Why Place Your Bet On The Horse That Always Loses?

November 16, 2009 | Filed Under Barack Obama, Budget, Business, Capitalism, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Free Trade, Freedom, Government, Corruption, Health, House of Representatives, Liberals, President, Socialism, Society/Culture, Taxes, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Why believe that Obamacare will “bend the cost curve,” when government has repeatedly failed to cut costs of existing healthcare entitlements?

The Obama administration and fellow liberal-progressive-socialists in Congress have based much of their rationalization for Obamacare on its purported reductions in healthcare costs. But, for at least two decades, proposals by the Social Security Administration and Congress to cut Medicare costs have come to naught.

This is hardly surprising, since Congress’s modus operandi is spending money, and the more of it the better, from politicians’ viewpoint. Alexis de Tocqueville, celebrated author of Democracy in America, put his finger on the insurmountable problem in mid-19th century. The theory of socialism is “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” but, while the public’s needs may be quantifiable, its wants are unlimited.

Efficiency is a negative criterion in any government project. Remember that the Employment Act of 1946 committed the government to maintaining full employment. From the politicians’ viewpoint, it is better to employ excessive numbers of people, at higher costs, to enhance the image of helping the people. Congress’s $787 billion so-called stimulus extravaganza is a recent example.
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Government As Narcotics Dealer

November 11, 2009 | Filed Under Barack Obama, Business, Capitalism, Communism, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Free Trade, Freedom, Government, Corruption, House of Representatives, Liberals, President, Socialism, Society/Culture, State Government, Taxes, Thomas Brewton | 1 Comment

-By Warner Todd Huston

Since the advent of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, monetary authorities have repeatedly upped the narcotic dosage as a remedy for the pains of easy money and credit addiction.

An exceptionally clear and insightful analysis of the precipitating and sustaining causes of the twelve-year-long Great Depression is to be found in Banking and the Business Cycle: A Study of the Great Depression in the United States. Published in 1937, this book provides a wealth of statistics and quotations from Federal Reserve officials, bankers, and economists of that era. It can be obtained from the Ludwig von Mises Institute via its website.

At the end of World War I, when the Federal Reserve System was only five years old, the Fed decided to prevent prices across the economy from falling back to the levels prevailing before the war. To do so, the Fed pumped so much money into the economy via the banks that total bank lendable deposits more than doubled in the six years from 1914 to 1920. To make the perspective clearer, the Fed pumped more lendable funds into the banking system in six years than had been created in the prior 131 years since the ratification of the Constitution.
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Sanctity of Criminals’ Lives

November 10, 2009 | Filed Under Crime, Democrats/Leftists, Government, Corruption, Security/Safety, Society/Culture, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Some groups like the ACLU, who advocate abolition of the death penalty for murder or rape, enthusiastically endorse murder by abortion.

Many Christians and religious Jews, along with secular liberal-progresssives, sincerely oppose the death penalty for convicted murderers or rapists. They are firmly persuaded that the God-given miracle of life is too precious to leave in the hands of fallible human jurors and judges.

Almost all people agree that murder, taking matters into one’s own hands without the sanction of civil justice, is forbidden. Indeed, that view is one of the oldest imbedded in society’s laws. Those same laws of society, from time immemorial, also dictated executing murderers and rapists, provided that they were brought before a lawfully constituted body and convicted by requisite evidence. Justice was fitting the penalty to the crime.
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Iran: Can Obama play hardball?

November 4, 2009 | Filed Under Afghanistan, Anti-Americanism, Barack Obama, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Europe, Foreign Policy, Government, Corruption, Iran, Islam, Islamofascism, Israel, Liberals, President, Society/Culture, Terrorism, Thomas Brewton, War on Terror, Western Civilization | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Robert Kagan’s Washington Post column gives us a look at the way the president appears to be playing his hand in the diplomatic game.

President Obama notoriously promised to bring change to our foreign policy relations. His presumption, shared by most liberal-progressives, was that every nation in the world truly desires to eschew war as a policy instrument.

Liberal-progressives take their cue from Auguste Comte’s writings in the 1820s. Comte was supremely confident that international socialism, under the rubric of his Religion of Humanity, would bring people from all over the world to learn from French intellectuals the means for restructuring political society. Restructured societies, with socialistic redistribution of wealth, would no longer experience crime, aggression, or war. Acting as moral judges, intellectuals would dictate appropriate rules for personal and international relations.

