Topic: Economic Devastation - page 96. (Read 504776 times)

I've so many of these stupid core values. Whats tough is that I know they are wrong, but knowing is not enough. I'm empotionally attached to them. I dont know why. Its like they are a part of me, like a sick leg i'm too romantic to amputate. Maybe because I think they define the myself or the self I want to become/idolize. Its truly idiotic because in the end its working against me.

CoinCube

I never did have you pegged as a Collectivist!  Marx, although he did uncover some analytical tools, is indeed to a great degree responsible for many hideous deaths.

In general, I go with whichever side of the argument at hand is most positive for personal liberty.  Lower taxes.  GTFO of my hair.  Fewer rules benefiting any "elite du jour".

And now look at the cops (USA).  Word comes in today of a cop who shot a guy in the back as he was running away.  I cannot remember (just my own observation) when the cops actually ever prevented a crime in my life (or a loved one's).  The cops/NSA/Police State are making me nervous...

CoinCube, I want to work and I don't work when I am here writing. I am doing this because I genuinely want to see if I could change even just one Marxist to a libertarian (and I realize you think you are a libertarian but I don't think there are but a few westerners who actually libertarians, i.e. even Eric S Raymond appears to be a Marxist apologist with totalitarian outbursts masquerading as an anarchist, because it is what you feel in your heart about nature and tolerating discord, diversity, imperfection, and random shit that determines your true philosophical affiliation). I don't think I can do it, but you are my guinea pig.
...
In short, I trust nature to deal with threats to nature. And the data on crime supports my view.

Collectivism is only beneficial and necessary where it was impossible to otherwise get economies-of-scale to accomplish necessary actions such as military protection and building roads.

I hope you support my efforts. As Howard Katz wrote, I know the justice of mother nature will bring humans great prosperity as it did when the Pilgrims learned to abandon their Marxism to survive starvation. And from that transformation all the greatness of the USA was spawned. I believe just maybe you can make this transformation. Maybe.
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If via technology we can eliminate the need for those economies-of-scale, then we no longer need large-scale collectivism.

Yeah sorry I think you need to entirely abandon that core value you are hanging on to. Specifically thinking that somethings just won't be fair or correct without doing something. That ideological itch has been planted in your brain and I don't think you can remove it.

There is one thing that could draw me back to the USA. Damn I miss where I was born and grew up. I was the white black kid. Right in there dancing with them totally colorblind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hWWVrEHaRA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHgJFutF5vs

The prior pic of me was 1991 in the French Quarter. Note I was sitting on a New Orleans Saints emblem.

You won't find that real New Orleans where the tourists are.

MY FRIEND, ALL YOUR LIFE YOU’VE BEEN TOLD THAT THE 16TH AMENDMENT was a transformational event in the history of the United States Constitution by which an unapportioned direct federal tax on "all that comes in" was authorized. You’ve been told that the amendment reversed the preceding 137-year-old Constitutional tax structure prohibiting such taxes-- under which the American people had grown to be the freest, most prosperous, and most optimistic people in the history of the world-- in favor of a radically-different structure under which the scandal-ridden and deeply-distrusted denizens of Washington, DC were granted carte blanche to reach directly into every wallet, be it that of a Wall Street tycoon or that of the average working stiff.

The 16th Amendment says the Pollock court's conclusion was wrong (or, in any event, is overruled). The amendment provides that Congress can continue to apply the income tax to gains that qualify as "incomes" (that is, the subclass of receipts that had always been subject to the “income” excise due to being the product of an exercise of privilege) without being made to treat the tax as direct and needing apportionment when applied to dividends and rent by virtue of judicial consideration of the source:
 

The amendment doesn't transform the "income tax" into a direct tax, nor modify, repeal, revoke or affect the apportionment requirement for capitations and other direct taxes. It simply prohibits the courts from using the overruled reasoning of the Pollock decision to shield otherwise excisable dividends and rents from the tax. As Treasury Department legislative draftsman F. Morse Hubbard summarizes the amendment’s effect for Congress in hearing testimony in 1943:
 

This isn’t Hubbard’s personal opinion. Almost immediately after the amendment was declared adopted in 1913, and the income tax was revived after its 18-year hiatus since the Pollock decision, the application of the tax was again challenged (in Brushaber v. Union Pacific RR Co., 240 U.S. 1 (1916)). Frank Brushaber, a New Yorker with investments in the Union Pacific Railroad Company, based his suit on a series of contentions about the 16th Amendment. The Supreme Court took the case with the intention of settling all issues regarding the purpose and meaning of the amendment and declaring the ongoing nature of the income tax as affected thereby.
 
The lengthy, detailed and unanimous ruling issued by the court declares that the amendment has no effect on what is and what is not subject to the income tax, and does nothing to limit or diminish the apportionment provisions in the Constitution concerning capitations or other direct taxes. Here are three more good summaries of the Brushaber ruling to add to F. Morse Hubbard’s:
 

So, the class of what qualifies as "income" subject to the tax remains the same after the amendment as it had been before it. The 16th Amendment eliminated the "source" argument, but didn't change the limits on what was subject to the tax. If something didn’t qualify as taxable without apportionment prior to Pollock and the amendment, it still doesn't qualify as taxable without apportionment. The Supreme Court reiterates this in ruling after ruling:
 

Summing it all up, the 16th Amendment comes down to this: The Pollock court had said, "Congress has laid a tax on a big class of excisable objects (which it calls "incomes"), and it's all good. But when the tax is applied to dividend and rent "incomes", it actually functions as a property tax on their sources and therefore, in regard to those two "incomes", the tax has to be apportioned."
 
The 16th Amendment simply says, "Nix to that last bit."

Here is the Supreme Court again declaring the ongoing vitality of the apportionment rule (the 16th Amendment notwithstanding), and specifically distinguishing the income tax as an excise and not a capitation:
 

l3552

Your comments here are very useful  Fear and resentment are much more destructive than most people know.

The State will always classify the former as the latter, unless it can license and tax the sex workers (e.g. indirectly by confiscating/expropriating the bar owners) to expropriate them.

You are building strawmen.

Just admit you hate nature.

...

Nature is a whole. You either ban it, or love it. I rationally chose the latter.

I don't hate nature when certain actors do heinous acts. I hate those actors. I accept nature as a beautiful system.

you are genuinely repulsed by human trafficking. Rather I see it as nature's way of competition and evolution, i.e. survival-of-the-fittest. I see it as a beautiful system of maximizing resilience. I think more like a native in this aspect, i.e. I want to live in harmony with nature.

Filipinos have it about perfectly in balance. Stop the heinous crime, but fuck the pedantic, agonizing rules.

I write trough my heart...

...labeling woman and children as assets or sheep as it said trough you and keeping you as far and entertained by the world novel as possible from your own world...

True Thanksgiving

There were about two weeks between the day of humiliation and the day of thanksgiving. This puts the first thanksgiving at the very end of July 1623 (probably July 29 or 30). The people of the Middle Ages were essentially passive. They believed that nothing happened by their own efforts. When something bad happened, it was because God was mad at them. When something good happened, it was because God was pleased with them. In the first case, they tried to win God’s favor (by fasting and humiliating themselves), and in the second case, they rejoiced and said thank you to God. These days of humiliation and thanksgiving were only one-time holidays. They would be declared by the leader of the community, celebrated once and then never repeated.

Today we have a different concept. A holiday is something to be remembered. So we celebrate it once a year, on the original date. The occasional, or one-time, holidays have disappeared.

It follows that what the Pilgrims did was an earth shaking event. They changed from the essentially passive people of the Middle Ages to the modern active people we are today. They had been facing starvation. Many people faced starvation back in the Middle Ages. Founding a new colony in the wilderness was not an easy thing to do. You all know the story of the English attempt to found a colony at Roanoke, Virginia in 1585-87. This, however, was a government project. The Government had agreed to send a supply ship in 1587. But in 1587, the English Government was under pressure from the impending Spanish Armada and could not spare the ship. The Roanoke colony disappeared and was never heard from again. Simultaneous with the settlement of the Pilgrims, a gentleman named Thomas Weston attempted another settlement in Massachusetts. But the Weston people were not Calvinists and did not have the moral fiber to make their settlement work. After many discouraging events, they gave up and went back to England.

In fact, the Pilgrims had decided to make the trip to America because Holland (their home at that time) was headed for a resumption of its war with Spain in 1621. The Independent (Calvinist) colony in Leyden split on what to do. Had the Spanish been victorious, the Spanish would have burned them alive (as was their established practice with regard to Calvinists). One part decided to remain in Holland and chance a Spanish victory. The other part opted for the journey to America. Thus these were not adventurous people looking to make a mark in the history books. They were ordinary people trying to live their lives and keep from being killed.

What they did in abolishing communism and establishing private property was to act pro-actively. Although the form of attributing everything to God and taking no responsibility for one’s own actions persisted for a while, the Pilgrims were the first people known to us in history who reversed this medieval attitude. Thus they felt, after 1623, that they had done something very significant. They must have decided to turn the occasional holiday (thanksgiving 1623) into an annual holiday and celebrate it each year on the anniversary. There exists in the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts to this day a local holiday known as Sidewalk Sales Days. It is a commercial holiday celebrated on the last weekend of July, and all the merchants put their goods out on the sidewalk in front of their stores and encourage customers with big sales. As the descendants of the Pilgrims and new arrivals spread out through the northern states, they had a sense that the event this first thanksgiving celebrated (the institution of private property) was very important. Thus they began to reenact this event each year, turning the occasional holiday into an annual one.

By the time of the American Civil War, Thanksgiving was widely celebrated through the North. Sarah Hale, the editor of Goody’s Ladies Book (a 19th century precursor to Ladies Home Journal) started a campaign to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday, and this was signed into law by President Lincoln. (This, by the way, is why the modern Thanksgiving is associated in most of our minds with cooking big meals and family get-togethers.).

All good and true, the above comes from the horses mouth, so to speak. (As Herodotus points out, the most reliable history comes from an observer who was on the spot and personally witnessed the events about which he writes.) , But in that case, why are we not taught this in school? From 1917 to 1989, most of the world was engaged in an ideological battle, or Cold War, between the communist world and the private property world. America was the leader of those nations which supported private property. Each year Americans celebrated their national holiday of Thanksgiving, and no one knew that this was the holiday celebrating the establishment of private property and the abolition of communism in America.

Here is what happened. During the American Revolution, when the British were driven out of Boston, they took a collection of important papers, including Bradford’s diary. Thus the diary was lost (to Americans). Later in the 19th century a Boston scholar received an order of fish from Nova Scotia, wrapped in what he recognized was a page of Bradford’s diary. He immediately wrote to the fish monger offering him money for the manuscript and telling him not to throw any more of it away. In this way (most of) the diary was saved.

But while the diary was lost, a group of pro-communist intellectuals saw an opportunity. They had always been uncomfortable with the fact that the great American holiday of Thanksgiving was a celebration of anti-communism. So they decided to make up a lie to subvert the true meaning of Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving, according to this left-wing theory, celebrates cultural diversity. The Pilgrims and the Indians got together and had a party, and that was the first Thanksgiving. It is true that the Pilgrims and the Indians had a party. Captain Miles Standish pursued an effective foreign policy, and by the autumn of 1621, nine of the surrounding Indian tribes (all except for the Narragansetts) approached with treaties of peace and friendship. The Pilgrims held a party in October 1621 and celebrated with their new Indian friends. However, Bradford mentions no thanksgiving in 1621. In fact, he describes the 1621 harvest as small and points out that the Pilgrims had brushes with starvation up until the thanksgiving of 1623.

Karl Marx taught that communism was a new phenomenon – the wave of the future. If one is a Marxist, one would not want to admit that communism existed in the past. A good Marxist has to pretend that communism started in the Soviet Union in 1917. What was communism doing in Massachusetts in 1622?

The astonishing thing was that, when Bradford’s diary was rediscovered, these pro-communist intellectuals were able to keep the lie going. And so it continues to this day and is taught to our children. This is an example of what people in our society call education.

This is a good example of the fact that most professional historians are united in an endeavor to impose a radical left-wing ideology on America – truth be damned. Every now and then an honest historian (like Winston Churchill) will slip through. But for the most part the field of academic history consists of a group of intellectuals dedicated to promoting lies for the purpose of destroying America.

