downhill and they must begin to put on the brakes.
How do we try to portray what is happening in our culture and political scene today? On the left it is by spin, prevarication and indoctrination. Many of us feel that truth is a beautiful thing. There is a big difference between seeing reality from a positive, hopeful perspective and simply lying about current happenings and their implications.
The methods of indoctrination have emboldened the radical left to seize and hold power in the United States. They are now utilized to stop discussion of electoral fraud. According to pollitical correctness, electoral fraud may not be investigated, it may not be discussed, its existence may not be suggested in political discussion.
Ashli Babbitt lost her life in the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Elegy for Ashli Babbit
Ashli Babbitt, patriot not well known,
Gave her life with that pure heart she had shown
When with the Air Force was four times deployed.
Of country love was she never devoid.
Vocally and through service her love showed
That could not in her flagged backpack be stowed.
In her President she believed as well,
And admired him more than she could tell.
He loved his country too, she was quite sure,
Although she could not claim he was demure.
Neither he nor she would socialists empower.
Our freedoms were the watchword of the hour.
Ashli saw how his re-election failed,
Which all democrats splendidly regaled,
Through rank corruption victory was won
For a fossil more corrupt than his son.
During these sad days the pandemic raged,
It demanded, swore democrats with glee,
Mail-in ballots would ensure victory.
After the election our Ashli saw
The news broadcasts the media would not show.
Fox News revealed the evidence quite vast
That left the honest thoroughly aghast.
The media corrupt claimed ceaselessly
“There was no proof” of fraud quite fearlessly.
It was Joe Biden’s “big lie” repeated
Until falsehood is in minds well seated.
Unlike the courts, including the Supreme,
Fox News considered what witnesses scream.
Fox did reveal the manner of the theft –
An election night of all honor bereft.
Officials, politicians and judges
In Democratic states with their grudges,
Stole the election with crudest of means,
Audacious and bold in unlikely scenes.
These were not random, harmless simple noise,
Nay! Coordination that justice destroys!
Gangsters injected ballots illegal,
Placing Joe on a throne high and regal.
Some ballots arrived as gifts from the dead,
Illegal ‘truckloads’ arrived, their drivers said.
Many witnesses saw and testified
Fraudulent manipulation – verified!
Ashli heard of many election rules
Violated brazenly by crass fools.
Thus were counted many illegal ballots
That suited well crooked counter palates.
Other counters and observers, horrified,
Took an oath on what they then certified.
Ashli would have read how voting machines,
Actually, applied computers run routines
As programmers may choose such to prepare,
Producing results, as desired, with care.
One can choose even the final outcome
By a margin’s pre-specified tedium.
Inspired, but tired, by programs in the news,
Ashli could find, online, more of such views.
Evidence in greatest abundance there
Would validate the crimes Fox had laid bare.
Unlawful ballots counted once were stacked
And counted once again as false as hacked.
Without an audit the fraud to dispel
A recount was quite meaningless as well.
Ashli apparently believed ‘twas time.
Patriots must band together against crime
And follow their elected President.
‘Twould be right to go where they might be sent.
An advocate of law and order’s sense,
Condemning arson, looting, violence.
Ashli, one with her President’s approach,
Would raise her voice, not weapons, in reproach.
Their plan was to “fight” vocally for truth,
Raising voices hopefully not uncouth.
Elected was each representative,
A servant of the public, service to give.
Patriots would “peacefully” walk the mall’s space,
Down to the capitol to plead their case.
They took no weapons; their plan was to use
Their citizenship voices and none to abuse.
To insist their servants should at this time
Investigate this gross election crime.
Before the congress certified this farce,
Methods and results some earthly force must parse.
The capitol march by some beat the crowd
And John Earl Sullivan, Antifa proud,
A leader of violence, hired that date
By CNN agents: “Take photos and hate!”
John intervened with more aggressive youth,
Inciting behavior not at all couth.
Ashli was among these, emotions stirred,
Perhaps the time had come for what she’d heard.
“Perhaps we must now take our country back.
Our courage and our will must not now slack.”
Sullivan roused the mostly right wing crowd,
Who, unlike police, were not with arms endowed.
Some told the officers, “You have the guns,
Would you shoot us down whom the congress shuns?”
Some let protesters pass, showed them around
This was the people’s house, this was their ground.
Ashli and a small group of activists,
One might gain audience if one persists!
The emotion of the moment was strong,
To force entry was most certainly wrong.
Then Ashli’s small group sought to breach a door
To a hall right outside the speaker’s floor.
With a helmet the door’s window was smashed
Ashli was quick. To the window she dashed.
While she climbed to the frame a black man moved
From behind a wall where he’d disapproved
Of forced entry. A barricade he’d made
Mostly of stacked chairs – the mob must be stayed!
From the door’s far side the black man approached
Armed with a gun, determined and well coached
He fired at point blank range, struck Ashli’s throat.
She fell from the window, the floor she smote.
Did the vigilante watch her tragedy?
Did he see her pain, her shock and agony?
Those around Ashley could have had no doubt,
Her life was ebbing, she was bleeding out.
Spirit daughter of the Divine, so fair,
How needless your demise and our despair.
Here a media lie was to emerge.
The shooter’s name the media would purge.
An officer he was alleged to be
Of the Capitol Police, immediately
Placed on administrative leave, said to be,
By whom was not revealed, of censure free.
He’d acted in all protocols applied,
Should/would not for any offense be tried.
One newspaper overlooked this narrative
Scores of local papers hastened to give
The shooter was not an officer as claimed.
In video, in street clothes he was seen.
Hired he was, to provide as readers glean,
A senator’s personal security,
Which he could do with utmost surety.
Thus was he nearby ere protesters appeared.
With good will, he sought to protect the revered
From this “invasion” poor Ashli was in.
He locked and blocked hallway doors from within,
Stacking chairs to reinforce those large doors.
