Dissident Veteran For Peace

I posted a link to this video over a year ago but it's so good it deserves its own post.

Labels: communism, economics, humor, politics, Remy, video

In the current American context reparations refers to the idea of forcing people who never owned slaves to pay compensation for slavery to people who never were slaves. Newsweek recently reported the estimated cost of reparations, according to one 2020 study, was "$6.2 quadrillion as of 2018" which "divided by 40,909,233 Black non-Hispanic descendants of the enslaved, could result in a total reparations payment per descendant of $151.63 million."

And don't get any ideas about a discount if one of your ancestors died fighting against slavery during the Civil War. The study's authors have that covered, too: 

... some reparations opponents point to the federal government's expenditures in blood and treasure to end slavery through the Civil War as a form of reparations already rendered. This argument suffers from two major problems. First, ending an injustice is not the same as making reparations for its enduring effects. Second, more than 200,000 Black soldiers, including slaves and free, fought and died disproportionately to earn the freedom of the enslaved. The moral credit for this self-liberation goes to them, not to the federal government that had permitted their enslavement for so long.

With Joe Biden and Kamala Harris poised to possibly begin relocating to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and 1 Observatory Circle, respectively, next January it's worth thinking a bit more about reparations.

Apparently, Biden's chronologically impaired thinking has, shall we say, quickly evolved on the issue. He reportedly said in 1975: "I don't feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation. And I'll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 [sic] years ago."

In a 2019 presidential debate Biden gave a muddled response when asked: "What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?" However, by February of this year Biden was on board with a proposal by Cory Booker (he of not inconsiderable, say 45%, European ancestry) "to study reparations and make a judgment whether or not what they should be and what they should do". Then Biden publicly stated about two months ago that he is in favor of "slavery reparations".

Kamala Harris, the privileged daughter of not one but two PhD possessing immigrant parents, co-sponsored Booker's legislation. She also reportedly supports reparations when she's not hiding in the "study it" column.

It's worth pointing out that the idea of slavery reparations is not new. I do not intend here to go all the way back to 1865 and Special Field Orders, No. 15. Given its limited scope and purpose, it is debatable that the order was intended as reparations for slavery. No, my goal is much more modest and I wish only to go back about five decades.

In 1969, James Forman of the Black Economic Development Conference (and formerly of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) "interrupted services at New York City's Riverside Church to demand $500 million in reparations from white churches to make up for injustices African Americans had suffered over the centuries." These demands were in accord with the BEDC's "Black Manifesto".

As Jason L. Riley put it:

Civil-rights organizations rejected the idea, which the NAACP's assistant director called "an illogical, diversionary and paltry way out for guilt-ridden whites." Bayard Rustin, who organized the 1963 March on Washington and was one of Martin Luther King's closest advisers, was another vocal skeptic of blacks cashing in on the tribulations of long-gone forebears. "The idea of reparations is a ridiculous idea," Rustin said. "If my great-grandfather picked cotton for 50 years, then he may deserve some money, but he's dead and gone and nobody owes me anything."

Rustin, profiled in this blog in 2006, called the demand for reparations "preposterous" and accused Forman of "hustling, begging." Rustin continued: "Furthermore, I don't believe that any black man in this country wants to be given a thing—just the opportunity to work, to work and take care of his family." Times have changed, Bayard.

Labels: Bayard Rustin, Biden, Black America, class, economics, history, Obama, politics, race, slavery, White folks

" ... Where do you stand on this gun stuff?"

"I own them and know how to use them, as you are aware," Cantrell says.

... Cantrell has evidently decided that a more thorough answer to Randy's gun question is merited. "But the more I practiced with them the more scared I got. Or maybe depressed."

"What do you mean?" ...

"Holding one of those things in your hands, cleaning the barrel and shoving the rounds into clips, really brings you face-to-face with what a desperate, last-ditch measure they really are. I mean, if it gets to the point where we are shooting at people and vice versa, then we have completely screwed up. So in the end, they only strengthened my interest in making sure we could do without them."

"And hence the Crypt?" Randy asks.

"My involvement in the Crypt is arguably a direct result of a few very bad dreams that I had about guns."

     Source: Neal Stephenson. Cryptonomicon, 2000 Harper Perennial paperback edition, p. 719.

"Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds ..."

     Source: Character of Goto Dengo in Cryptonomicon, p. 861.

