Anti-American Graffiti: Marxist Scribblings Sighted in Suburban Orange County

Here's the writing on the restroom wall at Barnes and Nobles at the Irvine Spectrum, found this weekend. Recall last year Gallup found that a 61 percent majority of progressives had a positive image of socialism. And here's another example in real life. Remember Marx's exhortation: "Workers of the world unite." The Marxian system is built on the increasing immiseration of labor. The graffiti implies that no one can get rich without exploiting workers, that is, it's impossible to be entrepreneurial without exploitation, and hence the rejection of the foundation of the capitalist free-enterprise system. It's fundamentally anti-American, as is all progressivism, for as an ideology it rejects the exceptionalism that built the nation to world preponderance, instead invoking the state-socialist model of the stagnant European welfare states, if not the murderous totalitarianism of Stalin. Either way, the Democrat Party's 20th-century socialist model is dragging us down, which is exactly what progressives want.

RELATED: At New York Times, "Obama Tax Plan Would Ask More of Millionaires" (via Digby and Memorandum), and Washington Post, "Vast majority of tax breaks go to households."

College Rape Accusations and the Presumption of Male Guilt

Oh boy, Peter Berkowitz is opening it up with this one, at Wall Street Journal, "Pressured by the Obama administration, universities abandon any pretense of due process in sexual assault cases":

Late August and early September bring recent high school graduates, bright and eager, to campuses around the country. Carefully planned orientation sessions will impress upon freshmen the paramount importance of sensitivity, of avoiding offensive words and ideas, and—notwithstanding that in recent years approximately 55% of matriculating freshmen nationally have been female—the urgency of maintaining a campus atmosphere friendly to women.



But parents who might expect this orientation to include an introduction to the moral and political purposes of liberal education—including respect for liberty of thought and discussion, and due process of law—will be sorely disappointed.



The neglect at freshmen orientation of the aim of liberal education and how it undergirds and is undergirded by the principles of freedom is not an accident. It is emblematic of college as a whole. Our universities impair liberal education not only by what they teach and do not teach in classrooms but also by the illiberal rules they promulgate to regulate speech and conduct outside of class.



The Obama administration has aggravated the problem. On April 4, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, head of the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR), distributed a 19-page "Dear Colleague" letter to "provide recipients with information to assist them in meeting their obligations."



At the cost of losing federal funding—on which all major institutions of higher education have grown dependent—colleges and universities are obliged under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act (which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex) to thoroughly investigate all allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, including the felony of rape. They are also obliged, according to Ms. Ali, to curtail due process rights of the accused.

Keep reading.



And following the discussion takes you right to the neo-Marxist legal and educational "reforms" of the last couple of decades, those instituting a sexual harassment regime of radical feminist ideological totalitarianism. And that's what today's "liberal" education is really all about. Isn't that sick?

Nouriel Roubini Video: Karl Marx Was Right

Roubini's a gifted economist, although this is the first I've seen him on video. He comes across more radical during interviews. At WSJ, "Nouriel Roubini: Karl Marx Was Right." (I had to click on the "pop-up player" to get the clip to load.)



I wrote previously on this here: "Capitalism in Crisis?" And see also Christopher Whalen, "Why Nouriel Roubini and all of us are wrong about Karl Marx":

When I hear people talking about Marxism in reverent tones it makes me nauseous. Marx was not right at all about class being the key determinant of human action. Yet despite America’s pretensions to being a free market, democratic society, the Marxian world view won the battle for ideas in the 20th Century. The New Deal and Great Society efforts to increase the scope of government in America all stem from the socialist ideas of FDR and his political heirs in both parties.



So much of our economic discourse in America today is entirely Marxist in nature — a reference to both Karl and Groucho Marx, as noted above. The legacy of FDR and the two world wars was to kill the American republic and put in its place a cheap imitation of France with platonic regulators pretending to moderate the bad old ways of greedy private business...



The fact of our intellectual reliance upon the work of Karl Marx to benchmark our economic success show humans to be creatures of habit, not reason. Marx embarked from a position of dialectical mysticism borrowed from Hegel and then attacked the classical economists, the enlightenment thinkers such as John Staurt Mill and Adam Smith who elevated the role of the individual. Those who laud Marx disparage all things American.



