Human nature always seems to make most people want something for very little, if any, effort. When someone comes along and makes promises that seem to be able to relieve pains or struggles to make ends meet or to gratify our desires for the comforts of life, we somehow don’t think of the cost in dollars—or in our liberty. We just want it and wanting it makes us feel good about the magical future. People who want to get people to believe this way and to vote accordingly are sometimes called Marxists.
Marxism is the belief that the accumulation of capital is evil and that capital and property is what makes the wealthy take advantage of those who have less than the so-called capitalists. The whole effort of Marxists, then, is to convince the “laborers” that they deserve their fair share of the wealth and that the force of government should be employed to make it happen, so that all are equally enjoying prosperity and the comforts of life. It is a gross deception.
Sadly, we have recent historical examples of how this Marxist philosophy works in real life. There’s the Marxist Vladimir Lenin taking over Russia, or the Marxist Mao Zedong taking over China, or the Marxist Fidel Castro taking over Cuba.
Cuba had been the sugar-producing capital of the hemisphere, with huge farms and mechanized equipment to be able to provide millions of Cubans with employment. Then, along came the Marxist Fidel Castro who promised each worker their own plot of ground to do as they wished. What a dream! When the government was overthrown and Castro was in charge, they began to distribute the land equally. But the people soon realized they could not afford to buy the equipment necessary to keep up the production as before, so they had to work their two acres of ground by hand to survive. They had been deceived. But it was too late. The Marxists, in whom they had great hope, were now in charge, and the only ones living comfortably were the Marxists – the Deceivers. Russia and China had already experienced the same Marxist fate.
Now comes 2024, and another candidate in Kamala Harris who sounds a lot like the three Marxists noted above. She wants to create an “Opportunity economy where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed.” She wants to lower costs for middle class Americans for everyday needs like health care, housing, and groceries. She wants to give homebuyers $25,000. Where is she going to get the money to pay for all this?
The answer is simple. She is going to confiscate the capital from those who have it through higher taxes on income, property, and yes, even unrealized gains! Apparently, it sounds so good to those who want to live by the sweat of another man’s brow. But, as history teaches us, it is only a deceptive dream. It is against the laws of nature. It will end in disaster for America. And by the way, just like the case of Lenin, Mao, and Castro, Kamala Harris has never built a business and created jobs for anyone outside of government. She has no idea of how to build a lasting economy. It is no wonder that she falls in line with the thinking of her Marxist father. She was trained that way. Her theme is “A New Way Forward.” Mao’s theme was a “Great Leap Forward.” It is gross deception.
America was redeemed from the tyranny of Europe by the shedding of blood. If America ever loses the fragile freedoms we now have by embracing the deceptive, failed system of Marxism, who knows what it will take to get it back?
The word “liberal” was once considered a compliment. It meant fair, principled, and thoughtful. The Age of Enlightenment was birthed by “classical liberals” with their then-fantastical notions about government by consent of the governed, legal equality of all, and individually owned rights.
Later as ideologies like collectivism and class oppression gained favor among the intelligentsia, the word “liberal” was hijacked and mangled beyond recognition. It was used to describe almost anything from well-meaning do-gooders to hard-bitten class warriors, from big government socialists to tyrants who silence and ostracize their opponents, for the good of society.
With time, “liberal” lost favor. When the label became a political epithet, Leftists dropped it like a hot potato, moving on to “progressive” as their new favorite label, even though “socialist” and “Marxist” are also accurate.
Here’s the point: in the unceasing war of democratic persuasion we call politics, what you say often matters less than how you say it and the phrasing you use. Somehow, the Left always seems ahead in the game of word messaging.
Take abortion. Since the heyday of the eugenics movement, Democrats have generally been for abortion and Republicans not. The two sides were labeled pro-abortion and pro-life.
Eventually Democrats, realizing that “pro-abortion” was off-putting to many, changed their label to “pro-choice” which made the decision to terminate a pregnancy seem more like a normal consumer transaction. “Pro-life” came to mean that Republicans demanded all babies must be carried to term.
Most Americans are abortions centrists, willing to support legal abortion up to 12 weeks or so. Yet Gallup polls reveal that 60% of “pro-choice” Democrats believe abortion should be legal at any time until the moment of birth, while less than a quarter of “pro-life” Republicans believe all abortions should be prohibited. Thus the Left, by the adroit use of labels, is able to obscure the fact that their views on abortion are much further from the mainstream than are Republicans’.
“Racist” might be the most abused word in the language. During the civil rights movement, there was a broad consensus that “racism” meant the practice of judging fellow humans by their skin color rather than by the “content of their character.”
But even as race relations broadly improved, for race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, that definition wasn’t good enough. They denied that color blindness was a positive goal in itself. They insisted instead that racial identity was our defining, inherent attribute that explained virtually all human behavior.