Labels: art and literature, economics, guns, philosophy, quotations

Labels: class, economics, media, police, police repression, politics, race, Tucker Carlson, video

• Old Town Road (Lil Nas X & Billy Ray Cyrus Parody)
• Better Now? (Post Malone Parody)
• Democratic Debate (The Rap)
• All My Loving (Beatles Parody)

Labels: communism, Democrats, economics, humor, politics, Remy

I can't help but believe that in the future we will see in the United States and throughout the western world an increasing trend toward the next logical step, employee ownership. It is a path that benefits a free people.

Source: Ronald W. Reagan. "Project Economic Justice" (a speech presented at the White House). August 3, 1987.

Labels: economics, government, politics, quotations, Ronald Reagan, video

The excerpts below are from Economix: How and Why Our Economy Works (and Doesn't Work), in Words and Pictures by Michael Goodwin and Dan E. Burr. All page numbers below are from Economix or the book's online references.

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members [the workers] are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged. -Adam Smith qtd. in Economix, p. 27 (Goodwin quotes only the first sentence); Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 90.

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People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.-Adam Smith qtd. in Economix, p. 28; Smith, p. 148.

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The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [capitalists], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it. -Adam Smith qtd. in Economix, p. 29; Smith, p. 288.

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Great is the usefulness of Ricardo's method. But even greater are the evils which may arise form a crude application of its suggestions to real problems. For that simplicity which makes it helpful, also makes it deficient and treacherous. -Alfred Marshall qtd. in Economix, p. 40; Alfred Marshall, Money, Credit, and Commerce, p. 190. This is a comment on the pitfalls of taking economist David Ricardo's economic models too seriously.

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Its limitations are so constantly overlooked, especially by those who approach it from an abstract point of view, that there is a danger in throwing it into definite form at all. -Alfred Marshall qtd. in Economix, p. 70; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, p. 461. This is a comment on the pitfalls of taking Marshall's own market equilibrium models too seriously.

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An industrial system which uses forty per cent of the world's resources to supply less than six per cent of the world's population could be called efficient only if obtained strikingly successful results in terms of human happiness, well-being, culture, peace, and harmony. I do not need to dwell on the fact that the American system fails to do this, or that there are not the slightest prospects that it could do so if only it achieved a higher rate of growth of production. -E. F. Schumacher qtd. in Economix, p. 162; E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, p. 96.

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All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. -Adam Smith qtd. in Economix, p. 198; Smith, p. 444.

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Everything the communists said about communism was false. Everything they said about capitalism was true. -Economix, p. 242; William J. Duiker & Jackson J. Spielvogel, World History Since 1500, p. 763. This is a bitter joke that Russians reportedly told one another in the wake of devastating economic reorganization after the collapse of the Soviet Union--the rise of the oligarchs.

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Labels: conspiracy, economics, quotations

In my opinion it [The Road to Serfdom] is a grand book. We all have the greatest reason to be grateful to you for saying so well what needs so much to be said. You will not expect me to accept quite all the economic dicta in it. But morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in a deeply moved agreement. ... I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say we almost certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share your own moral position. ... Moderate planning will be safe enough if those carrying it out are rightly oriented in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue. This is in fact already true of some of them. But the curse is that there is also an important section who could be said to want planning not in order to enjoy its fruits, but because morally they hold ideas exactly the opposite of yours, and wish to serve not God but the devil. -Letter of John Maynard Keynes to Friedrich Hayek

Source: Nicholas Wapshott. Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics (New York: Norton & Co., 2011) p. 198.

I've posted this quote not as a blanket endorsement of Hayek's book but because I was surprised to read that Keynes actually had something good to say about it--shows you how little I know about Keynes, I suppose. I mainly agree with the Libertarian critique of the state. It's been a long time since I read The Road to Serfdom so I can't say if this is true of Hayek but what I generally find lacking in Libertarian rhetoric is an acknowledgement of and grappling with the real threat to liberty posed by private, as opposed to state, power. As if to confirm that it turns out that General Motors bankrolled the distribution of a cartoon version of the The Road to Serfdom, which was first published in Look in February 1945 (see video below).

See also:

• "The Road from Serfdom" by Thomas W. Hazlett on Reason.com
• "Why I Am Not a Conservative" by Friedrich Hayek on LewRockwell.com

Labels: economics, freedom, politics, quotations, video