Then stood he still behind a wall to watch.
When Ashli climbed into the window frame,
Our black vigilante stepped out and took aim,
He fired then a single shot at close range.
Neither armed nor dangerous was she. Strange
That he could have taken one more quick stride
And physic’lly have pushed her back outside.
Apparently his barrier’s violation
Was imminent. He must defend his station!
He acted definitively to stop them.
Ashli had come to speak, by hearing met.
She was unarmed –to the shooter no threat.
The media and the police involved
Believed that misinformation resolved
More problems than transparency could aid.
This was an insurrection’s ghastly raid –
So was the narrative tacitly achieved –
Armed rebellion against rulers aggrieved
A martyr for protesters some might praise,
And this vigilante questions would raise.
Was he recruited? Was he deputized
In the heat of Capitol breach improvised
To become an armed, human shield
To protect our trembling congressmen kneeled?
That is certainly doubtful; more likely
It would seem he acted as vigilante.
What might the result have been one would ask
Had the black man been at the window task,
And shot by a white police officer.
One wonders just what police protocol
Claims a veteran heroine should thus fall.
One journalist has reminded us all
One must be cautious; females may attack
The elected agents who have our back.
We recall Mitt Romney suffered the same.
In an airport a woman approached him,
A question she had, asked to reproach him.
He commanded her at once to withdraw,
No Covid mask had she – serious flaw
In a public place. She wanted to ask
So she put on a mask to perform the task.
She asked. His rather flippant answer came
As he rose, his back turned to her (to shame),
Becoming ambulatory to leave.
That this I must report I sorely grieve.
‘Twas then as he left, she launched her assault,
Hurling at him in a voice to insult,
Somewhat louder than a whisper, “You are pathetic!”
His departure showed he is athletic.
BLM and Antifa
Contrast the difference between the past year of violence, looting, arson, chanting, and hatred of the leftist “youth” movement with their support from leftist politicians and the right, which also includes some extremists. But the time is apparently approaching when it may become necessary to fight for freedom in the literal sense. The founding fathers wanted the right to hold and bear arms for the populace to assure that some dictator would not take power and erase the freedoms of individual Americans.
With the polished techniques of election theft, it is to be expected that unless some measures are taken to change the precedents of the 2020 election, the Democratic Party will continue to hold power in all branches of government.
The interesting thing to watch in American politics now is simply how rapidly the radical left will take complete control of the Democratic Party. They will accept nothing less and the “moderate” democrats have been perfectly willing to enter into an alliance with socialists to regain the powers of governance. What they have failed to recognize, being unfamiliar with the nature of socialist societies, is that the socialists will at the first opportunity attempt to eliminate them as surely as they silence the political right on their way to a one-party, totalitarian state.
The role of the courts and the Supreme Court in the failed election.
Anyone willing to read or to listen learned that election fraud had beset the 2020 elections. Texas and 18 other states filed suit in the Supreme Court to extend the certification deadline. The Supreme Court, apparaently terrified at the implications of massive irregularities totally destroying a presidential election, decided to adhere to the media policy of denying the obvious. They refused to hear the suit, insisting that Texas and the 18 had no standing. It was not their business that other states had run their elections in such a manner as to elect the candidate with fewer valid, legitimate votes. The Supreme Court and the media stood together to launch socialism in the United States.
The Supreme Court of the United States. The decline of credibility.
The state of Texas plus 18 lawsuit was against four other states, asking the Supreme Court to extend the Dec. 14 deadline for certification of presidential electors. It appeared that electoral fraud had occurred in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, thus the “election” had apparently produced the wrong winner. That fraud had canceled the legitimate votes of Texans and made them, along with the voters of 18 other states who joined the suit, the losers of the corrupt election. The Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in cases between states. It is usually to adjudicate disputes between states with issues such as water rights. If the laws of a state have spillover effects for neighboring states, they can take action to ameliorate harm done to the health and well-being of the citizens of the affected state(s).
The propaganda media will try to convince us that the Supreme Court rejected the “evidence” of the Texas suit. They would give confirmation to the frequent, automatic claim that there has been “no evidence” for the claims of voter fraud in the election. They have tried not to discuss the legitimacy of this potentially constitution-ending election by ignoring the issue altogether. When it is not possible to avoid mentioning it, they will simply aver that “there is no evidence” of any wrongdoing. This is really an audacious cover-up, because conservative broadcasters such as Fox News and Newsmax spent weeks documenting the election fraud. They presented specific information and a multitude of eyewitnesses testifying under oath about the techniques used to steal the election. They testified persuasively of what they had seen and experienced. They were far more convincing than the media’s representatives who sneeringly reported “no evidence!” And they signed with responsibility their affidavits.
There have been numerous online credible and documented reports of the results of the fraud. Whistle blowers elaborated on the activities that delivered fraudulent ballots, evidence of fraudulent counting of the ballots, over-voting, backdating postal dates on ballots, midnight deliveries of truckloads of illegitimate ballots, and on and on. Listed along with this and my recent blogs, see the Navarro Report, which provides an excellent quantitative analysis of election activities and results. Also, find there Sidney Powell’s report and the Georgia Senate’s report on the numerous fraudulent techniques applied in that state’s overturning of the election results to favor Joe Biden, the actual loser in Georgia.
Chief Justice Roberts. How to pack the Supreme Court? Get nominated as a conservative, then join your real colleagues.
In denying the Texas suit a hearing, the Supreme Court declared that Texas did not demonstrate “a judicially cognizable interest in how these other states conduct their elections.” Under Federalism states decide for themselves how to run their own elections. Perhaps the justices believed what they heard on NBC or CNN and concluded that this is not an important issue because there is “no evidence” of wrongdoing in the election. Therefore, they could flippantly declare that Texas has no business in messing with other people’s elections and refuse to take seriously the legal views of the leaders of 18 state governments.
