[This article is reprinted from City Journal]

To assess the unprecedented scale that the modern democratic state has attained in Europe, it is useful to recall the historical kinship between two movements that emerged at its birth: classical liberalism and anarchism. Both were motivated by the mistaken hypothesis that the world was heading toward an era of the weakening of the state. While liberalism wanted a minimal state that would guide citizens almost imperceptibly, leaving them to go about their business in peace, anarchism called for the total death of the state. Behind these two movements was a hope typical of the European nineteenth century: that man’s plunder of man would soon come to an end. In the first case, this would result from the elimination of exploitation by unproductive classes, that is, the nobility and the clergy. In the second case, the key was to reorganize traditional social classes into little groups that would consume what they produced. But the political history of the twentieth century, and not just in its totalitarian extremes, proved unkind to both classical liberalism and anarchism. The modern democratic state gradually transformed into the debtor state, within the space of a century metastasizing into a colossal monster—one that breathes and spits out money.

This metamorphosis has resulted, above all, from a prodigious enlargement of the tax base—most notably, with the introduction of the progressive income tax. This tax is the functional equivalent of socialist expropriation. It offers the remarkable advantage of being annually renewable—at least, in the case of those it has not bled dry the previous year. (To appreciate the current tolerance of well-off citizens, recall that when the very first income tax was levied in England, at the rate of 5 percent, Queen Victoria worried that it might have exceeded acceptable limits. Since that day, we have become accustomed to the fact that a handful of productive citizens provide more than half of national income-tax revenues.)

When this levy is combined with a long list of other fees and taxes, which target consumers most of all, this is the surprising result: each year, modern states claim half the economic proceeds of their productive classes and pass them on to tax collectors, and yet these productive classes do not attempt to remedy their situation with the most obvious reaction: an antitax civil rebellion. This submissiveness is a political tour de force that would have made a king’s finance minister swoon.

With these considerations in mind, we can see that the question that many European observers are asking during the current economic crisis—“Does capitalism have a future?”—is the wrong one. In fact, we do not live in a capitalist system but under a form of semi-socialism that Europeans tactfully refer to as a “social market economy.” The grasping hand of government releases its takings mainly for the ostensible public interest, funding Sisyphean tasks in the name of “social justice.”

Thus, the direct and selfish exploitation of a feudal era has been transformed in the modern age into a juridically constrained and almost disinterested state kleptocracy. Today, a finance minister is a Robin Hood who has sworn a constitutional oath. The capacity that characterizes the Treasury, to seize with a perfectly clear conscience, is justified in theory as well as in practice by the state’s undeniable utility in maintaining social peace—not to mention all the other benefits it hands out. (In all this, corruption remains a limited factor. To test this statement, it suffices to think of the situation in post-Communist Russia, where an ordinary party man like Vladimir Putin has been able, in just a few years as head of state, to amass a personal fortune of more than $20 billion.) Free-market observers of this kleptocratic monster do well to call attention to its dangers: overregulation, which impedes entrepreneurial energy; overtaxation, which punishes success; and excessive debt, the result of budgetary rigor giving way to speculative frivolity.

Free-market authors have also shown how the current situation turns the traditional meaning of exploitation upside down. In an earlier day, the rich lived at the expense of the poor, directly and unequivocally; in a modern economy, unproductive citizens increasingly live at the expense of productive ones—though in an equivocal way, since they are told, and believe, that they are disadvantaged and deserve more still. Today, in fact, a good half of the population of every modern nation is made up of people with little or no income, who are exempt from taxes and live, to a large extent, off the other half of the population, which pays taxes. If such a situation were to be radicalized, it could give rise to massive social conflict. The eminently plausible free-market thesis of exploitation by the unproductive would then have prevailed over the much less promising socialist thesis of the exploitation of labor by capital. This reversal would imply the coming of a post-democratic age.

At present, the main danger to the future of the system involves the growing indebtedness of states intoxicated by Keynesianism. Discreetly and ineluctably, we are heading toward a situation in which debtors will once again dispossess their creditors—as has so often happened in the history of taxation, from the era of the pharaohs to the monetary reforms of the twentieth century. What is new is the gargantuan scale of public debt. Mortgaging, insolvency, monetary reform, or inflation—no matter, the next great expropriations are under way. Today, the state’s grasping hand even reaches into the pockets of generations unborn. We have already written the title of the next chapter of our history: “The pillage of the future by the present.”

Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher; his article was translated by Alexis Cornel. ]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/28/the-grasping-hand/feed/ 15 http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/20/how-the-democrats-lost-massachusetts/ http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/20/how-the-democrats-lost-massachusetts/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:01:54 +0000 Jacob Laksin http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46981

On the one-year anniversary of his presidency, Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress have received a stinging verdict on their collaborative reign. By electing Republican Scott Brown over Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley to succeed in the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, the voters of a state that Obama carried by 26 points in 2008 have sent a clear message that the legislative excesses of the majority party are too much for even the residents of the reliably liberal Bay State to bear.

Brown’s stunning five-point upset victory has already inspired its share of intraparty recrimination, much of it justified. It seems clear, for instance, that Coakley ran an inept and ultimately uninspired campaign, one that took victory for granted and paid the price for its complacency. One could also argue, as some Democratic insiders have, that the party’s campaign committee failed to foresee the dangers of Brown’s insurgent populist candidacy, intervening to save Coakley’s faltering campaign only after it was too late. Whatever the merit of these post-mortems, they also miss the broader lessons of Brown’s seismic triumph.

Domestic criminal trials for terrorists are a losing issue for Democrats. Brown scored some of his greatest successes when he assailed Coakley for her stand on national security. Some of Coakley’s wounds were self-inflicted, as when she insisted, against all evidence to the contrary, that there were no terrorists active in Afghanistan. But Brown was also able to tap into the mainstream view, which runs counter to the Obama administration’s policy, that terrorist detainees should not be entitled to criminal protections. In the aftermath of the Christmas terror plot, when aspiring underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab kept mum after being granted an attorney, there is little public appetite for terrorists with possible knowledge of new plots to be afforded the right to remain silent. Extending these civil liberties to terrorists is not only a national security threat. Brown’s victory suggests that it also a political danger to Democrats.  

Even Democratic-leaning states oppose the Democrats’ health care overhaul. In its final poll before the election, the well-regarded Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling found that the Massachusetts’ electorate was deeply skeptical of the Democrats’ health care plan, with 48 percent of voters opposing the plan. Considering that the state’s 2006 health care law was seen as an early model for the national reform, Brown’s win is the latest indictment of the Democrats’ vision of an expanded government role in health care. Because Coakley was a supporter of health care reform, Brown was able to capitalize on popular skepticism by running as the self-styled “41^st vote” who could stop the health care bill. He will now have the chance to make good on that promise.

Independents are disenchanted with the Democratic leadership. While Massachusetts is often seen as a liberal bastion, more than half the electorate is made up of independents. Their support proved critical to Brown’s victory. Even as liberal Boston voted the party line, independent voters from the state’s suburbs turned the tide in Brown’s favor. That follows a pattern in other battleground states, including Virginia and New Jersey, where an independent-led insurgency helped down Democratic incumbents. Against this backlash from independents, President Obama’s influence was ineffectual. Despite a last-minute stumping effort on Coakley’s behalf, Obama did little to help her cause. With his approval rating slipping below 50 percent, yesterday’s redeemer of Democratic Party fortunes has become today’s bystander in defeat.

The anti-Democratic revolt has crossed party lines. Although Democratic spinmeisters and partisans worked overtime to cast Brown as the tool of hateful right-wing interests and tea-party reactionaries – MSNBC loudmouth Keith Olbermann scraped bottom with an unhinged and invective-laden rant assailing Brown as an “irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude-model, tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees” – the discomfiting truth for the party is that Brown’s appeal blurred party lines. Some polls had Brown drawing support from nearly 20 percent of registered Democrats. That Democrats can no longer count on the loyalties of party faithful even in staunchly “blue” states is a poignant commentary on both the failures of Congressional Democratic leadership and a reflection of the growing populist backlash against Democrats’ misrule.

If Brown’s victory represents a severe judgment on the failings of the Democrats’ leadership, it’s not clear that they have gotten the message. One might think that Democrats would be chastened by the Massachusetts results. But the only lesson that Democrats seem to have learned from the race is that they need to be even more arrogant in pursuing an unpopular legislative agenda. When, in the final days of the race, it looked like Brown could indeed win, Democrats floated the idea of ramming the health bill through backchannels – whether by bypassing the Senate altogether and sending the House-approved version straight to President Obama or else by resorting to the “nuclear” option that would allow them to pass the bill with a 51-vote majority. Both options are widely considered political suicide, but such is the Democrats’ commitment to the legislation that even the prospect of certain defeat may be a weak deterrent.

