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The Modern Little Red Hen

Once upon a time, there was a little red hen who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered some grains of wheat. She called her neighbors and said, “If we plant this wheat, we shall have bread to eat.  Who will help me plant it?”

“Not I,” said the cow.

“Not I,” said the duck.

“Not I,” said the pig.

“Not I,” said the goose.

“Then I will,” said the little red hen. And she did. The wheat grew tall and ripened into golden grain.  “Who will help me reap my wheat?” asked the little red hen.

“Not I,” said the duck.

“Out of my classification,” said the pig.

“I’d lose my seniority,” said the cow.

“I’d lose my unemployment compensation,” said the goose.

“Then I will,” said the little red hen, and she did.

At last, it came time to bake the bread. “Who will help me bake the bread?” asked the little red hen.

“That would be overtime for me,” said the cow.

“I’d lose my welfare benefits,” said the duck.

“I’m a dropout and never learned how,” said the pig.

“If I’m to be the only helper, that’s discrimination,” said the goose.

“Then I will,” said the little red hen.

She baked five loaves and held them up for her neighbors to see.  They wanted some and, in fact, demanded a share. But the little red hen said, “No, I can eat the five loaves.”

“Excess profits!” cried the cow.

“Capitalist leech!” screamed the duck.

“I demand equal rights!” yelled the goose.

And the pig just grunted. And they painted “unfair” picket signs and marched around and around the little red hen, shouting obscenities.

When the government agent came, he said to the little red hen, “You must not be greedy.”

“But I earned the bread,” said the little red hen.

“Exactly,” said the agent. “That is the wonderful free enterprise system. Anyone in the barnyard can earn as much as he wants.

But under our modern government regulations, the productive workers must divide their product with the idle.”

And they lived happily ever after, including the little red hen, who smiled and clucked, “I am grateful. I am grateful.”

But her neighbors wondered why she never again baked any more bread.

Found here.

September 11 and the Anti-Capitalistic Mentality: An Interview With Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., for Frontpagemag.com

by Myles Kantor

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., is president and founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama and editor of LewRockwell.com. Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was a major economist and thinker whose historic treatises include Human Action and Socialism. The mission of the Ludwig von Mises Institute is “to restore a high place for theory in the social sciences, encourage a revival of critical historical research, draw attention to neglected traditions in Western philosophy, and promote the free and enterprising commonwealth.”

Myles Kantor: Ludwig von Mises entitled one of his books The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality. What did he mean by this?

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.: It’s a marvelous book, written in 1956. It still holds up. Mises addressed the question: why are the cultural elites so biased against the free-market economy, and all it represents, despite the evidence that it is the only system compatible with a developed civilization?

He took it for granted that huge sectors of the intelligentsia and media are deeply ignorant of economics. In this book he addresses the problem not of ignorance but hate: hatred of the businessman and entrepreneur, and the assumptions that the business class is secretly criminal, that the rich never deserve what they own, that businesses that rake in profits by serving others through enterprise somehow “owe” something to the “community,” so, if they don’t give it up voluntarily, it should be taken from them.

We see this on display in these disgusting Enron hearings, lovingly reported by the echo-chamber press. It’s one thing to prosecute crime, but this is anti-capitalism running wild. Nobody remembers that during the ‘90s boom phase of the market created by loose credit, investors cared only about accounting in order to sell companies with real earnings and buy those without. The conventional wisdom on the street was that any company that paid dividends was worthless. That’s the topsy-turvy world that easy money created in the late ‘90s.

So Enron was typical of major corporate start-ups during the boom phase of the business cycle, but in 2001 the free market struck back with a dose of reality. Unviable businesses melted. Thank goodness for that! And now investors are wary, as they should be. There is a wonderful witch-hunt on for companies that bury debt as subsidiaries, and there is ‘fessing up all over the place. Truth at last, courtesy of the market economy.

Now contrast this process with HUD, the post office, or any other federal bureau. The GAO comes out with regular reports showing that these agencies’ books are in complete chaos, with tens of billions missing, unaccounted for, or uncollectible. There are no earnings. There are no dividends. And who cares? No one. In Washington, GAO reports are used for scrap paper and birdcage lining.

