President Barack Obama has succeeded in stopping the flood of undocumented aliens from south of the border. Bringing illegal immigration to a halt has had the unfortunate side effect of bringing the American economy to a halt. Or did the reverse happen?

It turns out that the way to make America unattractive to Mexicans is to make America more like Mexico, which has been marked by bailouts, crony capitalism, and economic stagnation for several decades. “The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill,” begins a study by the Pew Hispanic Center. “After four decades that brought 12 million current immigrants—most of whom came illegally—the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed.”

“Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero—and Perhaps Less” notes that the Mexican-born U.S. population rose from below one million in 1970 to reach about twelve million today. The population shift is historic in several ways. The sheer numbers of the northward Mexican migration exceeds past mass migrations to the United States from Germany, Ireland, and points beyond. “The U.S. today has more immigrants from Mexico alone—12.0 million—than any other country in the world has from all countries of the world,” the report points out. Nearly six in ten immigrants to the United States come from Mexico, and about half of those Mexican immigrants are in the country illegally. Most Mexican immigrants, illegal and legal, live in two states: Texas and California. By way of comparison, about one in twenty-five Mexicans living in the United States settled in the northeast.

The numbers tell as much about Mexico as they do about the United States. One in ten Mexicans resides in the United States. The Pew Hispanic Center explains, “No other nation in the world has as many of its citizens living abroad as does Mexico, and 97% of them live in the U.S.” As the northward march has slowed, Mexico’s murder rate climbed and its birth rate descended. Crime, which might seem a plausible cause of departure, seems almost inversely correlated to the historic population shift. Pew cites the birth rate, which declined from 7.3 babies per Mexican woman in 1960 to 2.4 today, as one of several likely ingredients contributing to the migration moratorium. But the birth rate was in decline when the exodus peaked in the ’90s and ’00s.

So what’s causing Mexicans to stay in Mexico—and to return there from the United States?

The Titanic storyline embraced by left-leaning filmmakers, writers, and university professors is right out of “Das Kapital.” To them, the disaster happened because heartless capitalists put profits ahead of human lives. They falsly claim that this is why the Titanic had too few lifeboats. Above all, leftist ideologues vilify the Titanic’s rich first-class passengers. They falsely claim they got first crack at lifeboats – and as a consequence, passengers in second class and steerage died in large numbers. In this interpretation, the Titanic’s legacy was not about women-and-children first. It was about first-class-passengers first.

This false narrative was embraced by filmmaker James Cameron in his 1997 epic “Titanic” — a view that many impressionable movie goers now take as fact.

The truth was quite the opposite; and in other cases the truth continues to be elusive, the facts ambiguous.

The Hollywood narrative makes for good entertainment. But it ignores the fact that many of the Titanic’s first-class passengers – the “1 percenters” of their day – voluntarily went down abroad the ship so that women and children could get aboard lifeboats.

Consider first-class passenger Benjamin Guggenheim, 46, the scion of the Guggenheim fortune. As ice-cold water flooded through a gash in the ship’s hull, he was overhead to say that he and other social elites had “dressed up in our best and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.”

He passed along a message to a survivor, stating: “Tell my wife, if it should happen that my secretary and I both go down, tell her I played the game out straight to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward.”

Among other rich and famous passengers who died: American John Jacob Astor IV; Irish businessman Thomas Andrews (who oversaw the ship’s construction); and American owner of the Macy’s department store, Isidor Straus, and his wife Ida.

Of the Titanic’s approximately 2,223 passengers and crew members, about 1,517 perished – and 706 survived. The ship’s 20 lifeboats could only carry one third of the people on board.

For Titanic aficionados with a leftist agenda, the numbers and percentages of passengers who got to the lifeboats — their sexes and social classes — can be crunched to prove just about whatever one wants.

“The reality of class, selfishness, and altruism in the disaster is more ambiguous,” observes Edward Tenner in his article “Titanic and the 1%” published by the American Enterprise Institute. “As Titanic scholars acknowledge, the survival rate of passengers depended in part on proximity to the boat deck. So it is no wonder that nearly all the women and children in first class were saved. Conversely, complex passageways and language barriers further delayed evacuation of third-class passengers. In all classes, as the literary scholar Stephen Cox has underscored in an essay and an excellent book, moral choices cut across social lines.

“Individual responses aside, there are surprises in the statistics. For example, women in third class were significantly more likely to survive than first-class men: 46 versus 33 percent.”

He adds: “The most surprising and least known statistic is that nearly twice as many third-class as second-class men survived – 16 percent versus 8 percent – despite the greater distance of the former from the boats. Were the second-class men the most dutiful and chivalrous of all, the true unsung heroes of the tragedy? Were the third-class men simply younger and more vigorous? Or were the second-class men the middle managers of the era, either fatally deferential to the upper crust or disfavored, consciously or not, by snobbish stewards? In any case, a larger proportion of the dogs on the Titanic survived, 4 out of 13, than second-class men.”

How come the chivalry of Titanic’s richest passengers failed get proper attention in the “Titanic” movie? Because today no one would believe the truth; so says Cuban-born author and historian Luis E. Aguilar in his essay “The Titanic and The Decline of Western Ethnic.”

The international Religious Left equates Big Government with God’s Kingdom and angrily rejects any limits on government growth as supposed attacks on the vulnerable.

But former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey dissents from Religious Left orthodoxy, recently pronouncing of his own Britain’s precarious public finances:  “The sheer scale of our public debt, which hit £1trillion yesterday, is the greatest moral scandal facing Britain today.”

Senior prelates in America are not so discerning. Infamously, Jim Wallis of Sojourners helped form a “Circle of Protection” around the welfare and entitlement state during last July’s federal debt ceiling crisis.  Sadly, his coalition recruited the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches, the National Association of Evangelicals and the Salvation Army.  Meeting with President Obama, they effectively sided with President Obama against congressional Republicans more seriously trying to limit government growth in the face of gargantuan debt.

Similarly in Britain, Church of England bishops, with supine faith in the Welfare State, recently voted in the House of Lords to oppose their government’s proposed cap on welfare benefits to £26,000, or about $40,000.