These dedicated frauds are not going to reform themselves. It is your job as parent to correctly police the teachers of your children and to make sure they are teaching the truth. To fail in this is a betrayal of those children.

It is very tempting to see this as a battle between good and evil, and indeed there is a moral aspect to it.  (Thou shalt not steal.)  But the evil guys are not attacking the good guys (us).  Indeed, we have an immunity from them and are capable of actually making money off the depreciation of the currency.  The evil people in the establishment are making their profits at the expense of their own followers.  It is not evil versus good.  It is evil versus evil (sort of Nazi Germany versus Soviet Russia on the Eastern Front during WWII).  This is a subtle point, and most people will miss it.

         Let us take the American black community (most of it).  It is well known that the large majority of blacks vote Democrat, and it is widely believed that blacks are a major beneficiary of government jobs and handouts.  But then I stumbled across a rather astonishing fact.  Studying the unemployment statistics in the U.S. by race I came across the fact that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1940 (the first year in which the figures were broken down by race) black unemployment was almost the same as white.  Today black unemployment is regularly double white.

         How can this be?  Haven’t you heard all those stories about the Civil Rights marchers chanting and singing?  Can’t you read those anti-discrimination notices posted in every workplace in the nation: “DISCRIMINATION BY RACE, RELIGION OR BLA, BLA, BLA IS ILLEGAL.”  Well, it may be illegal, but there is one heck of a lot of it going around.  Right now, unemployment among black teen-agers is approximately 40%.  Many of these unemployed teen-agers get into trouble from their idleness.  Many of them get into drugs and wind up in jail.  The crime rate among American blacks is 8 times that among whites, and most of this is blacks murdering and stealing from other blacks.

         Or we can study the union movement of the 1930s and ‘40s.  It had been normal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for the average American worker to increase his real wages by 60% over a generation (30 year period).  After the New Deal was elected and adopted supposedly pro-labor policies, this went down to 40% for the 1942-1972  period.  Then after the Republicans accepted those “pro-labor” policies, real wages topped out in 1972 and have been declining ever since.  So the big “accomplishment” of the New Deal was to cause the wages of American labor, which had been rising since 1623, to go into decline.  This is the first generation of Americans to be poorer than its fathers.

         And again, we see the same thing with regard to the feminist movement.  What benefits accrued to women from the “woman’s” movement of the late 20th century?  Well, they won the “right” to go into combat; so that America is now the only country in the world which puts its women into harm’s way.  They elected a rapist (Bill Clinton) to be President of the U.S.  Their husbands divorce them.  They find themselves in middle age struggling to do the woman’s job of raising the children and the man’s job of earning a living.  They are hassled and harried.  Many times they are abandoned in their old age when they have lost their youthful beauty (e.g., Mia Farrow, who was abandoned because her boy friend took up with her own daughter).  Prior to the rise of modern feminism, American men stuck by their women.  Love, not sex, conquered all.

         In all these cases, it is the supposed beneficiaries of the establishment who are its victims.  Indeed, it is my heartfelt advice to all of you that; if the establishment ever comes out in favor of a group to which you belong, then fight them with all of your might.  And this is true with regard to economics.

         The people who lose money from the system of “legalized” counterfeiting are those who give their consent to it.  They may take a college course in Keynesian economics and believe the professor’s line.  They may read a popular newspaper and believe the editor’s line.  They echo the propaganda from the Fed.

         I refused to take any economics courses when I was at Harvard because the professors there said that the Federal Government did not have to balance its budget.  Even at that young age, I knew that this was gobble-de-gook.

Self Esteem

First, I want to make one observation on the comments to last week’s blog. I am sorry that I am offending people. But your life and happiness are at stake, and the freedom of America is at stake. So the issue is worth pursuing.

Anyone who reads the Bible has to be impressed with one basic fact. It instructs us that we should do two sets of mutually impossible things: When faced with the evil man, we should give him an eye for an eye and simultaneously turn the other cheek. We should be fruitful in the sexual sense and multiply and at the same time regard even sexual thoughts as evil. Also, we should be fruitful in the productive sense, yet take no thought for tomorrow; what we shall eat or what we shall wear.

Clearly what happened was that, once the original works of Moses and the prophets had won great esteem, other people came along and tried to promote their own ideas by sneaking them into the Bible (originally the works of Moses and the prophets). The first case of this (of which I am aware) is with regard to the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah, of course, preached that the evil man should receive the evil consequences of his evil actions. But some time after Isaiah was dead, another fellow came along with a very opposite philosophy, that one could escape the consequences of one evil acts by putting them off on a goat. This fellow pretended to also be Isaiah, and in the King James version the writings of both men are jumbled together as the Book of Isaiah. Fortunately, modern linguists have analyzed the Book of Isaiah and concluded, from an analysis of grammar and style, that two parts of it were written by different men (whom they call First Isaiah and Second Isaiah). First Isaiah was the real Isaiah, and he taught the principle of justice. Second Isaiah was a phony who tried to slip over his philosophy of the scapegoat by claiming to be the great prophet.

In general, precisely because the Bible is so widely respected by so many people, those who have an intellectual axe to grind try to slip over their own ideas under its guise. Thus the Bible which has come down to us today is a confused amalgam. For example, some people were offended by my observation that Jesus of Nazareth was a communist.

There are broad hints of this in the New Testament, the violent attacks on the rich, the persecution of individuals making foreign exchange (the money changers). But the real evidence that Catholic Christianity endorsed communism comes from a study of history. And the real failure of those who accept the Bible as the word of God and claim that it is the central influence on their lives is that they do not want to know as much as possible about the historical facts concerning the characters they so admire.

Jesus, for example, was a member of the Jewish group called the Essenes. They preceded him in time, and his teachings were the same as theirs. But the Essenes were openly communist. Again, the classical Roman Empire had a mixed economy. When the Christians took over in the 4th century A.D., Rome became a communist/feudal economy without money.

Communism was abolished by the Protestants, specifically the Calvinists. The Catholics defended it tooth and nail. To this day, to join a Catholic monastery one must share one’s wealth in common and not own any private property. When one realizes that the Jewish Essenes often called themselves The Poor, Jesus’ advice, “Take all that thou hast and give to the Poor; come follow me,” takes on new meaning (i.e., join Jesus’ Essene group and share your wealth in common).

This week I would like to step back from politics and consider some issues as to how a causal view affects one’s personal life. First, the use of alcoholic beverages.

It is well known that among those who drink, alcoholic beverages are very highly esteemed. Indeed, the way that the institution of slavery got started in ancient Rome was not by conquest. Rather the Romans grew grapes and made wine. They then traded this wine to the barbarians in Gaul, who would capture their own people and trade them as slaves.

Against this very strong desire on the part of drinkers, let us weigh the non-drinker argument.

1. Alcohol tastes terrible. Mixing it with a good-tasting fruit juice only mitigates the bad taste. For example, grape juice is very sweet. Wine has no real taste. The sweetness of the grape juice offsets the ugly taste of the alcohol. If drinkers object to this, all they have to do is to think back to the effort it took them to acclimate themselves. There is something else about the alcoholic beverage that is attracting them besides the taste.
2. The side effects of serious drinking are quite disturbing. The human body is desperately trying to get rid of the poison, and the drinker will often regurgitate what he has consumed. It is not a pleasant experience.
3. Under its influence, one becomes progressively less and less aware of his surroundings. One acts like a clod in social situations. One cannot drive a car safely. Often one cannot walk. And, for males, one cannot perform the sex act. The puzzle here is that these people consider alcohol an absolute must when contemplating a relation with the opposite sex. (During Prohibition deaths from cirrhosis of the liver dropped significantly.)
4. And if one persists, then there is a phenomenon called the hangover through which one’s body is wracked with pain for quite some time the following day (again the result of the ingested poisons).
5. Finally, there is an issue of which most drinkers are not aware. But if you talk to a teetotaler, such as myself, we are simply not tempted. If I meet a person who likes to consume a lot of refined sugar, I can understand the temptation because sugar is sweet. But if I meet a drinker, then I am at a complete loss because alcohol smells and tastes terrible You drinkers seem like freaks to me, and I cannot understand you..

So if you are uncertain how to meet the above arguments, then wait just a moment. I have an ability to put things into words, and I believe that I can answer for you.

Alcohol interferes with the higher levels of the brain. In particular, it destroys one’s judgement in regard to right and wrong. Most people in our society are brought up with a Christian code of ethics. They are taught that to defend one’s self against evil is wrong, to accumulate any degree of wealth is wrong, to feel hate toward even the most evil person in the world is wrong and to even have a desire for an attractive member of the opposite sex is wrong. Most emphatically, it is drummed into their heads again and again that everything fun is immoral, and everything moral is boring/painful/ or destructive of their lives in some way.

It therefore follows that, whenever they go out for fun, their conscience is going to nag at them. Indeed, these people have an expression as to what it is that alcohol does for them. “I was feeling no pain.” That is, they are in pain most of the time. Since the alcohol dulls the mind, it gives them a respite from pain.

When these people look at me, they have a feeling of sympathy. “Poor Howie. He is an ethical person, a square. He must be in pain most of the time. I don’t know how he does it.” On the other hand, when I see an alcoholic falling over into his own vomit, I also have a feeling of sympathy. “Poor idiot, his life is full of pain.” Obviously we do not understand each other.

What is wrong with this drinker is that he can not even imagine the code of ethics he was taught as a child being wrong. He was taught, for example, that feeling hate is evil. But he cannot help but feel hate. And every time he feels hate, he feels guilty.

It does not make any sense to me. These people are taught that morality consists of a set of actions which are directly opposed to human nature. But who created human nature? In their view, it is God. Let’s see. God creates a code of morality which human beings cannot practice. But God also created that human nature which cannot live up to His code. So who’s fault is it that human beings are bad? Obviously, it is God’s fault. It’s not our fault that God gave us a human nature that can’t do the job.

So these people fail in two ways. They fail existentially, meaning that they cannot perform. In this regard, I always think of the Spanish Armada, which attempted to invade England in 1588. The Spanish (Catholics) built a large navy, but it was a disaster. The Catholics of that day (as noted) had a communist/feudal economy, and it was reflected in the way they built their ships. English guns had longer range. The English stayed out of range and inflicted heavy damage. Not one English ship was sunk. The Spanish guns could only be fired once and could not be reloaded. The ships were badly packed, food spoiled, cannonballs were the wrong size for the cannons

But even on the rare occasions when these people succeed existentially, they fail spiritually. That is, win or lose, they come away feeling that they have done evil, that they are worthless, immoral creatures. So through most of their lives they have this double sense of failure. They can’t succeed, and they are not worthy of success.

On this issue, I have been strongly influenced by Nathaniel Brandon’s concept of self esteem. Self esteem is the conviction that one is fit for existence and is worthy of existence. To be fit for existence means that, if action is required, you will know what action to take. If you don’t know, then you have a confidence that you can learn. This gives you a feeling that you can succeed at your chosen job. To be worthy of existence means that you are the type of person who deserves to have good things happen to him.

Quite clearly, it is those people who do not have self esteem who need refuge in alcohol. It looks to them that they are going to fail at pretty much whatever they do. And they further have the burden that, if they do succeed, then they are not worthy of the success. Blanking out one’s mind is the natural reaction to such misery. And that is the real attraction alcohol has for them.

If alcohol is the natural reaction to low self esteem, then obscenity is the way of expressing it. There is nothing which so perfectly captures this sense that one cannot succeed in reality and that anyway one is not worthy of success as an obscene word or phrase. In my army days, it seemed that many sergeants could not complete an English sentence without throwing in an obscene adjective to modify one of the nouns. To roughly translate, this meant, life is lousy, I am lousy, everybody is lousy. Can such a person be said, in any sense, to be happy?

Related to the use of obscenity, is the degradation of sex. Since sex is the most intense pleasure a human being can experience, it comes to stand for pleasure, per se. But a person with low self esteem has said in his mind, “I am not worthy of pleasure.”

Human beings are capable of sexual pleasure on a much higher level than an animal. This is because humans have 3 levels of motivation. A human being is motivated by pleasure and pain, just as all animals are. A human is motivated by emotions (love, hate, fear, anticipation, etc.) as the higher animals are. (Pleasure and pain are not emotions. They are sensations and have a more intense but short range quality.)