And so now we have these politicos who specialize in public relations and wealth redistribution putting Enron on trial for alleged accounting malpractice. And why? Because the company went belly-up. But the market is supposed to punish unviable enterprises by shutting them down. Lord knows that would never happen to a government agency. Government specializes in keeping unprofitable operations going: look at the history of industry in the Soviet Union, or at American farming or the TVA.

Kantor: What type of anti-capitalism did Mises draw attention to?

Rockwell: All of the same types of bias were present forty-six years ago when Mises wrote his book. He noticed in those days that detective novels, for example, frequently make the rich businessman the villain. In movies, bureaucrats are heroic and public-spirited while businessmen are greedy, racist, and vaguely criminal. In popular music, the “suits” are the ones ‘dissed.

As for academia, outside one or two economics professors, nearly the entire faculty of the typical university is reliably anti-capitalist. As a class, academics can be depended on to oppose economic development, support high taxes, and latch on to every anti-enterprise cause that comes along.

Some of the anti-capitalism of the intellectuals is self-interest at work: those paid by the state identify with the state and its interests. There’s also snobbery at work: most intellectuals hate commercial culture. Well, folks, the glory of capitalism is that it permits you to choose what to consume and what not to consume. If intellectuals prefer the music of Anton Webern to Britney Spears, fine. Tower Records offers both.

But Mises’s analysis goes further to identify the problem of envy at the root of anti-capitalism. Whether in the arts, entertainment, or academia, the dominant players are talented people who believe that they are wiser and better than the masses. They are appalled that capitalism permits a B-school dropout to become a billionaire while they scrape by for a measly raise when promoted from assistant to associate professor. They set out to cripple the system that brings this about.

And yet this is not new. Since ancient times, the merchant has been scorned and his profession considered ignoble. The philosopher who strolls around speculating on the meaning of life is seen as the highest form of humanity while the man who risks his own money to make available food, shelter, medicine, clothing, and all the other material goods that make life liveable is despised.

Now I’m all for philosophy and other academic disciplines; like the priesthood, this is a vocation that requires sacrifice, and that is essential. But celebrate the risk-taking merchant too. He is a benefactor of mankind.

Kantor: Radical environmentalists in Europe often vandalize and perpetrate arson against McDonald’s restaurants. Is there a parallel between this aggression and the attacks on the World Trade Center?

Rockwell: Notice that whenever looting of businesses occur, at these anti-globalist events or in Europe when McDonald’s restaurants are burned, the press will frequently write that no violence has occurred, on grounds that no one was hurt or killed. No violence? What do you call it when gangsters destroy property for ideological reasons? You can call it violence, or you might even call it terrorism. The Earth Liberation Front has been doing this for years in the U.S., wrecking research labs and burning the cars of scientists. It’s hardly ever reported.

Think about the people who worked at the WTC: traders, insurers, speculators, retailers, lenders: financial experts whose contributions are essential to our daily lives. They labored every day to overcome linguistic, cultural, and regulatory barriers to unite the world in a great commercial project to improve the lot of mankind. But public schools teach that they are exploiters, Hollywood regards them as somewhat criminal, and not one person in ten thousand can tell you why what they do matters.

When the hijackers were choosing targets, they figured that they would smash these buildings because they somehow represented the “money power.” Well, not many among the cultural elites in this country or the rest of the world would really disagree with them. The urge to destroy business and finance as a sector plays itself out in politics and the media every day.

The attack on the WTC put into action what millions of students are taught every day in their college classrooms, what prime-time television suggests night after night, what the sociology journals seek to prove year after year: entrepreneurs and what they create are anti-social and wholly dispensable.

Yet enterprise and its symbols do not represent “money power” or any other kind of power. They represent the coming together of people to trade voluntarily with the hope of achieving material advancement and progress.

The watchwords of capitalism are persuasion and contract. Buying and selling is a cooperative act. No one ever forced a Parisian to eat a Big Mac. The urge to smash the system that makes it possible for people to have more choices in life stems from ignorance and evil. Without free enterprise, civilization would crumble and we would all starve and die.