But their former senior bishop, Lord Carey, who was Archbishop from 1991 to 2002, has criticized his colleagues’ fiscal and moral blindness.  Noting the bishops were insisting that families on welfare qualify for up £50,000 in benefits, or over $78,000, Carey expressed restrained Anglican incredulity.

“They must have known the popular opinion was against them, including that of many hard-working, hard-pressed churchgoers,” Carey laconically observed.  “They also knew that the case for welfare reform had been persuasively made, even if they didn’t agree with it.” Carey pronounced that these bishops, in their unquestioning defense of an engorged welfare state, “cannot lay claim to the moral high-ground.”

Carey, writing in a British newspaper op-ed, observed the obvious:  “If we can’t get the deficit under control and begin paying back this debt, we will be mortgaging the futures of our children and grandchildren.”  Surely fiscal responsibility is a moral cause that “mainstream” church leaders should support but too often don’t.   And fiscal health, for Britain, America, and most of the Welfare State addicted West, means some restraints on spending. “We desperately need to reform our welfare system,” Carey concluded, saying what is simultaneously so clear yet so difficult to admit for some.  “Opportunities to do so in times of prosperity have been squandered and now we are forced to do so at a time of high unemployment, under the guise of cutting expenditure.”

Admirably, Lord Carey specified that welfare reform is necessary not just for fiscal sanity but also moral health.  He faulted the Welfare State for fueling the “very vices” it attempted to cure and “impoverishing us all,” while trapping its victims into “dependency” and rewarding “fecklessness and irresponsibility.”  Such critiques do not usually fall from the mouths of bishops, in Britain or America.  Carey also noted the Welfare State stokes “social division” by creating resentment by the “squeezed” middle class against the “hand-outs” ladled to the entitlement class.

In typical fashion, the befuddled, indignant Church of England bishops opposing welfare reform claimed they are defending children and cited the Bible as their political manifesto. Lord Carey countered:   “I can’t possibly believe prolonging our culture of welfare dependency is in the best interests of our children.”

Last week, President Barack Obama, at a Capital Hilton fundraising event, told the crowd, “We can’t go back to this brand of you’re-on-your-own economics.” Throughout my professional career as an economist, I’ve never come across the theory of “you’re-on-your-own economics.” I’m guessing what the president means by — and finds offensive in — “you’re-on-your-own economics” is that it’s a system in which people are held responsible for their actions, that they take risks and must live with the results, that people can’t force others to pay for their mistakes, and that they can’t live at the expense of other people.

President Obama’s vision was shared by our Pilgrim Fathers of the Plymouth Colony in modern-day Massachusetts. They established a communist system. They all farmed together, and whatever they produced was put in a common storehouse. A certain amount of food was rationed to each person regardless of his contribution to the work. Many Pilgrims complained that they were too weak from hunger to do their share of the work. As deeply religious as the Pilgrims were, they took to stealing from one another. Gov. William Bradford, writing his history of the colony in “Of Plymouth Plantation,” said, “So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue, the next year also if not some way prevented.”

In 1623, after much debate, a new system was set up, in which every family was assigned a parcel of land, and whatever they produced belonged to the family. Gov. Bradford then observed, “The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.” After Gov. Bradford’s establishment of what Obama calls “you’re-on-your-own economics,” harvests were so bountiful that Bradford is credited with establishing what we now call Thanksgiving.

There are several seemingly immutable, hard-wired characteristics about humans that socialists, liberals and progressives find difficult to deal with and would like to change.

The Obama administration has been toying with a proposition so dangerous it dare not utter it directly.

The NY Times oped pages headline writers helped generate the proper spin for this pernicious ploy: “To Save Our Economy, Ditch Taiwan.” The story by Paul V. Kane, a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war and former international security fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, spelled out with wide-eyed enthusiasm a fantasy that would have disastrous consequences for America if it were ever enacted.

Mr. Kane urged President Obama to make a Faustian bargain with China’s leaders.

“He should enter into closed-door negotiations with Chinese leaders to write off the $1.14 trillion of American debt currently held by China in exchange for a deal to end American military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan and terminate the current United States-Taiwan defense arrangement by 2015,” Kane wrote.

In support of his “grand bargain,” Kane argued that “Today, the America has little strategic interest in Taiwan,” an argument the “China-is-not-a-threat” lobby has been making unsuccessfully for years.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is in China this week, ostensibly to win China’s support for the latest round of Iran sanctions, an embargo on Iranian oil sales and a ban on Iran’s Central Bank.

Given the lack of public outcry over Mr. Kane’s trial balloon, will Geithner make the debt-for-Taiwan pitch while he is there?

The Chinese appear to be playing along. In a story filed from Beijing on Tuesday about Geithner’s upcoming visit, the Associated Press touted China’s hostility toward more Iran sanctions.

“China has no reason to go along with this,” the AP quoted an Iran analyst at Peking University as saying. “China does not want to be seen as helping the U.S. when China’s own interest is concerned.”

So in other words, if the U.S. wants to get China’s cooperation on the oil cut-off and Central Bank sanctions, we are going to have to offer something really, really important. How about Taiwan? These days an island of free enterprise just across the Strait from China is seen more as an affront than an asset by the Obama White House.

And let’s not forget that in signing the new Iran sanctions into law on December 31, President Obama said he disagreed with the sanctions and had no intention of applying them.

So the table is set for a betrayal of Taiwan.

This President needs no lessons in cynicism from anyone. He recently announced a permanent deployment of U.S. Marines to Australia to defend against a growing China threat, so he can argue that he is no softie when it comes to Chinese expansionism. But defend Taiwan? Why? After all, as Kane says in his NY Times gambit, “our relationship with Taiwan, as revised in 1979, is a vestige of the cold war,” and “fear of a Red China menacing Asia is anachronistic.”

The Republican National Committee is taking the debt-for-Taiwan gambit so seriously that they will vote on a resolution at their annual winter meeting in New Orleans on Friday that would enshrine U.S. military support for Taiwan as a guiding foreign policy doctrine for the party’s presidential candidate this year.

What happens to Taiwan is “potentially the biggest foreign policy challenge that a new president will face, so we want our candidates to know our position and help them formulate their own,” Indiana RNC member James Bopp told the Washington Times.

