Jews in
legacy of
Socialism and Leftism as
U.S. eradication of
Slide Rule (Shute)
snow removal
social Darwinism
social eugenicism
Socialism
in Europe
social justice
social oppression
social safety net
Social Security
Some Thoughts (Sontag)
Sontag, Susan
Sotomayor, Sonia
South Shore Country Club
Soviet Union
Sowell, Thomas
Spanish Prisoner
Stalin, Joseph
Statism
Steele, Shelby
Stein, Gertrude
Steinem, Gloria
stocks, stock market
Stranger, The (Kipling)
Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams)
Styron, William
Superego
Superman
Supreme Court, U.S.
synagogues
Syria
Taliban
Talmud
Taney, Roger
taxes
Taylor, Mitchell
teachers unions
television
Ten Commandments
Tesla, Nikola
thalidomide
Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen)
Thomas, Clarence
Thomson, Lord
Tolstoy, Leo
Torah
totalitarianism
trade
tragic view of life
free market and
U.S. Constitution based on
Trilogy of Desire, The (Dreiser)
Trobriand Islanders
Trollope, Anthony
True Believer, The (Hoffer)
Truman, Harry S.
turkeys
unconstrained world-view
United Nations
urban planning
urban renewal
urban sprawl
utopias
Veblen, Thorstein
Vickers Ltd.
Victoria, Queen of England
Vietnam War
Village Voice
Voting Rights Act
Waiting for Godot (Beckett)
war
War and Peace (Tolstoy)
War on Poverty
War Powers Act
Washington, George
Washington Post
Water Engine (Mamet)
Watson, Paul Joseph
wealth, redistribution of
Weathermen
welfare
West Germany
“What Is the People” (Hazlitt)
What Went Wrong (Lewis)
White Guilt (Steele)
Whitman, Meg
“Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal” (Mamet)
Wikileaks
Wisconsin
Women-in-Jeopardy films
work
World Turned Upside Down, The (Phillips)
World War
Wright, Frank Lloyd
Wright brothers
xenophobia
Y2K scare
Yellowstone Park
Yiddish
youth
Zionist Conference
1
I do not think I am naïve. I have been supporting myself for quite a while, and, as a young man, took every job I could get. I was very glad to have them, but my happiness was neither gratitude toward my employers, nor insensitivity to the various slights, uncertainties, and thefts to which the unskilled, myself among them, were all subject. I was glad to have the money, and looked (and look) for any opportunity to earn more with less expenditure of effort and in more congenial circumstances. This attitude, I believe, is fairly widely shared, cutting across even the most deeply riven political lines.
2
See the educative outpouring of admiration, after September 11, for the police and firefighters, and the military—for those of our fellow Americans actually involved in the legitmate operation of Government. See also, per contra, Government’s affection for privatization—of the Chicago parking system, of various national prisons, of toll roads, of the care and feeding of troops. These among the few, legitimate enterprises of Government have in common a benefit to the citizenry greater through government oversight than would be delivered by the Free Market competition. Privatization is called “outsourcing,” but it is merely sale by incumbents of the property which is the people’s. Can anyone believe that any franchise has ever been sold by any government anywhere other than with the accrual of some personal benefit to the executives and legislators involved in the sale?
3
President Obama said, “The individual at some point, must be able to say, ‘I have enough money.’ ” But will Mr. Obama, out of office, say this of himself, and of the vast riches he will enjoy? One must doubt it.
4
The Right and the Left, I saw, differ not about programs, but about goals—the goal of the Left is a Government-run country and that of the Right the freedom of the individual from Government. These goals are difficult to reconcile, as the Left cannot be brought either to actually state its intentions, nor to honestly evaluate the results of its actions.
5
Compare Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, 1914: “For the basis of settled habit goes to sustain the institutional fabric of received sophistications, and these sophistications are bound in such a network of give-and-take that a disturbance of the fabric at any point will involve more or less of a derangement throughout. This body of habitual principle and preconceptions is at the same time the medium through which experience receives those elements of information and insight on which workmanship is able to draw in contriving ways and means and turning them to account for the uses of life.”
6
See also the grand visions of Urban Planning, which destroyed the Black Neighborhood, Welfare, which destroyed the Black Family, and Affirmative Action, which is destroying the Black Youth.
7
Consider the congruent phenomenon of the response to the inevitable failure of Government Programs. These Good Ideas—the Great Society, the War on Poverty, etc.—as above, upon inevitable failure, spawn increased governmental programs to “complete” their “work”—their failure being, inevitable again, ascribed to underfunding.
8
The mastery of skills is, more basically, essential, as inculcating the practical approach to problems: that is, “What am I trying to accomplish, is it worthwhile, what are its probable costs, where might I go for guidance, what tools do I require, how may I judge my progress?” These tools are the necessary precondition of any success in the world, whether in changing a tire or in supporting a family. As obvious as it is to state, the test, “How will I know when I am done?” seems to have escaped the voters on the Left. “When,” they might be asked, “will there be enough ‘Social Justice’? When will there be enough redistributing of wealth? When will there be enough ‘equality’?” This inability, in the electorate, to frame actual, practicable goals is exploited, first by the demagogue, and then by the dictator he may become or who replaces him; for, in the totalitarian state, nothing is enough, and, so the “Programs” must always continue.
9
Liberal Arts colleges have also traditionally sold their wares on the claim that such will allow the students to “discover themselves.” It is no accident that decades of such advertising have attracted and produced graduates who are unfitted for society, who can survive only through parental or institutional subvention, as intellectuals, as soi-disant “artists” or as “drifters.” Who does not know the thirty-year-old described by his parents as “still searching for himself?” By forty this person is, by his parents, generally not described at all, for to do so would be either to skirt or to employ the term “bum+.” It is not the purpose of the university to allow or to help students “find themselves,” but to fit them to take a place in and contribute to their society. How may endorsing and prolonging the impenetrable solipsism of adolescence do so? It cannot and it has not.