Kantor: Has popular culture’s appreciation of these individuals increased since September 11?

Rockwell: I wouldn’t say so. We’ve gained a greater appreciation of rescue workers, and that’s great, though I notice that many of them are seizing the opportunity to sue the city for personal damages. But what about the people and the occupations that were actually targeted by the killers?

Hardly anyone can name a single business that was smashed. Among them: Morgan Stanley, Fred Alger Management, Cantor Fitzgerald, MassMutual, Fiduciary Trust, Harris Beach & Wilcox, Oppenheimerfunds, Bank of America, Kemper Insurance, Lehman Brothers, Dean Whitter, Credit Suisse, and First Boston.

I don’t recall a single tribute to these institutions printed in the popular press. I don’t even rule out that many people among the U.S. intelligentsia thought that because these people were on the front lines of capitalism, they had it coming. Yet these are the brokers who worked every day to invest our savings and channel resources to their most profitable uses. These insurance companies provide the valuable service of securing our lives and property against accidents and did far more to achieve their aims than the Office of Homeland Security, which in fact has no real stake in the security of anything but its own budget.

Kantor: Have federal policies after September 11 reflected a greater appreciation of capitalism?

Rockwell: Again, the opposite has happened. At the World Economic Forum, held in New York in memory of September 11, you couldn’t tell the protestors from the main speakers. The podium always seemed to be held by some demagogue railing against the wealth of the West. Not one speaker bothered to give a tribute to free enterprise, not even the corporate people there. In all, it was a disgusting show.

The conventional wisdom now is that multinational corporations are just elaborate shell games covering every manner of criminality. The recent talk is not about whether there should be new regulation of business but how severe should it be.

Just recently, Pat Buchanan announced that the Enron collapse shows that “capitalism may contain the seed of its own destruction.” That’s a good summary of the Marxian view. Next, he’ll endorse a dictatorship of the proletariat and the expropriation of the Kulaks.

Kantor: To what extent was September 11 facilitated by domestic anti-capitalism, namely, regulatory impositions?

Rockwell: This is an interesting case. Of course, the FAA has long prevented airlines from defending their own property. I know many pilots who saw the need for guns on planes long ago. But the regulatory view was that this was unthinkable. They were told that hijackers need to be placated and talked to by experts on the ground, while passengers and crew should be compliant.

This is what all the terrorism experts were saying before September 11. If you think about it, this entire war and the huge increase in government power that has resulted, including the thousands dead and the billions in destroyed property, might not ever have occurred had the pilots had the right to protect property from invasion and theft.

So, yes, regulators are to blame in part. Of course, that doesn’t remove responsibility from the hijackers themselves. But let’s say you have a town council that forbids banks from installing alarm systems, and then all the local banks are robbed. Should the town council be held morally culpable along with the robbers? I think so.

There is also the interesting case of asbestos and the WTC. Might the steel in the building have weakened more slowly if asbestos had been able to be used on the upper floor as it was on the lower? Might that have given people more time to leave the buildings? Some engineers have said so.

As for restrictions on trade, those who support ongoing sanctions against Iraq and other countries need to consider that these polices violate free trade, and give rise to hatreds that can fuel terrorism. Long before the terrorists cited these sanctions as an excuse, people from groups like the Institute of International Economics had raised serious questions about the effects of these sanctions. Remember too that this is a region rich with oil profits made possible in part by domestic restrictions on energy production. This is why a policy of free trade with all peoples of the world needs to be matched by loosened energy regulations at home.

Kantor: Despite the devastation inflicted by socialism from Russia to Ethiopia to Cuba, its apologists maintain these regimes have perverted socialist principles. Is socialism inherently hostile to freedom? Is capitalism a precondition for peace?

Rockwell: That’s right, there’s always a new form of socialism being proposed in some new book. A bestseller on the college circuit called Empire, for example, calls for a new communism which, the authors promise, will be different from the old. But anything other than free enterprise always means a society of compulsion and lower living standards, and any form of socialism strictly enforced means dictatorship and the total state. That this statement is still widely disputed only illustrates the degree to which malignant fantasy can capture the imagination of intellectuals.