The draft RNC resolution includes support for continued arms sales to Taiwan, and an acknowledgement of Taiwan’s strategic relationship with the United States. Several of the resolution sponsors are seeking to get the presidential candidates to talk about Taiwan during the campaign. They have included a provision requiring the RNC to send the resolution to all the GOP presidential hopefuls, something the Washington Times says is “a first” for the GOP and has never been done by Democrats.

Some of us have been warning about Communist China’s intentions since the early 1990s and before. A series of investigative magazine articles I wrote for the America Spectator about the sell-off of U.S. military technology to China became part of the “China-gate” scandal of the Clinton years. (Those stories are now available in a low-price Kindle edition).

The news that Eastman Kodak is preparing to file for bankruptcy, after being the leading photographic company in the world for more than a hundred years, truly marks the end of an era.

The skills required to use the cameras and chemicals required by the photography of the mid-19th century were far beyond those of most people — until a man named George Eastman created a company called Kodak, which made cameras that ordinary people could use.

It was Kodak’s humble and affordable box Brownie that put photography on the map for millions of people, who just wanted to take simple pictures of family, friends and places they visited.

As the complicated photographic plates used by 19th century photographers gave way to film, Kodak became the leading film maker of the 20th century. But sales of film declined for the first time in 2000, and sales of digital cameras surpassed the sales of film cameras just 3 years later. Just as Kodak’s technology made older modes of photography obsolete more than a hundred years ago, so the new technology of the digital age has left Kodak behind.

Great names of companies in other fields have likewise vanished as new technology brought new rivals to the forefront, or else made the whole product obsolete, as happened with typewriters, slide rules and other products now remembered only by an older generation. That is what happens in a market economy and we all benefit from it as consumers.

Unfortunately, that is not what happens in government. The post office is a classic example. Post offices were once even more important than Eastman Kodak, and for a longer time, as the mail provided vital communications linking people and organizations across thousands of miles. But, today, technology has moved even further beyond the post office than it has beyond Eastman Kodak.

The difference is that, although the Postal Service is technically a private business, its income doesn’t cover all its costs — and taxpayers are on the hook for the difference.

Moreover, the government makes it illegal for anyone else to put anything into your mail box, even though you bought the mail box and it is your property.

That means you don’t have the option to have some other private company deliver your mail.

In India, when private companies like Federal Express and United Parcel Service were allowed to deliver mail, the amount of mail delivered by that country’s post offices was cut in half between 2000 and 2005.

A video interview with spokeswoman Rysle Dyre:

What human motivation gets the most wonderful things done? It’s really a silly question, because the answer is so simple. It turns out that it’s human greed that gets the most wonderful things done. When I say greed, I am not talking about fraud, theft, dishonesty, lobbying for special privileges from government or other forms of despicable behavior. I’m talking about people trying to get as much as they can for themselves. Let’s look at it.

This winter, Texas ranchers may have to fight the cold of night, perhaps blizzards, to run down, feed and care for stray cattle. They make the personal sacrifice of caring for their animals to ensure that New Yorkers can enjoy beef. Last summer, Idaho potato farmers toiled in blazing sun, in dust and dirt, and maybe being bitten by insects to ensure that New Yorkers had potatoes to go with their beef.

Here’s my question: Do you think that Texas ranchers and Idaho potato farmers make these personal sacrifices because they love or care about the well-being of New Yorkers? The fact is whether they like New Yorkers or not, they make sure that New Yorkers are supplied with beef and potatoes every day of the week. Why? It’s because ranchers and farmers want more for themselves. In a free market system, in order for one to get more for himself, he must serve his fellow man. This is precisely what Adam Smith, the father of economics, meant when he said in his classic “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (1776), “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” By the way, how much beef and potatoes do you think New Yorkers would enjoy if it all depended upon the politically correct notions of human love and kindness? Personally, I’d grieve for New Yorkers. Some have suggested that instead of greed, I use “enlightened self-interest.” That’s OK, but I prefer greed.

Free market capitalism is relatively new in human history.

A distinguished panel goes toe-to-toe about what America needs most on Jamie Glazov’s television show. (This is Part III of a three-part episode. To see Part I, click here; to see Part II, click here):

To get the whole story on why the Left supports destructive policies for America, read Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

A heated exchange about capitalism escalates into pandemonium on Jamie Glazov’s television show.  (This is Part II of a three-part episode. To see Part I, click here; to see Part III, click here):

To get the whole story on why the Left hates capitalism, read Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

Join the Jamie Glazov Show on Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2011 at 8-9 pm Pacific (11-12 pm EST) on Blog Talk Radio. This week’s guest is:

Leon Weinstein, the author of the new book, Capitalism 101.

Listen to the program by clicking here. Or go to:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2011/12/21/the-jamie-glazov-show

The call in number is 347-857-1380.

See you on Tuesday night!

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle. Click here.

President Obama undoubtedly saw a shrewd political move in his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, Tuesday, where a hundred years ago another progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt, delivered his “New Nationalism” address. It was at a time, like now, of a split in Republican Party ideology or at least in party positions.

In that 1910 speech, Roosevelt declared, “[T]he great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit.

“The absence of effective state, and, especially, national restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.”

Important and disturbing are the political agendas and attitudes toward capitalism that the current president shares with the progressive president of a century ago.

How neatly those words of Roosevelt fit the rat-tat-tat of Obama against the evil millionaires and billionaires he so eagerly wishes would only pay “their fair share” of income taxes.

Obama and Roosevelt share a number of similarities. As with Teddy, one of Barack’s favorite words is “I,” (as revealed in “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, page 20). Both men went to Harvard. But while there, Roosevelt was an outstanding scholar. No one knows the well-hidden grades Obama made.

Even as a young state assemblyman in the 1880s, Roosevelt’s progressivism embraced an activist government to alleviate social ills, historians have written. Roosevelt’s antipathy toward corporations resembles that of Obama. But Teddy envied the corporate captains who had worked their way up from the bottom. Teddy’s disappointment never to have had the opportunity to succeed in business is a far distance from Obama’s puny aspirations as a community organizer.

By the time he became president, Teddy had prepared himself for the office in every aspect, save one (the same failing of Obama): Namely, “understanding capitalism and the industrial nature of modern America,” as historians Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen write in “A Patriot’s History of the United States.” Also like Obama, Teddy did “more to impede business than any President since Old Hickory” (Andrew Jackson).

