US Economy Grows 4.3%, But Only the Rich Are Benefiting with Palki Sharma. Really!

Palki does not only suffer from a Trump Derangement Syndrome, she is also a Marxist!

Kemi Badenoch claimed the UK is ‘becoming a welfare state with an economy attached’. Really!

Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) has written about it for several decades.

The Communist Manifesto was published in 1849 in London by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Maybe Kemi Badenoch (age 45) needs to brush up on her history of socialism in the UK!

Spectator Evening Blend

Why is Marxism in all its many incarnations so successful since 1848?

Marxism and its many variants reduces/forces the many complexities of history, society, politics, and human behavior into a drastically simplified world view of foe versus friend and most everything is painted in black and white!

It neatly divides the world into colonizer and slaves, oppressor and oppressed, capitalist exploiter and laborers and so on!

Thus, Marxism is extremely banal and primitive!

It gives many mentally lazy people (no matter what their level of education etc.) and useful idiots the power to pretend to understand and explain the world! They falsely claim to fight injustice and inequity, but they are actually introducing more injustice and inequity!

What a perfect fallacy!

In 1989, the New York Times Reported ‘the Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges'

Recommendable! Marxism is one heck of a conspiracy theory!

The seduction of Marxism lies in the great pretense of explaining and reducing everything and history into very simple terms like class struggle. That is very seductive and speciously empowering to many people.

"... After absorbing Marxist ideas (even when those ideas weren’t called “Marxist”), generations of university graduates carried those ideas into other important American institutions: the arts, media, government, public schools, even eventually into human resources departments and corporate boardrooms. (This is known as “the long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by Communist student activist Rudi Dutschke, whose ideas were influenced by early twentieth-century Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci.) ..."

The New York Times Reported ‘the Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges' 30 Years Ago. Today, We See the Results - Foundation for Economic Education The lesson of 1989 is that today’s culture and ideas are tomorrow’s politics and policies.

Herbert Marcuse: The Philosopher Behind the Ideology of Antifa

Recommendable! Of course, Herbert Marcuse was not the only philosopher of the so called Frankfurt School/Institute for Social Research.

Herbert Marcuse is one of those primitive and shallow philosophers like e.g. Karl Marx, who tried to explain the world by painting only in black and white. Society, according to Marcuse, can neatly be divided in oppressed and oppressors. Enforced strict equality among humans is the sole solution! What a dangerous fanatic!

Marcuse is also one of the proponents of the so called Critical Theory, although his contributions may only be minor.

One may also detect a weird, naive, and distorted form of pacifism in Marcuse's writings!

Here are some excerpts of Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance:

1. "The conclusion reached is that the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed."
2. "The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandizing, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions and aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives."
3. "Tolerance is an end in itself. The elimination of violence, and the reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and animals from cruelty and aggression are preconditions for the creation of a humane society."
4. "This sort of tolerance strengthens the tyranny of the majority against which authentic liberals protested."
5. "To take a most controversial case: the exercise of political rights (such as voting, letter-writing to the press, to Senators, etc., protest-demonstrations with a priori renunciation of counterviolence) in a society of total administration serves to strengthen this administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness. In such a case, freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude."
6. "Generally, the function and value of tolerance depend on the equality prevalent in the society in which tolerance is practiced. Tolerance itself stands subject to overriding criteria: its range and its limits cannot be defined in terms of the respective society. In other words, tolerance is an end in itself only when it is truly universal, practiced by the rulers as well as by the ruled, by the lords as well as by the peasants, by the sheriffs as well as by their victims. And such universal tolerance is possible only when no real or alleged enemy requires in the national interest the education and training of people in military violence and destruction. As long as these conditions do not prevail, the conditions of tolerance are 'loaded': they are determined and defined by the institutionalized inequality (which is certainly compatible with constitutional equality), i.e., by the class structure of society. In such a society, tolerance is de facto limited on the dual ground of legalized violence or suppression (police, armed forces, guards of all sorts) and of the privileged position held by the predominant interests and their 'connections'."

