“If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.”
–Exodus 22:25

“At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts.”
–Deuteronomy 15:1

“If he has exacted usury or taken increase— Shall he then live? He shall not live! If he has done any of these abominations, He shall surely die; His blood shall be upon him.”
–Ezekiel 18:13

“If you have money, do not lend it at interest, but give to one for whom you will not get it back.”
–Thomas 95

“If you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners to receive as much in gain.”
–Luke 6:34

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
–Mark 10:25

“The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth he made for their subsistence, unincumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life.”
–Thomas Jefferson

“Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.”
–John Adams

“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance.”
–James Madison

“The bold effort the present [Second National] bank had made to control government, the distress it has wantonly produced… are but premonitions of the fate that awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it.”
–Andrew Jackson

“I killed the bank.”
–Andrew Jackson when asked about his greatest accomplishment

“People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work…. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to insure the National Wealth, must go in debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious value of gold. Interest is the invention of Satan.”
–Thomas Edison

“I am more than ever convinced of the dangers to which the free and unbiased exercise of political opinion — the only sure foundation and safeguard of republican government — would be exposed by any further increase of the already overgrown influence of corporate authorities.”
–Martin Van Buren

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the Country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.”
–Abraham Lincoln, after the passing of the National Bank Act

“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce… and when you realize that the entire system is so easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to told how periods of inflation and depression originate.” –James Garfield

“If, as I said, any persons are to make good deficiencies to the public creditor, besides the public at large, they must be those who managed the agreement. Why therefore are not the estates of all the comptrollers-general confiscated? Why not those of the long succession of ministers, financiers, and bankers who have been enriched whilst the nation was impoverished by their dealings and their counsels?” –Edmund Burke

Today: “83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people. 61 percent of Americans ‘always or usually’ live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007. 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans… Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975. For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together. In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one. As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets. The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth. Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008. In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector. The top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago….. Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009. Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years. The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income.”
–Michael Snyder, Business Insider

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
–Thomas Jefferson

“…First by Inflation….”

“Indeed, Clinton gave a speech on March 15, 2007 to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition in which she said “the alarm bell about the subprime home market has largely gone unnoticed by the (Bush) administration because they keep arguing we have to give trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the wealthy”…. The evidence shows both Obama and Clinton were talking about various aspects of the issue as early as 2006, before it had ripened into a crisis.”
—Politifact.com

“Despite the ongoing adjustments in the housing sector, overall economic prospects for households remain good. Household finances appear generally solid, and delinquency rates on most types of consumer loans and residential mortgages remain low.”
–Ben Bernenke, Libertarian Republican and Greenspan acolyte, February, 2007

“I was aware that the loosening of mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers increased financial risk. But I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk.”
–Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Fed from 1987-2006, in September 2007

“Predatory lending aimed at racially segregated minority neighborhoods led to mass foreclosures that fueled the U.S. housing crisis, according to a new study published in the American Sociological Review.”
—Reuters

“…Then by Deflation…”

“House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan is scheduled today to release a plan that would cut more than $6 trillion from President Barack Obama’s budget over 10 years, phase out traditional Medicare and call for a revamp of the tax code. ”
—Bloomberg News

“Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal cuts ‘nothing’ from Medicare, Social Security or defense in the next two to three years, and “in three years, he does not cut one dime from the debt.”
—Politifact, quoting David Stockman, Former Reagan Budget Director

“In a speech in February 2004, Greenspan suggested that more homeowners should consider taking out Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) where the interest rate adjusts itself to the current interest in the market. The fed own funds rate was at a then all-time-low of 1%. A few months after his recommendation, Greenspan began raising interest rates, in a series of rate hikes that would bring the funds rate to 5.25% about two years later. A triggering factor in the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis is believed to be the many subprime ARMs that reset at much higher interest rates than what the borrower paid during the first few years of the mortgage.
—Wikipedia.org on Greenspan