The way to realize those presumed universal peace desires, in the liberal-progressive scenario, is to be sensitive, even obsequious, and never to take military or diplomatic action unilaterally. To show its faith in the promise of world peace and benevolence under international socialism, the United States is to set an example for the world by disarming itself and reducing its economic and military power to rough equality with such powers in the rest of the world.

This diplomatic paradigm, faithfully followed by President Obama in his dealings with our self-declared enemies, has so far produced nothing more than promises.
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Socializing Society By Eliminating The Family

October 31, 2009 | Filed Under Abortion, Anti-Americanism, Barack Obama, Children, Communism, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Education, Environment, Family, Global Warming, Government, Corruption, Liberals, President, Religion, Science, Socialism, Society/Culture, Thomas Brewton, Welfare | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, proposes to abolish traditional marriage as a state-sponsored institution.

As many feared, same-sex marriage may become the wedge to destroy the religious and political institutions of marriage and family.

Each new day brings to light additions to the torrent of liberal-progressive-socialist attacks upon the basic social and political institutions of Western civilization and its foundation in Judeo-Christian morality. Reducing marriage to no more than issuance of a civil certificate acknowledging the partnering of any two people is exactly what the Soviet Union did. The aim was, and is under Obama’s New New Deal socialism, to break down lingering vestiges of individual moral responsibility and to supplant them with servility under the supposedly classless socialist political state.
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Bitten By Profligacy

October 17, 2009 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, Barack Obama, Budget, Business, Capitalism, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Europe, Government, Corruption, Journalism, Liberals, Media Bias, President, Society/Culture, Taxes, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The dollar edges closer to becoming a third-world currency.

Foreign central banks, suffering from the Treasury and Fed-engineered decline in the dollar’s value, are moving new currency reserve investments from the dollar into Euros and Yen.

Long-range effects on the United States will be bad.

If foreign central banks continue to shift their currency reserves from the dollar to other currencies, the dollar will lose its international reserve currency status, damaging our nation’s future. Interest costs on the national debt will rise, reflecting a higher level of economic risk for foreign dollar holders. To pay higher interest on the national debt, taxes will have to rise, crimping business and depressing employment. Costs of our imports, upon which we came to depend for inexpensive consumer and industrial goods, will rise, because the dollar is worth less on international markets. Those higher import costs will reduce business profits, further constraining creation of new jobs.
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The Meaning of Change

October 14, 2009 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, Anti-Semitism, Barack Obama, Budget, Capitalism, Communism, Congress, Conservatives, Constitution, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Government, Corruption, Liberals, Media Bias, Military, President, Socialism, Society/Culture, Taxes, Thomas Brewton, War on Terror | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Candidate Obama charmed inexperienced, poorly educated youth and disaffected elders with promises of an undefined abstraction called change. That change, we now can see, was to be forcible imposition of Obama’s true religion, secular socialism.

Change that candidate Obama promised turns out to be restructuring society to achieve social justice, which in the socialist lexicon is egalitarian redistribution of income and wealth. That means higher taxes, tight regulation of all sectors of the economy, and further enervation of a population increasingly dependent upon the political state for its sustenance.

The president’s pattern of industry czars and heavy new regulations, along with government financing and partial government ownership of major private companies is reminiscent of Mussolini’s Fascist State Corporatism in the 1920s and 30s, as well as of Hitler’s tight regulation of German industry after 1933. In neither case did these dictators seize full ownership of private industry, which liberal-progressives tell us is the definition of socialism. Instead, Mussolini and Hitler followed the prescription of socialism’s early theorists: regulation alone is sufficient to impose socialist statism.
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Oslo Edition of Saturday Night Live

October 11, 2009 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, Barack Obama, Communism, Democrats/Leftists, Europe, Foreign Policy, Government, Corruption, Journalism, Liberals, Media Bias, Military, Palestinians, President, Religion, Security/Safety, Socialism, Society/Culture, Terrorism, Thomas Brewton, Western Civilization | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Wolf Blitzer needs to continue his fact checking.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer recently devoted time to fact-checking a Saturday Night Live skit that cast a less than favorable light upon failure of The One to deliver on his campaign promises.

