The Tragedy Of The Commons

I used to be in charge of a warehouse in Everman, TX.  Everything that happened in the place was my fault, for better or worse.  The warehouse usually looked good.  We had good controls on the inventory there. 

We eventually outgrew it and moved into a much bigger facility in north Fort Worth. 

In the meantime, we still had the lease for the Everman facility, and kept a few dead or slow-moving products there.  And so did everyone else at other shops in the company.  Instead of a facility devoted to shipping only, it has become a storage bin for a wood shop, a metal shop, a plastics shop, and a trade show group.    

It isn't my place any longer.  It belongs to everyone in the company who has more crap than space.  It looks like hammered shit.  I would post before and after pics if I was sure it wouldn't offend co-workers. 

Here's why the place is now a dump.  And incidentally, it's why Socialism usually doesn't work very well.  This is from the Library of Economics and Liberty, on a concept called "The Tragedy Of The Commons":

In 1974 the general public got a graphic illustration of the “tragedy of the commons” in satellite photos of the earth. Pictures of northern Africa showed an irregular dark patch 390 square miles in area. Ground-level investigation revealed a fenced area inside of which there was plenty of grass. Outside, the ground cover had been devastated.


The explanation was simple. The fenced area was private property, subdivided into five portions. Each year the owners moved their animals to a new section. Fallow periods of four years gave the pastures time to recover from the grazing. The owners did this because they had an incentive to take care of their land. But no one owned the land outside the ranch. It was open to nomads and their herds. Though knowing nothing of Karl Marx, the herdsmen followed his famous advice of 1875: “To each according to his needs.” Their needs were uncontrolled and grew with the increase in the number of animals. But supply was governed by nature and decreased drastically during the drought of the early 1970s. The herds exceeded the natural “carrying capacity” of their environment, soil was compacted and eroded, and “weedy” plants, unfit for cattle consumption, replaced good plants. Many cattle died, and so did humans.

The rational explanation for such ruin was given more than 170 years ago. In 1832 William Forster Lloyd, a political economist at Oxford University, looking at the recurring devastation of common (i.e., not privately owned) pastures in England, asked: “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn, and cropped so differently from the adjoining inclosures?”

Lloyd’s answer assumed that each human exploiter of the common was guided by self-interest. At the point when the carrying capacity of the commons was fully reached, a herdsman might ask himself, “Should I add another animal to my herd?” Because the herdsman owned his animals, the gain of so doing would come solely to him. But the loss incurred by overloading the pasture would be “commonized” among all the herdsmen. Because the privatized gain would exceed his share of the commonized loss, a self-seeking herdsman would add another animal to his herd. And another. And reasoning in the same way, so would all the other herdsmen. Ultimately, the common property would be ruined.

Even when herdsmen understand the long-run consequences of their actions, they generally are powerless to prevent such damage without some coercive means of controlling the actions of each individual. Idealists may appeal to individuals caught in such a system, asking them to let the long-term effects govern their actions. But each individual must first survive in the short run. If all decision makers were unselfish and idealistic calculators, a distribution governed by the rule “to each according to his needs” might work. But such is not our world. As James Madison said in 1788, “If men were angels, no Government would be necessary” (Federalist, no. 51). That is, if all men were angels. But in a world in which all resources are limited, a single nonangel in the commons spoils the environment for all.

Hit this link to read the whole thing.  I'm working to try to appoint ONE random person to be in charge of the place.  That's really all it takes - ownership and authority. 

Quote of the day

I found it on Samizdata:


"And, make no mistake, Marxists did lose a big argument, one we now know as 'the 20th century'."

- Will Wilkinson

Poster came from here. 

For Future Reference

Marvel Variants descended from his corporate Valhalla a few days ago and visited my office. 
He noticed this book on one of the shelves:

I mentioned that it's a useful corrective to anyone still enthralled with the idea that the State can be all, provide all, and cure all.  The book nails down the Marxist Body Count at 100 million.  Mr. Variants opined that he generally doesn't give Marxist apologists the time of day.  But I seem to be surrounded by them.  And hell, I occasionally need somebody to talk to. 

There are living, breathing people on this planet, individuals who can feed themselves without making a mess, who still believe in the legend of a benevolent Fidel Castro.  I've been in homes that have copies of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book on the shelf, a relic from the owner's "hippie days".  My little brother, a history perfesser, has casually mentioned that he worked with a couple of Marxist academics at a Methodist university in Tennessee.  Yeah, you expect to encounter some tweedy academics floundering around in the post-Marxist mist within some Ivy League Hot Houses and Reservations, but at Methodist schools in Tennessee?  In the year 2011?  WTF???  What color are the skies in their worlds? 

