Many of the greatest minds of the late nineteenth century worried that anti-market ideology was destined to destroy civilization. It happens that modern man – civilized man – cannot live without a complex market economy to sustain him. Yet the market economy has long been the target of those who would overthrow it in favor of socialism. The free enterprise system is attacked as environmentally destructive, unequal, unsafe at any speed, and exploitive. In the words of the French scientist Gustave Le Bon, “Here, I repeat, is the danger of the present hour. We are possessed of the same sentiments of sickly humanitarianism which have already given us the [French] Revolution, the most despotic and bloodiest that the world has ever known – the Terror, Napoleon, and the death of three millions.” Of course, Le Bon penned these words before the bloodiest century of all – the twentieth century – in which socialism claimed over 100 million lives.
You would think that anti-market ideology has been discredited. But look around. Socialism is taught in the universities, along with political correctness. The younger “educated” generation knows nothing of previous socialist experiments. They only know the theory and practice of the utopia they are taught to believe in. Everyone knows that egalitarian sentiments are decisive. As Le Bon explained, “Under the unconscious and disintegrating influence of such sentiment the directing classes have lost all confidence in the justice of their cause. They surrender more and more to the leaders of the opposing party, who merely despise them in proportion to their concessions; and the latter will be satisfied only when they have taken everything from their adversaries, their lives as well as their fortunes.”
Anti-market forces are advancing on every imaginable front: through the public schools, the media, and even the judicial system. A former attorney for the Voting Rights Section of the Department of Justice has written a book which points to the DOJ’s campaign of attacking innocent businesses. His name is J. Christian Adams and his book is titled Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department. “Indeed,” writes Adams, “it should be deeply disturbing to every American that U.S. businesses are at the mercy of racially paranoid attorneys who can bring discrimination lawsuits against them.”
Those racially paranoid attorneys are not merely racially paranoid. They are also anti-market. That is to say, they are socialists. Businessmen in America erroneously suppose that the Civil Rights Division “is mostly populated by professional law abiding attorneys,” writes Adams. Of course, this was once true, until Attorney General Eric Holder filled the organization with lawyers whose main qualification was “working with leftwing activist groups.” According to Adams, the anti-market lawyers of the Civil Rights Division carry out “ideologically motivated acts of political warfare….”
Businessman and market watchers need to open their eyes. “The stakes are high,” says Adams, “because the Civil Rights Division wields enormous jurisdiction over the American economy. The Disability Rights Section, for example, zealously enforces the Americans with Disabilities Act and has brought movie theatres like AMC and Cinemamark, Norwegian Cruise Lines, the USGA, Days Inn, and the International House of Pancakes to their knees.” In fact, there is a general and ongoing assault on businesses across the country. And there can be no question that the Americans with Disabilities Act has become a socialist weapon of war.
There is much more in Adams’s book, especially concerning election fraud. “There are glaring flaws in our electoral system, from corrupted voter rolls to the lack of voting rights protections for military personnel stationed abroad, that the Civil Rights Division is clearly intent on perpetuating. If this situation continues, the division’s bias could well influence outcomes in the close swing states in 2012.” But of course, if your aim is to destroy the market, then – as Lenin said to Angelica Balabanoff – “everything that is done in the proletarian cause is honest.”
There are those who believe that destroying the free market will save mankind. According to Le Bon, “Socialism is far more a religious belief than a theory of reasoning.” Defects in logic do not hinder the propagation of the doctrine. Only calamity and ruin will bring men to their senses, and perhaps not even then. In advance of calamity, men of foresight have told us what to expect. “All the thinkers who have studied modern Socialism have indicated its dangers and have arrived at identical conclusions with regard to the future it holds in store for us,” wrote Le Bon. After all, it was the socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who wrote, “The social revolution could only end in an immense cataclysm, of which the immediate effect would be to lay waste to the earth, and to confine society in a straitjacket.” Describing the true objective of socialism as purely destructive, Proudhon denounced his own misbegotten socialist beliefs. “I repudiate socialism,” he wrote. “It is impotent, immoral, fit only to make dupes and pilferers!”
Another nineteenth century thinker, Herbert Spencer, warned that the triumph of socialism would be the greatest disaster the world has ever seen, and would end in military despotism. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche described socialists as “dolts and flatheads” whose ideas signify the “degeneration and diminution of man into the perfect herd animal … the dwarf animal of equal rights and claims….” In The Will to Power Nietzsche warned that the twentieth century would be convulsed by socialism, which represented a subtle reaction against growth and against life itself. “In the teaching of socialism,” wrote Nietzsche, “a will to the denial of life is but poorly concealed….”
Many socialist experiments around the globe have failed. We all know about the Soviet Union. Yet this knowledge has not stopped the steady advance of socialism in our schools, in our government – in our Department of Justice. Sadly, the crowd gives power to those that flatter best. And those that flatter best today are opposed to the market, and will make war against businessmen through every means available. One might ask, however, why so many businessmen fail to resist? “This decay of will,” wrote Le Bon, “coinciding with lack of initiative and the development of indifference, is the great danger which threatens us.”
Indeed, we have become the creatures of our own indifference. It is not that the schools have dumbed us down, or that we cannot see what is happening. Our ruin has been preceded by a more general decadence. “The ruin of nations,” wrote Le Bon, “has never been effected by the lowering of their intelligence, but by the lowering of their character.”