Surely Mr. Blitzer will follow up with an analysis of the lack of basis for the Nobel committee’s awarding its Peace Prize to President Obama.

He will find his rebuttal work easy.

The President has done exactly nothing in the way of concrete action to stabilize volatile foreign conditions or to restrain rogue states (Iran, Russia, North Korea) that continually work to destabilize world political and economic conditions. No effective action, just talk, talk, talk. All of that talk has been ignored by rogue states, which have contemptuously dismissed Obama’s empty words and continued unrestrained in their campaigns to dominate Asia and the Middle East.
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Keynesianism Loves the Total State

September 25, 2009 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, Budget, Capitalism, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Free Trade, Freedom, Government, Corruption, Liberals, Society/Culture, Taxes, Thomas Brewton | 1 Comment

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Keynesian macroeconomics, the mythology favored by liberal-progressives ranging from President Obama to New York Times propagandist Paul Krugman, is a rationalization for massive expansion of deficit spending and socialization of the entire economy.

From the Mises.org website, John Maynard Keynes’s introduction to the 1936 German edition of his General Theory:

The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire.

Keynes’s bete noir was individual savings, his so-called liquidity trap, which he identified as the cause of economic depression. His ideology thus calls for displacing individualism with collectivized power of the political state, evidenced by rampant creation of Federal agencies, deficit spending programs, and punishingly higher taxes. This is what the Obama administration is pushing to do today.
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Labor Day: A Tribute To Highway Robbers

September 7, 2009 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, Barack Obama, Business, Capitalism, Communism, Congress, Crime, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Government, Corruption, Jobs, Journalism, Liberals, Media Bias, President, Socialism, Society/Culture, Taxes, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Labor Unions are a throwback to the days of travel by horseback, when highwaymen fell upon lone travelers, beating them and robbing them of their possessions. Unions still have the ambivalent status of thugs, to their victims, and Robin Hoods, to their supporters.

Crafts labor unions evolved out of the medieval system of crafts guilds, which used an apprenticeship system to restrict the number of craftsmen in every skilled trade and thereby to set prices and limit competition. After the start of the industrial revolution in the early 1800s, the crafts guilds morphed into unions of skilled workers, such as carpenters, electrical workers, metal workers, etc.

Today’s industrial unions of unskilled workers such as the United Auto Workers, longshoremen, and steelworkers have a somewhat different provenance. Their inspiration was Karl Marx’s several Socialist Internationals, which in different incarnations were headquartered in Europe and in the United States. Marx envisioned cooperation among all workers - the employed and unemployed - in labor unions as the means to destroy what he called the despotism of capitalism. It is such unions that bankrupted the automobile and big steel producers in the United States and reduced the port of New York to secondary status. (See Labor Unions: Socialism’s Shock Troops)
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Murder’s OK, But No Torture. We’re Liberals

September 5, 2009 | Filed Under Democrats/Leftists, Government, Corruption, Journalism, Liberals, Media Bias, Security/Safety, Society/Culture, Terrorism, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

To understand the grotesque hypocrisy of liberal-progressives we must view it from the perspective of their religion of socialism.

Let’s immediately dispatch the moralistic protestations of liberal-progressives that any degree of rough interrogation of terrorists, even to save thousands of lives from planned attacks, is unconscionable. Liberal-progressives grow weak-kneed contemplating the confinement and interrogation of a few hundred terrorist thugs, while aggressively murdering millions of babies.

President Obama supports the slaughter without judicial due process of babies via abortion, which is reminiscent of the an earlier pagan worship of the god Molech, requiring the sacrifice of infants. At the same time, the President’s fellow liberal-progressives hold street demonstrations and candle-light vigils to protest execution of vile murderers and rapists and to protest incarceration of criminals. These are pagan rituals oozing from the gospel of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that private property was the root of all evil and, in particular, the cause of crime and wars.
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Government Stimulus Spending: Differing Perspectives

August 29, 2009 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, Barack Obama, Budget, Business, Capitalism, Communism, Congress, Conservatives, Constitution, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Free Trade, Freedom, Government, Corruption, History, Liberals, President, Socialism, Society/Culture, Taxes, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

President Franklin Roosevelt, speaking of the intractable Depression, sourly admitted that Keynesian fiscal policy, in theory, was the simplest thing in the world, but in practice, a disaster.

