Because I have a cottage at Minaki, Ontario and am originally from Manitoba, I’m on a newly formed members-only Facebook group of Manitobans with cottages in northwestern Ontario. (I confessed to the organizer that I’m now a Californian and he said that was alright.) Why such a group? Because Doug Ford, the Premier of Ontario, has taken measures against freedom of movement that make my governor, Governor Newsom, look positively libertarian by comparison. Ontario has its own provincial police force, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). Ford has set up road blocks to stop people entering Ontario from Quebec in the east and Manitoba in the west. The OPP asks people with Manitoba license plates the purpose of their visit and often turns them away, even if they say, and show evidence that, they are doing needed maintenance on their cottages. And evidence of vaccination? Fuggedaboutit. Probably thousands of Manitobans have cottages in and around Minaki and Kenora. The Canadian summer is short. So people typically want to start their season with some maintenance and setup on the Victoria Day weekend (people now call it “May long”), the weekend before the Memorial Day weekend, and start going more and more in June. Most Manitobans now cannot do so. Robbing Canadians of their summer cottage time is a very big deal. So this group has gotten together and had conversations like “I got through the border by telling the cops this;” “Hmm, that didn’t work for me;” “Were you hauling lumber in a truck? That might help.” There was a different conversation on the site today. The organizer asked people to name retail stores and other businesses in northwestern Ontario that welcomed of people with Manitoba license plates. After a short pause, many people gave many examples. One funny one: “The owner of the [deleted by DRH] even posted on her personal page that she was organizing a group to go steal the Ontario sign and move it east of Kenora.” I told my wife, who’s from New Jersey, about this this morning. My wife is not an economist but she’s lived with one for 39 years. She said, “Of course they would be welcoming. These stores depend on Manitobans. They would be crazy to turn them away.” There’s Gary Becker’s The Economics of Discrimination in three sentences. I did point out, however, one example of a store that was the opposite of welcoming. Here’s what one of the commenters said: LCBO in Keewatin have been asking people for there postal code prior to shopping… Under the guise of a survey. When you don’t have a Ont. Postal code they tell you you’re not welcome here. Does anyone know what LCBO stands for? And who runs it? Gary Becker strikes again. For the short version of Becker’s thesis that’s longer than 3 sentences, see Linda Gorman, “Discrimination” in David R. Henderson, ed. The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. It explains the behavior of those for-profit stores and of the LCBO. Note: The above picture if of my dock, taken in 2013. I hope it’s still there. (1 COMMENTS)

Miguel Perez sent me this email, entitled “the curious case of my education.”  Reprinted with his permission. Hi, I am sharing my case with you, because I feel it epythomizes some of your points against current education. I was born in Spain, in 1988, went to public school and it was a disaster. I was diagnosed with severe ADHD, and was unable to finish middle school. I came to China, where I faked my high school diploma to get into college. I studied Chinese language and literature there, and set the record of my whole university, being, to this day, the only international student there to have passed HSK6 (the highest chinese language state examination). Then I won “bridge to China” by the Confucious Institute, also faking to be an university level student, since I couldn’t compete otherwise. Later I also won the bronze medal for the chinese language and culture olympics of one of the four biggest cities in China (shenzhen). I have been a TV personality, and tv comentator on chinese TV stations, being somehow famous in my city. I also have managed to do business on my own, and to this day I have run a little trading company for 6 years.  