The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear this case was sheer arrogance and reflected the left-leaning leadership of a Chief Justice ready to step in and rescue an important, anti-constitutional position currently being legislated by the court. It began with his saving the Obamacare assault on constitutionality by claiming that the government’s power of taxation justifies a state takeover of a major private industry in an otherwise market economy. The Constitution does not countenance central government management of the economy.
The Texas case most certainly does have legal standing. Standing is simply that a party can demonstrate to the Court sufficient connection to and harm from another state’s law or action to justify that party’s participation in the case. Standing exists, inter alia, when a party is directly subject to an adverse effect by the statute or action of another state. The damage suffered will continue unless the court grants relief. The party has standing because damage has been done and because of the conditions for which relief is being sought.
American citizens are sophisticated enough to understand the idea that the external effects arising from a situation, condition, or action brought about by one party can adversely affect another party. Could there be more real or pressing harm than that caused by rogue states destroying the electoral integrity of a national democracy? Because of the strong-arm tactics of election officials and ballot stuffers in these four states, the United States has installed in national offices an illegitimate president, an illegitimate vice president, and a political party that has announced its intention to change or eliminate the Constitution of the United States. The damage or harm arising from the illegal actions of election administrators in these democratic states arises from their announced intention to pack the Supreme Court, eliminate the Electoral College, add additional states to the union, nationalize the healthcare industry, change the congressional rules of governance, nationalize the energy sector, cancel major parts of the Bill of Rights, and so on. It is apparent that the justices of the Supreme Court failed to pay attention to the words they spoke when they took their oath of office. The SCOTUS has been under a cloud for decades because it became rogue in legislating the deaths of millions of unborn Americans from the bench. Now it clothes itself in ignominy by looking the other way when action is called for to save the constitution of the United States from socialist extermination.
Senator Schumer promised to change America and to change the world if the Democrats control the senate.
No one asked the Supreme Court to decide the election. They needed to investigate and decide just who had decided the election. The 74 million voters who voted for President Trump did not decide the election, nor did the smaller number of voters who voted for IP Biden. The election was decided by the few million ballots illegally and strategically submitted to overcome the Biden deficit. Once counted, those illegitimate votes were “stacked” in the piles of legitimate votes and recounted. Surprise! Joe Biden got more votes. And he could have had any number of additional votes manufactured to complete the coup on the administration of a legally elected president of the United States.
A few years ago, U.S. business schools were talking about the new manufacturing system in the country, the “just in time” system. Critical inputs of production were to be delivered at the very moment they were to be used in the production process. This model of efficiency was to be adopted by the planners of the election fraud. The Covid infection justified, after the media’s preoccupation with all things pandemic, the Democratic Party’s demanding a postal electoral system easily subject to fraud. In critical democratic electoral strongholds one could monitor the results and, whenever the democratic candidate fell behind, sufficient votes could be produced to swing the total in the actual loser’s favor. This was done internally by changing the vote count (“flipping” the votes from the candidate currently ahead) electronically or by adjusting the human count. It could also be done externally by delivering midnight truckloads of fraudulent ballots.
Incidentally, before the election it had been anticipated and well-advertised that a “blue wave” of democratic electoral victories was imminent. But the wave never occurred. The Republicans systematically won state and national elections that improved their ballot-box results. But when illegitimate ballots were filled out in huge numbers in Joe Biden’s favor, the writers marked only the presidential box, failing to fill out the complete ballot. Therefore, the democrats must explain some strange election results. Why would a majority of voters fill out their ballot for Republican candidates, but then vote for Joe Biden for president? How else would you get the results we got?
Finally, the Supreme Court hated the implication that in the four states charged in the Texas case, their taking action would have disenfranchised 10 million votes in the four voter fraud states. They showed no concern whatever, in fact they mockingly disdained the 74 million votes disenfranchised by the corrupt election results.
The Supreme Court said that had they accepted the Texas case, the transition would have been delayed and a constitutional crisis would have been the result. They were, it is rumored, terribly afraid of the potential rioting of the leftist BLM and Antifa. But to refuse the case resulted in a fraudulent outcome with the loser of the election being installed in the Presidency of the United States. The Court must assume that what Americans don’t know won’t hurt them, or that what they are forced to forget will just disappear from history. The constitutional crisis now ultimately becomes the potential for the nullification and destruction of the constitution. The position of the Supreme Court is untenable and ridiculous. Unfortunately, it is also tragic.
Are we witnessing the sunset of our Republic in the United States of America?
The new oath of office for national public servants: “I solemnly swear that I will defund the Constitution of the United States of America from all enemies foreign and Democratic.”
Calm down now, folks! This new oath is just humor. It is ironic humor because of the element of truth involved. The caption to the picture just above it, however, is anything but humor.
Are we witnessing the sunset of constitutional democracy in the United States?
The Problem.
After numerous attempts of the “Resistance” to remove President Trump from office, the attempt to steal the presidential election of 2020 was successful. Hundreds of witnesses of the vote counting formally testified that they observed massive “irregularities” of the procedures. Smash-mouth techniques of ballot box stuffing and numerous other illegal electoral activities produced non-credible results. Under corrupt communications media, the blatant lie was promoted that there was no “evidence” of damaging electoral fraud. Deathly afraid of the implications of what had happened to American politics, everyone turned away from any recognition of the problem. The courts simply punted. They did not find that there was no evidence of fraud; they simply refused to give it any attention.
The massive corruption of a US Presidential Election did not seem conceivable. It was an issue too big for anyone to believe it might actually happen. But it wasn’t too big for democrats actually to have accomplished on election night. Whether the Democrat Party as an organization is responsible for flipping the election results, or whether particular democrats are responsible, the party must bear responsibility for the massive fraud and cover-up. We should not be surprised at democrat willingness to accomplish the fraud, since the democrats spent much of 2020 and 2021 showing us they are willing to accept violence and outright criminality as a means to political ends.