But finally, human beings are motivated by moral considerations (seek the good and avoid the evil). Good and evil are abstract concepts, and it is only the human mind which has the ability to understand them.

Animals are attracted to a sexual mate by outer physical characteristics which convey that this individual would make a good father or mother. (For example, large breasts in women convey a high level of estrogen, hence more intense feminine traits. Visible musculature in men conveys a good provider and high testosterone (hence more intense masculine traits).

But over and above the traits we have in common with animals, humans have the ability to think, “This person is of high moral value (or vice versa).” Romantic love is the combination of an animal attraction with a high moral evaluation. (Obviously people who have a body-soul dichotomy cannot fall in love. Such a view tells its adherents that physical sex and spiritual love are mutually opposite and contradictory. This is why there are no reports of romantic love through most of the Middle Ages. Romantic love entered England with the Reformation, and Shakespeare called attention to it in Romeo and Juliet.

In the 20th century, we had Hugh Heffner, who went back to treating sex as a purely physical attraction. Heffner’s promise was great pleasure if you followed the Playboy Philosophy. But the generation which followed that path is the most miserable and sexually unhappy in modern times. Not only are there a great many divorces, but no longer do people marry for love. In the 1950s and ‘60s, almost every popular song was about love. The people who married for love stayed together “until death do us part.” Today people tear each other apart emotionally and inflict terrible wounds.

One incident which will remain with me for the rest of my life was a phone call from a women (with whom I had a platonic relationship). She was moving, she announced, and wanted to give me her new phone number. She suspected, she went on, that her ex-husband was trying to kill her. She was cutting off all connection to her former address and phone (easy to do in Manhattan) and would, as far as he was concerned, just disappear.

I could not know whose fault this situation was. But it amazed me that the relation between two human beings who had once said that they loved each other could deteriorate so badly. This is perhaps a worst case, but when I review my friends and their married/romantic lives, I see one long record of heartbreak and emotional pain among the generation brought up on Hugh Heffner’s philosophy.

Cultivating a high self esteem is one of the most rewarding things one can do in one’s life. It gives you a basic good feeling about yourself. Whatever hardships life brings your way, you have the spiritual strength to sail right through them. Avoidance of obscenity and promiscuity are two important musts. If you feel a temptation to use alcohol (or drugs) to evade reality, then you must question the moral code you were taught as a child. Is it really true, and are you really evil for breaking it? Once you have the right moral convictions and know how to act on them, the temptation for alcohol will disappear.

It is tempting to say that the Nobel Prize Committee and the intellectuals who are supporting Obama are doing this deliberately, that they imagine themselves to be an elite class who will walk into a position akin to that of Plato’s guardians whereby they are the rulers, and we are their serfs.

Fortunately, that is not the way it works out. Most aggressors attack the weak. They don’t attack the strong. Some examples from history illustrate the point.

1) In the collapse of the Roman Republic into an empire; the enemies of liberty on two successive occasions formed a triumvirate. In both occasions the members of the triumvirate then went at each other. The most famous of these battles was Mark Anthony vs. Octavius (Actium, 31 B.C.).
2) In World War II, the entire continent of Europe was thrown into turmoil. But Germany never attacked Switzerland. Switzerland was a rugged mountain country where every man was armed and trained. The Swiss rode out the war without fighting a battle. On the other hand, Belgium counted on her status as a neutral. Germany had signed a treaty recognizing her neutrality. In early 1940, a German officer in the west was ordered to bring the German invasion plans for Belgium to Berlin. He missed his train and in order to make the meeting hitched an airplane ride from a friend. But the plane got lost in the fog, wandered into Belgium and crash landed. The invasion plans were captured by the Belgium police, who took them to the Government. The Belgium Government pretended that the plans did not exist and clung to its strategy of relying on a treaty. They would not even allow British and French armies to enter their country to better take up defensive positions against the Nazi attack (which came May 10, 1940).

Who was more successful in achieving peace, Switzerland or Belgium? Again, Germany never attacked Britain (or even France). Both Britain and France declared war on Germany after the German attack on Poland. The Germans were attacking the weak. Similarly, Saddam Hussein was full of fire and brimstone vis a vis Israel. But in reality he attacked his Arab brother, Kuwait. The ancient Romans had a saying, “If you wish for peace, prepare for war.”

Is the Nobel prize committee’s assumption correct that the world wishes to be ruled by its own values? The values of the great majority of societies in world history have led to war, poverty, disease, internal violence, ignorance and superstition. But until the year 1689 no one had any answer (leaving aside ancient Rome). But in 1689, the people of England declared a Bill of Rights. All of a sudden Englishmen had rights. At that time, a small group of Englishmen had journeyed half was round the world to buy tea in India and sell it back home. Many other Europeans had heard of the benefits of tea, and many European nations had their East India Tea Company. In 1757, the British Tea Company was attacked by the Nawab of Bengal. 4400 British tea company clerks inflicted a stunning defeat on 50,000 soldiers of the Nawab. This was followed by a series of British victories until the British East India Company controlled a territory the size of Western Europe.

Why were the Indians so easily defeated? Because they wanted to live under British rule. The British had rights. It was a better way of life. In the same way, why did people from all over the world give up their language, their culture and their way of life to come to America? Because Americans had rights. They wanted to live under American values, not their own values.

In words of one syllable, values are objective. All people around the world want the good things of life: food, clothing, shelter, security, happiness, cures for disease, knowledge.

For example, America and Germany made, exactly opposite choices. In 1776, America said that “all men are created [with] equal…rights]” I 1880, Germany adopted a philosophy of love. It said that the Government is like a big father, who loves his subjects and wants to give them something for nothing. These were two directly opposite concepts of what government ought to do and how it ought to act. Is it impossible to judge between them? Not at all. We simply look at the consequences. American became the wealthiest country in the world. It lead the world in charity and was remarkable for the ability of (otherwise quarrelling) ethnic groups to get along together. It became the strongest country in the world and was the country what everyone else tried to come to. It led the world in scientific invention and discovery.

Germany, on the other hand, plunged Europe and the World into WWII. It killed over 50 million human beings. It sank to new lows in introducing barbarism, torture, slavery and mass murder to what has previously been a reasonably civilized society. To this day, the people of Germany are hated by almost every nation in Europe. In addition, her country was over run and ravaged by foreign armies, and millions of her own people were killed.

Is it possible for any reasonable person to say that all choices and actions are equally valid and that no course of action is better than or worse than any other? This idea – which was rammed down my throat at Harvard – is insane. Some acts are objectively good, some are objectively evil and some are morally neutral.

Although it would be better to have a full intellectual understanding of the difference between right and wrong, it should be possible for even the least knowledgeable person to be able to tell – by their results over a long enough period of time – which society is doing good and which is doing evil.

What the political left is working for in Massachusetts is the victory of the political right and the ascension to power of a man like Adolf Hitler. They are not yet at the point where they dare to throw off their left-wing disguise and come out openly as fascist, but they are quite close. By the way, I would like to say to all critical commentators, my central thesis, which I have been repeating in blog after blog is the essential evil of the welfare state. My repeated challenge to all my critics is the following: IF YOU ADVOCATE A WELFARE STATE, LIKE THAT INTRODUCED BY THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATS IN 1880, THEN HOW CAN YOU BE SURE THAT IT WILL NOT EVOLVE, LIKE GERMANY, INTO A NAZI STATE?

Most of the comments about Kennedy this week have focused on his political position, which is standard Massachusetts social democracy. That is:

Government loves people.
Therefore, it gives them something for nothing (by robbing from the rich).
Therefore, Ted Kennedy is motivated by love and is a good person.

These two parties, the party of love and the party of hate, have been contesting for at least 2000 years. They have existed in every society (aside from those dedicated to liberty and humanity) in every era of history. In every case, there is a major conflict. The left appears to win or to be about to win and then somehow there is a twist of history, and the right comes out on top.

Take, for example, the deterioration of the Roman Republic into an empire. A party arose in the late republic. It was founded by Gaius and Julius Gracchus (together called the Gracchi.) These brothers proposed the abolition of debts and the distribution of grain to the Roman mob at a reduced price (later free).

Caesar was murdered by the republicans, plunging the country into civil war. (The pro-republican party were called the Liberatores, which translates most reasonably into libertarians.) The Peoples Party won the civil war and reestablished the empire.

Well, that seems fairly straight forward. The party of the left, the party of the poor, won a clear cut, overwhelmingly victory. It was so overwhelming that the name of Caesar became the title of rulers for the next two millennia, and in the year 1916 the head of Germany was called the Kaiser, and the head of Russia was called the Czar.

So how did the people of Europe fare under the Caesars of the past two millennia? Did they continue to get their free bread from the loving and benevolent government? What happened to the policy of robbing from the rich to give to the poor?

Well, first the people of the Roman Empire lost the choice to go into many different professions. First, prices rose terribly over a half century. Second, the government responded with price controls. This forced all businessmen out of business, and soon, if you wanted some economic good, you had to get/make it yourself. This turned out to be a lot harder than the ignorant and corrupt Roman people had realized. Suddenly they were unbelievably poor. You have undoubtedly seen movies about the Roman legions of the first centuries with their glittering breastplates and helmets. Well, after Diocletian’s price controls these were replaced by leather breastplates and helmets, but these in turn could not stop barbarian swords and spears. Suddenly the Roman armies could no longer defeat the barbarians, and the Empire fell.

By this time, the multitude of jobs which had existed in the first century A.D. had ceased to exist, and most everyone was a farmer. These then became tenant farmers working the land of a rich person. Under Constantine, the average Roman lost the right to quit his job, and eventually his son was compelled to take the same job as his father. The rich person became an aristocrat, and the average Roman became a serf.

Did the medieval aristocrat work hard and produce a lot of wealth so that the government could rob from him and give to the poor? No, he didn’t work at all. Rather the average serf worked very hard so that the aristocrat could rob from him. And when the aristocrat wanted a little amusement, he took one of his serfs down to the torture chamber and put him on the wheel. And the Czars and Kaisers, etc. of that era were recognized by the people of that time as extreme right wing.

How did this happen? How did the Caesar, who loved the poor people and gave them free grain, turn into the Czar who robbed from the poor and gave to the rich? How did Caesar turn from the extreme left to the extreme right? The answer, of course, is that that was the plan from the beginning. The people of Rome were misled, not by their stupidity but by their desire for something for nothing. They did not see the truth because they did not want to see the truth, and on the day before the Czar fell there were still a great many Russians who thought of him as their little father who loved them.

Democracy in America

There is a concept in American politics which is often expressed as: “We are a democracy. Whenever we have a disagreement, we vote on it, and the majority wins.” An illustration of this idea is the current debate over health care. The “liberals” have one view, and the conservatives have another view. The country is now in the process of voting, and when the vote is in, we will accept the decision of the majority. That’s the system.

First, is that actually the system? At the time that America was created, did any of the men who created it indicate, in any way, that they were setting up such a system? Are there any words to this effect?
ndeed, another Revolutionary writer, James Wilson, made the following statement:

“…the only reason why a free and independent man was bound by human laws was this – that he bound himself.”

Andrew C. McLaughlin, Wilson on Blackstone, The Foundations of
American Constitutionalism: (New York, 1932), pp. 83-84.

This is a most interesting statement because it does not deal so much with political issues as ethical issues. And John Locke, the philosophical inspiration behind the Founding Fathers introduced the idea of a political right. What does the word right mean? Any child can tell you that something right is something good. It is the opposite of wrong. A right, as Locke used the concept, a political right, was a freedom of action. Locke was saying that political rights were right (in the moral sense). He was saying that freedom was morally right.

John Adams followed up on Wilson’s support for voluntary consent. He wrote:

“The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals; it is a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people.”

Constitution of Mass., 1780,” chiefly the work of John Adams, from
Documents of American History, 8th Edition, ed. Henry Steele Commager (New York, 1968), p. 107.

In conclusion, since they based their political philosophy on the concepts of rights and morality, America’s Founding Fathers intended to set up a system based on voluntary consent. They had no intention of resolving all differences by majority rule.

Second, let us take a common sense example. Let us imagine that we are setting up, not a government, but just an ordinary association for an ordinary purpose, perhaps a bridge club, a ski club or a club to study classic literature. What would we do? The answer, of course, is that we would follow James Wilson’s principle. We would deal with all parties by their voluntary consent. No one would be forced to join our ski club without his voluntary consent.