I am 32, and I own two houses which are already already cleared of debt. How can I have been able to compete in business lacking the important educational skillset taught in school? And that is in addition to having some brain handicap. Either I have been really lucky, or the skillset taught in schools is quite useless for productivity. Does society have a right to cut people with difficulties like me from developing a work specialization through twelve long years of arduous obedience to qualify for it? Since advances in cognitive science show that specific intelligence is not completely related to general intelligence, does the system have a right to deprive people of the right to develop specific capabilities and skills without demonstrating first some general intelligence in twelve different school subjects? Not mentioning people with ADHD, and dyslexia, is this a form of discrimination for people with low general intelligence that could demonstrate aptitude at some narrower skills or tasks but get deprived of the opportunity by design? Also, I have run some experiments with driving license examinations,  a knowledge similar to school learning, and I have found that for most people, the knowledge that allows them to pass an examination is precisely the knowledge that fades with time, realizing that most people can’t pass again the same car driving theoric examination just a year after having passed it. I wonder if a similar experiment has been run with academic subjects, but I hypothesize that it would obtain the same results: Content that is not used daily is forgotten, and only very general knowledge remains of a subject after a year of learning it. So, do we teach exactly the kind of knowledge that gets forgotten and use it as a barrier for other types of knowledge? These are questions that I hope you may address more fully in your work. Thanks so much, Miguel Perez Fernandez (0 COMMENTS)

One hundred years ago today, on May 31 and June 1st, 1921, white mobs descended on a prosperous black enclave of Tulsa, Oklahoma, dubbed “Black Wall Street.” The original purpose was to lynch a black man who was in custody after being accused of raping a white woman. The riots that followed, in which armed black men also (understandably) participated, ended up with hundreds of black residents killed or injured, and the burning and looting of most of the neighborhood (as shown on the feature image of this post, a photograph taken on June 1, 1921). For example, Dr. A.C. Jackson, a nationally renowned surgeon, “was shot dead by the mob, after he walked out of his home with his hands held up.” A debate is going on in Oklahoma about how public schools taught or should teach the history of this shameful event. The Republican governor recently signed a law that bans the teaching of “critical race theory,” a Marxism-laden interpretation of race conflict. It also restricts all public schools from teachings that make an individual “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex”–which could be looked at as a strange borrowing from woke victimology although, in this case, the victims are indeed children. Some believe that the legislation aims at restricting the teaching of the massacre’s history. Note however that the state’s educational standards already require to teach it from third grade and even encourage starting in second grade. (See Tawnell D. Hobbs, “New Oklahoma Law Sparks Debate Over Teaching About Tulsa Massacre,” Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2021). What lessons can the economic analysis of politics suggest on both the intriguing debate and the shameful original event? (The economics of politics studies government action by ordinary people as opposed to angels.) Here are a few reflections. When the opinions professed by the state (“the state” meaning the whole apparatus of government) aim at the equal protection of all individuals, there is little to object as they correspond to what appears to be the basic function of a non-identitarian state. It is different if the state is ultimately responsible for everything and may thus intervene anywhere. It must then have an official opinion on everything. Except if all citizens share the same opinion, the state’s official opinion “takes sides” (in Anthony de Jasay’s terms), that is, discriminates in favor of some citizens’ opinions and against the opinions of others. But the main problem comes when the state acts on its discriminating opinions, when its actions take sides for some citizens and against others. It is of course not literally true that the state has an opinion or does things. The state is not a big individual. Even the most dictatorial state is an assemblage of institutions and ultimately of individuals, and what the state thinks or does is the result, often unintended, of the statocrats‘ interactions both among themselves and with their supporting clienteles. This is how public-choice economics generally analyzes the state. The State of Oklahoma is the same state that, at the time of the Tulsa massacre, by action or inaction, took the side of a faction of citizens, the whites, against another section, the blacks. Many other governments in America did the same. In contradistinction, the normative dimension of the economics of politics à la Buchanan aims to prevent the exploitation of minorities. Regarding the exploitation of blacks in America, the mission has been accomplished (although sequels