What the socialists hate most is that the masses have never risen up to overthrow the free-enterprise society. This had already frustrated them by the turn of the 20^th century, so many of them hatched a new scheme to impose socialism by crisis. In Europe, and to some extent in the U.S., war was their preferred method of getting rid of the market economy. They saw that war puts the government in charge of economic life. They knew that if they ever stood a chance to impose central planning, it was to be through war socialism.

This is why the socialists and the left generally were such strong advocates of entry into World War I, and why FDR so badly wanted to enter World War II. Hitler too believed that war was the best way to bring about national socialism. Mussolini felt the same about fascism. Dictators love war. We even saw elements of this in the Clinton years: he turned to war when his collectivist domestic programs weren’t panning out. And the left is correct in this: people are more prone to give up liberty in wartime.

Ludwig von Mises, who saw his country and civilization wrecked in two world wars, used to say: “The first condition for the establishment of perpetual peace is the general adoption of the principles of laissez-faire capitalism.” People on the left and right today reject that view, and we live with the destructive aims and policies of anti-capitalism, and we have perpetual war.

This is why, so far as the Mises Institute is concerned, we will keep doing what we have always done: defend the economics of capitalism against its myriad enemies, because it is the very foundation of peace, prosperity, and civilization, and the best, and perhaps only, source of effective security as well.

March 12, 2002

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

The War Ethics of Benny Gantz

“Every Jewish mother should know that she has deposited her sons in the hands of generals who prefer enemy lives (and the foreign forums where they can brag about that) to the lives of her children.

Nadav Halamish (who is running in the Zehut primaries) discovered this 2015 speech by Benny Gantz, the Chief of Staff of the Operation Protective Edge defeat – currently running for election at the head of a new party.

In his speech, Ganz brags that despite the fact that shots were being fired relentlessly at Israel’s Golani soldiers from the Wafa hospital (which had become Hamas HQ) in the Saj’aiyah neighborhood of Gaza, and despite the fact that the IDF had already spoken with the hospital/Hamas HQ administrators to ensure that there were no civilians there – when he finally decided to shoot back at the hospital, Gantz ordered to hold fire just a bit longer in order to check with the hospital once again to ensure that there were no civilians there.

In other words, the IDF High Command skewed the front line soldiers’ element of surprise, made it possible for the enemy to prepare itself well for the Golani attack and then – after repeated warnings, the Chief of Staff did not take advantage of his immense firepower superiority and instead of turning the hornets’ nest into dust by bombing it from the air, preferred to send the Golani infantrymen into the fire.

“Woe is to the evil person and woe is to his neighbor,” says the Jewish fighting ethic.

The Geneva Convention also places the responsibility for the death of civilians who were used as human shields upon the shoulders of the side that used them as such.

But Gantz decided to be more Catholic than the Pope.

Gantz, motivated by different “ethics”, fashionable and expedient, explicitly admits in his speech that although he had warned the evil terrorists’ neighbor, he again constrained the momentum of the battle.

“And we took the risk on the Golani Brigade” brags the Israeli general Gantz.

For Gantz, a dead IDF soldier is better than a photo of a destroyed hospital.

The farcical Chief of Staff of Operation Protective Edge, repeats that to the best of his knowledge, there were no Gazan civilians hurt there.

No Gazan civilians were hurt.

But a Golani soldier was…

Media reports from that battle (a Google search for “Waffa hospital Golani” shows reports in Hebrew on Mako, YNET and Walla) quote the IDF spokesman who said that there were enemy command centers and arms stockpiles in the hospital and that they were shooting automatic and anti-tank weapons at our forces “over many long days”.