Of course, certain funding is necessary to make the ski club work. So we would probably set up dues. We would make it clear at the outset that the club charged dues; thus when each person joined, he was agreeing to pay dues; thus this conforms to the principle of voluntary consent. Further, since we could not tell in advance what level of dues was required to carry out the purpose of the club, we would probably have the exact level of dues set by majority vote, keeping in mind that each person had the right to quit the club (secede in political terms) at any time for any reason.

Third, this voluntary consent model was exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution. The Constitution granted the Federal Government 17 powers. The idea was that it had those powers and no others. As they said, over and over;, it was a limited government. Certain issues were resolved by majority vote but only after the unanimous consent of everyone agreed that majority vote would apply in this particular case.

For example, an important purpose of government is to go to war. However, it is not realistic to think that every person in the society will agree on every war. Nevertheless, we all want to stay together as a society because we need the protection of an organized society in case of future aggression by evil people (e.g., Hitler, Osama bin Laden). Therefore, this is an issue which the Constitution lists as one of the 17 powers of the Federal Government. Most people, when they have lost a vote on a particular war, will choose to remain in the association (i.e., remain citizens) rather than secede. But in the concept of the Founding Fathers they always have the right to secede if they feel strongly enough. Indeed, at the time of the War of `1812, New England was ready to secede if the Federal Government continued to prosecute the war. The 4 New England states called a convention in Hartford, CT and voted to secede if the Madison Administration enacted a military draft. “Hell no, we won’t go” is a long American tradition. Earlier in the war Madison called out (federalized) the New England militia. The New England governors and congressmen pointed out that the militia could be called out only for purposes within the country (“to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions” Art. I, section . They could not be sent across a national border.

When Madison ordered the New England troops across the Canadian border, they refused to go. This led to the defeat of the American invasion force and is the reason that Canada is an independent country today. New England’s right to succeed was accepted by all the other states, and the New England militia were never punished for their disobedience.

In a similar manner, the western part of the state of Virginia seceded from Virginia just prior to the Civil War because they did not want to fight a war for slavery. Thus was formed the state of West Virginia. Even Lincoln, who was in principle opposed to secession, accepted the West Virginia secession.

As a result of the Civil War, the nation accepted an anti-secession viewpoint, but this represents nothing more than the evil of Abraham Lincoln and the general failure of the pro-liberty movement of the time. Certainly Lincoln’s viewpoint had no support from the Founding Fathers.

Fourth, the voluntary consent model and the concept that the powers of government were limited were explicitly affirmed during the adoption of the Bill of Rights. In answer to an objection by Hamilton (who correctly foresaw the possibility of such people as the modern social democrats) James Madison proposed an amendment as follows:

“The exceptions here or elsewhere in the Constitution, made in favor of particular rights, shall not be so construed as to diminish the just importance of other rights retained by the people, or as to enlarge the powers delegated by the Constitution; but either as actual limitations of such powers, or as inserted merely for greater caution.”

James Madison, speech in the House of Representatives on June 8, 1789,
Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, (Washington, Gales & Seaton, 1834), Vol. I, p. 439.

In simple words, if the Constitution does not give the Government permission to do something, then it can’t. But if the Constitution doesn’t explicitly say that the people have a certain right, then they still have it. Powers limited. Rights unlimited. End of story. Madison’s proposal was divided into two parts and voted into the Bill of Rights as the 9th and 10th amendments.

Now what does this mean? To take a few simple examples, the Constitution does not give the Government power to pass health care legislation. Therefore, all such legislation, be it Medicare/Medicaid or the current Obama monstrosity, is unconstitutional. Since it is unconstitutional, it is null and void and has no power. It is not a law. If you are a juror, your obligation on the jury is to vote in accordance with the fact that the above legislation is not law. The same is true for social security and for all of the wars unconstitutionally declared by Presidents since Harry Truman. You also have a moral obligation to vote against any candidates who violate the Constitution and work toward the impeachment of such officials.

Fifth, the modern social democratic position (that everything should be decided by majority vote) simply goes against the most basic common sense. It is one of the characteristics of evil people that they will load the game in their own favor and never make the slightest attempt to be fair. A good example of this is the policy adopted by the New Deal to destroy food, first by plowing under crops and later by simply paying farmers not to grow it. The argument for this policy is that it will make the whole society richer. In the same way, the Wall Street bailout bill of 2008 was defended by the argument that without it the financial system would have collapsed. However, Wall Street firms have been going bankrupt pretty much since Wall Street began, and each time the financial system came back stronger. These were not serious arguments. The people who made them did not believe them. They are not genuine disputes. Further, the party which championed these positions (in both cases the Democrats) openly declared that its objective was to rob. (It said, “rob from the rich and give to the poor,” but it always robbed from the poor and gave to the rich.)

Cicero pointed out that even to propose such legislation destroyed social harmony. If I can claim that you have to give me money and that you have to submit the issue to majority vote, then I will obviously keep manufacturing false issues with the idea of stealing your money. Thomas Babington Macaulay contrasts the heroic behavior of the newly republican Romans of 510 B.C. with “modern” Rome after the welfare state had come in:

The struggle for America

Several weeks ago I made the statement that Barack Obama was a Nazi. Some commenters responded in the vein of: ‘Well, Katz, I know that people get emotional and make extreme statements in discussing politics. But in this case I think you went over the line in regard to what is acceptable. In the U.S. today, you don’t call someone a Nazi. You just don’t do it.’ (When I used single quotes, I mean to indicate that this is not an exact quote. However, the spirit of it is accurate.)

So I want to say that I do not do this sort of thing. I do not make extreme statements that I do not mean and for which I have to apologize at a later time. Just the opposite, I am very careful with my words and make every effort to be accurate. Barrack Obama is a Nazi. He is proving it day after day, and unless a great many people wake up and wake up very rapidly the very existence of America may be at stake.

In all countries which have repudiated liberty over the past 2000 years (and that is the large majority of them), there have always been two parties. These are formed on the basis of the body-soul dichotomy, and this is the assumption that the universe is divided into two aspects: the world of the body and the world of the spirit. The first applies to everything generally covered by the word “materialistic.” The second applies to everything spiritual. And the assumption (never questioned in these cultures) is that the materialistic and the spiritual are in an eternal war which can never be resolved and must last for eternity.

Other names for these parties are the party of hate and the party of love, or the political right and the political left. Such parties have arisen in every one of these societies of which we have knowledge.

These two parties rose (most recently) in early 20th century Europe. Speaking of Europe as a whole, the party of love was called socialism; the party of hate was called fascism.. Within Germany, the party of love was the Social Democratic Party. The party of hate was the National Socialist, or Nazi, Party.

As noted, these two parties have existed in most societies for most of history. The names have changed with time and place, but their essential natures have not. In the French Revolution, there were the supporters of the king (right) and the sans-cullottes (left). In first century A.D. Judea, there were the Essenes (left) and the Zealots (right). Through the Middle Ages there were the aristocratic class (right) and the peasants (left). But always the two classes have existed; and have fought with each other. And while there have been many occasions when one or the other appeared to be victorious, in the end the “defeated” party rose again and the battle renewed.

It is characteristic of this battle between left and right that most people who have a body-soul dichotomy start out on the political left and then switch over to the right. Indeed, it sometimes seems that the left is trying to gain recruits for the right. A good example of this is the current homosexual marriage issue, which is being pushed by the left. If homosexuals did exist and if it were possible for them to marry each other, then why push such an issue which seems almost deliberately designed to anger the average person and drive him over to the right? Is the left deliberately trying to lose?

The answer to that is yes, the left is deliberately trying to lose. The parties of left and right, while bitter enemies on the surface are, when viewed historically, a larger whole. And what the left is trying to do is secure the victory of the right.

If you study the American left from early in the 20th century, then it is easy to see that it is based on the Social Democratic Party of Germany. You have probably heard a conservative talk show denounce the left as socialist. Well, if they are socialist, then they are a very peculiar type of socialist. They don’t seem to pay much attention to collective farming. And there is not a lot of interest in government ownership of the means of production (such as steel, railroads, etc.). Rather there is a fanatic support for two issues: government provided retirement “insurance” (social security) and “free” government medical care (socialized medicine).

What is the key to these two issues? Both of them were championed by the German Social Democratic Party in the late 19th century. Socialized medicine was voted in circa 1881, and social security was voted in circa 1890. The point is that Germany was both geographically and culturally inbetween the socialist east (Russia and Eastern Europe) and the free west (America and Britain). Thus the Germans fought out the battle between socialism and free enterprise and reached a compromise. The essence of the compromise was that health care and retirement (and a few other items) were to be socialized, but the rest of the economy was to be based on free enterprise. There are some exceptions to this, but it is on the whole accurate.

Many times I have heard a conservative argue that the Democratic program implies socialism and make dire predictions in that direction. The conservative’s logic is impeccable, but his prediction never seems to come true. The explanation is that his Democratic adversary is not motivated by logic. He is motivated by what a(n older) psychologist called significant others. (This has no relation to the term “significant other” used to designate a certain type of sexual partner.)

Significant others are the important people in the world (from one’s point of view). Significant others are anybody who is anybody. If you are in the New York theater crowd, then your significant others would probably be famous stars and other aspiring actors/actresses. If you are in the political world and have taken several courses given by Social Democratic professors, then your significant others are politicians and political activists who think like you.

What is scary is that we all know where German Social Democracy wound up. The Social Democrats were the party of love. One of these Social Democrats, a young man named Adolf Hitler, led the way and turned Germany from the country of love to the country of hate.

I have previously explained why an advocate of the philosophy of love will ultimately wind up on the side of hate (not every time but in the majority of cases). No matter what one’s intention, emotions have a mind of their own. If someone is unjust to you, then you will feel hate in response. The person who has a personal philosophy of love cannot make his hate go away. He is an animal, and in certain circumstances (like a dog) hate is his natural response. What he does instead is to pretend that the hate does not exist.

The result is that the hate goes underground where it is not identified rationally and where it smolders. Over and over, this person is treated unjustly, and each time he suppresses his hate. Finally, he is walking around with an enormous amount of hate, like a pot of boiling water with the lid tightly tied down.

The young Adolf Hitler was a struggling artist living in the Bohemian section of Vienna. He was a Social Democrat in politics. He was trying to uplift the world by producing great art. He was a vegetarian (love animals, don’t eat them). There are many thousands of people like him in Greenwich Village, Manhattan and other left-wing enclaves to this day. They are universally considered gentle and loving people.

Then one day Hitler attended a meeting of the young Nazi Party. It spoke to the huge reservoir of hate which had built up inside him during his Social Democratic period. In one week, he went from extreme left to extreme right. (without spending a day in the center).

If you have seen any Hollywood WWII movies, you know that the Nazi is invariably presented as almost a stick figure. He moves his arms and legs in an absurd, rigid manner as though he were a puppet instead of a human being. The reason is that this Nazi had previously spent time as a Social Democrat. As a Social Democrat, he had an explicit philosophy of love, but as the hate built inside of him, he had a harder and harder time suppressing his true emotion. He went through a period when, still possessing an outward philosophy of love, he was experiencing intense feelings of hate. In this stage, he learned to keep his emotions inside of him. He became a suppressive person, meaning a person who suppresses the emotions he is feeling. Such suppression gradually became automatic, and it was carried over to his Nazi period.

Two things are important to understand. 1) Our society has absolutely no concept of what is going on here. Human behavior is like any other subject. If you understand it, then you can make correct predictions. Just as an astronomer can predict an eclipse of the sun, then you can predict (most of) the behavior of your husband, wife or friends. But when your predictions go significantly wrong, then it shows that your understanding is badly mistaken. A good example is Jim Jones and his Guyana commune. Jones was being praised as a spiritual person and a man to be admired and emulated at the precise time he was turning his commune into a prison camp. In a similar manner, European intellectuals were full of praise for Germany about 1900. At that time, America was being insulted as the country of rugged individualism (intended as an insult). This meant that Germany was the country of love, and Americans had no love. Could any judgement be more mistaken?