still remain, aggravated by regulations such as professional licensure and zoning). In 1997, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission was formed by the government of Oklahoma to investigate the massacre. It was not too soon. It sometimes seems, however, that the state-exploited minorities and the state-supported exploiters are actually switching places. Whichever side it takes, group-identity politics remains a recipe for social strife. Education should arguably be separated from the state, just like religion is. This ideal raises a problem if one also believes, like most classical liberals, that the state should ensure all children a minimum level of education in order that future citizens be not deprived of a minimum of opportunities. But the government is not manned by omniscient angels. In America, divisive politics intervened in matters of education such as whether the theory of evolution should be thought. Many youngsters have likely been handicapped either by bad public schools or by reactionary religious-sectarian schools. The state’s control of education is an easy propaganda tool. Since the state cannot satisfy everybody, especially when it intervenes everywhere, it will choose whom it better please (to paraphrase de Jasay). It will publicize statist values and the beliefs of its most important clienteles. It is easy to imagine how public education in some American states supported segregationist views. Today, despite the theoretical diversity of the locally-controlled public education system, public schools have been cartelized and standardized by teachers’ unions and their supporters in the intellectual and political establishment. The same discriminatory states that, under the weight of majority opinion, enforced slavery and then Jim Crow laws now tend to enforce opposite preferences, which include affirmative action and the shaming of the descendants of some white exploiters as if to punish a collective sin. This is of course the opposite of the classical-liberal ideal of a state that does not take sides–except in more or less unanimously agreed values such as formal equality and the repression of crime. In Oklahoma and elsewhere, children seem to have become pawns in a political power game. I would argue that education is a matter of time and gradualism. What purpose can be served by an organized effort to teach third-graders about the Tulsa Race Massacre? Only after receiving some basic education and gaining some grasp on life and its beauty, can children become intellectually capable of dealing with horrors such as the Tulsa massacre, eugenics, the Holocaust, the hundreds of millions of deaths under communism, the internment of Japanese Americans, and perhaps–God help us!–the sort of Plantation State that is now being built (see the last chapter of de Jasay’s The State). Tulsa 100 years ago (the massacre) and Tulsa today (the strange debate) can illuminate a comparison of two major economic theories of politics. On one hand, James Buchanan’s theory of “constitutional political economy” aims at preventing the exploitation, or at least the continuous exploitation, of a minority by the majority. On the other hand, Anthony de Jasay’s theory takes discrimination and exploitation as the essence of politics: for him, taking sides by political authority is the only meaning of governing. (0 COMMENTS)

Tyler Cowen directed me to a Ross Douthat post on people with intellectual influence: Scott Sumner/Stephanie Kelton: Because market monetarism and modern monetary theory arguably stand in the same relation to our “no, really, deficits don’t matter” policymaking era as Milton Friedman did to Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism. I’m flattered that Douthat believes that I’ve been influential, but I worry that people might misunderstand this claim.  As far as I know, my views on the deficit are almost the opposite of the MMT view: 1. I’ve been strongly opposed to the big budget deficits during the Trump/Biden era because they will require future tax increases, which slows economic growth.  In contrast, many MMTers don’t seem to believe that deficits impose a burden of future taxpayers. 2.  When inflation becomes a problem, MMTers favor tax increases as a way to restrain inflation.  I don’t believe that tax increases are an effective means of reducing inflation (as we saw in 1968) and instead favor tight money as an anti-inflation tool.  Thus when inflation does become a problem, MMTers basically assume that the budget deficit is too big, whereas I assume that money is too expansionary. My views on the budget deficit are very much out of step with the times.  I opposed fiscal stimulus last year, while (AFAIK) most economists favored it.  I don’t believe that excessive fiscal stimulus in the US causes high inflation, most economists believe it does. (0 COMMENTS)

