By Kelly O'Connell ——Bio and Archives--July 10, 2012
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"Classical liberalism" is the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. Till 1900, this ideology was known simply as liberalism. The preface "classical" is now necessary since liberalism has become associated with wide-ranging interferences with private property and the market on behalf of egalitarian goals. This version of liberalism is sometimes designated as "social," or (erroneously) "modern" or the "new," liberalism.Today's liberalism connotes a radically different scheme from the classical variety. Liberalism, in its current modern sense, embodies several main facets most closely associated with socialism and Marxism. First, individual rights are best subsumed and extinguished under the state's rights. Second, private property is sacrificed for the good of "the People." Third, religious expression in public forums is discouraged as anti-theistic naturalism takes its place. Fourth, collectivist social enterprises are encouraged. Fifth, humanism as a broad philosophical stream replaces tradition and religious expression. In essence, modern liberalism is almost indistinguishable from totalitarian collectivism.
Prior to the great crisis of 2007, the governments of the European Community (according to its official statistical service Eurostat) spent 47% of GDP, against 19% for the US federal government. In 2009, government spending as a share of GDP rose to 51% in Europe, and to 36% in the US with the Obama stimulus plan.
When Stalin collectivized the peasant farmers, they were utterly demoralized. By 1932, more than 12 million of them had flooded Russian cities, hoping to flee the oppressive realities of collectivization and "dekulakization." Their influx into the cities threatened to destabilize the rationing system that Stalin instituted in 1929. The number of people holding ration cards grew from 26 million in 1929 to nearly 40 million in 1932. As a Marxist, Stalin would not consider, even for a moment, that the socialization of agriculture was itself responsible for the decreased productivity of Russian farms and factories. Instead he identified the class enemy as the culprit, and increased the purges of those accused of trying to "sabotage" his socialist plans. In particular, he condemned the kulaks and "kulak helpers," mass numbers of whom he ordered his henchmen to execute, sentence to slave labor camps in Siberia, or otherwise deport to remote regions of the country. It was the camps that Stalin created for this purpose--the infamous Gulag archipelago--that inspired Hitler to create concentration camps for the Jews.Stalin might seem an extreme example, and yet he was simply following leftism, much like Mao and Lenin, as well--who all revered Karl Marx, godfather of today's liberalism.
It's an open secret in my discipline: in terms of accurate political predictions (the field's benchmark for what counts as science), my colleagues have failed spectacularly and wasted colossal amounts of time and money. The most obvious example may be political scientists' insistence, during the cold war, that the Soviet Union would persist as a nuclear threat to the United States. In 1993, in the journal International Security, for example, the cold war historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote that the demise of the Soviet Union was "of such importance that no approach to the study of international relations claiming both foresight and competence should have failed to see it coming." And yet, he noted, "None actually did so."
A scientist who posed as a board member of a conservative organization to gain access to its confidential information has been reinstated as president of the Pacific Institute, the environmental research organization that he founded in California. An independent inquiry had confirmed the account offered by the scientist, Peter Gleick, of the false pretenses under which he obtained documents of the Heartland Institute in Feb.Needless to say, true theories don't need "scientists" who lie to "prove" them accurate.
Graphic photos posted on the Internet showed a 23-year-old woman named Feng Jianmei lying in a hospital bed with the remains of the fetus, soaked in blood. The story received widespread attention online, and a few days ago it was the most popular topic on Weibo, China's Twitter. The woman's husband said family planning officials in Shaanxi Province forced his wife to abort her second child after the couple were told that they had violated the nation's one-child policy. The couple had been ordered to pay a $6,300 fine if they wanted to go ahead with the pregnancy. When they failed to pay, Ms. Feng was beaten and given an injection that induced a late-term abortion, the couple said.Further, liberalized policies on sex and single parenthood are tearing society asunder. The NY Times reports over 50% of children born to women 30 and under are to single mothers. This is the largest cause of poverty, according to experts, but just the tip of the iceberg according to statistics on fatherlessness:
The president's 2009 stimulus program was a massively expensive bust. President Obama's top economic advisor Larry Summers said funds must be "targeted" at resources idled by the recession, the interventions must be "temporary," and they needed to "timely," or injected quickly into the economy. None of that turned out to be true. "Even if you were to believe that government spending can trigger economic growth," says Veronique de Rugy, "the money is never spent in a way that's consistent with the conditions laid out by the Keynesians for it to be efficient."
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Kelly O’Connell is an author and attorney. He was born on the West Coast, raised in Las Vegas, and matriculated from the University of Oregon. After laboring for the Reformed Church in Galway, Ireland, he returned to America and attended law school in Virginia, where he earned a JD and a Master’s degree in Government. He spent a stint working as a researcher and writer of academic articles at a Miami law school, focusing on ancient law and society. He has also been employed as a university Speech & Debate professor. He then returned West and worked as an assistant district attorney. Kelly is now is a private practitioner with a small law practice in New Mexico.