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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.