In the Preface for his new Knowledge, Reality, and Value, Mike Huemer engages in some humorous megalomania.  In response to the question, “Why read this book?,” Huemer states: The author. I’m smart, I know a lot, and I’m not confused – which means you can probably learn a lot from this book. You probably won’t learn too many falsehoods, and you probably won’t run into too many passages that don’t make sense. All accurate.  Huemer is very smart, does indeed know a lot, and is not confused.  And his book does indeed contain few falsehoods.  To keep this Book Club interesting, however, I’m going to focus on what I see as the major errors.  And in any case, if I focused on where he’s right, the Club would take months. This week covers “Part 1: Preliminaries.”  Let’s dive right in. 1. Philosophical progress. Myth #2: Philosophy never makes progress. Philosophers are still debating the same things they were debating 2000 years ago. Comment: No, that’s completely false. Huemer then presents some examples of (a) relatively new philosophical questions (like modal realism), and (b) debates that have largely been resolved in the eyes of professional philosophers (like the morality of homosexuality). Strictly speaking, he’s obviously right, but I still say this “Myth” is insightful (and painful).  Compared to other academic disciplines, philosophers really do spend a lot of time rehashing 2000-year-old debates.  It is hard to imagine, for example, that consequentialism will ever conclusively triumph over deontology.  And if it does, it will probably be based primarily on conformity, not arguments.  For example, any halfway decent philosopher could easily construct half a dozen arguments for the immorality of homosexuality.  A utilitarian, for example, might oppose it for lowering birthrates, or simply creating a large social conflict for the benefit of a small minority of people.  And given the utilitarian framework, it’s not clear these arguments are wrong. 2. Validity versus soundness. Huemer confesses, “I’m about to tell you why I hate the way my fellow philosophers (and I!) use the words ‘valid’ and ‘sound’.”  Namely: I hate the philosophical usage of “valid” and “sound” because in normal English “valid” and “sound” both sound like they mean “perfectly okay”, or something like that. While Huemer definitely offers some puzzling examples of valid arguments that fit the textbook definitions, I still say that it’s useful to distinguish between (a) arguments that fail because they contain false premises, and (b) arguments that fail because they don’t make sense on their own terms.  “Valid” and “sound” fit the bill, and I know of no substitute on the market.  And any substitute would probably be equally confusing, because ordinary English lacks everyday terms for this distinction. 3. “Truth is good for you.” Huemer writes: Truth is good for you. More precisely, knowing the truth is generally good for attaining your goals. For whatever goals you have in your life, it is almost always useful to have true beliefs… Ordinary errors cause you to make ordinary, small mistakes. E.g., being wrong about what stores sell burritos causes you to waste time and not get your burrito. Philosophical errors, on the other hand, cause you to make bigger mistakes, like wasting your life. As the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, I have to call this a major overstatement.  Most people persistently hold many false beliefs, largely because most beliefs are barely related to any practical goals.  Furthermore, some important truths, including philosophical truths, are unpopular.  Which leads us to a major way that knowing the truth hinders the common goal of being well-liked by other people.  To spell things out: Holding unpopular truths often leads to the voicing of unpopular truths, which often makes people dislike you. On balance, I suspect that having a stern truth-seeking mentality is pragmatically useful compared to being a typical conformist, but the evidence is fairly weak.  (I do however agree with Huemer that we have a prima facie moral duty to seek the truth even when the consequences are bad). 4. How to be objective. For example, when responding to opposing views, you should respond to the most plausible opposing views and address the strongest arguments for those views – that is, the views and arguments that have the greatest chance of being correct while being importantly different from your own view. When you explain what your “opponents” think, try to state their views in the way that they themselves would state them. What should you do, though, if almost all of your opponents believe in weak arguments for their own view?  If you put the strongest arguments in their mouths, you fail to “state their views in the way that they themselves would state them.”  