A thoughtful reader, who generally disagrees with me, posted the following as part of his comment responding to The Bigger the Government, the Harder the Economic Fall:

I must confess that I find your “mysticism” explanation of how business cycles occur somewhat baffling, but knowing your anti-Keynesian viewpoint, I should not be surprised that you view any governmental pump priming with suspicion.

According to the butterfly effect, any seemingly insignificant action will have a cascading effect and invariably lead to a chain of events elsewhere. How much more telling would the expenditure (whether you approve or not) of billions of dollars be to the economy than the flutter of the wing of a moth?

My response:

I can’t presume to speak for the reader’s views, but liberal-progressives on balance advocate the Keynesian macro-economic approach, a variety of chaos-theory, butterfly effect, which appears to me to be simplistic.
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Obamacare: Quintessential Socialism

August 23, 2009 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, Barack Obama, Budget, California, Capitalism, Communism, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Free Trade, Freedom, Government, Corruption, Health, Liberals, President, Socialism, Society/Culture, Taxes, The Law, Thomas Brewton, Welfare | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The overriding characteristic of President Obama’s National Socialist healthcare is forced equality of consumption, a major step in the direction of egalitarian distribution of income. Emphasis is upon the word forced.

As we see with the widespread town hall protests against the President’s proposed National Socialist healthcare proposals, people do not willingly surrender the fruits of many years’ labor to the government in the name of an undefined abstraction called the common good. Particularly is this true when it is liberal-progressive bureaucrats who decide arbitrarily what constitutes the common good.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed essay, Martin Feldstein, Harvard economics professor and former chairman of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors, sums up Obamacare: it’s all about the raw power to decide who gets what treatment, while cramming everyone into identical little boxes in order to eliminate any efforts in the direction of individuality. And the bureaucratic mechanism for eliminating individuality is rationing medical care.
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Multi-Cultural Amorality in the White House

August 22, 2009 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, Barack Obama, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Free Trade, Freedom, Government, Corruption, Health, Journalism, Liberals, Media Bias, President, Race, Republicans, Socialism, Society/Culture, The Law, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Washington Post reports that President Obama aims to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

Doing so will offend hundreds of millions of heterosexual married couples in order to please a minority of voters. If one looks only at homosexual couples, that minority is probably less than 1% of the population, particularly if one takes into account the lesser degree of stability in homosexual relationships than in heterosexual ones.

Politically, the President’s opposition to DOMA is probably motivated by his need to throw a sop to his liberal-progressive-socialist worshippers, who have been irritated or outraged by his failure to deliver on many of his campaign promises.
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Henry Lewis Gates and the Debasement of American Education

August 7, 2009 | Filed Under Barack Obama, Conservatives, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Free Speech, Government, Corruption, Journalism, Liberals, Media Bias, President, Society/Culture, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

More consequential than Professor Gates’s racist rant against a Cambridge police officer is the core rot in American education introduced by his academic specialty, black studies, which is an excrescence of 1960s and 1970s student radicalism.

Harvard’s Professor Henry Lewis Gates is, of course, not solely responsible for the muddle-headed mess that is American education today. But the politically-correct, identity-politics education, of which he is a champion, has destroyed the historical purpose of education, leaving us an ignorant and divided people.

Student radicals of the late 1960s and 1970s demanded “relevant” subjects, but those subjects gave them no useful knowledge or skills, thus leaving them outside the mainstream of employment and contributing to their bitterness and feelings that they were victims of discrimination.

Black studies and the other identity-politics specialties are radicalizing preparation for work as community organizers. Their effect is to establish a separate culture that is critical of the ethos upon which the United States was founded.
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Destructive Social Justice

July 30, 2009 | Filed Under Barack Obama, Budget, Business, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Elections, Freedom, Government, Corruption, Health, Hillary Clinton, Liberals, President, Socialism, Society/Culture, Taxes, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The Democrat/Socialist Party’s plan to nationalize healthcare exemplifies the essence of social justice: an invidious urge to destroy what exists and a faith that social harmony depends upon making everyone equally miserable.

Liberal-progressives estimate that 46 million people, 15% of the population, lack health insurance. In order to provide them insurance, liberal-progressives intend to force each of us to forgo any vestige of individuality and to accept a prison-like regimentation of our healthcare.