"... This [Critical Theory] might sound benign, but in practice, critical theory is the shallow analysis of politics, history, art, and society through the lens of power dynamics. It places the world into a box of oppressor vs. oppressed and insists that those who are oppressed are “good” and those who are oppressors are “evil.” ... Marcuse applies this theory in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”—a true example of doublespeak—wherein he argues that free speech and tolerance are only beneficial when they exist in conditions of absolute equality. When there are power differentials at play, which there most certainly always will be, then free speech and tolerance are only beneficial to the already powerful."

Meet the Philosopher Behind the Ideology of Antifa - Foundation for Economic Education His work is considered to be the root of neo-Marxism, which is a backward philosophy that is manifesting itself in backward ways.

The Essence Of Marxism By Niall Ferguson

Very recommendable! An excerpt of a longer essay by Niall Ferguson.

"The founders of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were just two of many radical critics of the industrial society, but it was their achievement to devise the first internally consistent blueprint for an alternative social order. A mixture of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy, which represented the historical process as dialectical, and the political economy of David Ricardo, which posited diminishing returns for capital and an ‘iron’ law of wages, Marxism took Carlyle’s revulsion against the industrial economy and substituted a utopia for nostalgia.

Marx himself was an odious individual. An unkempt scrounger and a savage polemicist, he liked to boast that his wife was ‘née Baroness von Westphalen’ but was not above siring an illegitimate son by their maidservant. On the sole occasion when he applied for a job (as a railway clerk) he was rejected because his handwriting was so atrocious. He sought to play the stock market but was hopeless at it. For most of his life he therefore depended on handouts from Engels, for whom socialism was an evening hobby, along with fox-hunting and womanizing; his day job was running one of his father’s cotton factories in Manchester ... No man in history has bitten the hand that fed him with greater gusto than Marx bit the hand of King Cotton."


The Essence Of Marxism | Hoover Institution: A belief that the industrial economy is doomed to produce an intolerably unequal society.

LinkedIn Marxist Class Struggle Propaganda

Posted: 10/10/2019

Every morning LinkedIn provides its users with a Daily Rundown feature of selected news. On many days, I have to cringe my teeth given the utter leftist propaganda LinkedIn is spreading.

Here is a wonderful example how LinkedIn tries to stoke the flames of economic inequality and to stir resentment between rich Americans and the rest:
“Lower tax rate goes to the richest
For the first time in U.S. history, billionaires in America paid a lower tax rate than those in the working class, according to a study by U.C. Berkeley economists. The richest 400 families in the country paid an average effective rate of 23%, or a full percentage point lower than the 24.2% rate paid by the bottom 50% of American households. While the tax rate paid by the poorer half has changed little over time, the 400 richest U.S. households had an effective tax rate of 47% in 1980.” (S1; emphasis added)

What is the takeaway:

1. LinkedIn is absolutely clueless about economics and taxation!
2. If these UC Berkeley economists indeed produced such a study with those conclusions, then they are laughable amateurs and clueless as well
3. It is well known that e.g. the top decile of income tax payers pay about 50% or more of all federal income taxes. Too look only tax rates and not at tax revenues is as stupid as it gets!
4. Few of the rich and wealthy American households receive any welfare benefits, but many of the bottom 50% of households do and these welfare benefits and tax refunds are a substantial form of tax free additional income to those households

My advice to LinkedIn: Do not blindly rehash stupid articles from the Washington Post (S2)!

The underlying economic study was recently published as a book (S3). This book costs $26.55 on Amazon. Just look at the ridiculous title: “The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay”. What a waste of money!

Last but not least: One of the study’s authors is assistant economics professor Gabriel Zucman at UC Berkeley:
“Zucman has co-written several papers with Thomas Piketty” (S3). Thomas Piketty was also his doctoral advisor. Piketty, a French economist whose work focuses on wealth and income inequality, has been thoroughly discredited as an economist based on his best selling book “ Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. Only leftists still admire Piketty!
In 2015, Zucman published his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens”. So called “tax havens” are another favorite scapegoat of leftists! Tax havens are by far not only used by the rich and wealthy, but also by dictators and their families and by corrupt politicians. Tax havens are often a canary in the coal mine indicating excessive taxation by greedy politicians!