I call this the Straw Man Straw Man, and it comes up often in political discussion.  My response is to start by criticizing popular arguments, then criticize the “steelmanned” position to cover my bases. 5. Frequent fallacies. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone affirm the consequent or deny the antecedent. To the extent that the list identifies genuine errors, most of them are pretty dumb, so you probably don’t need much discussion of them. A day or so after I read this, I read an argument that affirmed the consequent.  Unfortunately, I can’t remember what it was.  But trust me, it happened! 6. “Subjective claims” are underrated.  Huemer plausibly writes: Roughly, a “subjective” claim is one that requires a judgment call, so it can’t just be straightforwardly and decisively established. For example, the judgment that political candidate A is “unqualified” for the office; the judgment that it’s worse to be unjustly imprisoned for 5 years than to be prevented from migrating to the country one wants to live in; the judgment that Louis CK’s jokes are “offensive”; etc… Note: I am not saying that there is “no fact” or “no answer” as to whether these things are the case, or that they are dependent on people’s “opinions”. What I am saying is that there are not clear, established criteria for these claims, so it is difficult to verify them… People often rely on subjective premises when arguing about controversial issues. The problem with this is that subjective claims are more open to bias than relatively objective (that’s the opposite of “subjective”) claims. So people with different philosophical (or political, or religious) views will tend to disagree a lot about subjective claims. And for that reason, they are ill suited to serve as premises in philosophical, political, or religious arguments. Advice: Try to base your arguments, as much as possible, on relatively objective claims. Yet on reflection, it is hard to reconcile this with Huemer’s earlier advice to “Use weak, widely-shared premises,” when crafting arguments.  How so?  Because many claims that “can’t just be straightforwardly and decisively established” are also widely-shared – and many claims that can be straightforwardly and decisively established remain controversial!  “Being mean to children is worse than being mean to adults” is weak, widely-shared, and hard to straightforwardly and decisively establish.  “Communist governments murdered millions of people” is strong, narrowly-shared, and easy to straightforwardly and decisively establish.  I agree that subjective claims are less likely to be “weak and widely-shared.”  But given that you’re reasoning from weak and widely-shared premises, it’s hard to see any additional reason to avoid subjective premises. 7. The popularity of absolutism. Beginning philosophy students sometimes want to know whether there is “absolute truth” or “objective reality”. These questions are not much discussed in contemporary, academic philosophy because there is not much disagreement about them among philosophy professors. Later: Philosophy professors, at least those from major research universities, tend to hate truth relativism. (Sometimes, we wonder where students learned relativism and what can be done about it. It wasn’t from us! Maybe they learned it in high school?) Why should we hate relativism? So people like Richard Rorty are a tiny minority in academic philosophy?  (More a question than a criticism). Like Huemer, I took many undergraduate philosophy courses at UC Berkeley.  While I don’t recall anyone promoting relativism, many professors spent most of their time arguing for radical skepticism.  Logically, saying “No one knows anything” is not the same as “Truth is relative.”  But once students feel like they have no way to reach the truth, it’s hardly surprising if they switch over to ersatz agent-relative versions of “truth.”  So maybe philosophy professors bear some collective guilt for this after all? 8. Since I’m basically out of disagreements for Part 1, let me end with a particularly excellent passage which I emphatically support: Truth relativism does not just fail to be true, and it does not just fail to aim at truth; truth relativism actively discourages the pursuit of truth. How so? The relativist essentially holds that all beliefs are equally good. But if that’s the case, then there is no point to engaging in philosophical reasoning. We might as well just believe whatever we want, since our beliefs will be just as good either way. But this undermines essentially everything that we’re trying to do. When we teach philosophy, we’re trying to teach students to think carefully, and rationally, and objectively about the big philosophical questions (which hopefully will help you think well about other stuff too). When we do research in philosophy, we try to uncover more of the truth about these questions, so that we can all better understand our place in the world. All of that is undermined if we decide that it doesn’t matter what we think since all beliefs are equally good. To repeat, please leave your questions in the comments for both me and Huemer.  I’ll respond later this week, and he’ll reply in due time.   (0 COMMENTS)