Democrats’ missteps are of course only part of the story of the Massachusetts race. The other is Scott Brown. Savvy, charismatic and clued into voters’ concerns, Brown’s campaign was everything that Coakley’s was not. Both the Coakley campaign and President Obama poked fun at Brown’s regular-guy image – particularly the well-worn GMC truck with which he traversed the state. But it’s Brown who will have the last laugh. In one of his final campaign stops, Brown promised to pack up his “truck and drive it straight to Washington.” Thanks to the Democrats’ blunders and to his political skills, he’s on his way.

Being a leftist Anti-Zionist means not only never having to say you are sorry, such as when you get your facts all wrong.  It also means that you have an obligation to represent yourself as a victim of harassment.   Armchair martyrdom is as fundamental a part of leftist ideology as anti-Americanism and hatred of Israel.

In his now-famous essay from July, 1976, “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America,” Thomas Wolfe wrote about how desperately American academics wish to feel persecuted.  A pretense of being persecuted today seems to do wonders both for their ego and for their web traffic.  The entire “Zionist Lobby” is largely an invention by these same people, anxious to show that they are being oppressed by an evil nefarious conspiracy.  You just need to wave your stigmata and denounce the “Neo-Conservatives,” the “Rightwing McCarthyists,” and – of course the Jews.  Whining about being persecuted seems to be the leading participation sport of today’s far Leftists and the radical armchair postureurs.

As documented recently on this web site, Joel Beinin, the Israel-hating pro-Hamas sometimes-Maoist professor of Middle East Studies at Stanford University is just such a persecution whiner.  Here is what we wrote:

‘“McCarthyism” seems to be Beinin’s third favorite “m” word, after Marxism and Mao, and he applies it liberally to anyone who dares to criticize him. Beinin wrote a 2004 article called “The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East.” In it, Beinin denounced the Ford Foundation’s decision to withdraw funding from any university grantee that finances the promotion of “violence, terrorism, or bigotry or the destruction of any state.” What worried Beinin was that such restrictions could potentially hurt a “Palestinian student group [that] called for the replacement of the state of Israel with a secular, democratic state,” meaning one seeking the extermination of Israel.’

Beinin went on to declare that Bay Area Zionists silenced him and prevented him from giving a talk to a school in San Jose.  The San Francisco Chronicle checked and reported that no one at all from the local Jewish Community had even spoken with anyone at that school.

Well, the good professor is back.  Over the Thanksgiving weekend he widely circulated the following epistle, which we reprint for you here in full, spelling errors and all:

26 November 2009

I arrived in Israel at about 15:00 on Wednesday, 25 November afternoon to visit my mother, brother, and sister who are Israeli (and US) citizens resident in Israel since 1973.  My mother has been ill, and this visit was prompted primarily for that reason. I have visited Israel dozens of times before – most recently December 2008 – and resided in the country for extended periods on several different occasions.  Yesterday, for the first time since my first visit to Israel in 1965, I was detained without explanation at Ben-Gurion airport for nearly two hours and ultimately interrogated.  The questioners asked questions that they surely already knew the answers to.  The asked, for example, my profession and my email.  My position as Donald J. McLaughlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University and my email are a matter of public record, easily obtainable from the website of Stanford’s Department of History.  The questioners also asked whether I had travelled (sic) to “other countries in the region” which, since they had my passport in their hands for the better part of two hours with all the relevant visa stamps, was also not obscure information.  My luggage was not searched nor was I asked any question remotely related to the security of Israel except whether I had traveled (sic) to Iran (I was there once, for two weeks, in 1970 when Israel had warm relations with the Shah’s regime).

It therefore appears that this “investigation” had no purpose other than to harass and intimidate me.

Upon leaving I was told that I would be contacted further by one “Amos” from the Ministry of Defense.  For my convenience, I was given his phone number: 054-*******.

Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History
Professor of Middle East History
Joel Beinin
Contact in Israel: 054-565-2320

The main reports about the horrific suffering by Beinin at the hands of the security personnel at Israel’s airport have been on web sites run by Israel’s own predominantly-Arab Stalinist communist party and on one of its front groups named “The Left Bank.”