Since the Democratic Party has now gained a monopoly on governance, however, the consequences are even more serious. They have unlawfully seized power with a promise essentially to annul, revoke and eliminate the U.S. Constitution and historically associated institutions of governance. They have paved the way for the ultimate establishment of one-party, dictatorial socialism in the United States.
The Election Aftermath: Attack on the Nation’s Capitol.
On January 6, 2021, a large crowd of Trump supporters congregated at the White House to be addressed by the President. He announced that he had no intention to concede the election, since it had been tainted by voter fraud. He had actually won by a landslide, he asserted, but through audacious irregularities the election had been overturned by incredible numbers of illegitimate ballots and procedures not permitted by the constitutions of the states involved.
For a week or so after the 6th, I believed that when the speech ended, the crowd walked down to the Capitol grounds. A small number of the many thousands of protesters breached the Capitol itself while the congress was in session and in the process of certifying the 2020 election results. At that point the protest turned into a violent riot.
But there is more to the story. As CNN has since revealed, the rioters were not responding to President Trump’s non-incendiary words. A CNN reporter, a BLM agent, and others had started planning to attack the capitol earlier. The attack began before President Trump’s speech had ended. Extremists left the rally early and proceeded to the riot.
Representative Cheney, nominally a Republican, observed that: ““The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.” Of this “betrayal” she added, “The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence.” We have learned her accusation was false about the intent and the effect of the President’s remarks. I suppose that the President could have called out the police, although they had already been informed by the FBI that violence was pre-planned for the day. But what Mrs. Cheney missed, even with her expertise in betrayal, was that at the time the riot was being launched the President was preoccupied with a speech he was giving at the White House to polite protesters. Moreover, Mrs. Cheney is in a position of authority in the congress. One wonders why she didn’t forcefully intervene to stop the violence.
Violence by protesters has occurred with some frequency over the past year in the large metropolitan areas of the United States. On January 6th, there was illegal entry of the capitol, the destruction of public property, and mob activity that law enforcement agencies struggled for hours to overcome until the crowd was dispersed.
This disgrace was not what one would expect from President Trump’s followers. It is not they who are motivated by hate and committed to violence to achieve political ends. “Trumpers” want to make America great, not tear down its national symbols and traditions. Rather, it is the destructiveness of the Antifa and Black Lives Matter that reflects the hatred of the extreme left and of its Marxist revolutionary leadership. Violence reflects the rejection by radicals of America’s greatness, its historical monuments, and its alleged “systematically racist” culture. Trumpers oppose this nihilism and are strong advocates of law and order. How could people turn on these beliefs and resort to violence in an attack on the nation’s capitol?
This is the kind of Trump supporter who would attack the capitol, burn, loot, and threaten lawmakers with bodily harm? She and other polite protesters came in for much railing by democratic politicians and the media.
The democrat militia, Marxist Antifa and BLM rioters, are more thorough than those at the capitol. They burn and loot along with their violence.
First, let us recognize that huge crowds of Trumpers at the scene of the capitol “breach” were not involved in the attack. Arriving somewhat late, they remained calm and polite outside on the capitol grounds. A smaller number of extremists were actually involved in the assault on the entry and interior of the Capitol. Interestingly, images were shown in news reports of doors being opened for some of those who did enter. It has now been learned that some interlopers moving with the thousands of polite Trumpers included leftist activists. Even when leftists were denying the possibility earlier, my suspicions of their involvement were provoked because, in Antifa fashion someone had prearranged the placement on site (near DNC and RNC headquarters) of explosive devices, which, fortunately, were not deployed inside the Capitol. Delivering riot equipment in advance by rental truck was a tactic of Antifa in last year’s frequent riots.
There were clearly some nominal Trump supporters who were stirred up by the Antifa and BLM extremists. As in any very large group, there are likely to be hangers-on who are just along with friends or who may relish a chance for a fight. They will have the attitude that if anyone lays a finger on their buddies, they will punch them out. There may have been some number of those present, of course. The aggressive interlopers of both types –nominal Trump supporters and leftist extremists —were in the wrong and should be subject to appropriate legal sanction. Their unlawful behavior should subject them to the appropriate punishments provided by our laws; it should not have removed from them their civil rights, making them subject to harsh imprisonment conditions without any charges being filed and being held indefinitely.
In spite of all the railing about “insurrection,” none of those arrested have been charged with the crime. Investigation demonstrated that none of the participants of the protest was armed. In spite of the prevarication of some of the media, the police at the site were not harmed by the offenders. There was no looting, there was no arson, and only one person was killed, assassinated at point blank range. An unarmed protester shot at point-blank range without warning was Ashli Babbitt, a veteran of the United States air force.
US IVP Kamala Harris, Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images). Her warcry: The protests (riots) will continue after the election. AND THEY SHOULD!!!!
For those arrested in the numerous 2020 riots, IVP (Illegitimate Vice President) Kamala Harris helped pay bail and organized an effort to raise donations to pay bail so that criminals could get back out on the streets and into the action of further violence. Harris will doubtless have second thoughts about bailing out those who are being arrested for this year’s DC riot. She has said on television that one should not expect the riots to cease just because there was to be a 2020 presidential election and she mentioned that such riots should continue.
Unfortunately, one young, unarmed California veteran of four duty tours was shot dead in the Capitol with a small crowd trying to gain entry. She would represent the few aggressively active participants who sincerely believed that the massive electoral fraud was a coup on our democracy and our democratic electoral processes, and that the time had come to initiate the battle to save our country. That is something that cannot be understood by the incensed politicians who condemned the protest but swallowed whole the false and treacherous platitude that there was “no evidence” that electoral fraud had occurred. Ashli Babbitt knew that the election was stolen and the country she had fought for on the battlefield was being swallowed up by socialists. The politicians didn’t care about the electoral fraud, the courts didn’t care, the state and national legislatures didn’t care. But Ashli Babbitt cared.