I've never understood why Nazi sympathizer idiots were treated with far more scorn than Marxist idiots.  The Commie Death Camps achieved ten times the death rate as their fascist competitors.  What gives? 

Here's a partial listing of the worst of the Marxist Apologists and their output, along with the work of a few others who've documented their delusions.  I'm posting this mostly so I can find this stuff later.  We owe this guy for putting it all together. 
The pieces with an asterisk are the "denial" works.  The rest are commentary.

*************************************************


General

Leopold Labedz, Of Myths and Horrors [PDF]

In the aftermath of the Cambodian killing fields, a leading Sovietologist shows how the “progressive” left supported totalitarian terror and mass slaughter while cultivating a self-image of pristine innocence.

Wojciech Roszkowski, In the House of the Hanged Man [PDF]

A leading Polish intellectual addresses the standard excuses offered by apologists for communist crimes.

Individuals

Neil McInnes, The Long Goodbye

Paul Hollander, A Man of Faith
Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm openly justifies the murder of millions.

Leszek Kolakowski, My Correct Views About Everything
The brilliant philosopher mercilessly exposes New Left guru E. P. Thompson.

Anders Lewis, An Ugly Anti-American
The totalitarian propaganda of New Left historian Gabriel Kolko.

Ian Williams, Ramsey Clark, The War Criminal’s Best Friend

Michelle Malkin, Ramsey Clark’s Bloody Resume
The ultra-leftist former US Attorney-General defends every anti-American mass murderer he can find.

Gerard Jackson, How the Diseased Left See the World
Apt comment on the communist apologetics of Philip Adams.

- Soviet Apologists:
-- Bolshevik Apologists

Richard Pipes, 1917 and the Revisionists
“Revisionist” historians portrayed Lenin’s coup as a popular revolution.

-- Terror-Famine Deniers

James Mace, Letter to the Editor of Ukraine Report
The history of attempts to deny Stalin’s responsibility for the terror-famine.

Roman Serbyn, The Last Stand of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide Deniers

On the notorious Soviet-sponsored denial tract.

Robert Conquest, James Mace et al., Replies to Jeff Coplon [PDF]

Exposing some of the lies in Jeff Coplon’s Village Voice essay.

Taras Kuzio, Denial of Ukrainian Famine and Terror Continues Unabated
David Marples, Debating the Undebatable? Ukraine Famine of 1932-33

Gijs Kessler, Mark Tauger on the 1932-33 Famine
Mark Tauger denies that there was criminal intent – even though Stalin seized grain from the starving, deprived villages of supplies, prevented foreign assistance and deliberately trapped the victims!

-- Sovietologists

* J. Arch Getty, Letter to the London Review of Books [PDF]

Paul Mitchinson, Another Kremlin Apologist?

Gabriel Schoenfeld, Review of The Road to Terror [PDF]
The discredited historian J. Arch Getty once reduced the death toll to thousands.

Misunderstood Stalin “Killed Only 1.3m”
Oxford University Press gives the deniers a platform.

George Walden, Back to the Soviet Future
Moshe Lewin’s attempt to rehabilitate the Soviet dictatorship.

-- Extremists

How Shaw Defended Stalin’s Mass Killings
George Bernard Shaw denied the Great Famine and justified the Great Terror.

Jason Maoz, The Abominable Izzy Stone
Radical journalist I. F. Stone was notorious for his Soviet sympathies.

Rocco DiPippo, A Scholar For Stalin

On the denial propaganda of English professor Grover Furr.

Ronald Radosh, The Left’s Lion

Historian Eric Foner regrets the demise of the USSR.

* William Blum, The Wonderful World of Anti-Communism

Bin Laden’s recommended radical doubts that Stalin murdered millions.

- China Apologists

Alan H. Ryskind, Red Refugees Refute Old China Hand [PDF]
Edgar Snow was undoubtedly the worst of the Maoist sycophants.

* William Hinton, On the Role of Mao Zedong
William Hinton was a lifelong champion of the Maoist revolution.

Exchange: What We Know About China and How We Know It [PDF]
Werner Cohn, Human Rights in China

Keith Windschuttle, Mao and the Australian Maoists
The role of academics in defending one of history’s bloodiest tyrants.

Bryan Caplan, China, India, and Maoist Apologists

Answering the arguments of the tyrant’s apologists.

Livingstone Compares Poll Tax Riots to China Massacre
Editorial, Ditch Livingstone

Far-left London Mayor Ken Livingstone belittles the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Jamyang Norbu, Acme of Obscenity

Eviscerates Tom Grunfeld’s pseudo-scholarly tract on the Chinese communist record in Tibet.

- North Korea Apologists

Anders Lewis, Useful Idiot
Historian Bruce Cumings is the premier academic apologist for the North Korean mass murderers.