Sources (S):

1. Lower tax rate goes to the richest (LinkdIn 10/10/19)
2. For the first time in history, U.S. billionaires paid a lower tax rate than the working class last year (Washington Compost 10/8/19)
3. The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay 1st Edition
4. Gabriel Zucman, French economist, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of

Merkel Challenger Martin Schulz Is A Staunch Marxist

Posted: 2/5/2017  Updated: 2/11/2017

Update Of 2/11/2017

I had overlooked this article containing an interview with the former president of the European Parliament published 3/21/2013 (emphasis added):

1. “... We can only develop a true European democracy if people fear the European Parliament. My job as President is to make sure that the European Parliament is taken seriously and feared. ..,”
   [Seriously?]
2. “.... Sure, things have gone wrong in Greece, but what makes me angry is that there are people who have to look for food in rubbish bins while at the same time super-wealthy Greeks buy expensive homes in London and Berlin.”
   [What a distorted world view! Marxist to the bone!]

Original Article With/Without Revisions

Germany has a new contender for replacing the highly overrated chancellor Angela Merkel in the upcoming general elections in  September of 2017.

However, Martin Schulz (a social democrat, or member of the SPD party) is a hardcore marxist. Further, he is basically a lifelong, mediocre career politician. He is disappointing. Years ago I read a published essay by Mr. Schulz, which left little doubt that he is a marxist (Unfortunately, I do not remember title nor publication or the date it was published).

Martin Schulz has written other curious essays as well (emphasis added):

1. Europe’s Opportunity In Hollande (5/8/2012) “... François Hollande’s victory is a fresh chance for Europe. It should spell the end of a policy oriented exclusively towards austerity, which has paralyzed our economies and divided the EU. The new French president’s commitment to a European growth policy has brought hope to citizens, and should not alarm anyone – certainly not the financial markets. … Indeed, Europe needs a master plan to avoid a tailspin of recession, growing unemployment, and weakening banking systems. … The growth pact can be properly financed by new sources of revenue, such as a financial-transaction tax and joint project bonds for infrastructure investment, or by curbing tax evasion and tax fraud and eliminating tax havens, as well as by more efficient and intelligent use of structural funds. … The EU also needs common initiatives to replace piece-meal bilateral agreements on tax evasion and tax havens, which undermine the goal of a fair society.”
   [Schultz here highly praises the recently elected new president of France, Hollande. I wonder whether he still thinks Hollande was such a great politician. Some of Schulz’s language is quite comical!]
2. European Council Meeting: Are Young People as Important as the Banks? “... a telling question put to me by a young Spanish woman last year in Madrid, which I cannot get out of my mind. That question was: ‘You managed to find EUR 700 billion to bailout the banks, so why can’t you find some money for us?’ Surely the time has come for us to acknowledge that young people are at least as systemically important as the banks. … The Youth Guarantee, which has already been approved by the 27 EU ministers for employment and social affairs, needs to be written into the law of each Member State at the earliest opportunity. Under this scheme, young people will have the guarantee of being offered a job, apprenticeship or traineeship or the opportunity to continue their education or training within four months of leaving education or becoming unemployed. Given the current situation, it is important for that guarantee to be backed up by the law. … In general, though, the best way of combating youth unemployment is to focus on growth. But how, exactly? By, for example, stimulating investment that will generate jobs for young people. And where will the money come from? From all available sources, including the financial transaction tax and action to put a stop to tax evasion and close down tax havens. If social justice is to mean anything, bankers and insurers need to play a part in securing our children’s future.”
   [Do I even need to comment on this? This candidate is a marxist moron! Like Obama, no clue about economics!]

It was reported that Schulz thinks that the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was great! “When Hobsbawn died, Martin Schulz  tweeted: "Eric Hobsbawm was a man of extraordinary qualities. His books have greatly inspired and influenced my political and historical thoughts."” (Source)

(Photograph source)

Like many socialists before him, Schulz has publicly denied to be a marxist! (Source)