Now the above Beinin hysterics about being “intimidated” need a dose of deconstruction.  Beinin routinely travels to countries that happen to be at war with Israel, and has visited Iran, which happens to be officially on record as calling for the annihilation of Israel and its population.  By his own admission, Beinin’s passport is bristling with visas from such countries.  One would expect even the sleepiest airport passport inspector at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport to sit up and take notice of someone coming into the country with such visas.  Most passport inspectors at Tel Aviv airport, by the way, are teenage girls.  So you can imagine the terror and intimation experienced there by the poor professor.

Now Beinin’s insistence that the airport security staff must have known who he is rings a bit curious.  I did a search of the Hebrew web, and – sure enough – there are some internet mentions of him in Hebrew, but almost all of those are on the web sites of communist party and its fronts, which the airport inspectors may not visit on a regular basis.  There are two mentions of Beinin’s getting sued by Los Angeles journalist Rachel Neuwirth for his posting false smears about her.

What about Beinin’s claim that being questioned about his travels in belligerent countries constitutes “harassment” and “intimidation?”   (We have only his word that the questioning took two hours, and no mention at all of his being offered cookies and tea; I have waited in that airport for longer just to get a guitar case out of the belly of a plane!)   Well, an acquaintance of mine named Julia is an Israeli Jew born in Libya, a fact noted on her Israeli passport, and you would not believe the hassle she goes through every time she wants to come to the United States for a visit!  My wife was questioned at length and searched at Tokyo airport after 9-11 because her passport says she was born in the Middle East.

More to the point, Joel Beinin is an anti-Israel hate propagandist, someone who has made a career out of rationalizing anti-Jewish terrorism and endorsing Arab demands for Israel’s annihilation.  Other countries routinely bar hostile propagandists for far less provocation.  Canada banned ultra-leftist and Saddam’s agent George Galloway from entering, and also banned some other radicals.  Canada also banned a controversial rap group from entering.  The US banned Tariq Ramadan due to his terrorist connections.  It has banned others for security reasons, including Cat Stevens, the British author Sebastian Horsley, a pro-LSD Canadian psychologist, and at least one Israeli.  The UK banned radio host Michael Savage (along with 15 other people) for being insensitive to Moslems, and tried to ban Dutch politician Geert Wilders.  Egypt has barred Hamas members from entering.  The Ukraine banned the mayor of Moscow from entering the country because of things he said.

Now as it turns out, Israel almost never prevents anti-Israel propagandists and anti-Semitic hate-mongers from entering the country.  For example, it rather stupidly allows lots of “anarchists” from the “International Solidarity Movement” and similar pro-terror groups to enter the country and then to attack its policemen and soldiers as their attempt to help Palestinian terrorists.  The only two anti-Israel propagandists of note who have been barred from entering Israel in recent years were: 1.  Norman Finkelstein, a Neo-Nazi who was fired by DePaul University and who was barred from entering Israel due to his intimate ties with the Hezb’Allah, and 2. Richard Falk, the anti-Semitic retired professor from Princeton who was barred from entering Israel as head of an anti-Israel UN propaganda “commission.”  (When Falk arrived earlier as a private person to give university lectures, he was admitted.)

Anti-Israel fanatics, like Noam Chomsky and the Swedish journalist who recently invented a medieval blood libel about Jews stealing the body parts of Palestinians, have been admitted to Israel freely, although they never would be if I had anything to say about it.  Even Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose nasty diatribe, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, has become the Koran for Israel-bashers and Jew-haters around the world, were welcomed in Israel for a speaking tour.

It goes without saying that Beinin has never expressed any criticism of the fact that Israelis are prohibited altogether from entering Iran and most Arab countries.  Some of those countries prohibit entry to Jews from anywhere.  In Saudi Arabia you will get expelled and beaten to a pulp if you have a Hanukka Menorah or a Christmas tree.

Of course the greatest irony in all of this is that Beinin was not banned from Israel at all, in spite of being a fanatical pro-terror anti-Israel propagandist.   He was simply interviewed by an alert young passport inspector, suspicious of all those visas in Beinin’s passport from countries seeking Israel’s annihilation.  For Beinin, however, the incident was a priceless opportunity to wave his stigmata and show the world what a persecuted martyr and victim he is.  His questioning in the airport proves he is being intimidated and harassed by them damned Zionists!