- North Vietnam/Viet Cong Apologists

-- Pre-War Bloodbath Deniers

Anita Lauve Nutt, On the Question of Communist Reprisals in Vietnam [PDF]
Refutes various arguments by left-wing deniers of North Vietnam’s land reform bloodbath.

* Gareth Porter, The Myth of the Bloodbath: North Vietnam’s Land Reform Reconsidered [PDF]

The key bloodbath-denial work, relying on official communist propaganda sources.

Robert F. Turner, Expert Punctures “No Bloodbath” Myth: Gareth Porter Refuted [PDF]

Point-by-point refutation of Porter’s thesis. Porter could barely speak the language he accused others of mistranslating!

Hoang Van Chi, Reply to Gareth Porter [PDF]

An early historian of the land reform rebuts the charge that he was a CIA propagandist.

-- War Crimes Deniers

* Gareth Porter, The 1968 “Hue Massacre” [PDF]

* Edward Herman and Gareth Porter, The Myth of the Hue Massacre [PDF]
Porter and Herman denied the Viet Cong massacre of thousands in the South Vietnamese city of Hue - even though the perpetrators repeatedly admitted their responsibility.

Robert F. Turner, The Fonda Fallacies

Robert J. Caldwell, She’s Still Hanoi Jane

On Jane Fonda’s conduct during the Vietnam War.

-- Post-War Bloodbath Deniers

* Sophie and Paul Quinn-Judge, Viet Nam: Reunification and Reconciliation [PDF]
Far-leftists applaud the North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam and paint a glowing picture of the concentration camps.

Stuart Elliott, Americans Still Traveling Down the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Sickening report on the conduct of Gareth Porter, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk and other “apologists engaged in the systematic cover-up of genocide and gross violations of human rights.”

* Vietnam: A Time For Healing and Compassion [PDF]

Far-leftists deny the post-war bloodbath and reprisal policy, urging that the dictatorship “should be hailed for its moderation and for its extraordinary effort to achieve reconciliation among all of its people.”

* The Truth About Vietnam [PDF]

Far-leftists justify the concentration camps and boast that “Vietnam now enjoys human rights as it has never known in history.”

Gerard Jackson, The Lies and Hypocrisy of the America-Hating John Pilger

The squalid performance of the “investigative journalist” John Pilger, who tried to conceal communist guilt in the mass drowning of the boat people and the attempted starvation of millions in Cambodia.

Mark D. Tooley, Hanoi Lifted Me

On the shameful conduct of the National Council of Churches in present-day Vietnam.

- Khmer Rouge Apologists

Sophal Ear, The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979: The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia [PDF]

Important study documenting the far-left academic campaign to defend the Khmer Rouge during the horrors in Cambodia. The intellectual deniers of mass murder included Gareth Porter, George Hildebrand, Malcolm Caldwell, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman.

Michael Ezra, The SWP and the Eichmanns of Cambodia

Stuart Elliott, From Collective Guilt to Collective Silence

The far left’s early reaction to “one of the most brutal bloodbaths of modern history.”

* The Thoughts of Ben Kiernan [PDF]

The shocking record of scholar Ben Kiernan, who supported the Khmer Rouge during the slaughter and then defended the brutal dictatorship imposed by the Vietnamese communists. Kiernan has been described as “poacher-turned-gamekeeper in the field of genocide.”

* Human Rights in Cambodia: 1-10 11-25 26-40 41-56 57-70 [PDF]

Congressional hearings in which David Chandler expressed agnosticism about the bloodbath reports and Gareth Porter openly denied them. Porter’s performance was considered so disgraceful that one Senator compared him to apologists for Nazism.

Torben Retboll and John Barron, Exchange: Cambodia [PDF]

A typical example of the far left’s attempt to discredit John Barron and Anthony Paul, the two journalists who published the first full investigation of the slaughter.

Bernard Levin, The Evil That Men Do and the Men Who Call it Good [PDF]

Michael Ezra, Malcolm Caldwell: Pol Pot’s Apologist [PDF]

Andrew Anthony Lost in Cambodia: The Life and Death of Malcolm Caldwell

British academic Malcolm Caldwell, the most notorious intellectual champion of the Khmer Rouge, was murdered while visiting Pol Pot.

* Richard Dudman, Pol Pot: Brutal, Yes, But No Mass Murderer [PDF]

Radical journalist Richard Dudman, who had accompanied Malcolm Caldwell to Cambodia, was still downplaying the crimes more than a decade later.

- Frelimo Apologists

Paul Bogdanor, Western Leftists and Third World Sadists
A leading activist in Britain’s Stop the War Coalition celebrates a brutal dictator in Mozambique.