2) The party of love (the left wing of the Democratic Party) is full of individuals who are full of hate. Usually they will not admit to themselves the large amount of hate they carry around. But if they get a chance to kill a few million people, they will jump at it. I have previously mentioned Obama’s science czar, who is on record as favoring doping the water supplies of the nation so as to sterilize large portions of the population (without the public’s knowledge or consent).

Now if I called this gentleman a Zealot, you would not understand me because you have not been educated as to the evils committed by the Zealots. If I went into the corresponding evils of the various right-wing parties of the Middle Ages, it would roll off your back because you have not been educated. But the last time a political movement changed from left to right and then began to perpetrate its barbarities, we called them Nazis. If you don’t see the same potential for evil, then the only issue is your ignorance of politics and human nature.

If we study the rise of Hitler, what is absolutely amazing is the willingness of his victims to meekly walk into his killing machine. Czechoslovakia was unable to fight. They were sold out by Chamberlain and by the French. But Poland, instead of uniting with the Czechs in a pro-Slavic alliance, attacked Czechoslovakia from the east. What was Poland’s “reward?” She became Hitler’s next victim. Then the Russians, instead of sticking by Poland in a pro-Slavic alliance, helped Hitler by attacking her from the east. Did it help them? Did Hitler appreciate it and say, “Thank you?” No, Russia became his next victim. Meanwhile, the French left was preaching pacifism. Soldiers sympathetic to the left did not want to fight when the Germans attacked in 1940 and simply went through the motions. In the spring of 1939, when the Germans launched phase 2 of their conquest of Czechoslovakia, virtually all German troops were pulled over to the east. The French (who had an alliance with Czechoslovakia) could have walked in and captured the Ruhr Valley, which contained virtually all of Germany’s war-making potential. The German army would have been paralyzed. Knowing this, some German generals had arranged a plan to depose Hitler and sue for peace with the French. It was only Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich which made the German victory apparent and persuaded the German generals to call off their plan. In other words, Hitler would have been a minor figure who ruled Germany for a few years and then was overthrown by his own people. Hardly anyone today would know his name, and WWII would never have occurred.

And what happened to the people of those countries who knuckled under to Hitler? They were treated like animals. They were thrown into slave labor camps. They were murdered in death camps. From 1939-1945, Europe was transported back into the 9th century.

You have to understand that man has free will. If you fight for justice in your own country in your own time, history tells us that you can get it. If you don’t fight, then you will be herded up by the kind of savages Obama is now appointing and calling czars. You will disappear, and no one will care that you were ever alive.

If you remember “Dr. Death,” (Jack Kevorkian) of the 1990s, some new information has come to light about him and the media treatment of his killings: (Rasmussen Reports, 9-10-09)
As for the risible notion that his [Jack Kevorkian’s] victims were terminally ill, well, it collapses in the harsh light of a New England Journal of Medicine analysis of the autopsies of 69 Kevorkian cases in Oakland County, Mich. The report found that three-quarters of Kevorkian's "patients" were not terminally ill. Indeed, five showed no evidence of disease.
That's right, folks, he [Kevorkian] engaged in what Cavuto called "mercy killings" for healthy people.
Deborah J. Saudners, “You Really Don’t Know Jack,”
Cavuto is Neil Cavuto, managing editor of Fox Business News. “Mercy killing” was the German word for the first government murders of sick people (intended to save money for the German socialized medicine system). This killing machine was later expanded into the Holocaust.

Given that Obama has a radical body-soul dichotomy, the question is, is he on the left or the right. From its inception to January 2009, the American social democrats have been on the left, e.g., Jimmy Carter types. But the first thing that Obama did, upon taking office, was to ram through the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, a Government agency with the assignment of saving money on health care. This was done with lightening speed, and obedient Democratic congressmen and senators voted for it without reading it. Saving money sounds like a good idea, but there is no country with socialized medicine which has been able to save money on health care except by murdering people. Germany led the way in the 1930s, and their murder program turned into the Holocaust. Barack Obama is a monster. He has an enormous amount of hate inside him, and he is capable of atrocities of which we have no concept – unless the American people can rally to stop him

...And the West with its luxury and concomitant hysterical idealism (i.e. lying to ourselves with delusion) will collapse with the anthetical traits.


Cute fantasy definition. Now how about reality?

It is so easy for the powers-that-be to herd you cattle. They make some implausible cathedral definition or concept that appeals to your spoiled brat lives where you think everything can be perfected, non-violent, harmless, and antiseptic. Why be repulsed by what is natural? Would you rather nature didn't exist so you weren't born?

Imagine what happens to the West when the suppressed reality comes to reality of chaos, rioting, looting, hunger, etc.. I will be watching with my popcorn from far away on Ted Turner's CNN (and so will he).

The true story of Christmas

If you study western society for the past 400 years, then it is hard to find an age in which people have talked so much about love and done (or felt) so little about it as our present time.

Now that I have studied history I know that there have been large scale movements for love and/or peace which have swept both western culture and probably much of the world and then have been followed by mass barbarism of a kind which is barely conceivable. Germany from 1880 to 1945 is my favorite example. Jim Jones is a smaller American example. Whenever we find in history a mass movement for love, we find it followed by an explosion of hate and violence, and it is always the people loudest in their profession of love who are guilty of the greatest atrocities.

The cause of this pseudo-love (at least in Western culture) is Christianity. People right up to the present day are taken in by social movements preaching love and then explode into hate precisely because (ignoring their own real feelings) they believe that somehow, somewhere it is possible to establish a society where people love each other provided that everyone just tries...

The phrase political economy was used in the late Middle Ages because the aristocracy used government to rob from the people and redistribute wealth to itself. Of course, the medieval aristocracy did not want to admit that this was what they were doing. If you have the guns, knives and battle-axes on your side, not only can you rob the other guy, you can make him repeat all kinds of lies about what a nice guy you are.

However, upon deeper reflection the medieval aristocrats did not have as many guns, knives and battle axes as they thought. They did win most of their battles through most of the Middle Ages, but then the day came when their world came to an end.

In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine had gone to France preaching democracy and liberty. When the king of France made the mistake of summoning the representatives of the nation to debate an important national issue (the budget), Jefferson told the common people that they, not the clergy or feudal lords, were sovereign. A century earlier, King Louis XIV had told the people of France, “The State, it is I.� But in 1789, the people said to the King, “�We are sovereign.� And soon the King and the Aristocracy did not have so many battle-axes as they had thought. Indeed, now it became apparent that the people outnumbered the aristocrats by 100 to 1. In a short time, the aristocrats had been driven out of the country, France had become a democracy, and the King, who had chopped off so many of the heads of the people of France, had his own head chopped off as well.

This, of course, is a strange conclusion. We started with the observation that the aristocracy was abusing the people of France for economic reasons. And now we are forced to the conclusion that, although this had been the normal practice for 1,000 years, the power of the aristocracy was very limited. As noted, they were outnumbered by 100 to 1. How could this happen?

The answer is very simple. Indeed, it is an old cliché, something so hackneyed and old fashioned that everyone overlooks it.

THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD.

And indeed, so inured have people become to this important truth that they have failed to notice that it explains most of the great battles of history. For example, it was taken for granted prior to 1789 that aristocrats could easily defeat a peasant army. But that was the time when the pen (wielded by the priests) was on the side of the aristocracy. By the 1780s, the pen was wielded by enlightenment intellectuals, who were on the side of the people.

You all know of Napoleon’s victories. But you have been told (by lying historians) that these victories were won by Napoleon’s military genius. Not so. Napoleon won most of his victories from 1795-1812. And this was the period when the ideology of the day favored democracy and the rights of man. However, as time went by, Napoleon started listening to sycophantic intellectuals (who were telling him that he was a genius). At the time of his early victories, the Austrian and Prussian armies he faced had no freedom in their own countries. These soldiers knew that, if they lost the war, they would get more freedom. (A good example of this was the fact that, when the French conquered Karl Marx’s home town, they abolished communism and substituted private property.)

By 1815, Marx’s home town had abolished communism, and it was apparent to most Frenchmen that Napoleon had ambitions to make himself a hereditary dictator. That is the real reason that Napoleon met his Waterloo.

Using these principles, that most actions of most human beings are motivated by the desire for wealth and that the pen is mightier than the sword, we can understand the military and political events of the past 2 centuries. In the early 20 th century, a new group of intellectuals arose, a group which, like the medieval priests, wanted to steal from the common people and give to the aristocrats. However, these intellectuals did not imitate the medieval priests. Just the opposite, they pretended an ultra-modern, scientific orientation.

Take, for example, John Maynard Keynes. He called his economic theory “the new economics.� However, Keynesian economics is nothing more than mercantilism, which was precisely the old economics. Keynes is famous for introducing mathematics into his economics (although he did not know any mathematics). That is, Keynes was a con artist, and the mathematical language is intended to intimidate the reader and frighten him into giving in to anything that Keynes said.

In previous articles, I have chronicled the different predictions that various prominent Keynesians have made at various times. There was John Kenneth Galbraith’s prediction, in early 1955, that the stock market was going to re-enact another 1929, Henry Kaufman’s prediction, in 1982, that the country was about to suffer an important “depression,� another “depression� (by Ravi Batra) in 1990 and an incredible bull market (“DJI 36,000� by 2002-4). And, of course, to this very day believers in the N.Y. Times prediction of a “great recession� in 2008 sit and wait for the enormous decline in prices (which will never come), just as they waited for the reenactment of the 1929 crash in 1955.

The modern intellectuals follow the same tactic as the medieval intellectuals. They constantly fabricate new arguments to justify robbing from the average American. In turn, they are rewarded by these fraudulent intellectuals.

In words of one syllable, the modern intellectuals are continually lying to the people. Like any other liar it is necessary for them to continually invent new lies. This has all happened before. For example, the lies of the medieval aristocracies included the claim that God had had a child via a mortal woman; however, the inference was to be avoided that God was a male. A powerful argument in favor of this was that, if you didn’t agree with it, then they would torture you to death.

...If you want to function properly in today’s world, you must see reality as it is.

Fifth, if you are going to understand the history of the United States, and the world, in the 20th century, it is very important to understand the story of the Depression. The story is absolutely incredible. In the early 20th century, there was a major world war (WWI), and all nations used this as the occasion for massive depreciations of their currency. In Germany, from 1914 to 1923, the Wholesale Price Index rose from 1 to 726 billion. In America, things were much better, and from 1914-1919 the Wholesale Price Index only rose from 1 to 2. However, this led to a sharp drop in the real wages of the average working man which became a political issue.

The Republicans had the correct answer to this issue. The exact same thing had happened in the Civil War. At that time, Congress moved to reduce the quantity of money so that the dollar restored its tie to gold and returned to its pre-war value. As the Republicans of 1919 put it, "What this country needs is a good 5¢ cigar." Cigars had cost 5¢ in 1914 and had risen (along with the general price level) to 10¢ in 1919. What the Republicans were trying to achieve was a general reduction in prices back to their 1914 level. Since prices were the same in 1914 as they had been in 1793, this was simply a return to the normal way of doing things. Prices fell sharply in 1921 and again in 1930-33. By '33, the Republican program had been achieved, and prices in America were back to their 1793 level.

In the teens and '20s in America, pretty much everyone saved. They put their money in the savings bank and received 5% interest per year. If you do the compound interest calculation, then money saved over a 50 year working lifetime will multiply in amount by about 4¼ times. (The first year's savings multiply by 11 times, the last year's savings only grow by 5% and the middle years grow proportionally.) This multiplication is what makes it possible to retire. As a result, in America virtually everyone saved. What the Democrats did from 1914-1919 was to cut the value of the working man's savings in half.

What the Republicans wanted to do was to restore the value of the working man's savings. By bringing the value of the currency back up to its 1914 level, this was accomplished. That is, the Republicans were the party of the working man.

A depression is a period during which the vast majority of the people become poorer. A recession is similar in kind but smaller in degree. Defined in this way it would seem quite unreasonable to have recessions or depressions. After all, the world is made up of many different kinds of people. They differ in many ways, and the concept that they would all either get richer at the same time or poorer at the same time is somewhat strange. There can be some exceptions to this. For example, the early 1940s were a depression in the United States (and most countries). You could not buy a new house or a new car. You could not buy more than 3 gallons of gasoline per week. Important food items, such as butter and meat, were rationed.