When Hillary Clinton was working in 1993 to impose socialized medicine upon us, the Washington Monthly, one of the purest strains of socialism within the liberal-progressive, mainstream media, editorialized forthrightly that a fundamental aim and benefit of Hillary Care would be forcing business leaders to sit for hours in crowded doctors’ waiting rooms to receive medical care. There is more than a bit of nastiness in this liberal-progressive urge to smash what others have built and to drag people down to their level.
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Social Engineering and Price Controls

July 29, 2009 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, Barack Obama, Budget, Business, Congress, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Free Trade, Freedom, Government, Corruption, Liberals, President, Society/Culture, Taxes, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

All government intervention in the economy distorts decision making, with bad and unanticipated results.

Classical economics, on the whole, attempts to explain how individuals behave under changing economic conditions. The implicit idea is that people, acting as individuals, collectively move an economy. But classical economics recognizes that within an economy, many different economic factors impinge upon individuals who have highly variegated economic preferences. Free market prices, changing continually in response to the changing balance of supply and demand across markets for tens of thousands of different kinds of products and services, are the signals that trigger individuals’ economic decisions.

Keynesian macroeconomics, in contrast, assumes that the economy is comprised of monolithic abstractions treated as if they were independent, controllable “things.” Among others, those “things” are consumption, savings, investment, wages, and employment. The implicit assumption is that everybody can be controlled by one-size-fits-all policies. Thus divorced from the multitude of individual aspects of real life, Keynesian economists believe that their computer models can with precision predict consumption, investment, and wages, enabling them to maintain full employment at all times.
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The Long, Agonizing Decline of the United States

July 27, 2009 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, Barack Obama, Budget, Business, Campaign Finance, Communism, Congress, Conservatives, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Government, Corruption, Journalism, Liberals, Media Bias, President, Society/Culture, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

We are following the downward path of Great Britain, one of the two greatest of Western history’s empires.

We can draw several cautionary lessons from the history of our British cousins. Of all the world’s nations we and the UK are most similar, both in our rise and in our decline.

In addition to sharing the English language, our whole constitutional ethos and legal system derive from the British constitution and from the common law. Ours are the principal nations that made the sovereign’s right to taxation subject to the will of the people expressed in Parliament and our state and national legislatures.

Most especially, ours were the only nations that arose upon the primacy of private property rights. It was this fundamental element of natural law that, more than anything else, accounted for English and American individualism. It was an ethos that the German Empire’s Iron Chancellor Bismarck contemptuously dismissed as a society of shopkeepers, as opposed to the Prussian landed aristocracy. It was, however, an ethos that twice bested the statist collectivism of Continental Europe in world wars.
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The Supreme Court And The Commerce Clause

July 20, 2009 | Filed Under Barack Obama, Congress, Conservatives, Constitution, Democrats/Leftists, Free Trade, Government, Corruption, Journalism, Judges, Liberals, Media Bias, President, Society/Culture, Supreme Court, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

The Constitution’s commerce clause has been stretched beyond recognition to justify traveling the road to tyranny by obliterating the 9th and 10th Amendments in the Bill of Rights.

The Constitution’s Article I, Section. 8 says, inter alia:

“The Congress shall have Power…To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes…”

In the hearing for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, she was asked to comment upon the Constitution’s commerce clause. Senator Dianne Feinstein inquired about the extent to which the Court can restrain Congress’s use of the commerce clause to regulate anything and everything it lays eyes upon. As Senator Feinstein noted, that will become particularly important as Congress and executive branch regulatory bodies embark upon procrustean regulations under President Obama’s proposed “green” legislation.
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Gore Tips His Hand

July 16, 2009 | Filed Under Anti-Americanism, Budget, Business, Communism, Congress, Constitution, Democrats/Leftists, Economy/Finances, Global Warming, Government, Corruption, History, Liberals, Socialism, Society/Culture, Thomas Brewton | No Comments

-By Thomas E. Brewton

Liberal-progressives’ drive to integrate the United States into a world government, a new socialist international under the UN, is a carefully concealed element in the man-made global warming scam.

Needless to say, Al Gore and other self-anointed intellectuals envision themselves in positions of great personal power in the forthcoming socialist world government.

Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, opposing Marxian collectivism in 1872, described what life was to be under such men:
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"Governments are instituted among men,deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776




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