- Cuba Apologists

-- Myths

Norman Luxenburg, Castro’s Effect on Life in Cuba [PDF]

Alfred G. Cuzan, The Undisputable Achievement of the Cuban Revolution [PDF]

Kirby Smith and Hugo Llorens, Renaissance and Decay [PDF]

Refutations of the propaganda fantasies about stunning advances in welfare under the communist dictatorship.

Lawrence Solomon, Bad Cuban Medicine

Lawrence Solomon, Fidel Batista!

Lawrence Solomon, Cuba’s Cruel Joke

Investigative series reporting mass poverty under the communists.

Jay Nordlinger, The Myth of Cuban Health Care

Humberto Fontova, Moore’s Pro-Castro Propaganda Hides Cuban Suffering

On the filmmaker-clown’s grotesque propaganda documentary Sicko.

-- Mythmakers

Jeff Jacoby, Castro’s Cheerleaders
The seemingly endless list of apologists for the Castro dictatorship.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa, The Killing Machine: Che Guevara, From Communist Firebrand to Capitalist Brand

The absurd distortions of the Guevara cultists.

* Human Rights and Cuba

Liars pretend that “there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution” in Cuba. Signatories include Harold Pinter, Tariq Ali, José Saramago, Rigoberta Menchu, Nadine Gordimer, Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover and Ramsey Clark.

Michael C. Moynihan, Still Stuck on Castro

Fawning media coverage of Castro’s retirement.

- Sandinista Apologists

Alfred G. Cuzan, Tourists Duped by Sandinistas [PDF]

Alfred G. Cuzan, The Latin American Studies Association vs. the United States: The Verdict of History [PDF]
Radical leftists, having learned nothing, flocked to worship another dictatorship.

Alfred G. Cuzan, The Nicaraguan Election [PDF]

Robert S. Leiken et al., The Nicaraguan Tangle: Another Exchange
Sandinista apologists fell over themselves to assert the authenticity of the rigged 1984 election.

- Ethnic Cleansing Apologists

Marko Attila Hoare, Nothing is Left

Marko Attila Hoare, The Left Revisionists

Marko Attila Hoare, Srebrenica and the London Bombings: The “Anti-War” Link
On the far-left campaign to whitewash the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. Deniers discussed include Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Michael Parenti, Michel Chossudovsky, Diana Johnstone, John Pilger and Harold Pinter.

Balkan Witness, Bosnia / Kosovo

Articles debunking far-left deniers such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Diana Johnstone, Ramsey Clark, John Pilger and William Blum.

Alan Kocevic, Proving Genocide in Bosnia

Diana Johnstone’s denial arguments answered.

- Rwanda Genocide Deniers

Oliver Kamm, After Srebrenica Denial: Where Next?

Gerard Caplan, The Politics of Denialism: The Strange Case of Rwanda

Marko Attila Hoare, Srebrenica Deniers Get Their Mucky Paws on Rwanda
Noam Chomsky’s former coauthor Edward Herman and his new sidekick David Peterson have compounded their denials of the Srebrenica massacre by claiming that the Rwanda genocide never happened.

- Baathist Apologists

Charles M. Brown, Confessions of an Anti-Sanctions Activist
How Western far-leftists became propaganda tools of the Baathist mass murderers.

* John Pilger, Crime Against Humanity [PDF]

* William Blum, Great Moments in the History of Imperialism

Respect Watch, Galloway Backs Saddam’s Bloody Deputy
Far-leftists argue that Iraqis were better off under Saddam Hussein and champion his murderous foreign minister.

Oliver Kamm, Propagandists For Barbarism

Trotskyists line up to celebrate the terrorist mass murderers in Iraq.

- 9/11 Deniers

Panoply of the Absurd

“Judeosphere,” Conspiracy Theorists of the World, Unite!
The lies of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Mark Roberts, Loose Change Creators Speak [PDF]

Mark Roberts, Loose Change Second Edition Viewer Guide

“Internet Detectives,” Loose Change

The lies of Chomsky cultist Dylan Avery and his comrades, who cite neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers and mock 9/11 victims.

“Archontan,” Michael Moore on Afghanistan

The filmmaker-clown explains his doubts about bin Laden’s guilt.

Media

James Crowl, Concealing the Famine, 1932-1934 [PDF]

James Mace, Collaboration in the Suppression of the Ukrainian Famine
Publications such as the New York Times and The Nation covered up the worst peacetime mass murder in European history.

Media Research Center, Back to the “Peaceable” Paradise: Media Soldiers For the Seizure of Elian

The successful campaign to return a child to slavery after his mother gave her life to free him.