In support, the media and the Left subtly changed the language around racial equality. Equality before the law is a precious right bequeathed to all Americans under the Constitution. As a substitute, the Left devised a new definition for “equity,” now meaning equality of outcomes, a supposedly superior goal that assures permanent employment for the professionals in the field.
Nevertheless, the SAT, welfare reform, legitimate law enforcement, and anything smacking of merit were all deemed racist. Consequently, today the charge of “racism” has lost much of his coherence. “Playing the race card” is recognized as being bereft of real arguments for your point. Worse, if all racial discrepancies are blamed on “racism,” then the hard work of addressing the real causes of racial inequality can be deflected.
Institutions typically don’t like to admit that they use gender and racial discrimination in personnel decisions. Rather than come clean about their practices, however, they adopted the term “affirmative action” which did exactly the same thing. A majority of Americans are neither fooled nor amused.
There is obviously a world of difference between the legal immigration that has nurtured and defined America and the tsunami of lawlessness now plaguing us. Yet media commentators use “immigrant” to describe lawbreakers and lawful immigrants alike, as if only bigots believe there are real differences.
Finally, congressional bills are often given intentionally deceptive names. The Inflation Reduction Act was a recent laughable example. The bill was actually a package of green subsidies still chasing the climate chimera and other outrageous handouts that had zero possibility of reducing inflation.
Words can be powerful tools in the pursuit of truth or falsehood. Classical liberals should call out those who deliberately use words to lie.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
On Fox News recently, the leader of an “anti-work subreddit” with over 100,000 followers, caused a stir by claiming that “laziness” was a virtuous lifestyle choice, which should be freely available. She depicted work as a form of oppression that the woke are justified in resisting in principle. The guest was a part-time dog walker who hoped to someday “teach philosophy.”
Shrug this off at your peril. Like many other threads now coursing their way through our culture (CRT, BLM, MMT, etc.), anti-work has deep roots in Marxist ideology.
In “The Abolition of Work,” Marxist author Bob Black decades ago argued that the only way for humans to be free is to reclaim their time from jobs, the “source of most of the misery in the world.” “No one should ever work.”
Instead, they should indulge in voluntary free play. Only thus could they avoid the subordination and degradation of the workplace. Nietzsche argued that work “uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes away from reflection, brooding, dreaming…”
It’s not just goofy dog walkers or cranky proto-communists in the anti-work bandwagon today. Relief measures implemented when our response to COVID dried up the jobs markets are no longer necessary, yet a great many Americans are simply disdaining a lifestyle that includes working. 4.5 million people quit their jobs in November alone. There are currently 12 million jobs available. Services are becoming harder to obtain, and empty shelves are popping up.
But work from the beginning has been a cornerstone of American culture. America and Canada were settled by Europeans who came to stay and create a better life. Land and other resources were plentiful here, but labor was scarce. So work was necessary to survive and prosper.
In Europe, idleness was admired. Gentlemen were hereditary landowners who believed work was a humiliating sign of failure, best left to the masses.
In America, by contrast, work was honored and rewarded. Common people could become landowners simply by “working” the land. Small farmers, shopkeepers and artisans, workers…all were the backbone of the economy.
DeTocqueville in the 1830s noted the astonishing industriousness of Americans. “An honest day’s work for a day’s pay” was the prevailing code of conduct.
With a productive private sector and a modest, non-intrusive government, America prospered unimaginably, transforming itself from just another British colony to a worldwide beacon of opportunity and prosperity.
But work provided more than material comforts. It endowed each worker with dignity, a sense of self-worth and personal agency. Each citizen could take justifiable pride in providing for and protecting their family.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many Americans dreaded material poverty less than the loss of dignity from not working. Written materials from that time confirm that severe economic hardship was considered temporary and survivable, but loss of dignity crippled the human spirit.
We now know that both economic prosperity and dignity eventually survived. But today the connection between work and dignity seems to be diminished. Dignity itself seems to have fallen out of style. Our leaders emphasize made-up rights, inequality, and income guarantees, but dignity is mostly ignored.
In the 1990s, the Contract with America implicitly established the notion that the Great Society welfare programs of 30 years previous had been a colossal failure. By disconnecting beneficiaries from work, they had consigned generations of Americans to lives of dependency and poverty of spirit.
The reforms enacted by the states consisted mostly of work requirements for able-bodied adults on welfare. Despite their success, over time the requirements have gradually been eroded by the hostile bureaucracy that administers welfare programs.
Now Democrats, once the party of work and workers, are seeking to eliminate work requirements altogether. Work is seen as an injustice that particularly minorities and poor people shouldn’t have to endure.
Unless workers work, there are no goods and services produced and the standard of living falls for all. A society where citizens vie to avoid work and live off the productivity of others, and where politicians scramble to accommodate them, is in danger. Ahead lies chronic economic weakness and vulnerability to tyranny.