Of course these unlawful, mob activities were unacceptable and politicians at the scene were gratified with the opportunity to express their extreme, patriotic indignation. Although in this case there was no arson, vandalism was indeed experienced, so it finally occurred to democrats for the first time after months-long Antifa and BLM violence that these activities are actually criminal, possibly even dangerous.
What brought us to this point?
The 2020 presidential election was highjacked by democrat operatives. President Trump and his legal team were unable during weeks of strenuous effort to find any judge, court, or legislature that would investigate or even listen to evidence of voter fraud and election irregularities. In the wake of the fraudulent election, a large share of American voters was distraught with the failure to achieve electoral integrity in the world’s newest banana republic. This led to the January 6th protest at the capitol, but there were also calls before that event for the president to take strong action.
The WTPC (We The People Convention), General Flynn, and many others called for President Trump to initiate Martial Law in the United States so that a new election (without perverse computation and ballot box stuffing) could determine the actual winner. A noted conservative commentator, Ann Coulter, has faulted President Trump for failing to back up his verbal insistence on law and order with firm federal action to stop arson, looting, and violence. The country is now prepared for firm action to protect the capitol, but apparently still refuses to recognize the need to protect elections that determine the President.
Implications of the stolen election.
I.P. Biden. After history’s most extensive electoral fraud and an unimaginable second impeachment of his rival, Joe calls for national unity.
We should not forget, of course, that history is full of surprises. Having stolen the presidential election and having installed I.P. Biden, the Democrats have basically taken control of all three branches of government. Since the Democrat Party won the runoff election in Georgia in January, 2021, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. Leading democratic politicians have promised political initiatives that pave the way for the installation of a socialist regime. But in spite of our pessimism, things may not develop precisely as the extreme left plans. The narrow margins by which they hold majorities in congress, the striking divisions within the party (socialists demanding increased power within the administration), and disillusionment with the implementation of inflationary and thoughtless IP Biden policies could contribute to gridlock. Perhaps the country still doesn’t need to be rescued from the destruction of the Constitution and from the establishment of a socialist order in the United States.
As this is posted, documents revealing the Obama administration’s weaponization of the FBI and Justice Department to spy on and sabotage the Trump Campaign and the Trump Administration, especially through the FISA courts, are being declassified and will likely provide yet additional evidence of corruption and treachery.
Nevertheless, even if Republican legislative opposition can have some influence, Republicans will not necessarily be able to obstruct plans the Democrats have promised to change the senate rules of governance, pack the supreme court, eliminate the Electoral College, establish additional democratic states, strip numerous rights from the Bill of Rights, defund the Police, and, ultimately, take us to the point Senator Schumer has promised – to change the United States and the world. Since President Obama promised a complete “transformation” of our country, numerous Democrats, including I.P. Biden, have expressed the same objective. The complete “transformation” promised will extinguish or eliminate the constitution, as all the leading democrat politicians continue to violate their oath of office and their promise to defend the constitution. They will have not only failed to defend the constitution against its enemies, both foreign and domestic, but they will have demonstrated to the world that, beginning with the Obama-Biden administration, they actually are those enemies.
Traditional democrats, of which I was once one, have not favored socialism in the United States. But in recent years they have stood silently by and permitted the lawlessness and violence of Antifa and BLM, the youth militia of the party, to do things democrats had never previously accepted. They have silently watched the party advocate and adopt more and more radical policies. So anxious have they been to express their loathing of President Trump they have zealously sought to oust him from office without the slightest hint of legitimate cause. Their party platforms have unabashedly advocated socialist policies and tactics. Nevertheless, party bosses have now twice stepped into political elections to block the increasingly popular candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Twice he has been denied the Party nomination for the presidency. So there is still a limit to what traditional democrats are apparently willing to accept in terms of the radicalization of their Party. Nevertheless, the Party organized and executed the attempted “deep state” coup of the Trump administration through the “resistance,” through the Russian investigation hoax and through a senseless and juvenile impeachment.
The coup de grâce of the “never-Trumper” conspiracy was the theft of the presidential election in 2020. The moral principle behind the socialist takeover of the U.S. government was as follows: because President Trump is so evil, such a racist, and such a liar, any dishonest action to denigrate, insult, embarrass, harm and especially to remove him from office is morally justified.
As a result of the successful election fraud, it appears that in the future democrats will be able to manage power as they wish, i.e., to establish a permanent one-party dictatorship. Until they drop the farce and deception of “elections” altogether to become a one-party nation, they can easily control their voters or, when necessary, the ballot box. Because democrats are indoctrinated to feel that they must not seek information from a source like Fox news, the only information the cooperative general voters have access to is the incessant propaganda of the left-stream media. The U.S. media have the back of the Democratic Party. The media have also meddled systematically in the electoral process, e.g., by covering up the pre-election story of Biden family corruption, by covering up the gangster-style theft of the election, by continuously smearing President Trump, and performing other indoctrination tasks.
What should have been done
In the meantime, evidence has become undeniable and powerful that agents of the democrats used smash-mouth tactics to overthrow the 2020 presidential election in America. They attacked the system on election night in key democratic strongholds through a variety of activities that broke numerous state and federal laws and defied every sense of decency. The attack was so brazen that people would not have believed it had they understood what had happened. The American media had an incredibly easy time covering up the ballot box coup simply by categorically denying what had happened and repeating ad nauseum: “there is no evidence at all” that the election was subject to voter fraud. This was such an audacious prevarication so strongly asserted by the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, that the uninformed immediately assumed it to be true. Democrats have made few attempts to affirm that the election was not stolen; if they go beyond the simple assertion that there was no wrongdoing, it is merely to cite the corrupt/inept local officials who assert that there was no fraud. They hasten to add that the courts have not found any proof of fraud. One judge was asked to hear a very large number of witnesses of fraudulent, illegal activity and said he preferred to read the hundreds of affidavits. The next morning, doubtless after a good night’s sleep, he rejected the case without discussion.