My pinned tweet (the tweet that keeps on your profile page, on notorious social media) reads as follows: Be advised that “markets” do not vote, they have no direction, no leader. They only function to attribute a price to things. If you threaten not to give back whatever you borrowed, the lender will demand a higher yield. If it deems your threat to be credible, it will not lend you anymore I am used to angry answers, from time to time. People love to find “markets” guilty for whatever happens, particularly in matters of public finance. The rhetoric of markets versus the people is a classic of contemporary populism. Don Boudreaux is a master of asking “compared to what?” to uncover hypocrisies and fallacies coming from the interventionist camp. Criticisms of the market economy are, if I may use this word, so embedded in the nirvana fallacy that the latter became something like the default state of mind. The intricacies and shortcomings of real-world markets are opposed to the linear solution which an ideal government could provide. So, instead of having a fair trial, real-world capitalism vs real-world socialism, we do always end up comparing real-world capitalism with ideal-world socialism, and rhetorically the battle is quite easily won. The greatest Italian economist of the 19th century, Francesco Ferrara (1810-1900), identified precisely this trend in his essay on “Il germanesimo economico in Italia”, which in 1874 noticed that statism was taking over economists in Italy as it did in Germany. Wrote Ferrara: “the very notion of a State” … “They have mistaken it for a real thing: they figure it exactly as they find it illustrated in a legal handbook, in any philosophy of law and history: they seem unable to realise that this is all an ideal, a vision, a supposition, whereas in the practical world the State is and always was the government, the group of men who have power. And these need to be weighed, not with the ineffable virtues attributed to the ideal body, as instead with the interests, the passions, inseparable from all human beings. Thus is that any economics established on this fallacy will be inherently false. Any feature that should properly be attributed to the ideal State becomes nonsense as soon as it is ascribed to the real one. Ferrara highlights an essential point: the tendency towards an idealization of the state goes together with a tendency to consider relatively abstract notions as if they were concrete beings. The state is at the same time ideal and something which exists outside its rulers and bureaucrats, and has agency of its own. Once again, this view is so embedded that it makes it almost impossible to see markets as something thay “non votano, non hanno una regia o un capo”. Markets are identified with particular companies, as it is impossible to come to terms with the fact they are the unintended outcome of billions of transactions. When an ideal state is compared with real markets, if the first is deemed having agency of its own, the latter should too. (0 COMMENTS)

Economist Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago talks about poverty with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. In recent years, a number of scholars have claimed that millions of Americans live in extreme poverty, akin to the standard of living in the poorest countries around the world. Meyer argues that these studies are based on flawed surveys or […] The post Bruce Meyer on Poverty appeared first on Econlib.

Economist Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago talks about poverty with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. In recent years, a number of scholars have claimed that millions of Americans live in extreme poverty, akin to the standard of living in the poorest countries around the world. Meyer argues that these studies are based on flawed surveys or […] The post Bruce Meyer on Poverty appeared first on Econlib.

Economist Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago talks about poverty with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. In recent years, a number of scholars have claimed that millions of Americans live in extreme poverty, akin to the standard of living in the poorest countries around the world. Meyer argues that these studies are based on flawed surveys or […] The post Bruce Meyer on Poverty appeared first on Econlib.