That same Google search also brings us a very detailed description of the battle on the website of the Golani 13th battalion: “The El-Wafa hospital served in effect as Hamas HQ, according to intelligence…150 meters from the El-Wafa hospital, from which they were shooting ceaselessly…the fighters…returned fire…Shawn Carmeli, a machine gunner by military training, a lone soldier…who made Aliyah to Israel at the age of 16…realizes that the machine gun ammunition belt on top of his APC was stuck…and it had to be fixed in order to continue to fire at the terrorists across the road from the hospital…Shawn…gets out of the APC to fix the stuck ammunition belt…doesn’t succeed…around him shots are being fired from all sides but Carmeli goes out again…The Unit Commander asks him not to expose his entire body, but Carmeli answers him immediately, ‘I am doing it quickly and will finish’…The Unit Commander goes out to help…The Unit Commander comes back in but Carmeli doesn’t return with him…it took about a minute to pull him back in…Carmeli was hit by enemy fire and killed…the first casualty of the Golani Brigade in the operation”.

Shawn Nissim Carmeli was 21 when he fell.

David Ben Gurion formulated the upper ethical bar required of an IDF commander: “It is not enough for the commander to know his work. He must love people, the life of his soldier must be dear to him…Every Hebrew mother should know that she has deposited the fate of her son in the hands of commanders who are worthy of it.”

The values of the distorted “fighting ethics” that the offshoots of the New Israel Fund have embedded by means of commanders like Benny Gantz and his friends in the IDF have already brought about the deaths of hundreds of soldiers and perhaps even more.

My son, Avraham, a cited soldier in one of the infantry brigades, could not remain silent. About half a year ago, he publicly condemned this phenomenon and was dismissed from his position.

Was Benny Gantz worthy of commanding my son? Your sons?

Is a person who preferred the unbroken walls of the Waffa hospital/Hamas terror command over the life of Shawn Carmeli, may God avenge his blood – worthy of being an Israeli leader?

And one last word –

The Defense Minister during Operation Protective Edge was Bogie Ya’alon. The PM was Binyamin Netanyahu.

Their responsibility for the abandonment of our sons is no less than Gantz’s.

It is even greater.

The Great Voucher Fraud

by Laurence M. Vance

The mantra of “school choice” is repeated endlessly by proponents of educational vouchers and is getting louder. But does an income-transfer program cease to be an income-transfer program just because it is recommended by conservatives, libertarians, a Republican president, and free-market economists?

Advocates of educational reform are agreed on one thing: the doleful condition of the public school system. But instead of proposing a free-market solution, the panacea offered for improving the education of American youth is usually government vouchers. The federal government would provide each child a voucher worth enough money to fund his education. Parents would have the “choice” of the school on which to spend the voucher. The school would then redeem the voucher for payment from the federal government. If this was describing anything but vouchers for education, it would be denounced as an income-transfer program as well as a subsidy to private industry, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.

But rather than being viewed as another income-transfer and corporate-welfare program, vouchers have garnered the support of many conservatives and libertarians who would otherwise be outraged if taxpayer money flowed anywhere but into education. Because of the opposition to vouchers by the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and local teachers’ unions, many ardent defenders of the free market have latched on to the voucher movement. Many conservatives who only recently talked about abolishing the federal department of education now support increased government funding of education through vouchers. Some libertarians claim that vouchers will improve education by fostering competition. The Milton & Rose Friedman Foundation is pushing vouchers under the rubric of “educational choice.”

The voucher solution is understandable coming from conservatives since they generally have no problem with using the state to further their political and social agendas. However, for libertarians to embrace a government program such as vouchers is indeed troubling.

Yet vouchers themselves are not a bad idea. There are many private voucher programs in existence. Even in the ideal case of a complete separation of school and state, vouchers would be a viable alternative for the funding of education, and perhaps very much so. The problem with vouchers is their funding.

The main objection to government vouchers is that they are paid for by the taxpayers – the same taxpayers who already fund the public school system. So not only are vouchers an income-transfer program, they amount to a double tax: the taxpayer foots the bill for both public and private schools. Vouchers are “fresh money.” Tax money spent on educational vouchers does not come out of tax money spent for traditional schooling. No current voucher proposal even hints at a reduction in funding for public schools to pay for vouchers. To argue that parents who receive vouchers to fund their children’s education would merely be getting back some of their own tax dollars is to ignore the fact that most of the parents eligible for vouchers will pay little or no taxes to begin with.