AUSTIN, TX. Nov. 7, 2020. Simultaneous demonstrations in support of President-elect Joe Biden and current President Donald Trump face off in front of the Texas State Capitol in downtown Austin following the announcement of the presidential elections. Photo by Gabriel C. Pérez/KUT
Corrupt judges presiding over democratic courts never denied the existence of evidence; they simply refused to consider any evidence at all. And there were tons of evidence that they ignored. Moreover, in cases where the managers of the local elections denied any wrongdoing, one can rest assured that they were simply covering their sterns to avoid embarrassment and to cover guilt. They delegated the policing of the election to individuals complicit in the corruption. That should cost them not only shame, but their employment or political office as well.
Consider now the particular candidate for whom the election was stolen. There are at least three reasons why Biden is not suited to be president, but only one reason why he must be understood to be an Illegitimate President. First, consider the three reasons why he should not be president.
1. Joe Biden has never been a popular national candidate. When running on his own he was singularly unable to present a significant candidacy until the Democratic Party bosses (not the voters) chose him to be the party’s representative. He was their last chance to stop the momentum of Senator Bernie Sanders and their support for Biden disenfranchised the irresponsible millennials supporting a socialist candidate for whom the bosses felt the country was not yet prepared. IP Biden’s “remain in the basement” candidacy for president and total lack of connection with voters were the reason why millions of illegitimate votes needed to be manufactured by ballot-box manipulators. IP Biden won far fewer counties than Obama, but it was claimed that he had millions and millions more votes than Obama had. Of course!
A typical Joe Biden presidential candidacy rally. Sometimes his attendees stayed in their cars and there were as many of those as we see individual participants here. So some of his rallies were probably twice this large.
2. Due to his age and physical condition Joe Biden frequently shows he is cognitively challenged and lacking in the energy and vitality the very demanding Presidency of the United States requires.
3. Joe Biden’s financial trail and Hunter Biden’s laptop both provide evidence of extensive corruption of the Obama Administration’s Vice President. Morally, ethically, and legally, Biden disqualified himself to be a serious candidate for the Presidency. The cover-up of the Biden story preceding the election by the unprofessional media and the Democratic Party was a part of the overall corruption and theft of the election.
Nevertheless, none of the above reasons explain why justice should have required a new election or an audit of the contested results in democratic strongholds. (It is presumed that an audit would not merely have recounted the same illegitimate ballots of previous recounts.) The reason for a corrective election is that Joe Biden was not the winner of the 2020 presidential election. The dishonest media have asserted brazenly and falsely that there is no evidence that the election was stolen by the Democratic Party. Joe himself was, without doubt, not directly involved in the massive, unparalleled electoral fraud involving, in the aggregate, millions of illegitimate and incorrectly recorded ballots. But some individuals in the Party organized, coordinated and implemented this final phase of a five-year planning effort to oust a duly-elected President of the United States. This election was the final effort to complete a cowardly coup of President Trump’s administration.
I invite the skeptical reader to review the reports of some who presented persuasive evidence of electoral fraud in the 2020 presidential election. They are presented under the title “Election 2020: Stolen! The Evidence.” It is listed in this website with my blogs at the bottom of the introductory page right where you found this blog.
Barack Obama has implied that the riots of 2020 and 2021 were an extension of the racist history of the United States. He did not explain that this was a history of the Democrat Party with its southern slavery, Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan, the Jim Crow laws and the institutionalized racism of the south until many northerners gradually went south and updated the politics of the contemporary south.
In a campaign speech during a period of extended Antifa and BLM riots in the United States, Obama opined:
“In a lot of ways, what has happened over the last several weeks is challenges and structural problems here in the United States have been thrown into high relief. They are the outcomes not just of the immediate moments in time, but they’re the result of a long history of slavery and Jim Crow and red lining and institutionalized racism that too often have been the plague, the original sin of our society.”[i]
Lincoln’s life, thoughts, and abolition of slavery were historic. Nothing in the lives of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao are comparable. Enjoy the monument; who knows when the left will destroy it.
Without saying so, BHO here provides a brief outline of the history of the Democratic Party, which enters this drama as the political party of the southern United States fighting against Republicans in the North under Lincoln. Lincoln’s party gave much blood and treasure to free the United States from Slavery. The racism of the south continued, long after the war, strictly as a product of the Democratic Party with their exclusive promotion of Jim Crow laws, and the dominance of southern political power through the Ku Klux Klan. As Republicans began to move into the southern states in more recent decades, the heritage of racism has gradually begun to disappear and many of good will wish the country to heal. That is a long process which began some time ago under Christian blacks and many others of good will.
The Ku Klux Klan, organized in many states, here marches proudly through the nation’s capital.
The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., showed the way to social justice need not be tainted or thwarted by violence. He and others began the healing process for racism in the United States.
The process of healing was impeded by the callous neglect of Democratic governors and mayors in both the north and the south. Their policies failed to eliminate obstacles to the education that is necessary to liberate people from poverty. The destruction of the nuclear family in black urban communities was also a disaster for the black community, and it has been exacerbated over time as those communities have degenerated into crime, drug use, and gang violence. Decades have passed as conditions have deteriorated in black communities. The Democratic Party’s response has been implied clearly. If the congress can’t pass laws to stop urban violence, there’s nothing we can do other than continually advocate gun control laws which Republicans reject. But, unfortunately, nothing has been done by the Democratic Party to address the education, employment, and public health conditions which inspire hopelessness, violence and crime.
Camden, New Jersey reveals urban center conditions.