Yet, as incredible as it sounds, Mr. Krugman, as well as the whole economic establishment is unaware of the depressions of the 1940s and places, not merely an ordinary depression, but what they call a great depression in the 1930s.

I have frequently pointed out that the period 1930-34 saw a rise in meat consumption in the U.S. from 129 lbs per person to 144 lbs per person (Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, series G-881). Similarly, there was a rise in butter consumption and a fall in margarine consumption. At the same time, people started giving more to charity. These actions are hardly the behavior of people getting poorer.

The same source also gives the annual earnings for an average worker for 1932 as $1120. This may not seem like much, but one must keep in mind that prices in 1932 were much lower than today. At that time, the U.S. was on the gold standard. A dollar was defined in law as 1/20 oz. of gold. That is, in 1932 the wage for the average American was 56 oz. of gold. By 1974, the average wage was down to 40 oz. of gold, and today the average wage is 32 oz. In short, America is poorer today than it was during what Paul Krugman calls the "great depression."

That is, as prices fell due to the Republican policy of restoring the currency, wages also fell but more slowly. Real wages rose. Keynes openly admitted this. Further, virtually all working men had a cushion from the rise in value of their savings. They were able to live off this cushion and hold out for higher wages. This is the reason for the high unemployment of that period.

It is interesting to note that there was a period similar to "The Great Depression" in the 1870s. The correct term is credit contraction, and one of these occurred in 1873-79. There was a period of high unemployment, but it only lasted for a few years. The party in power was not blamed for anything, and economics did not become a political issue. The Republicans were reelected in 1876. That is, people understood that it was the job of government to protect people's rights, and that every time a government tries to make its country richer the country gets poorer. What was the result? This period in America, the late 19th century from 1866-1896, was the period of the greatest economic growth in the history of any country in the world. One after another great new inventions flowed from the minds of the country's smartest men, and these were quickly mass produced for the convenience of the average person. The electric light, the telephone, the automobile came from this period. It was the great age of the railroad and saw the beginnings of crude oil. The average working man saw a 90% rise in his real wages. This compares with the last 37 years over which the wages of the average working man declined. It was a period when the country was on the gold standard and during which prices declined. An average item which cost $1.00 in 1866 was down to 30¢ by 1896.

This wonderful system was overthrown in the early 20th century by a massive outpouring of lies These lies came thick and fast, one on top of the other, like the layers of an onion, so that I call them the onion of lies. The first lie in the onion was that J.P. Morgan was on the political right and Woodrow Wilson was on the political left. In fact, both Morgan and Wilson cooperated to slip in the third central bank. (The Democratic platform of 1912 promised," We oppose the so-called Aldrich bill or the establishment of a central bank") Morgan (the Republican) financed Teddy Roosevelt's 1912 campaign so that he could divide the Republican vote and act as a spoiler, allowing Wilson to win the 1912 election. Wilson campaigned against Morgan and then, as soon as he was elected, hastened to do Morgan's bidding.

F.D.R. was a Wall Streeter, a Gordon Gecko type. He had seen how the central bank's expansion of money and credit during WWI and again in 1922-28 had made the stock market go up and had made the real wages of the working man go down. His intent was to continue this policy of robbing from the poor and giving to the rich. On his first day in office, he rammed a bill through the new congress to abolish the gold standard and give commercial bankers the privilege to create money. They have been creating money for the past 76 years.

Since F.D.R.'s intent was to rob from the working man, this had to be covered over. How can you put a good face on low wages? Well low wages reduce unemployment. So the New Deal's mantra became "unemployment." And that has been the story of the past 76 years, a pseudo-Democratic Party which robbed from the poor to give to the rich and which won the votes of the poor by screaming "unemployment." Matched with the scheming Democrats was a clueless Republican Party which was dragged along with every lie and often did the Democrats' work (e.g., Nixon's price and wage controls in 1971).

An average 30-year period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the real wages of the average working man advance by 60%. As noted, the one 30-year period when prices declined saw real wages advance by 90%. As prices started to rise, the wage advance slowed. For example, in the 30-year period 1942-1972 real wages rose by only 40%. Then as the rate of price increase accelerated, real wages turned down, and to this day 1972 is the high point for real wages in American history.

Note that, as the last tie to the gold standard was cut (1971) and the money supply began to accelerate to the upside (Reagan,/Bush, Sr.) both the stock market and corporate profits exploded to the upside. Under the gold standard, from 1885 to 1933, stock prices were flat. But since the abolition of gold, the country has seen its greatest stock market rise in history. F.D.R.'s program of robbing from the working man to benefit Wall Street and the bankers is in full swing, and Ronald Reagan was one of its greatest disciples.

Indeed, the only thing which seems to have changed is that the evil has become more blatant. Mr. Krugman, the whole New York Times and the rest of the nation's media supported Henry Paulson's program to openly steal $750 billion from the American people and give it to Goldman Sachs. Paulson didn't even pretend to be helping the poor.

Howard S. Katz holds a BA in mathematics from Harvard University.

"...To combat (the) deliberate misinformation (put out by the establishment and the media) I have set up a financial newsletter, the One-handed Economist.  I refused to take economic courses at Harvard when I attended in the late 1950s and instead studied Austrian theory economics on my own.

The principal cause of the mass wrong headedness of the investing public can be traced back to 1948.  In that year, the Manhattan Bank bribed Harvard University to appoint John Kenneth Galbraith to a chair of economics.  This was part of a campaign by a group of New York bankers.  They had recently acquired the special privilege to create money (the Emergency Banking Bill of 1933, enacted March 9 of that year).  Now they were promoting a crackpot economic theory which said that the creation of money out of nothing is the road to plenty for a society.              

                Well, if printing money makes us rich, then counterfeiting ought to be legalized.  This has been tried many times in history, but it always makes the country poor.  That is, it makes the people with the special counterfeiting privilege rich, but it makes the rest of the country poor.              

                 Harvard University did not call it a bribe, of course.  They called it a donation.  But it was a “donation” with a catch.  Harvard had to appoint John Kenneth Galbraith to the economic chair created by the “donated” money.  You see, Harvard had not intended to appoint Galbraith to anything.  He was one of these paper money crackpots.  And he didn’t know any economics..   But the money was too much to resist.  Galbraith pretended to hate the bankers but preached the employment of their paper money privilege.  The Federal Reserve bank, together with the private bankers, embarked on a program of creating money out of nothing, which led to a massive increase in U.S. prices.  From 1793 to 1933, prices in America were stable.  An average item cost the same in 1933 has it had cost 140 years before.  Since that time, average prices have risen by a factor of 17 times.  This leads to a transfer of wealth from poor to rich which far outweighs the transfer from rich to poor via New Deal tax policy.              

                 The action of the Manhattan Bank in 1948 was part of a larger campaign by a few New York banks to take over the teaching of economics in America.  They infiltrated their “economists” into the most prestigious universities, and the smaller schools rushed to imitate the leaders.  Soon there was hardly a college/university in America which taught real economics.              

                  The result of this is that there has been a half century of economic students who have been “educated” in the crackpot idea that our society can get on the road to plenty (“stimulate the economy” is the common phrase) if it only allows the bankers to create money out of nothing.  These miseducated students then graduated with degrees and got jobs in. various sectors of our economy as economic reporters, columnists and advisors.   At the drop of a hat, these “experts” beat the drums for more paper money.              

                  For example, you have heard of the taxpayer bailout of Wall Street of 2008.  This was a lie.  The money which went to Wall Street was not raised by taxes, and there was no tax increase in the bailout bill.  The extra money was created out of nothing (a flat one trillion dollars).  The average American will pay for this, but he will not pay via the IRS.  He will pay as prices rise for virtually all goods and services due to the extra money in circulation.            

                  And now we come to the reason the average person cannot make money in the financial markets.  To justify the Wall Street bailout, the crackpot economists (who now parade around as experts with long titles) started to preach the danger of a second Great Depression, i.e., a massive decline in prices which would have similar effects to the period of the 1930s.  The propaganda for this was so thick that you could cut it with a knife.  Of course, there is not going to be any Great Depression or Great Recession or anything to do with a decline in prices.  You can’t just create a trillion dollars out of nothing.  This has increased the money supply by (at this writing) 70%.  And it is just the beginning.  More such increases are planned.  Everywhere you turn, in every newspaper, on the nightly TV news, in every magazine and source of opinion, you are being told that prices are going down.  But in fact what is about to happen is that prices will be going up, going up aggressively and massively, going up as never before in American history, back to 1780.

The case for killing Granny

I was an opponent of Medicare/Medicaid in 1965. One of my arguments was that taxing the people and giving the money to government to pay for health care would destroy the normal incentives which keep costs under control. All of a sudden every patient would want more money spent on him. Every issue which pertained to cost would be resolved in favor of higher cost. The patient, who prior to 1965 tried to keep costs down, after ‘65 tried to raise costs higher (because it gave him the feeling that he was getting free goods via the government). As health care costs rose, this argument was driven home again and again. First, Medical spending as a percent of GDP in the U.S. rose from 5% to 7%. Nobody complained. Then it rose to 10%. Again no complaints. Then 12%. Then 15%. Now it is 17%. And suddenly we have a “crisis.”

When Lyndon Johnson rammed Medicare/Medicaid through a Democratic Congress in 1965, he had studied European health care systems. He knew that all of them killed people. All of these systems were imitating the German socialized medicine system, and Germany led the way by killing people who were expensive to treat.

Since all of the propaganda in favor of state-sponsored killing is being framed in terms of voluntary death (somehow never called suicide) and withholding of care, let us be precise in our language. To assist someone in committing suicide is assisted suicide. To withhold treatment from someone who expects treatment and to whom you have promised treatment is killing, but it is not necessarily murder.

Given this terminology, in the 1930s the Germans – who had instituted socialized medicine in 1880 – decided it was getting too expensive. First, they tried withholding care. This was a half-hearted effort and was given up rather quickly. Then came the program of actively killing those most expensive to treat. This, of course, is state sponsored murder. That is, the government, formed (in part) to protect the right to life, was now engaged in cold-blooded murder. One after the other, European countries imitated Germany, and Germany kept expanding its murder program. More and more people were thrown into the killing machine with less and less connection with the idea of saving money, and finally the killing program became known as the Holocaust.

The other European countries did not take things to the extreme of Germany. They don’t provide the health care they promise. They waste an enormous amount of the money which is spent on health care. How far each of them goes beyond mere pulling of the plug to active murder can only be determined by a careful study. But perhaps we can get a sense of things by looking at Canada (which in this regard acts like a typical European country). When a Canadian gets sick and goes to his national health care system, the system is very anxious to please: “Let us see. First we need a diagnosis. Go here, there and the other place and take this, that and the other test.” So you go here and there only to be told, “6 month wait for this test; 9 month wait for that test.” But now you are in the middle of things, and complaining would only slow everything down. So you get your tests. Then a year later you come back to your original doctor, and he tells you, “If we had had this diagnosis a year ago, we could have successfully treated your cancer. However, now you are terminal. Very sorry.”

This is the Canadian (and most European) health care system. After wasting an enormous amount of money on health care, it fails to provide enough resources to give its people the care it has promised. Where is the line where killing slides into murder? Actually it depends on how clearly the people who operate the system know what they are doing. If they are extremely stupid, then I guess they are not murderers.

But one thing can be said in favor of Lyndon B. Johnson. Faced with the killing program of the typical European system, he refused to go that route. He said that the U.S. was a wealthy country and could pay for all the medical care that its citizens needed. He said that the day when health care costs became prohibitively expensive would never come.

On Sept. 21, 2009, Evan Thomas said that that day has come.

So Mr. Thomas, Newsweek, the supporters of Dr. Kevorkian and the vast majority of Democrats in Congress owe us an apology. For the past 4 decades, they have been giving us the party line of Lyndon Johnson. Today they admit that they were wrong. The day has come.

Back in 1965, LBJ looked at the possibility of state sponsored murder and was horrified. He pulled back. He did not deal with the issue and only swept it under the rug, but at least he had the decency to be horrified. What has happened to the American left over the past 44 years is that they are no longer horrified by state sponsored murder.