Like Obama, Roosevelt sided substantially with labor, and at one point said, “To hell with the Constitution” (Tindall and Shi, “A Narative of America”). Obama regularly skirts the Constitution.

In his speech in Kansas, Obama described Roosevelt not only as a progressive but as a “socialist” and a “communist.” Roosevelt was not a socialist or a communist, although he was called a communist by Eastern political opponents, histories say.

“This is the defining issue of our time,” Obama said in his Kansas speech. “This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home and secure their retirement.”

Having taught in a state university for thirty years, I’m not surprised by the ignorance on display among the Occupy Wall Street protestors. From kindergarten to university, for decades our schools have abandoned the teaching of basic facts and foundational thinking skills, and replaced both with leftish received wisdom and stale mythologies, all the while they have anxiously monitored and puffed up students’ self-esteem.

This lack of critical understanding and ignorance of simple fact characterize the main theme of the protests, that the wealthy “1%” of Americans have gamed the system to enrich themselves at the expense of everybody else, an analysis redolent of Scrooge McDuck cartoons or Frank Capra’s portrait of Old Man Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. But these caricatures are woefully uninformed about how a global, free market economy works. For example, the protestors rail about growing “income inequality,” but they forget that this expansion of the wealth of top earners has been accompanied by that same cohort’s paying more and more of the total federal tax bill, so that today nearly half of tax-filers pay nothing. Nor do they consider the issue of income mobility: from 1999-2007, about half of households in the bottom quintile had moved up the income ladder, while nearly half of households in the top quintile had moved down.

As for those greedy “millionaires” who refuse to pay their “fair share,” in this same period, half were millionaires only once, and only 6% were millionaires for the whole nine years. Indeed, as the Treasury Department reports, among the top 1/100 of 1 percent in 1996––the group Mother Jones demonized for obscenely increasing their wealth over the last 30 years–– only 25% remained in this group in 2005, and the median real income of these taxpayers declined over this period. Finally, according to the Treasury Department, “Median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period [1996-2005]. In addition, the median incomes of those initially in the lower income groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the higher income groups.” No doubt things have gotten worse for many because of the recession, but there are plenty of people to blame beyond the “1%” and Wall Street villains, from the federal appointees running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to the home buyers lying on mortgage applications.

This obsession with income inequality, moreover, reflects profound ignorance of capitalism’s revolutionary genius. To the protestors, the fact that top earners increased their income more than others did is prima facie evidence of capitalist skullduggery. They seem to think that a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates has a zillion dollars because they somehow purloined money that in a just world other people would have had. Of course, in reality Microsoft and Apple have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and enriched others at the same time the corporations enriched themselves. That’s how capitalism works: it creates wealth that indeed spectacularly benefits the few, but that also raises the living standards of the many by creating jobs. More important, it is a dynamic, open system, one that creates opportunities for the clever and hardworking. And it has been wildly successful, so much so that today, young people who in the past would have started work at 16, can now spend several years of extended adolescence in colleges and universities, where they can earn impecunious degrees in subjects like Medieval French Poetry or Postcolonial Literature, and then loaf about lower Manhattan protesting the evil system that has rescued them from the drudgery of farm labor or factory work, and given them nutritious cheap food, healthy bodies, straight white teeth, and gadgets like X-Boxes and I-Pads.

Noam Chomsky doesn’t like corporations, but the only one He doesn’t seem interested in exposing is al Qaeda. Since its inception, al Qaeda and its recently expired figurehead, Osama bin Laden, have essentially operated as a multinational importer-exporter of murder, fear, hatred, nihilism, and racism. They’ve had a hand in some of the most significant acts of degradation since the end of the Cold War, and have done so via a byzantine financial network of front companies, false charities, and squandered inheritance (see, for instance, the fine research of Rohan Gunaratna on this). But to read Chomsky these days, one is forced to overlook all this capitalist malfeasance and conclude the following:

1. There was little or no evidence that Osama bin Laden was involved in 9/11 when we first invaded Afghanistan; moreover, there’s still little or no evidence.

2. Morally, George W. Bush is worse than Osama bin Laden (or, presumably, whoever was actually responsible for 9/11).

3. Since we killed Osama bin Laden, we must admit that it would be OK for someone to kill Bush or President Obama.

4. The United States is racist and imperialist.

These are the main points of Chomsky’s Official Reaction to the recent raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which took out bin Laden. It wasn’t enough for Chomsky to criticize the U.S. for not giving him a “fair trial.” No, to lodge that complaint only would be to consent to the moral parameters of the argument as put forward by Washington—that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 and deserved some form of retribution. The extremist impulse to destroy and rebuild another world is evident in the way Chomsky wants the entire perspective redefined. Whereas before He might have been content to criticize bin Laden as the product of American foreign policy, now He apparently feels even doing that might be an indulgence of the imperialist narrative.

Thus we had no evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in 9/11 when we routed the Taliban, and “nothing serious has been provided since.” So what about, for instance, certain videos of bin Laden that seem to implicate him? Chomsky, like any good socialist, is not buying those goods: “There is much talk of bin Laden’s ‘confession,’ but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.”

Not all your time is wasted on reading such glib callousness. Chomsky’s latest croak signifies something in which we can all rejoice: that the doyen of the radical Left has begun a final descent into incoherence. As a critic of U.S. foreign policy, Chomsky’s standards of evidence are low; usually it’s enough for Him merely to glance at a mainstream news article to begin building the palace of speculation. But radicals are notoriously unfazed by the banalities of the obvious; for the real criminals and mass murderers, the standards of evidence suddenly and sharply rise. It is this aspect of the radical mind that is its final source of rot and decline. Chomsky might not be sure now that bin Laden bore any responsibility for 9/11, but He was sure enough to appoint Himself the interpreter of Muslim grievances after the Towers fell. Lower Manhattan was still a festering open wound when Chomsky first lectured us about the attacks:

“It is generally assumed, plausibly, that their origin is the Middle East region, and that the attacks probably trace back to the Osama Bin Laden network, a widespread and complex organization, doubtless inspired by Bin Laden but not necessarily acting under his control.” [italics mine]

Further:

“Bin Laden despises the US for its support of these regimes [i.e. Saudi Arabia]. Like others in the region, he is also outraged by long-standing US support for Israel’s brutal military occupation, now in its 35th year: Washington’s decisive diplomatic, military, and economic intervention in support of the killings, the harsh and destructive siege over many years, the daily humiliation to which Palestinians are subjected, the expanding settlements designed to break the occupied territories into Bantustan-like cantons and take control of the resources, the gross violation of the Geneva Conventions, and other actions that are recognized as crimes throughout most of the world, apart from the US, which has prime responsibility for them. And like others, he contrasts Washington’s dedicated support for these crimes with the decade-long US-British assault against the civilian population of Iraq, which has devastated the society and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths while strengthening Saddam Hussein — who was a favored friend and ally of the US and Britain right through his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds, as people of the region also remember well, even if Westerners prefer to forget the facts. These sentiments are very widely shared. The _Wall Street Journal_ (Sept. 14) published a survey of opinions of wealthy and privileged Muslims in the Gulf region (bankers, professionals, businessmen with close links to the U.S.). They expressed much the same views: resentment of the U.S. policies of supporting Israeli crimes and blocking the international consensus on a diplomatic settlement for many years while devastating Iraqi civilian society, supporting harsh and repressive anti-democratic regimes throughout the region, and imposing barriers against economic development by ‘propping up oppressive regimes.’ Among the great majority of people suffering deep poverty and oppression, similar sentiments are far more bitter, and are the source of the fury and despair that has led to suicide bombings, as commonly understood by those who are interested in the facts.”

Bin Laden was someone against whom we had no credible evidence, although Chomsky had an entire dissertation prepared the week after the attacks.

It must be difficult to be a radical nowadays—always having to decide whether to rehabilitate terrorists or simply declare they were never terrorists to begin with. It’s a tough choice, one not to be made on an empty stomach. But what’s saddest is that the term “public intellectual” is squandered on the producer of something that could have been peeled off of Alex Jones’s website. Anyone, especially the LaRouchies, could have written Chomsky’s piece for Him. The obvious and extreme logic, the almost sociopathic confidence in the conclusions, the clunky diction and syntax, the desperate seeking of moral equivalence—what does it mean to be a “public intellectual” if any blogger in the country could write your stuff and not miss a beat?

There’s some more filth to be mopped up here. Not one to miss out on any demagogy, even the lowest and most obviously self-discrediting, Chomsky has signed on to the idea that the name Operation Geronimo signifies an “imperial mentality” that is “so profound” in Western society; indeed, our minds are so racked with false consciousness we don’t even realize we are “glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders.”

On to that other genocidal invader, George W. Bush, the American Pol Pot (well, Noam’s jury was out a while on that one, too). Chomsky assures us:

“Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a ‘suspect’ but uncontroversially the ‘decider’…”

Uncontroversially, Chomsky is now America’s most boring public intellectual. One needs to think back to the earliest days of the War on Terror to come up with slogans as crass as “Bush = bin Laden.” You can all do better than this, I assure you. It might be amusing to play a little game: Every time a major foreign-policy event occurs, pretend you’re Noam Chomsky and get to work producing an Official Reaction. Then compare it to what He actually writes. You’ll notice how neatly it lines up. You’ll also notice how mindless and easy a task it all was, like pulling the lever on a rigged slot machine. Welcome to Chomsky’s world.

Leftist Rule for Engaging Conservative Ideas #1: conservatives’ motives are never what they claim. It must be rigorously asserted that right-wingers are invariably driven by impulses more sinister than making people better off or trying to find solutions to the problems we face. New Republic senior editor Jonathan Chait knows that lesson by heart—on the Daily Beast, he argues that from the lowliest Tea Partier all the way up to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the Right is animated by a view of “the poor as parasites” and “the rich as our rightful rulers,” a dogma we’ve picked up from philosopher Ayn Rand:

Ayn Rand, of course, was a kind of politicized L. Ron Hubbard—a novelist-philosopher who inspired a cult of acolytes who deem her the greatest human being who ever lived. The enduring heart of Rand’s totalistic philosophy was Marxism flipped upside down. Rand viewed the capitalists, not the workers, as the producers of all wealth, and the workers, not the capitalists, as useless parasites.

John Galt, the protagonist of her iconic novel Atlas Shrugged, expressed Rand’s inverted Marxism: “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.”

In 2009 Rand began popping up all over the Tea Party movement. Sales of her books skyrocketed, and signs quoting her ideas appeared constantly at rallies. Conservatives asserted that the events of the Obama administration eerily paralleled the plot of Atlas Shrugged, in which a liberal government precipitates economic collapse.

To be sure, Rand’s ultra-capitalist works have enjoyed a surge in popularity recently, a predicable response to our leaders overreaching in the opposite direction. But it’s not quite true to suggest Rand is universally embraced on the Right; for instance, consider National Review’s March 2009 symposium on Rand, which on the whole takes a dim view of the author (in fairness, she’s much more popular at Big Hollywood).

I haven’t read her, and have no strong opinions about her philosophy either way, but I can certainly tell when mainstream conservative thought is subjected to class-warfare caricatures:

When Ryan warns of the specter of collapse, he is not merely referring to the alarming gap between government outlays and receipts, as his admirers in the media assume. (Every policy change of the last decade that increased the deficit—the Bush tax cuts, the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—Ryan voted for.) He is also invoking Rand’s almost theological certainty that when a government punishes the strong to reward the weak, it must invariably collapse […]

Ryan casts these cuts as an incentive for the poor to get off their lazy butts. He insists that we “ensure that America’s safety net does not become a hammock that lulls able-bodied citizens into lives of complacency and dependency.” It’s worth translating what Ryan means here. Welfare reform was premised on the tough but persuasive argument that providing long-term cash payments to people who don’t work encourages long-term dependency. Ryan is saying that the poor should not only be denied cash income but also food and health care.

The class tinge of Ryan’s Path to Prosperity is striking. The poorest Americans would suffer immediate, explicit budget cuts. Middle-class Americans would face distant, uncertain reductions in benefits. And the richest Americans would enjoy an immediate windfall. Santelli, in his original rant, demanded that we “reward people [who can] carry the water instead of drink the water.” Ryan won’t say so, but that’s exactly what he’s doing.