This is the socialist paradise of Havana, Cuba. Democrats are convinced that this is where the Castros secured social justice and equality.
In the course of eight years, the Biden/Obama administration did precious little to solve urban problems. They did what they could subtly to encourage the Antifa and Black Lives Matter, both of which organizations scream for black liberation while simply using their oppressed communities to seek to overthrow the free government and economic system of the United States through their attacks on American capitalism. These are Marxist organizations to whom the black lives they use in their promotion of violence and looting truly do not matter. Given the large supply of young revolutionaries available for the cause, any loss of black participants can easily be made up from the large supply of irrational, indoctrinated millennials nation wide. They are more interested in disruption and rebellion than in liberating the black communities from the impoverishment of democratic policies.
BLM protests after George Floyd’s tragic death were seen in many urban centers and internationally.
Finally, black lives matter to the BLM socialists only when those lives are already of a given age. Supporting all the social policies of the liberal left, abortion is also enthusiastically endorsed by Black Lives Matter. It is common knowledge that a disproportionately large share of all U.S. abortions are performed on black women. Babies in the womb are not clearly defined; they may be black, they may be lives, but they most certainly do not matter to the BLM movement’s leaders.
Obama subtly puts a stamp of approval on the post-pandemic violence that broke out in so many of the urban centers of the United States. He says: “In some ways, as tragic as these past few weeks have been, as difficult and scary and uncertain as they’ve been, they’ve also been an incredible opportunity for people to be awakened to some of these underlying trends. They offer an opportunity for us to all work together to tackle them, to take them on, to change America and make it live up to its highest ideals.” Like so many commentators who have refused to condemn the violence, the lawlessness, the looting and the aggression against both police and non-revolutionary bystanders that have taken too many lives, Obama says we should look at the upside of the revolution, it gives us a great opportunity to “change America.” He has continued, beyond his presidency, to encourage people to continue to “transform America.” Reform isn’t what the revolutionaries have in mind, it is as Joe Biden’s political slogan: we shall transform America completely. We must rebuild and rebuild it right. Bring on the socialism! Es lebe der Aufstand.
America doesn’t need transformation. It needs to be made great again. It needs to have its cities changed so that places like San Fransico, Seattle, and New York can be saved from the blind and insidious policies of democratic managers. They have provided inferior education for their minorities, if it can be honored by the euphemism “education.” They have provided welfare policies that guarantee the decline of the nuclear family in black communities, they have provided no hope for the future of black lives locked in gang socialization, poverty, hopelessness, drug use, and a genecide approach to “choice” as abortion affects the black community far more than proportionately. And now that Obama is no longer president, his current policies have the same ameliorative effects as they did when he was president. Zip! There was a distinct contrast in what the succeeding administration did for black communities and black youth. Unfortunately, President Trump’s policies were the first hope seen in black communities, but they were not given the opportunity to develop.
Obama says that “Part of what’s made me so hopeful is the fact that so many young people have been galvanized and activated and motivated and mobilized because historically so much of the progress that we’ve made in our society has been because of young people… When sometimes I feel despair, I just see what’s happening with young people all across the country and the talent and the voice and the sophistication that they’re displaying, and it makes me feel optimistic. It makes me feel as if this country is going to get better.” Yes, the Antifa and BLM are the children of Obama and the Democrats who have defended them so steadfastly as they have tried to burn down the country, while their political leaders claim ridiculously that they deliver “peaceful protests.”
After teaching over forty years as a professor, nobody knows better than I what bright and competent young people we have in this country. But young people, like their seniors, need to be able to understand history – every country that has tried socialism soon came to understand why their leaders were either ignorant or dissembling when they claimed their launch of a new socialist experiment would finally “get it right.” Our bright young people can no longer be the hope of our future if they remain indoctrinated and continue to buy into a dogmatic, revolutionary doctrine rationalizing lawlessness and violence. They must first open up to alternatives. I have written a long tome on all the basics of socialism – its thoughts and theories, the attempted application of the system in socialist countries, and the attempt to revive socialism in the United States. I have recently published a sequel, much shorter for the modern reader and updated to include the implications of current socialist policy proposals for our country’s future. I recommend a serious reading of the book to those tempted to follow the socialist crowd.
I have spent many years studying and researching socialist systems, living in contemporary and former socialist countries, teaching and writing about the fallacies and follies of Marxism, and reviewing the equally nonsensical doctrines of cultural Marxism. We have heard the Obamas complain of their depression quite a lot lately. The message they should be sending to black communities is that we live in a great country where, given the right preparation and education, there is no honor or beneficent situation to which young people cannot aspire. The attainment of success is much sweeter than government handouts and many are the exemplary black people who have been successful in their lives and professions. Unfortunately, this is not the message likely to emanate from individuals who have a preference for the economic ideology of Marxism. Thus, BHO closes: “I’ve been hearing a little bit of chatter in the internet about voting versus protest, politics and participation versus civil disobedience and direct action. This is not a (sic) either/or this is a both/and. To bring about real change, we both have to highlight a problem and make people in power uncomfortable.” So he invites our young people to take to the streets. Es lebe der Aufstand!
The work of “Peaceful Protest” in the Post-Pandemic Riots.
Karl Marx said that the class struggle was the driving force of human history. Without a class system in America, current Marxists have decided that a socialist revolution should be based on a race struggle. BLM is disinterested in black lives; they have no protests to make when the crime wave following the socialist introduction of violence on American streets produces large numbers of deaths among innocent blacks, including very young children. Such deaths are of no interest when it is a question of blacks murdering blacks and when local democrat officials encourage lawlessness by refusing to prosecute it. The “defund the police movement” has discouraged law enforcement and protection of either lives or property.
Agents of law and order. “Line up to protect our citizens and their property. If you are opposed in this, stand down!”