- New York Times

Marco Carynnyk, The New York Times and the Great Famine

James Mace, A Tale of Two Journalists [PDF]

Jacob Heilbrunn, The New York Times and the Moscow Show Trials [PDF]
America’s premier newspaper whitewashed the Ukrainian genocide and the Soviet purges.

Carl D. McMurray and Charles W. Dunn, Castro and the New York Times: An Image in Transition [PDF]

The newspaper’s disastrous misreporting of Cuba.

* Sidney Schanberg, Indochina Without Americans: For Most a Better Life [PDF]

This infamous commentary was published days before the Khmer Rouge victory.

- The Nation

* Alexander Cockburn, A Million Here, A Million There
Cockburn’s infamous column claiming that “Stalin did not plan or seek to accomplish genocide.”

* Editorial, Blood-Bath Talk [PDF]

* Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Distortions at Fourth Hand
The Nation defends the Khmer Rouge.

Abraham H. Foxman, Letter to The Nation

The Nation is caught running an ad for Holocaust deniers.

- Monthly Review

Oliver Kamm, Divers Deniers

Michael Ezra, Leftists For Genocide Denial
This longstanding American Marxist journal has published apologetics for Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Milosevic and the Rwandan mass murderers.

- Z Magazine

Oliver Kamm, Chomsky’s Outlets
Kamm exposes a Holocaust denier at Z Magazine.

Balkan Witness, Debate: The Srebrenica Massacre

Z Magazine contributor Edward Herman denies the Srebrenica massacre, provoking outraged replies.

Balkan Witness, Edward Herman on the Lists of Missing at Srebrenica

Evidence refuting Z Magazine’s denial of the Srebrenica massacre.

- The Guardian

* Seumas Milne, Catastroika Has Not Only Been a Disaster For Russia

* Seumas Milne, The Battle For History

* Seumas Milne, Communism May Be Dead, But Clearly Not Dead Enough

“Harry’s Place,” So Goodbye Then, Seumas Milne
Denier stands up for Stalin, laments the demise of the USSR and thanks communist mass murderers for their “genuine idealism and commitment.”

* John Gittings, A Great Leap Backward?

Denier tries to rehabilitate Mao.

* Seumas Milne, Why the US Fears Cuba
* Brian Wilson, Revolution Revisited

* Richard Gott, The Future of the Revolution in the Hands of Teenage Pump Attendants
Deniers champion the Castro dictatorship.

* Jonathan Steele, Darfur Wasn’t Genocide and Sudan is Not a Terrorist State

Denial of the genocide in Darfur.

- New Statesman

* Christopher Hitchens, Iraq Flexes Arab Muscle
The Baathist mass murderers were praised in Britain’s major leftist magazine.

* Neil Clark, Milosevic: Prisoner of Conscience

Portrays the Serbian ex-dictator as a persecuted socialist dissident.

* James Sparshatt, The Communist Heaven That is Cuba

* John McDonnell, Why Cuba is a Beacon

The titles say it all.

Institutions

- Institute for Policy Studies

* Gareth Porter, Congressional Testimony on Cambodia [PDF]
The IPS defends the Khmer Rouge.

Joshua Muravchik, “Communophilism” and the Institute for Policy Studies [PDF]

Detailed analysis of the far-left think tank’s disgraceful record of support for totalitarian mass murderers.

- National Lawyers Guild

Jesse Rigsby, NLG: The Legal Fifth Column
The totalitarian ideology of the National Lawyers Guild.

Shawn Macomber, North Korean Lawyers Guild

Shawn Macomber, Real Revelations

Michael P. Tremoglie, The NLG: Shilling For Stalinists
The NLG’s revolting apologetics for North Korea.

- Amnesty International

Christopher Archangelli, Amnesty For Iraq
Argues that the leftist “human rights group” suppressed Baathist atrocities so that it could concentrate on denunciations of America and Britain.

* Canon Paul Oestreicher, A Line Has Been Crossed

The former UK chairman of Amnesty International compares Middle East terrorists to French Resistance heroes and justifies the killing of Israelis, Americans and Britons.

Ted Lapkin, Defining Terror

The secretary-general of Amnesty International whitewashed jihadist massacres.

Editorial, “American Gulag”

The secretary-general of Amnesty International asserts that American detention facilities for captured terrorists are no different from the Gulag.

Patrick Devenny, Amnesty: For North Korea

Amnesty International downplayed the North Korean horrors.

Jamie Weinstein, Amnesty Irrational

In just one year, “Amnesty produced more country reports on the United States than on Cuba, Syria, North Korea, the Palestinian Authority, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia combined.”

Does this seem like overkill, to continue throwing up Red Scare warning flags this late in the game?  Maybe so.  But check out this recent statement by someone named Simon Winchester, remarking on the recent death of Kim Jong-Il:

India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out - its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.