Two main fallacies sink Chait’s argument. First, have and have-not doesn’t have to be an either-or contest. Leftists speak as if one person simply having more constitutes stealing from another, as if there’s only so much wealth to go around. But that’s nonsense for the basic fact that most people, once they have money, don’t just stuff it in a safe and forget about it; we constantly spend it on all sorts of necessities and entertainment, at which point the people we bought from spend it on all sorts of necessities and entertainment, and so on, and so on. This is particularly important when it comes to people in a position to spend their money on creating jobs—you might recognize them as “the rich,” the perennial villains of liberal mythology.

As Rob Port points out regarding the “idea that there is a static amount of wealth in the world”:

If you believe that this is true, I hope you don’t own a business. Otherwise, every dollar you make is actually serving to move your customers closer to poverty. You have to believe that a company like Microsoft or Nike or Target has consigned millions (if not billions) of people to poverty by growing so large.

The second fallacy is in talking about government “rewarding” and “punishing” people. To believe that a tax cut is a “reward” for the recipient, you have to believe the money he’s getting back wasn’t his to begin with, but is basically a gift from Uncle Sam. Likewise, stopping the flow of subsidies is only a “punishment” if the government is taking away money that already rightfully belonged to the beneficiary. But as we’ve discussed before, this understanding of money is bogus. What money the government has, it takes primarily from we the people through taxation. It has no “stash” of its own to draw money from.

Again, I don’t presume to know the genius-to-gibberish ratio of Atlas Shrugged or Ayn Rand’s other works, but when I survey the Right, I certainly don’t see any epidemic of greedy Tea Partiers who want the poor to die in the streets. Kudos to Jonathan Chait for finding a line of attack more original than “racist!,” but if the fruits of Rand’s labors are anything to go by, Chait might have to look for another club to beat us with.

In an era when the budding Van Joneses of this world are “dropping the radical pose” and concealing their truly dreadful, intellectually bankrupt ideas beneath layers of hopey-changey gauze it is refreshing to read a lefty who actually says what he means.

Thus, Chris Hedges and his post This Country Needs a Few Good Communists, a title that requires no decoder-ring or special glasses to understand. His basic thesis is America was a better place when communists were allowed to operate with impunity (damn those witch hunts anyway) and the Left-Lib movement has become anemic for the lack of them.

The communists spoke the language of class war. They understood that Wall Street, along with corporations such as British Petroleum, is the enemy. They offered a broad social vision which allowed even the non-communist left to employ a vocabulary that made sense of the destructive impulses of capitalism. But once the Communist Party, along with other radical movements, was eradicated as a social and political force […] We lost our voice and became part of the corporate structure we should have been dismantling.

[…]

It does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working class, but we have to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good.

One suspects the injunction against violence is perfunctory since Chris has written glowingly (no pun intended) elsewhere in support of the recent Greek riots. If people burning to death in buildings doesn’t give him pause it’s difficult to imagine what would. Also, since the article explicitly advocates the dismantling of the corporate structure it is reasonable to conclude Chris is up for more than a chat.

Nor does Chris ever quite get around to explaining how the statism he describes can be avoided after the structures he so reviles have been torn down, or why no communist government has ever been able to avoid that rapid and bloody metamorphosis—but it’s possible he is too focused on elucidating the evils of capitalism, and the obvious communist-gap in responding to it, to concern himself with those kinds of details.

But these are quibbles.  Let me repeat—without a hint of irony—that I appreciate his candor. He states sincerely held positions that can be evaluated and debated on their own merits. He provides clear choices—as in “is that the way I want to go?” He wants to tear down capitalism so he says that. He doesn’t insult my intelligence by pretending it’s all to save the sea turtles or protect my children from the horrors of Chocolate Yoo-hoo. He doesn’t appropriate the rhetoric or symbols of American history to somehow convince me that collectivism has always been the plan.  In short, he believes enough in his ideas to state them plainly. Why more of his confreres aren’t as forthcoming is a question worth asking, except the answer is more or less self-evident. I am surprised Master Hedges hasn’t already gotten the ix-nay memo.

I disagree with everything he says, including “and” and “the,” but I respect him more than any ten Robert Gibbses (sorry for that unhappy image) you want to put in the room—and let’s not even talk about his boss.

Anti-White La Raza Calls for Revolution Against White America

The media refuses to acknowledge racist violence in America – unless they can falsely accuse the Tea Party movement of it, that is. They have insinuated that tea party protesters are anti-black, Obama-hating racists, attempting to start violent revolutions.  These accusations are false. Tea parties are about preserving the Constitution, America’s founding and heritage, lowering taxes, government spending, and finding new leaders with Constitutional values to lead America.

On March 20, 2010, Salon.com’s Joan Walsh said of tea parties:

When the tea party movement began last year I saw it as right-wing reaction, but given the economic turmoil across the country…Maybe there was populism within the movement that the left needed to recognize.  I attended a local tea party last April 15, tax day, and while I didn’t find folks whose minds seemed mutable by liberal populism, at least it seemed possible to have a conversation…Of course I was in San Francisco, so it probably wasn’t representative of the tea party movement…A year later…The tea party movement is disturbingly racist and reactionary, from its roots to its highest branches…the movement’s origins in white resistance to the Civil Rights Movement was impossible to ignore.”

Media leftists promote left-wing ideology supporting violent revolutionaries in America. When it comes to real aggression against this great nation, the media covers it up. Would Miss Walsh view La Raza’s attempts at revolutionary violence, calling for Hispanics to rise up against whites, disturbingly racist? I fear not.

On May 6, 2010, Los Angeles high school teacher Ron Gochez told a La Raza rally to rise up revolutionary-style and fight America:

“We are revolutionary Mexican organization [La Raza] here.  We understand that this is not just about Mexico.  It’s about a global struggle against imperialism and capitalism… At the forefront of this revolutionary movement is La Raza.  We will no longer fall for these lies called borders.  We see America as a northern front of a revolutionary movement…Our enemy is capitalism and imperialism,” further calling the revolution a “global struggle.”

YouTube videos are the only footage showing Gochez riling up crowds with hate-filled anger toward America and whites, telling students of Mexican descent: “There’s 40 million potential revolutionaries north of the border, inside the belly of the beast,” Gochez’s reference America, whom he wants taken over by Hispanics.