Democrats occupying elected administrative offices have presided over the violence. They have protected the mobs by ordering police to stand down and in many cases supporting vocally the movement to “defund the police.” It makes sense for leftists to protect the mobs, since the mobs are simply the street vanguard of the socialist movement. Protesters have been informed that their objective in peaceful protest is to combat peacefully the systemic racism built into the caste system of the United States and that social justice requires protest and social action. But the rioters and the organizational bosses of BLM and Antifa are well aware that the blacks and their supporters are simply being used by the revolutionaries.
Is Mr. Floyd the real reason for the violence?
Yes, revolutionaries! The organizational leaders have already taught the Antifa and BLM more senior activists that this is not at all about George Floyd or about police brutality toward the black community. This is about the Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist Revolution! Capitalism is to be brought down so that woke politicians and revolutionaries can establish a Marxian system.
It is clear that the political left in the United States wants to distract the focus of Americans away from the facts and make them think that the rioters are simply sincere youth who are calling for social justice. But their foundational hope is that the movement will bring us closer to the scrapping of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist (it would probably be more accurate for revolutionaries to say “communist”) government and economic system. But even journalists on the right prefer to reference the revolutionaries simply as “progressives” or with other such epithets as shall surely fail to acknowledge what the revolutionaries themselves are really striving to accomplish.
On the morning of the 12th of August, it was reported that in the fourth month of civil unrest in Portland, Oregon, rioters had invaded a residential neighborhood the previous Saturday night. They targeted people inside their own homes. Nightly protests and riots since May had previously remained contained to downtown Portland.
Due to polling about people’s political preferences, we were already aware that millions of millennials had been indoctrinated in our schools and universities to believe a socialist system would be preferable to a market economy. We have now seen in our larger cities that a good share of these recruited revolutionaries are prepared to pursue Marxian revolutionary methods to achieve their desired “dictatorship of the proletariat.” This time socialism is to be built on the shores of dictatorship in the United Socialists of America.
After but a few weeks of the covid-19 pandemic, the positions of the political parties had become apparent. Those who worship at the alter of science (whether or not they know the difference between a null hypothesis and a test tube) tended to rejoice at the arrival of a virus that could shut down an historically strong economy. They did not want to see a strong economy at election time and their hearts were cheered when they found a reason (Covid-19) to support shutting down the economy. Some governors were willing to put the constitution on hold in deciding who could continue to exercise their normal, constitutional rights. One could still get an abortion, one could still loot and riot, but one could not endanger the community by worshiping, for example, even if one stayed in a car and wore a mask. Our national judicial leader even pronounces religion to be a mere “social activity,” subject to being shut down by health-conscious Democratic governors.
Social distancing at Church. May we do it?
Naaa…. Too risky! Come back when your religion-hating governor says you may.
In California and other places, one may lose the right to go to a beach or a church. But did you hear one Democratic governor complain about the failure to practice social distancing at either the peaceful protests or the riots that followed on the heels of the virus? Of course, the difference is one of social necessity or social luxury. Abortions and looting are apparently viewed by some governors as socially necessary activities.
Peaceful Protest results in 2020.
What should we learn from military leaders, current and former, about abstaining from the use of our military to quell insurrection?
Military leaders may speak out against deploying our military in domestic situations because
a. They don’t want our soldiers put in harm’s way.
b. They want a peaceful world rather than a violent one.
c. They want to save taxpayers money.
d. They love peace and decry war.
e. They believe the American media, the Deep State, the political resistance and the loathing media are trying to achieve American unity. Military protection of lives and property would serve to enable the president in his quest to divide the American people.
f. They don’t want our proactively political youth to attend Sunday School next week with any bruises or bandages.
g. They are frustrated because Senator Bernie Sanders failed to secure the Democratic nomination for the 2020 presidential election.
The list could go on; It is hard to know what is really in people’s hearts when they make political statements. Our unofficial Acting Commander-in-Chief and Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, felt that the nationwide rioting was not a sufficient threat to make the use of American troops necessary in the 2020 riots. I think most people who do not disdain law and order agree that that action should be taken only as a last resort.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.
Putting aside the Esper perspective, we are fortunate that we still know what to do regarding the national military leadership. After all, we have our constitution, a model for democracies around the world. We are a Democratic Republic with the established governance principles and laws of the Constitution. We are not governed by the vagaries of the rule of men, which feature arbitrary laws. Such subjective laws are established, for example, by tyrannical powers in violation of democratic principles. Such rule can even be imposed by leaders who are elected by deceiving voters, promising to give them what they want. Nor does the constitution foresee governance by a military junta or dictatorship. So it is to be highly recommended that the military types inclined to lecture the president hold their tongues and support civilian leadership. If they like the alternative governance model, our unelected military leaders might consider residence in Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, or China. Unfortunately, the selection of tyrannical domiciles is somewhat limited by the repeated failure and subsequent disappearance of socialism in so many countries.
Our Constitution, a model for the world’s democracies.
Should we defund police departments?
An amazing number of activists have expressed the view that the way to enhance the lives of our colored communities is not to seek a way to eliminate the small share of public servants who suffer from bigotry, but to eliminate the public servants who respond to our 911 telephone calls and who have the potential power to stop city-center populations from self-elimination. The more moderate view of “defunding the police” is simply to reduce the resources available for the police to solve growing law-enforcement problems, but there are actually a good number of activists who really do want to see police departments disappear.
So that rioters need not be troubled with the possibility of being arrested, and so that police officers will no longer have the opportunity to kill blacks (incidentally, have you ever checked to see how many white people they have killed?), socialists are now demanding that police departments should be eliminated. That would save taxpayers money, of course, although we might have to increase the number of firefighters inordinately. (Sorry, it slipped my mind that Democrats have an answer for the problem of arson too: “let it burn!”) In any case, defunding police could save money on 911 operators. One could simply install a 911 recording saying: “Sorry! Emergencies have now been disclassified. Have a nice day!”