Yeah.  They're still out there.  Come back, Joe McCarthy!!  We still need you !!

Sometimes you don't learn what you think you're going to learn.....

For the last couple of weeks I've had a great, great time with the Occupy Wall Street people. 

Radley Balko recently provided a helpful link to a piece in Forbes, where a typist named Kyle Smith hopes that the OWS movement never ends. 
Why?
Because, after all the rapes, thefts, tent gropings, assaults, Anti-Semitism, old woman toppling, public urination and the like, the cute little buggers might actually be learning something about human nature and how the world works. 

Here's Mr. Smith:

Years from now, a major political candidate will come to the fore and say, “I got my political education as a member of a protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street. And it’s the reason I stand before you as a private enterprise-loving capitalist today.”

Some editorial writers have called for evicting the OWS squatters from downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park (a better solution: Lock them in! Wouldn’t society be much better off without these malodorous whiners?), but the longer the occupation lasts, the more valuable the lessons being learned by these youngsters. Their college educations obviously didn’t include even rudimentary tutelage about how a marketplace — and by extension (since most things are connected to trade) society — works. But now they’re learning, for instance, that:

1) Rule of law comes first. It doesn’t matter whether your business is widget marketing or universal social justice: You can’t work until you have secured basic order, which requires a non-corrupt constabulary authorized in the judicious use of force. The Manhattan OWS site, which is largely covered with tents that lend shelter to peaceful protesters and privacy to opportunistic felons, is being linked to more and more reports of theft, sexual assault, random groping and even rape.

The occupiers, who operate on a foolhardy belief that they are a self-policing as well as self-governing organization, have reacted to crimes by forming “shame circles” in which, as if reenacting a scene from a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, they surround malefactors and cry, “Shame, shame, shame!” (What, without trial?) Desperadoes, unfazed by such non-punishment, have declined to flee. A society that fails adequately to punish lawbreakers will disintegrate into chaos.

2) Welfare breeds freeloading. The idealistic, studenty, ultra-left-wing quality of the Zuccotti proceedings has attracted nutritious, restaurant-caliber meals, large donations of clothing and other goods and large cash balances. All of this private charity is very much in the tradition of free enterprise, but the political types have been unnerved by the increasing presence of ordinary apolitical homeless people who don’t know much about satiric anti-capitalist puppetry, but would very much enjoy a sandwich.

OWS has been shocked to discover these folk aren’t “contributing” anything (nothing important, anyway, like slogans or resolutions), and derided them as “professional homeless people” (to distinguish them from the amateur kind). Food preparers instigated what one protester called “blacklisting” of such individuals to keep them from sharing the bounty the “productive” members of the movement have secured.

This is a crucial battle between inactivists and activists. Consider this comment on the official OWS forum:

“The money was sent for the protesters, not panhandlers. The protesters want jobs, but can’t find any. Panhandlers (In my experience, flame away) don’t want jobs. There is a difference for all the fogies spewing about hypocrisy. We should not allow people’s good intentions to be taken advantage of by miscreants and other parasites.

But exactly! Having granted the principle that you must be willing to work if you want to eat, OWS has done all the heavy lifting for those who would question whether the policies of social-democratic welfare states are even moral, much less practical. (OWS hasn’t yet run out of donated pizzas, but Europe proves you will eventually run out of other people’s money).

3) Private, profit-seeking businesses provide a social good.  Before OWS began, among the corporations you would have expected to be the least likely to receive its blessing would have been McDonald’s, which has been wolfsbane to the collegiate left since at least the 1980s. Previously known mainly as rainforest-despoiling animal-butchering obesity-inducing corporate goons, Mickey D is now A-OK with OWS. A downtown franchise half a block from Zuccotti Park allows protesters to use its bathrooms without purchase and fuels discussion of the revolution with its generous, barely profitable Dollar Menu.

There are no facilities in the plaza, suggesting the movement would have had to keep its collective legs crossed for the past few weeks were it not for the burger profits that keep the restrooms working. McDonald’s is an especially salient reminder of why dreamy idealists are able to function: Because someone, somewhere who gets up and goes to work making things people actually want to buy is subsidizing them. Just ask Karl Marx, who was sent money by his buddy Friedrich Engels to support him while he was writing “Das Kapital” — money that came directly from Engels’ father’s worker-exploiting apparatus, also known as a “factory.”

And speaking of Karl Marx, here's one of Samizdata's quotes of the day:

"I wish Karl would accumulate some capital, instead of just writing about it." - Karl Marx's Mama

Bill Ayers wrote "Dreams From My Father"

I was once impressed with Barack Obama as a public speaker.  Then I figured out that he had memorized a few dozen stock paragraphs that he used over and over and over with different nouns in strategic places. 