Tea parties never call for whites fighting blacks, the only brutality was committed by leftist union groups beating up a black man supporting his local tea party: NewsReal’s Joesph Klein reported the media, as well as Al Sharpton, ignored the beating of a black tea partier by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organizers, yet continue calling tea parties anti-black racists screaming the “N” word at politicians.

Of course videos proved the usage of the “N” word false. That did not, however, prevent media moron Keith Olbermann from claiming otherwise:

“I would like to thank whoever shouted at Mr. Lewis and Mr. Carson for proving my previous point.  If racism is not the whole of the Tea Party, it is in its heart, along with blind hatred, a total disinterest in the welfare of others, and a full- flowered, self-rationalizing refusal to accept the outcomes of elections, or the reality of democracy, or the narrowness of their minds and the equal narrowness of their public support.”

Unlike the Tea Party movement, Revolutionary Hispanic group La Raza isn’t calling for some innocent protests, but for an outright insurrection. Although they accuse tea partiers of racism whenever they dare disagree with Obama’s socialist policies, our left-wing media turn a blind eye to La Raza’s hatred towards whites. After all, to our progressive friends, violence or racism aren’t really the problem: capitalism and democracy are.

Oh darn. Well, it’s not as important as Sarah Palin’s Facebook page anyway. 

Shortly before the controversial Tea Party rally in Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nevada there was a nationally organized anti-war rally on March 20th to mark the 7 year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. It took place in cities across the country with group participants such as “ANSWER” and “United for Peace and Justice” and many, many others. You probably didn’t hear much about it because Bush is out of office now. Anti-war protests just don’t command the media attention they used to. This particular confluence of conviviality featured such lovely messages as: 

To stop all war’s [sic] you must do one thing: Be kind to animal’s [sic]; spay and neuter all filthy Jews. 

Israel — not Muslims — did 9/11 (with Jewish & Gentile U.S. zionist helpers)

These signs came out of the rally in Los Angles, CA which was loaded with 9/11 truthers who are notoriously anti-semitic. By the way, I had to insert the nonexistent punctuation for the first sign to make it legible. Such a cerebral crowd these protests draw! 

This person caught some really great shots. Lots and lots of Swastikas and Stars of David. Here’s just one example:

[Solidier’s Name & Photo] Global Hatred and Deceit of “Chosen People” Cannibalized by [Swastika]=[Star of David] 9/11 Is Indeed Zionist Conspiracy 

But really, that’s not the half of it. These “peace” rallies generate some of the most disgusting rhetoric on the political landscape. One man scrawled on an American flag,

American imperialism by theft and murder

Another sign:

Free abortion on demand! Women’s liberation through Socialist Revolution! 

One picture from the same event shows a t-shirt with the words, 

F*** Capitalism (® Revolution Books)

which you could purchase for a mere $15.00. There is no better repudiation of capitalism than purchasing — for the low price of $15.00 — a mass-produced, registered trademarked garment which say so. Be the first socialist on the block to have one!   

Here are some more photos from San Francisco. I especially enjoy the first protester’s apt use of the word “BullS***” to fully capture the range of his frustration. What a jubilant fellow. 

But remember! It’s the Tea Partyers you really have to be afraid of. 

**Note: Lead image not taken from a March 20th, 2010 protest. 

__

Nichole Hungerford is Social Media Director and Contributor to Smart Girl Nation. You can follow her work at Obama Porn or via Twitter @ObamaPorn. 

Yesterday, in Part 1 of this article, I explained the difference between hard and soft indoctrination and expressed a hope that the latter could be combated if students had the knowledge and the courage to bring non-Marxist texts into their classroom discussions.

My own journey follows a similar dual path of experiences and books though is not as dramatic as Horowitz’s.

It was also as a collector that I began to seriously understand the single most important difference between leftists and conservatives: the reality of human nature. Through my interactions with both those on the other side of the phone and my colleagues and bosses within the call center I realized the reality of how people actually are: we are evil, lazy, cruel, self-interested, and stupid. In other words we are broken. And we — people with our human nature — are the root cause of all social problems. It doesn’t matter if you pass laws, elect new politicians, or change to a new system of government. Our problems will still remain because we will still be here.

[Editor's note: Amidst a global financial meltdown and an increasingly activist federal government in Washington, it’s become fashionable to assert that the days of free-market capitalism are numbered. Despite the historical failure of governments based on his theories, Karl Marx is suddenly in vogue as the voice of economic reason. On his new website, FutureOfCapitalism.com, Ira Stoll surveys the economic scene and finds that the conventional wisdom is wrong: reports of the death of capitalism are very much exaggerated, while the causes of the current economic downturn are often misunderstood. The author of Samuel Adams: A Life, Stoll was vice president and managing editor of The New York Sun, which he helped to found. He lives in New York City. Ira Stoll joined Front Page to discuss the roots of the economic crisis, Friedrich Hayek’s legacy, the illusions of ObamaCare, and much more.]

FPM: How did you get the idea for the site and what do you hope it will accomplish?

Stoll: The closing months of the New York Sun were some of the most dramatic months of the financial crisis, and, at the time, the paper’s editorial stance on the Bush administration’s actions was quite an unusual one. Senators McCain and Obama, Secretary Paulson, Speaker Pelosi, President Bush, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Mayor Bloomberg, Senator Clinton, and Rep. Barney Frank all supported TARP. The New York Sun opposed it with editorials like this one. While other papers were cheering on the administration’s seizure of Fannie Mae, which Secretary Paulson has since conceded was an “ambush,” we were opposing it with editorials like this one and this one.

When the Sun closed, I wanted to stay with this story, which seems to me to be one of the hottest of our day and one in which I have a point of view that isn’t widely expressed elsewhere in the press. FutureOfCapitalism.com seems like the best way to do it. I hope it will challenge some of the dominant narratives about the financial downturn, help people better understand some of the issues involved, expose some of the self interest and hypocrisy and moral obtuseness among some of the others speaking out on these issues, and help defend the system of private property rights and rule of law and freedom that has helped allow America to prosper.