Ludwig von Mises writes in his book Human Action, that Marx stigmatized the economists as “the sycophants of the bourgeoisie.” He notes that Marx was “the son of a well-to-do lawyer,” and Engles, “a wealthy textile manufacturer, never doubted that they themselves were above the law and, notwithstanding their bourgeois background, were endowed with the power to discover absolute truth. It is the task of history to describe the historical conditions which made such a crude doctrine popular.”



Not only was Marxism crude, but it missed most of the major developments of the 20th Century. Revolution occurred not in bourgeois Germany but in brutal, backward Czarist Russia. More important, the class-centric view of Marxism proved incorrect in a world of greater openness, mobility and individual choice. The act of conscious choice driven not by greed, but the desire for betterment; of human action as von Mises coined the term, rejects Marxist class determinism.

That reminds me of an essay, Eric Foner's, "Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?" Foner wants to minimize American exceptionalism while holding out more commonality with the European experience than scholars acknowledge (which is leftist baloney, of course). See also, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, "It Didn't Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States."

Capitalism in Crisis?

Old Man Marx is (partially) being resurrected in Nouriel Roubini's, "Is Capitalism Doomed?" (at Memeorandum):

So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proven wrong). Firms are cutting jobs because there is not enough final demand. But cutting jobs reduces labor income, increases inequality and reduces final demand.



Recent popular demonstrations, from the Middle East to Israel to the UK, and rising popular anger in China – and soon enough in other advanced economies and emerging markets – are all driven by the same issues and tensions: growing inequality, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness. Even the world’s middle classes are feeling the squeeze of falling incomes and opportunities.



To enable market-oriented economies to operate as they should and can, we need to return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods. That means moving away from both the Anglo-Saxon model of laissez-faire and voodoo economics and the continental European model of deficit-driven welfare states. Both are broken.



The right balance today requires creating jobs partly through additional fiscal stimulus aimed at productive infrastructure investment. It also requires more progressive taxation; more short-term fiscal stimulus with medium- and long-term fiscal discipline; lender-of-last-resort support by monetary authorities to prevent ruinous runs on banks; reduction of the debt burden for insolvent households and other distressed economic agents; and stricter supervision and regulation of a financial system run amok; breaking up too-big-to-fail banks and oligopolistic trusts.



Over time, advanced economies will need to invest in human capital, skills and social safety nets to increase productivity and enable workers to compete, be flexible and thrive in a globalized economy. The alternative is – like in the 1930s - unending stagnation, depression, currency and trade wars, capital controls, financial crisis, sovereign insolvencies, and massive social and political instability.

RTWT for the context. Roubini can't go all the way for the socialist revolutionary program (completely smashing capital), so he goes for a hyper-Keynesian quasi-socialist model instead. The end result is really the same: The complete obliteration of the individual into the maw of the state bureaucracy (and today's progressive thought police are the spiffed up version of communist totalitarianism's secret police, i.e., a new NKVD). And while Roubini merely cites Marx on the crisis, Stefan Stern (tweeted by Roubini), goes all the way for the proletarian revolution, "Marx was right about change":

Those who regard the recent actions of rioters in English cities as "criminality pure and simple" will not see any connection between Roubini's declaration that "Marx was right" and the decision to steal a 42-inch TV from a burning electricals store. But, for some, looting may have seemed a sensible (if illegal) response to the apparently continuous turmoil of the economy. If everything about your financial future seems at best uncertain and at worst desperate, why not carpe diem, or carpe television at any rate? Rational economic man (and woman) has finally been sighted, legging it down Tottenham High Street in a new pair of trainers.



Marx said that while interpreting the world was all very well, the point was to change it. If capitalists want to keep their world safe for capitalism, they need to face up to what is wrong with it, and change it, fast.

I agree. We need to change the ever expanding social welfare state, rationalize the economy with lower taxes and less regulation, and put people to work. The rioters in Britain's aren't remotely near the starving urchins of the British 19th century industrial revolution. They're mobs of yobbers outfitted with Blackberries. The state keeps them well fed and what do they do but burn down their cities? Socialism sucks. It creates ungrateful losers who kill the innocent and destroy productive capital. The left owns this crisis, all of it, and the politically correct spinelessness has only exacerbated the dislocation. ASFLs.