I was once impressed with Barack Obama as a writer.  Then I figured out, after a few months of listening to his speeches, that he just might...not....be....capable of stringing coherent thoughts together. 

Exhibit A in this is "Dreams From My Father", his autobiography.  It really is a pretty good book.  But it doesn't sound like Barack Obama.  It doesn't even sound like Barack Obama talking to a ghostwriter.  I mean, if I were to secretly turn this blog over to some other typist for a couple of week's, my 15 regular readers would notice something different, right? 

Back in October of '09, I laboriously typed a couple of pages from "Barack And Michelle - Portrait Of An American Marriage" into this site and got a few jillion hits.  No one else had put it out there.  This section is about the writing of "Dreams From My Father", and Bill Ayers, the former terrorist that Obama claims he only knew from a couple of fundraisers:

******************

"Desperate to finish the book, Barack and Michelle took a leave of absence from their jobs and decamped to the Indonesian island of Bali so that, as his sister Maya put it, he could “find a peaceful sanctuary, where there were no phones, to work on the book.” When he returned in early 1994, Barack burrowed even deeper into the Hole (the office behind the Obama kitchen) in a last-gasp effort to finish it.

Two months later, with a September 1994 deadline looming, Barack was still stymied. It was around this time that, at Michelle’s urging, he sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor, Bill Ayers. Michelle had known Ayers’s wife, Bernadine Dohrn, at Sidley Austin, where Dohrn worked as a paralegal between 1984 and 1988. Dohrn’s father-in-law, former Commonwealth Edison CEO Thomas Ayers, just happened to be one of the firm’s most important clients."

"Barack got to know Bill Ayers’s father and his brother, John, when all three served on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Education Fun. Ajnother mutual friend of Ayers and Barack was Jean Rudd, whose nonprofit Woods Fund had provided Jerry Kellman with the money he needed to hire Barack as an organizer back in 1985.

Neither Michelle nor Barack seemed particularly troubled to discover that William Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn had been two of the 1960s’ most infamous radicals – leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist group that set off thirty bombs in the 1960s and 1970s.

After an explosion in the Weathermen’s Greenwich Village bomb-making laboratory killed three of their fellow Weathermen (including Ayers’s girlfriend at the time, Diana Oughton) and virtually destroyed the neighboring town house owned by Dustin Hoffman, Ayers and Dohrn went underground. In 1973 charges against them were dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct, but Dohrn remained a fugitive until she finally turned herself in to police in 1980.

Ayers made no apologies for his terrorist past, and in the 1990’s still described himself as “a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist….The ethics of communism still appeal to me. I don’t like Lenin as much as the early Marx.”

I love that phrase. "The ethics of communism". Communism killed somewhere between 60 and 100 million people. They made the Nazis look like amateurs. But their intentions were so good and wholesome.

Ayers’s radical past didn’t seem to bother Chicago’s civic leaders, many of whom worked with him on education reform. He worked particularly closely with Mayor Richard M. Daley on reshaping the city’s school programs – an effort that also brought him into contact with one of Daley’s assistants at the time, Michelle Obama.

What did interest Barack were Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer. Unlike Barack, Ayers had written and cowritten scores of articles and treatises, as well as several nonfiction books beginning with Education: An American Problem in 1968. But it was the tone Ayers had set in his latest book – To Teach (1993) – that Barack hoped to emulate.

The tale of a maverick teacher who takes her students onto the streets of New York to teach them firsthand about history, culture, and survival, To Teach was written in a fluid, novelistic style. Barack asked for Ayers’s input, and Ayers, who like so many in his circle was greatly impressed by the charismatic young activist, obliged.

To flesh out his family history, Barack had also taped interviews with Toot, Gramps, Ann, Maya, and his Kenyan relatives. These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes, were given to Ayers. “Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together,” another Hyde Park neighbor pointed out. “It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both.”

In the end, Ayers’s contribution to Barack’s Dreams from My Father would be significant – so much so that the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’s own writings. Even the caveat at the beginning of Dreams, in which Barack points out that he uses invented dialogue, embellished facts, composite characters, inaccurate chronology, and pseudonyms to create an “approximation” of reality, resembles Ayers’s defense of the inaccuracies in his memoir Fugitive Days. In the foreward to his book, Ayers states that the book is merely a collection of his personal memories and “impressions.”

“There was a good deal of literary back-scratching going on in Hyde Park,” said writer Jack Cashill, who noted that a mutual friend of Barack and Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, thanked Ayers for helping him with his book Resurrecting Empire. Ayers, explained Cashill, “provided an informal editing service for like-minded friends in the neighborhood.”