But even aside from the funding issue, there are still a number of problems with government educational vouchers.

First of all, the state does not give without taking something in return: it always controls what it subsidizes. After accepting public money, private schools will no longer be responsible to parents but to government. Therefore, vouchers will ultimately destroy private schools and the identity of sectarian schools.

Second, vouchers will make private schools inefficient. Without vouchers, private schools must compete for business in the free market. If every private school is on the government dole, the incentive to keep costs down will be greatly diminished. The universal availability of vouchers will distort the marketplace by establishing a floor below which tuition would not sink.

Third, vouchers will put some private schools out of business. This will happen in two ways. Schools that refuse to accept vouchers will most likely find fewer paying customers. Schools forced to accept vouchers (can a restaurant refuse to serve anyone?) might well choose to close their doors rather than fall under government control.

Fourth, the correct solution to a problem is never increased government intervention. Government is the problem, not the solution. Increasing government intervention and forcing someone to pay for the education of someone else’s children are about as far afield from libertarianism as one can get.

Fifth, to imply that vouchers are what enable parents to have “school choice” is to perpetuate the myth that parents don’t already have a choice about their own children’s education. All parents have “school choice” right now – just as they have food choice, clothes choice, and car choice. What voucher supporters really mean by “school choice” is that parents don’t have a choice of where to spend other people’s money for the education of their children.

Sixth, voucher proponents don’t advocate food stamps or government-subsidized housing and medical-care programs. So why do they compromise on the issue of education? What is so magical about education? Vouchers are nothing but food stamps for education, and even worse since they would generally pay the entire cost of a child’s education.

Seventh, in spite of the language of the free market that is often used by libertarians when they make the case for vouchers, there is nothing about using the coercive power of the state to raise and dispense education funds that is akin to supply and demand, the price system, consumer sovereignty, or competition. Real competition in education can be achieved only when there is a complete separation of school and state.

And finally, vouchers would foster increased dependency on the government. Parents would look to the state as the provider of educational funds for their children just as many parents now receive subsidies from the state for their food, medical care, and housing. There is, however, one redeeming thing about vouchers: they are an admission by government that its public schools are a failure.

A threat to independence

But even without these problems, vouchers are a great fraud to begin with. Under a state-funded voucher system, there are many groups that will still have no “school choice” because they will never receive a voucher in the first place.

Those who homeschool their children will certainly not be eligible for vouchers. Most parents who homeschool do not have a degree from a state-recognized college or university, are not certified teachers and do not have the money for all the recommended textbooks to establish an elaborate curriculum. So in addition to paying taxes for the support of public schools, parents who homeschool would have to purchase books, videos, software, and supplies without a voucher to pay for them.

Those who would enroll their children in a religious school will find out that vouchers will be off-limits to them as well, since most religious schools, by their very nature, are highly discriminatory. Many religious schools hire only teachers and admit only students who are adherents to their own particular faith. Any religious school that refused to compromise would be denied vouchers. The temptation would be great to give in to government demands – meager at first, like all government regulations, but then highly intrusive.

The most overlooked group that will have no “school choice” under a voucher system is the taxpayers who would pay for the privilege of “school choice” that others would have. Educational vouchers given to parents for each school-age child to spend at the school of their choice comes from only one source: the taxpayers. Couples with no children who spend thousands of dollars to educate the children of others will now have to cough up even more money. Local communities are not taxed to feed and clothe all of the children living in them, but they are taxed to educate them. If it would be unthinkable to directly tax the citizens of a community to feed and clothe all of the children in the community, then why is it acceptable to tax the citizens at large to educate the children of some?

Ultimately, the real issue is not vouchers but the role of the state in education. The theory behind the government education monopoly is that government, rather than father, knows best. But the paean of “school choice” should be seen just for what it is: one government program to fix another failed government program. In spite of much conservative and libertarian support that vouchers have, they are merely another transfer payment from the “rich” to the poor – an income redistribution scheme just like food stamps, Medicaid, AFDC, and yes, the funding of public education. So when it comes to the education of your children – just say no to vouchers.

March 28, 2005

From Lewrockwell.com, here.