I have described in this blog how the party of love becomes progressively brutalized and turns into the party of hate. Indeed, there is an inbetween period when such people are committing horrible atrocities and can still convince themselves that they are people of love. I have exhibited the medieval priest, who has used the political power of the Church to have the heretic burned at the stake, coming to the execution and praying loudly for the soul of the heretic. Love in theory, hate in practice. Similarly, the Nazi murders of the 1930s were called “mercy killings.” Why “mercy killings?” Because everyone knew that Germany was the country of love, and if they were killing people, it must have been killing for love.

Well, the party of love here in the United States may not be as bad as the party of love in Germany 80 years ago. But they are cut from the same mold.

What would have happened to the world if there had been no United States of America to rescue it from the Germans? A realistic prospect is not good. In 1941, Hitler had conquered most of Europe. A few small countries remained neutral, but they could be gobbled up any time Hitler felt ready. Britain could not be conquered, but she did not have the strength (alone) to liberate Europe. Without American war materials the Soviet Union was finished. The most likely outcome would have been a Nazi Europe from that day until today.

Well, if the United States goes Nazi, who is there to rescue us?

Keep in mind the nature of the enemy. They start out as the party of love. Gradually hate grows inside of them, but they keep protesting that they are people of love. They become expert at pretending to themselves that they are not feeling what they are feeling. They devise incredible excuses for the most abusive treatment of other human beings, all rationalized in their minds as acts of love.

Quite frankly, I am scared. These people are pure and total evil. They are a danger to everyone they are around. Think of Pol Pot and what he did to his fellow Cambodians. Think of Jim Jones and what he did to his followers. Think of the crazies of the New Left of the 1960s, first handing out flowers to people (the flower children) and then building bombs to kill them.

At this time, the situation is too fluid to make firm predictions. At best, the protest movement being led by people such as Glenn Beck may be successful and lead to a Republican sweep of Congress in 2012 (similar to 1994). At worst, the majority of the American people may be converted to those political positions which, in the 1930s in Germany, were considered Nazi.

But there are some general principles which can guide us through these difficult times. First, the party of love/hate is basically full of cowards. They attack the weak and cozy up to the strong. This is blatantly obvious from studying the Nazis. As American troops raced across Europe in 1945 into the heartland of Germany, the Germans kept diverting troops to crush small resistance movements. They seemed to take more delight in crushing the weak than in actually saving their country.

Second, I have been a political activist for 40 years. I have come up against the S.E.C. and the I.R.S., and I have sued the U.S. Government several times. Never have I been singled out for fighting. Most often it was easier for them to give in to me and take advantage of those who were too gutless to fight back. When I contemplate the evil which is going on in America today, I am frightened. I am so frightened that I dare not give in or go along. I am so frightened that I know I must fight.

I reject the idea of sacrificing myself for my principles. My principles are to save me and make my life come out better, not to get me sacrificed. If your principles can’t do this for you, then what good are they? This is why I stick to my principles.

The most successful foreign policy in American history was that conducted by Miles Standish, the military leader of the Pilgrims. After the terrible sickness of the winter of 1620-21, the Pilgrims were down to 50 survivors. Eliminating women, children and those too old, Standish probably had an “army” of 20 men. His one advantage was the fire-stick (a primitive gun), a weapon with which the Indians were not familiar and which terrorized them.

Standish made a treaty of friendship with Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoag Indians (who occupied what is today Cape Cod, Plymouth and Bristol Counties, Massachusetts) Massasoit was afraid of the Narragansetts, who lived in what is today Rhode Island, and he figured that the fire-sticks of the white man would be a useful counter in a war with the Narragansetts.

Shortly after the treaty was made, Massasoit was attacked (as it turned out by a dissident faction of his own tribe). Standish rushed troops to his aid. (He must have sent something like half his “army.” Massasoit was saved. When the other Indian tribes of Southern New England saw what good allies the white man was, 9 tribes (all except the Narragansetts) sued for treaties of peace and friendship. This solved the Pilgrim’s foreign policy problem, and there was no further conflict with the Indians for more than 50 years.

One of the most important requirements when faced with danger is the ability to act in unison. If you are caught alone, then you are an easy target, and this is likely to encourage aggression. But if you are organized (even for a non-military purpose), this gives you the strength of a united action. (If you study the early mass demonstrations, you can see that they were clearly intended as implying a threat of a riot. The movement for this, that or the other would hold a demonstration. It would be non-violent, but there would most definitely be a threat of violence. The movement’s enemies would see a large group of people in the streets (angry and militant) and would be afraid. Organization is power.

The opposite of this is also true. Compare WWI with WWII. In the first case, Germany’s enemies (Britain, France and Russia) stuck together. The Russian army was a joke. But when the Germans attacked France, then Russia, true to her alliance, sent her troops toward Germany. The Germans made hash of them, but the attack scared the German commanders enough that they diverted troops away from the western theater. This made it possible for the French and British to hold the line at the Battle of the Marne. On the other hand, as WWII approached, Russia and France did not unite. The Germans attacked west and defeated France. And then they turned east and dealt heavy blows against Russia.

In this regard, it may be a very good strategy to join the Free State movement. This is a movement among libertarians to move to New Hampshire. This was intended to create a critical mass of pro-liberty sentiment in what is already the freest state in the Union. As a result of their “live free” philosophy, the people of New Hampshire have a friendly, positive attitude toward others. The biggest traffic problem that occurs is when two cars come to an intersection where only one can pass at a time. Both stop, and each waves the other to go forward. (It is an easily observable fact that in areas of the world where people have an explicit philosophy of love, then they treat each other very badly, and there is a great deal of interpersonal hostility.) If socialized medicine comes to the U.S., then the greatest resistance will occur in New Hampshire. Enforcement will be extremely difficult.

I also feel that the time has come for every adult male in the U.S. to own a gun. Own it and know how to use it. I also expect that this includes adult females. Our social code of respect for others is breaking down, and it is hard to predict the exact events of the future. Of course, the Nazis hope that everyone will walk quietly and peacefully into their ovens, but I hope that the American people have more spunk than that.

However, now the problem has mushroomed far beyond this simple scenario. Formerly, we faced a government which wanted to violate our property rights. But now we face a government which wants to violate our right to life. Obviously the original gold bug strategy is still valid. Owning gold will still protect our property rights. However, now something more is needed.

“Wait Katz,” you say. “This makes no sense to me. I can understand a person who wants to steal from me. It’s immoral, but I can understand his motive. However, I can not understand a person who does not know me yet who wants to kill me.”

This is a good question. Unfortunately history gives us the answer. There are people who don’t know you but who want to kill you. And the prime example occurred about 80 years ago in the country of Germany.

From 1880 to 1920, Germany was the most admired country in Europe. Germany was considered the most “progressive” and the most “civilized” country and received high praise from most of the world’s intellectuals. Germany was the country of love. Then in the 1930s this country began a program of killing. Since Germany was the country of love, this killing had to be killing for love (if such a thing makes any sense) and hence was called mercy killing. This “mercy killing” gradually mushroomed into what we today call the Holocaust and was itself a part of a much larger killing program, which ultimately took the lives of 50 million human beings. The importance of this for America today is that the German mercy killing program evolved directly out of another program. In 1880-81, Germany passed legislation imposing socialized medicine on the country. Over the 50 years from 1880-1930, the cost of the socialized medicine system became so expensive, that the Germans decided to save money by killing those people expensive to treat. So the Germans of that day were not really killing people out of love; on another level, they were killing people to save money. (Note that, after 45 years of Medicare/Medicaid, America seems to have reached the same stage which Germany reached after 50 years of socialized medicine.)

There is another aspect of German history which is important to understand. We all have the image of the brutal tyrant who imposes his will on the people. But history teaches that this is only an image. The ruler who makes his people do what they do not want will either be voted out of office (if democratically elected) or murdered (if he has seized power by force). People cannot be led where they do not want to go. A good example of this is a comparison of Germany vs. Italy during WWII. The Italian people did not like Mussolini. Italian troops surrendered with big smiles on their faces. They would not fight. But German troops fought very well, often to the death. Study the Napoleonic Wars in which German armies were smashed by Napoleon. How different it was in 1940 when the French crumbled before the German onslaught. What had happened in the intervening century-and-a-half?

The answer was that the German people loved Hitler. Their claim that, “Hitler made us do it,” was a blatant lie. (There is a further lie, widespread in the American media, that Hitler was not elected by the German people. In the German election of March 1933, there were 5 parties which received more than 10% of the vote. So it was virtually impossible for any one of them to get an absolute majority. This was the case for every country in Europe. In 1933, the Nazis received a huge plurality, of 44%. Then 2 smaller parties, each of whom received 11%, joined the Nazis in electing Hitler dictator. Altogether, Hitler was the choice of 66% of the German people.)

After Hitler was elected dictator, a wave of pro-Hitler sentiment swept the country. Stores sold little Hitler do-dads. Hitler was embarrassed and put a stop to it. And of course, the German people fought like tigers. They often fought to the death. On the battlefield, there is no way that a commander can force his soldiers to fight. The enemy is already threatening them with death. Over and over in history, armies which do not want to fight break and run or go through the motions. The Germans did not do this. We cannot escape the conclusion that the Germans loved Hitler. Why did they love him? Because they were full of hate. And Hitler gave them a chance to kill people.

Well, what has been happening in this country over the past 80 years is that a group of German professors came here and infiltrated our colleges (particularly the history and government departments). They gave out high grades to attract the laziest and stupidest students. They converted these to their pro-German philosophy and then sent them out into the world to take over the U.S. media. These people are now full of hate. They claim to have a philosophy of love, but the emotion inside them is hate. (Two smaller, but more familiar examples are 1) the New Left of the 1960s, which began with the Flower Children and ended by throwing bombs, trashing cars and assassinating Robert Kennedy and 2) Jim Jones and his Guyana commune, which began preaching love and ended with a mass murder/suicide.)

My answer to your question is that the media and the political left are filled with the students of these German professors. These people preach a sappy, stupid, unreal love in their formal philosophy (just as Hitler did prior to 1919), and are filled with hate in their hearts (which they never admit publicly but which can be seen by their actions). Why would these people want to kill you? Because hate is their primary motive, and they will kill those who put up the least resistance.

If I am scaring you, it is because I am scared. If America turns Nazi, both ourselves and the world are in great danger. Fortunately, the polls show that Obama and his health care bill are extremely unpopular. Hopefully, the Democrats will suffer an overwhelming defeat in the November election, and this nightmare can be put to rest. If not, then we will have to fight. There is no way you can compromise with this evil. There is no way you can mollify it. It can be fought, but you have to decide to fight.

Socialized Medicine

Certainly Obama has moved forcefully in the direction of socialism and fascism. His most shocking action was the deliberate sneaking in of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. This measure was slipped into the economic “stimulus” bill (H.R. 1), and the Democratic legislators voted for it by an overwhelming majority WITHOUT READING IT. When some legislators asked for time to read the bill, Obama pounded on the table and asserted that the “stimulus” bill needed to be enacted immediately, and there was no time to read it. (“Stimulus” is in quotes because to stimulate something means to make it better and more energetic, and the Obama economic measures are going to deal a massive body blow to the American economy. But that is a subject for another time.) The parallel with the Emergency Banking Bill of 1933, enacted March 9, 1933, on the first day of F.D.R.’s administration is too exact for comfort. In that case also, legislation which directly attacked the fundamental rights of the people was rushed through a weak-kneed Congress without being read. I well remember a quote from that period which also applies to this. “We rely on leaders whose fate is lifted to the skies.”

The cover story for the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology is that its purpose is to save money on health care costs. Don’t you want to save money? Of course, the average worker in the health care field is exerting all of his efforts, every day in every way, to see to it that the system spends more money. Dangerous new drugs are approved, and their prices are jacked up. Effective but inexpensive remedies are made illegal, and the doctors who practice them are viciously attacked by the same Government which claims to be trying to lower costs. Health care costs are growing like a brain tumor, AND THIS HAS BEEN TRUE IN EVERY COUNTRY WHICH HAS PRACTICED SOCIALIZED MEDICINE OR ANYTHING RESEMBLING IT. Furthermore, Lyndon Johnson knew this in 1965 when he enacted Medicare/Medicaid. He stated at that time that an undesirable feature of the system was that it always got so expensive that countries practicing it resorted to murdering patients who were expensive to treat. He stated that this undesirable feature could be avoided here because America is a rich country and could afford any amount of medical costs.