Certainly none of these authors hesitated to acknowledge their admiration for one another at the time. In his 1997 book, A Kind And Just Parent, Ayers would cite the “writer” Barack Obama (along with Muhammad Ali and Louis Farrakhan) as one of the celebrities living in his neighborhood. In turn, Barack would write a glowing review of that same book for the Chicago Tribune, and Michelle would host a panel discussion on the book at the University of Chicago, with Ayers and her husband as the principal speakers.

Thanks to help from the veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books. With some minor cuts and polishing, the book would be on track for publication in the early summer of 1995. In the meantime, he began showing the rough draft to a chosen few relatives.

*************

So what of it? 
Well, The Teleprompter Jesus was elected on the strength of his "writing".  He claimed that he didn't know Ayers that well, Ayers was just a guy in the neighborhood. 
 
And finally
 

Last Thursday evening at Montclair State University, with a video camera rolling, Bill Ayers volunteered that yes indeed he had written the acclaimed Barack Obama memoir, Dreams from My Father.

Unprompted, Ayers also noted that while Dreams deserves its praise, Obama's second opus, Audacity of Hope, is "more of a political hack book."

Not surprisingly, Ayers retreated into irony as he ended the session. "Yeah, yeah," he said after confirming again that he wrote Dreams, "And if you help me prove it, I'll split the royalties with you. Thank you very much."
With his final comment, the Ayers-friendly audience laughed in relief. The media will laugh nervously upon seeing the video as well. The White House will not.
Barack Obama knows what I know and what the people who have read my book, "Deconstructing Obama," know: Bill Ayers is the principal craftsman behind Dreams. The evidence is overwhelming.

Ayers also established, as I have contended from the beginning, that he is not the author of Audacity of Hope. Although Obama claims unique authorship of this book too, it was, as Ayers suggests, a disingenuous feint to the center written by committee.

Worse for Obama still, Ayers knows that the story he and Obama contrived in Dreams is false in many key details. The fact that Donald Trump has proved willing to challenge that story has got to make the White House even more apprehensive.

As was obvious in his speech at Montclair, Ayers does not like the application of force in Libya, and this may have been his own way of retaliating. Consider it a shot across Obama's bow. The White House will.

Here's yer video. 



And here's a video of our current Secretary Of State, trying to nail Obama on the lie:




The country is in the best of hands. 
I mean, if a bunch of radical Marxists really found a way to take over a country in order to destroy its economy, involve it worldwide conflicts, ruin its healthcare system, and plunge it into horrific debt so they could implement a system more to their liking afterwards, could they do better than this? 

"I'm A Marxist" says Dalai Lama

From Australia's News.com site:

'I'm a Marxist' says Dalai Lama, but agrees capitalism has helped China

Capitalism has helped China ???  One need not be the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, to figure that one out. 
According to The Black Book Of Communism, Chinese Marxists killed 100,000,000 people trying to make Brother Karl's system work.  After watching capitalist societies like Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan prosper, people got tired of starving for the sake of Marxist ideology. 
People have been moving out of poverty at the rate of one million per month ever since they began (slowly) discarding their Marxist lunacy.  Sorry for the premature rant over nothing but a headline, but I have friends in China whose parents were killed during the Cultural Revolution.  I have other friends who were exiled to the countryside for "re-education" after being labeled Class Enemies.  
And this nutcase in a nightgown says he's still a Marxist.   

Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama says he's a Marxist, yet credits capitalism for bringing new freedoms to China, the communist country that exiled him.

Aw, but what about the starvation and class warfare and waiting in long lines for everything and the death camps?  Don't you think people miss it? 

"Still I am a Marxist," the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived today with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures.
"(Marxism has) moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits," the Dalai Lama, 74, said.

Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit.  Piled on high, tamped down, refilled, dehydrated, and refilled again.  Bullshit.  Marxism is based on the ethics of envy.  I want what is yours, what you worked for, or what your parents gave you.  I don't want to work for it, or to give you anything for it, BTW.
The only way to make this happen is through a totalitarian government.   
Free Market Capitalism is about you producing something that other people want, and offering it in exchange for what you want.  The evil, moustache-twirling Free Market Capitalist who produces a really good backhoe at a really good price does more good for humanity than every Marxist wealth-spreader who ever lived. 

However, he credited China's embrace of market economics for breaking communism's grip over the world's most populous country and forcing the ruling Communist Party to "represent all sorts of classes".

And yet, he says he is still a Marxist. 
Why would someone like The Dalai Lama embrace a philosophy that encourages people to mindlessly revere their leaders and devote their lives to serving those in authority and not question anything about the philosophy of those in power? 
Oh.  I get it now.  
Never mind.