FPM: One of the immediately interesting things about your site is the title, Future of Capitalism, which goes against the brooding consensus on some quarters of the Left and the Right that capitalism has no future. For some on the Left, the financial downturn and the ongoing recession is evidence of capitalism’s demise. For some on the Right, the government takeover of banks, automobile companies, and possibly even one-sixth of the economy through an expanded role in health care, is a sign that capitalism is dead and socialism has arrived. What is your prognosis for capitalism?

Stoll: I think it has a future, because it is better than any of the known alternatives at generating innovation, growth, and prosperity. But there are all kinds of varieties of capitalism out there – crony capitalism, Chinese Communist-style state capitalism. The critics have taken to calling real capitalism “unrestrained market capitalism” or something like that. I think that a capitalism in which most of the decisions on allocating capital are made by individuals, rather than the government, does have a future. At least, I am trying to do my part to make sure it does.

FPM: You recently highlighted a useful piece of wisdom from the economist Friedrich Hayek. He observed that “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Based on its handing of the economy to date, do you think the Obama administration appreciates Hayek’s insight?

Stoll: Well, it’s ironic, because one of Obama’s top economic aides, Lawrence Summers, was quoted in the Boston Globe in 2004 reaffirming his 1998 statement,

“What’s the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today…What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That’s the consensus among economists. That’s the Hayek legacy.”

Hayek did write in favor of both a safety net and social insurance. And the Obama people will argue that by not nationalizing the banks, and by supporting a health care overhaul that neither makes all doctors immediately federal employees nor replaces all health insurers with a federal “single payer,” they are respecting markets and avoiding the arrogance of central planning. But in an interview collected for FutureOfCapitalism.com Hayek biographer Bruce Caldwell told me he thought Hayek would have opposed ObamaCare. Hayek had a son who was a doctor in Britain’s National Health Service and hated the bureaucracy.

It does seem to me that Hayek’s insights have been insufficiently heeded, not only by the Obama administration, but by the Bush administration, which, in its treatment of Fannie Mae and AIG shareholders, was as heavy-handed and misguided in my view as anything Obama has done. In holding over Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke, the Obama economic policy has really been in many ways a continuation of Bush rather than a radical departure from it.

FPM: One of the biggest recent economic stories is the continuing saga of health care reform. How do you think the Obama administration has handled the process of passing the legislation and what do you make of the health care legislation that we’ve seen so far?

Stoll: As I noted in the review of the book Health Care Turning Point on the site, it’s amazing that they’ve gotten as far as they have. The federal government can barely afford the Social Security and Medicare entitlements it is already committed to. Yet Obama got both the House and the Senate to pass bills of 2000+ pages significantly expanding government’s obligations to fund health care.

I think the resistance they are running into is partly skepticism from the public, which quite sensibly doesn’t believe you can give 40 million more people health insurance without it costing the government more money. In fact, Obama would have us believe that we can cover 40 million more people and at the same time have it be deficit neutral or even bend the cost curve down. The ability of majorities in both houses of Congress to accept that proposition is a testament to something, maybe the power of wishful thinking.

But again, a point not often made, but one I have tried to make at FutureOfCapitalism.com, is that the Bush administration didn’t exactly cover itself with glory on the health care front, either. Total federal, state, and local government health spending in America grew to $1,036 billion in 2007 from $597 billion in 2000, an increase in the government’s share of overall spending to 45% from 43%. Those expenditures will grow further as more of the population ages into Medicare.

FPM: A running theme on your site seems to be the low opinion in which the left-wing American elite, including the Obama administration, holds the American public. For instance, everyone from the president to administration friendly journalists are fond of saying that health care legislation has stalled because the public is insufficiently informed to appreciate its merits. Are they wrong?

Stoll: Obama has given at least 52 health care speeches since taking office. If the public is insufficiently informed, maybe the president isn’t as brilliant a communicator as he is given credit for. I actually think the public has a quite accurate sense of what the general direction of the president’s proposed changes will mean, though if they are uncertain of the details, it may have less to do with their alleged denseness and more to do with the fact that the Democrats have chosen to write 2000-page bills, the details keep changing amid the scramble for individual votes, and the texts of the bills sometimes aren’t released until the last minute.

FPM: In the past you’ve noted that many of your colleagues in the press have, at best, mixed feelings about capitalism. How does that impact economic coverage in this country?

Stoll: Adversely. On the other hand, all sorts of incentives in journalism tilt the playing field toward negative coverage in all fields of endeavor, not just economics or business. You can sell more papers and get higher ratings and win more prizes by exposing corrupt politicians or horrible criminals than by profiling honest, law-abiding citizens. So it’s not just the businessmen who fall victim – Bill Clinton got some rough press coverage there for a while, too.

FPM: A subject that you’ve often explored on the site is that role that religion plays in people’s understanding of capitalism. We saw a demonstration of that most recently during the Bernie Madoff scandal, which triggered a bout of anxiety from Jews concerned about how the story might play into classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. What are your thoughts on that aspect of the Madoff case and, more broadly, how religion colors people’s perception of capitalism?

Stoll: I didn’t really see the Madoff case that way because so many of his victims were also Jewish. In my review on the site of Jerry Muller’s book Capitalism and the Jews, I wrote about what Professor Muller calls “The Long Shadow of Usury.” I think a lot of popular hostility toward financial capitalism is driven by age-old, mainly Christian, hostility to usury and its association with Jews, a theme that was taken up by both the Communists and the Nazis.

FPM: You’ve recently editorialized against the so-called soda tax, which New York’s Gov. Patterson, among others, have suggested passing on sugary soft drinks as a way to fight obesity. Why do you object to the tax – particularly since, as you note, you don’t even drink soda?

Stoll: New Yorkers already bear one of the highest state and local tax burdens in the country. The politicians ought to be trying to find ways to cut our taxes, not dreaming up new taxes to impose.

FPM: At the risk of ending on a bleak note, let me ask you about local politics. You seem somewhat pessimistic about the political and economic future of New York State. What would it take to put the state on the right track?

Stoll: Well, the best thing would be new leadership in Albany that understands that New York is competing for human and financial capital, both globally and within the laboratory of the states, and that acts accordingly. The big costs in the state budget are education and health care, and workers in both fields are represented by powerful public employee unions. But even with the right leadership in Albany, New York will have a hard time succeeding if Washington is targeting the financial industry, which is a big job engine in New York.

FPM: Ira Stoll, thanks very much for joining us.