So here we are, and the disciples of Lyndon Johnson are telling us that the rise in medical costs is a crisis and SOMETHING must be done about it. Of course it is a crisis, and something must be done about it. That something is the abolition of Medicare/Medicaid. The system is a complete and total failure (as defined by its stated purpose). But that is not Obama’s something.

As noted, many other countries have faced this problem, and the answer is always the same. Cut medical costs by murdering people. Does the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology have a different solution? Of course not. They intend to order doctors to murder their (expensive to treat) patients. Quite frankly, we will not even know when the murdering begins.

In my discussion of Germany, I showed how the Holocaust started with the attempt to murder expensive to treat patients in the German socialized medicine system. Once it started, the Germans found out that (to them) killing was fun. And they began to kill more and more people: first, the political enemies of Hitler, then the Jews and the Gypsies. This is the inner logic of any society which adopts a philosophy of love. It has a conscious and explicit dedication to love. And there is a growing quantity of hate in its heart. Gradually the discrepancy between the words of love and the actions of hate grows larger and larger. The people in this society find that killing is so much fun. This is the exact description of the average left-wing Democrat. If you say to any of these people, now that they have admitted that health care costs are outrageous, abolish Medicare/Medicaid, they will reply, “Oh, no. We can’t do that?”

Why can’t they do that? The U.S. health care system was unsocialized from 1776 to 1965, and Americans had the best health care in the world. The answer is that they like to kill. The system is built on love in theory and hate in practice. Officially, “We provide health care for all our citizens because we are full of love.” Practically, “Well, we don’t like to talk about what the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology does, but it is necessary to make the system work.”

One of the great things about America is that it is made up of many different kinds of people. These people approach life in different ways. They become knowledgeable about different areas of reality, and they become successful in different fields. Thus we can learn from them. I try to keep the attitude that I can learn something from almost anyone, and I am not often disappointed.

I am one of these different people. I was never brought up as a Christian. I am a Jew from a family of Sadducees, and my great ancestors were high priests at the time of King David. They were descended from Moses (via his brother Aaron), and they understood what Moses was trying to teach the world. Of course this kind of stuff is not passed on in the genes. But through a lot of study (and some luck) I have managed to recover my family heritage. When I did, I realized that I have something of great practical importance to teach the people of our time.

We all know that the Greek people, particularly in the city of Athens, flowered in the 6th century B.C. They did great intellectual work. They did great work in architecture and the arts. They rose to become a great power in military terms, and when the Macedonians united them, they established a great empire in that portion of the world. But modern intellectuals, although they acknowledge the greatness of classical Greece, do not have any explanation for why these great events suddenly appeared in one small part of the world for a brief moment in time and then disappeared. Well, here is the explanation.

In the eighth century B.C. the Greek poet Hesiod, obviously influenced by the Five Books of Moses (or as much of the Old Testament as existed at that time) started to preach the concept of justice to the people of Greece. The Israelites of that day were neighbors to people of Greek descent (the Philistines, or Sea People), and they had commercial and cultural ties to Greece proper. Hesiod reinterprets the ancient Greek religion, remodels Zeus so that he sounds like the God of the Old Testament and emphatically preaches the concept of justice. His message is that Zeus is just. He rewards the good and punishes the evil. This idea took about two centuries to penetrate Greek culture, and the great age of classical Greece was the result.

A similar period of cultural success attended the ancient Hebrews when they first learned the concepts of monotheism and justice from Moses directly. They began as a group of slaves or serfs running away from their masters. Soon they acquired their own country. And within the space of 3 centuries (the time of Solomon), they had acquired a small empire in the mid-East and a great deal of wealth.

Clearly there is something going on here. When the people of a culture discover the concept of justice. they rise to greatness. There is a burst of energy. They make both intellectual and practical achievements. They astonish the world. If we examine the roots of our own culture and ask what has made the United States great over the past few centuries, we have to trace things back to the ideas of the Founding Fathers, which in turn are modeled on the ideas of John Locke. But Locke was a Calvinist. What the Calvinists did was to reinterpret the Christianity of that day in terms of the Old Testament and the concept of justice.

The Christians of Calvin’s day were not very nice people. If you dared to disagree with them, on even the most obscure point of theology, they would burn you alive. Death by slow roasting and being buried alive were also popular. If Calvin wanted a chance for his ideas to spread, he needed to employ deception. So he pretended to be a true Christian, going back to original Christianity. This was not so. Calvin’s doctrine that you can’t get to heaven by your own efforts led his followers to disregard the New Testament (and its doctrine of love). All of the thinking up to that time was that the reason for following Christ’s teachings was that this was the way to get into heaven. Once the Calvinists gave this up, they turned to the Old Testament and the doctrine of justice. It is not an accident that William Bradford, the governor of the Pilgrims (through most of their early days) kept a Hebrew diary. Hebrew was at that time a dead language and had last been spoken some 1800 years previously in a small portion of the world some 5,000 miles from where Bradford lived. Yet he had learned the language and was comfortable with it. In general, the Calvinists studied the Jewish people of their day and imitated them. The free economy was imitated from the Jews of the Middle Ages. These people were scattered and were not in control of any government; however, they sometimes managed to find heads of state who let them govern themselves according to Jewish law, and in these cases they set up free economies and became renown for their great (by medieval standards) wealth. This, of course, continues today, and we have the phenomenon of Jewish department stores and Jewish financial people (of whom I am one).

If we ask the reverse question, why did these cultures fall, then we get the reverse answer. Why did the people of Greece sink back into mediocrity? Why did the Roman Empire fall? Indeed, the most recent example of a fall of a great culture occurred only half a century ago. Britain elected the Labor Party. They championed the welfare state. The British pound collapsed, and the British economy sunk to the level of an ordinary European country. In each case, the cause was the abandonment of the concept of justice. Plato influenced the ancient Greeks away from justice, and neo-Platonists, such as Augustine, influenced the 4th century Romans the same way. That was the cause of the Dark Ages. The rise of socialism and fascism in the 20th century was caused by a neo-Platonic group of intellectuals. called the Romantic School, who flourished in German-speaking Europe in the late 19th century, in particular, a special subset of this group who employed what I call the wolf in sheep’s clothing technique.

It is not exactly a secret that modern intellectuals love Plato and hate religion. When I was at Harvard, it was a standing comment that one could not graduate without reading Plato, Marx and Freud. Marx and Freud are neo-Platonists. Yet Plato was a polytheist. That is, he embodied the most irrational form of religion, the form which believes that the gods come down and interrelate to human beings (cure them of diseases, fight with them in wars, have sexual relations with them, perform miracles). This form of religion has been given up by even the least rational people in our modern culture and exists today primarily in the universities.

It is very important to understand that this polytheistic-Platonist view has a very deep body-soul dichotomy. In this view, the world is divided into two elements – called the spiritual, or Dionysian, aspect and the materialistic, or Titanic, aspect. In this view, the spiritual and the materialistic are mutually exclusive. Everything in the universe must belong to one of them, but nothing can belong to both.

What these people call the spiritual aspect are those things relating to consciousness. Much of their spiritual world is fabricated (God, angels, ghosts, etc.). But there are conscious entities in the universe, animals and humans, and these are the closest that exists to a spiritual universe. However, if you look at the human consciousness, it is easy to see that it evolved in response to certain environmental demands. About 10 million years ago, a group of chimpanzees in East Africa (along the Rift Valley) found that they could get food by going into the water. When an animal changes its environment (in this case from trees to water), there is a big increase in intelligence (e.g., elephants and dolphins). By 5 million years ago, these chimps had evolved into the earliest humans (lost body hair, gained greatly in intelligence and adopted an erect posture). Then these primitive humans made another big change in environment. They came back out of the water, not into the trees but onto ordinary land. This caused another big increase in intelligence. This double environmental pressure has led to a highly intelligent animal and a great expansion of the human mind. This is what a Platonist calls spiritual development. But of course this “spiritual” development had a great many practical consequences. It led to the discovery of tools (and later farming) and thus a great increase in the ability to get food. It led to the discovery of new weapons and greater proficiency in war. In our own age, it has led to major improvements in the standard of living. That is, the “spiritual” development of a greater mind has led to a number of “materialistic” developments, thus proving that the two realms are not mutually exclusive.

I have pointed out that in politics this body-soul dichotomy leads to a division between a (spiritual) party of love and a (materialistic) party of practicality. And what history teaches again and again is that these two parties, while opposite on the surface, are identical in their essence. Generally, a party of love (the political left) appears and begins to spread its doctrine. Then some of the members of the party of love convert to a party of hate or practicality (the political right). This is happening in our own day right in front of our eyes, and it has happened repeatedly in history.

The most important example of this occurred in Germany starting in 1875. A new political party was started to bring the country Christian Government. It was called the Social Democratic Party, and it was based on the concept of love. Government was to be like a big father who loved his subjects and gave them something for nothing. The Social Democratic idea was adopted by the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who called it his Christian program. Its two principle features were socialized medicine and social security. This was called the welfare state and proved very popular throughout Europe. “A government based on love” thought all of the people. ‘What a wonderful idea. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this idea before? And government based on love swept nation after nation, but Germany led the way and was highly esteemed in intellectual circles at the turn of the 20th century. Germany was the most advanced, the most progressive, the most idealistic country in the world. Then the country of love began to change. Within the country of love, the Social Democrats were the party of love. The first thing that happened was that a member of the party of love, named Adolf Hitler, changed into a preacher of hate. He became the spokesman for a new party of hate (the Nazis). And gradually, through the 1920s, the party of hate grew stronger and the party of love grew weaker. Finally, the party of hate took power, and Germany went on an orgy of hate and murder that lasted 12 years and killed 50 million human beings.

The modern left is desperate to deny the fact that the original Nazis came from the extreme left. They went from one extreme to the other. The left rewrites this history to pretend that the Nazis came from the German conservative movement. In fact, the conservatives hated Hitler and tried to kill him. The same thing has happened many times in history. A society begins preaching the doctrine of love. Then the people of that society change from love to hate, and the society goes on a rampage of hate and destruction.

That is where we are in regard to the modern day Democratic Party. It is composed of people who have a conscious philosophy of love and who are full of hate. Barack Obama fits this role to a T. He is not the Jimmy Carter-type of leftist who is content to spout philosophy. He has a toughness in him which he keeps under tight control.

What shocked me was his deliberate deception in sneaking over the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology without allowing the Democrats in Congress to read the bill for which they voted. Such legislation was exactly the way that the Holocaust started in Germany. First, they killed those people whom the socialized medicine system considered too expensive to treat. Then they threw in the political enemies of Hitler. Then they threw in the Jews and the Gypsies. All of the countries who imitated Germany and set up socialized medicine also kill people. But they are more moderate about it. They give the impression of being caught in a dilemma whereas the Germans gave the impression that it was a lot of fun.

Of course, killing people is the line which distinguishes the party of love from the party of hate. You can deceive yourself that you are still motivated by love even after you have started killing. The Germans, for example, called the killings of the 1930s “mercy killing,” which we can interpret as “killing for love.” However, an objective historian has to judge people by their actions. Barack Obama wants to kill people. He wants it so much that he engaged in some pretty high pressure political tactics to ram this legislation home (disguising it as part of the economic stimulus package). He has crossed the line between love and hate.

In our historical age, the most recent acting out of this story of love and hate was, as noted, in Germany; the party of love was the Social Democrats, and the party of hate was the Nazis. Therefore, when a member of the party of love in our society crosses the line and joins the party of hate, it is perfectly appropriate to call him a Nazi.

Of interest here is Obama’s recent appointment as Science Czar, John Holdren who, in a 1977 book Ecoscience (San Francisco,W.H. Freeman, 1977) advocated forced abortion, taking babies from their mothers and bringing a World Government police force into the U.S. Wilipedia wrote:

Holdren received worldwide[citation needed] coverage in the news after it has been found that he co-authored a book in 1977 that advanced such controversial birth control methods as mass sterilization through drugs in the water supply and sterilization of criminals [13]. [Wikipedia, article on John Holdren, July 12, 2009.]

A lot of horrific things can be funded that do not require a physical presence.

You are conflating voluntary prostitution with human trafficking.

The last word is yours.

Human trafficking: the trade of humans, most commonly for the purpose of sexual slavery, forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others