If you read the Washington Post regularly, you’re probably familiar with Glenn Kessler, the Post‘s official fact checker. Kessler analyzes various statements and claims to determine whether they are true. If he finds them false, he awards them Pinocchios, with the number of Pinocchios depending on the degree of falsehood. The highest number of Pinocchios he awards is 4. On May 29, Glenn Kessler earned his own Pinocchios. At issue was a statement that Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA) made at an America First rally in Georgia on May 27. Here’s what he quoted: You know, Nazis were the National Socialist Party. Just like the Democrats are now a national socialist party. Now Kessler would have been on good grounds had he challenged her second statement. The Democrats are nationalists to some degree, although probably somewhat less than Republicans and way less than the Nazis. They’re also socialists to some degree, more so than Republicans, but way less so than the Nazis. But that’s not the route Kessler took. Instead he challenged her first statement. Under a section titled “The Facts,” Kessler writes: The full name of Hitler’s party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. In English, that translates to National Socialist German Workers’ Party. But it was not a socialist party; it was a right-wing, ultranationalist party dedicated to racial purity, territorial expansion and anti-Semitism — and total political control. His first 2 sentences are fine; 0 Pinocchios. But the first clause of his last sentence is false. They really were a socialist party. They were also, as Kessler says, ultranationalist and dedicated to racial purity, territorial expansion, and anti-Semitism. They also wanted total political control. None of that contradicts the claim that they were socialist. Stalin was dedicated to territorial expansion and many of the leading Soviets were also anti-Semitic. Stalin also wanted total political control and achieved more of it than Hitler did. Stalin was also a socialist. Would Kessler say that Stalin was not a socialist? If so, I think we would need to award him 5 Pinocchios. Kessler attempts to buttress his case by listing the first 8 of 25 planks in the 1920 Nazi Party platform. Those planks do help his case that the Nazis were anti-Semitic (duh) and nationalists (ditto duh). But what about the other 17 planks? Kessler doesn’t list them but instead quotes Ronald Granieri’s analysis of them. Space is cheap on the web so I will quote the remaining 17: 9. All citizens must have equal rights and obligations. 10. The first obligation of every citizen must be to work both spiritually and physically. The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality, but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all Consequently we demand: 11. Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of rent-slavery. 12. In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore we demand the total confiscation of all war profits. 13. We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts). 14. We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries. 15. We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare. 16. We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality. 17. We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and prevention of all speculation in land. 18. We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, Schieber and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race. 19. We demand substitution of a German common law in place of the Roman Law serving a materialistic world-order. 20. The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. The plans of instruction of all educational institutions are to conform with the experiences of practical life. The comprehension of the concept of the State must be striven for by the school [Staatsbuergerkunde] as early as the beginning of understanding. We demand the education at the expense of the State of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession. 21. The State is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young. 22. We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army. 23. We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press. In order to enable the provision of a German press, we demand, that: a. All writers and employees of the newspapers appearing in the German language be members of the race: b. Non-German newspapers be required to have the express permission of the State to be published. They may not be printed in the German language: c. Non-Germans are forbidden by law any financial interest in German publications, or any influence on them, and as punishment for violations the closing of such a publication as well as the immediate expulsion from the Reich of the non-German concerned. Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden. We demand legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life, and the closure of organizations opposing the above made demands. 24. We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: common utility precedes individual utility. 25. For the execution of all of this we demand the formation of a strong central power in the Reich. Unlimited authority of the central parliament over the whole Reich and its organizations in general. The forming of state and profession chambers for the execution of the laws made by the Reich within the various states of the confederation. The leaders of the Party promise, if necessary by sacrificing their own lives, to support by the execution of the points set forth above without consideration. Planks 13, 14, and 17 seem pretty socialistic. Finally, Kessler tries to make his case by quoting the famous quote by Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller. He does it by quoting the version used at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It goes: First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. The words, says Kessler, “provide a flavor of what the Nazis thought about socialists.” There are 2 things to note, though. First, the way I had always heard it and seen it written, the first line is: First they came for the C0mmunists, and I did not speak out–because I was not a Communist. Which is right? The major expert on this is UC Santa Barbara history professor Harold Marcuse. (Is that name familiar? He’s the grandson of Herbert Marcuse.) According to Harold Marcuse, “In the narrative versions directly traceable to Niemöller he always started with ‘the Communists.'” (bold in original) It is not controversial that Hitler hated Communism. That does not mean that he hated socialism. Second, you know who else “came for the Communists” or at least some of the Communists and many of the socialists? Joseph Stalin. Does that mean that Stalin was not a socialist? Finally, Kessler’s methodology proves too much. Hitler came for (murdered) Ernst Rohm and many top officials in Rohm’s SA on the night of the long knives. They were Nazis. If Kessler were to apply his methodology consistently, he would have to conclude that Hitler was not a Nazi. That makes zero sense. That’s the problem with Kessler’s methodology. The Nazis really were nationalists and socialists. So Glenn Kessler deserves some Pinocchios. How many does he deserve? (0 COMMENTS)