“For the fact is that the Obama stimulus — which itself was almost 40 percent tax cuts — was far too cautious to turn the economy around. And that’s not 20-20 hindsight: many economists, myself included, warned from the beginning that the plan was grossly inadequate. Put it this way: A policy under which government employment actually fell, under which government spending on goods and services grew more slowly than during the Bush years, hardly constitutes a test of Keynesian economics. Now, maybe it wasn’t possible for President Obama to get more in the face of Congressional skepticism about government. But even if that’s true, it only demonstrates the continuing hold of a failed doctrine over our politics. It’s also worth pointing out that everything the right said about why Obamanomics would fail was wrong. For two years we’ve been warned that government borrowing would send interest rates sky-high; in fact, rates have fluctuated with optimism or pessimism about recovery, but stayed consistently low by historical standards. For two years we’ve been warned that inflation, even hyperinflation, was just around the corner; instead, disinflation has continued, with core inflation — which excludes volatile food and energy prices — now at a half-century low. The free-market fundamentalists have been as wrong about events abroad as they have about events in America — and suffered equally few consequences. “Ireland,” declared George Osborne in 2006, “stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking.” Whoops. But Mr. Osborne is now Britain’s top economic official. And in his new position, he’s setting out to emulate the austerity policies Ireland implemented after its bubble burst. After all, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic spent much of the past year hailing Irish austerity as a resounding success. “The Irish approach worked in 1987-89 — and it’s working now,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute last June. Whoops, again. But such failures don’t seem to matter. To borrow the title of a recent book by the Australian economist John Quiggin on doctrines that the crisis should have killed but didn’t, we’re still — perhaps more than ever — ruled by ‘zombie economics.’ Why?”
—Paul Krugman

“…First by Inflation…”

“In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks,”
–Spencer Bachus, Republican Chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services and TARP negotiator, December 2010

“It is plain hubris to think that this government, with its $14 trillion dollar debt, annual deficits, and wasteful-spending, is worthy of this plenipotentiary oversight,”
-Michelle Bachmann, January 2011, on her bill to repeal the financial reform bill

“The less we fund those [bank regulatory] agencies, the better America will be. I think anything we can do to slow down, deter or impede their ability to engage in this oppressive overregulation, which is freezing up our economy, would be good for our country.”
-Mitch McConnell, June 2011

“Well, it is a check that this public is looking for on this runaway agenda of this administration. They don’t want to see any more spending, especially if it promotes policies that kill jobs. That’s what you’ve got, both with the Obamacare bill and the Dodd-Frank bill.”
–Eric Cantor, 2011

“The House Appropriations Committee financial services subcommittee on Thursday approved its 2012 appropriations bill, which curbs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.”
–The Hill.com

“Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: “deregulation,” “shadow banking,” “interconnection,” and, yes, “Wall Street.” When Democratic members refused to go along with this insistence that the story of Hamlet be told without the prince, the Republicans went ahead and issued their own report, which did, indeed, avoid using any of the banned terms.That report is all of nine pages long, with few facts and hardly any numbers. Beyond that, it tells a story that has been widely and repeatedly debunked — without responding at all to the debunkers.In the world according to the G.O.P. commissioners, it’s all the fault of government do-gooders, who used various levers — especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored loan-guarantee agencies — to promote loans to low-income borrowers. Wall Street — I mean, the private sector — erred only to the extent that it got suckered into going along with this government-created bubble. It’s hard to overstate how wrongheaded all of this is. For one thing, as I’ve already noted, the housing bubble was international — and Fannie and Freddie weren’t guaranteeing mortgages in Latvia. Nor were they guaranteeing loans in commercial real estate, which also experienced a huge bubble. Beyond that, the timing shows that private players weren’t suckered into a government-created bubble. It was the other way around. During the peak years of housing inflation, Fannie and Freddie were pushed to the sidelines; they only got into dubious lending late in the game, as they tried to regain market share.”
—Paul Krugman

“…Then by Deflation…”

“In addition to acknowledging that seniors, disabled and elderly people would be hit with much higher out-of-pocket health care costs, the CBO finds that by the end of the 10-year budget window [under Paul Ryan’s plan], public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing.”
—Talking Points Memo

“GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty recently called for $2 trillion in tax cuts for individuals and businesses in the next decade, as well as two to three times less federal spending – cutting a total of $8 trillion. But on Tuesday, Pawlenty expressed his foreign policy plans to remain involved in the Middle East – to “seize” the opportunity “amid the turmoil of the Arab Spring” and to “help promote freedom and democracy.” The GOP candidate said America should stop “leading from behind” and be more active in regions like Libya, Egypt and even Saudi Arabia.”
–Nicole Glass, FrumForum.com

“The $137 million deficit in the budget year ending June 30 represents about 0.456 percent of the $30 billion state budget, or less than half of 1 percent. The projected $3.6 billion deficit for the next two-year budget is more serious: about 12 percent of the overall budget…. In unveiling his two-year budget, Walker cut aid to local schools and government by about $1 billion. But the proposal, which now goes to the Legislature, included new spending in some areas, including adding $1 million in raises for prosecutors, $993,800 for additional public defenders and $1.04 million to investigate Internet crimes against children. On the opposite side of the ledger, the budget reduced revenue by some $140 million through a variety of tax cuts, including ones aimed at businesses and individuals with Health Savings Accounts.”
—Politifact.com

“…First by Inflation…”

“As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana…. The richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut of $61,000 from President Obama. They would get $370,000 from Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. And that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings. ”
—New York Times

“After the worst crisis since the Great Depression, President Obama has unleashed an unusual force to regulate the financial system: a bunch of empty seats…. The Obama administration put up Peter A. Diamond for a position on the Federal Reserve board. Winning a little something called the Nobel Prize [4] hasn’t helped him with confirmation, however. Sen. Richard Shelby, the powerful Alabama Republican and ranking member of the banking committee, is standing in his way. The senator also quashed the nomination of Joseph A. Smith Jr. to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency. But much of the blame for this situation lies with the Obama administration. It’s almost as if the president and his staff have thrown up their hands. The administration has had trouble finding good candidates who are willing to go through the vetting process and has shied away from fights. It also hasn’t seeded the ground or supported the nominations it has made, people complain.”
—ProPublica.org

“Schneiderman’s probe, news of which came out yesterday in this piece by Morgenson, reportedly targets the banks’ mortgage securitization process during the bubble years. Morgenson reported that Schneiderman is focused on at least three companies: Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and old friend Goldman, Sachs. This investigation has the potential to be a Mother of All Nightmares situation for the banks for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the decision to go after the securitization process is a total prosecutorial bullseye. This is the ugly heart of the wide-scale fraud scheme of the bubble era. Again, the business model during this time was a giant bait-and-switch scam. Sleazy lenders like Countrywide and New Century first created huge masses of bad loans, committing every conceivable kind of fraud to get people into loans (from doctoring income statements with white-out to phonying FICO scores to engineering fake appraisals). They then moved the bad loans quickly to the big banks, which pooled them and chopped them up (this is the “securitization” process), sprinkled hocus-pocus math on them, and then sold them to suckers around the world as AAA-rated securities…..The reason this is such a potentially deadly investigation for the banks is that they seemed to be so close to getting away scot free. There is another investigation into the banks’ mortgage abuses by the states’ Attorneys General, led by Iowa AG Tom Miller, that was rumored to be headed toward a settlement, despite the fact that nothing like a complete investigation has been done. The expectation for some time has been that the banks would eventually have to pay a significant, but eminently survivable, settlement for abuses during the bubble era. Although the Miller probe was focused on practices like robo-signing and other such documentation abuses, it could theoretically have covered securitization as well. But if the AGs were to sign off on a friendly global settlement for mortgage abuses prematurely, it would be like a DA offering a millionaire murderer a 2-year plea bargain before the cops even had a chance to interview all the eyewitnesses. It would be a blatantly political arrangement. Such a desire to get some kind of deal done and sweep the mortgage mess under the rug once and for all seems almost universal among high-ranking politicians, and particularly in the Obama administration, which has acted throughout like it wants more than anything to simply get all of this over with and put in the past.”
—Matt Taibbi

“Schneiderman, a Democrat who rode to office by pointing out Wall Street’s misdeeds, requested documents earlier this year from Bank of America, the largest lender and mortgage servicer, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley regarding their mortgage operations…. Schneiderman’s inquiry also raises questions about the speed the Obama administration and a coalition of state attorneys general and bank regulators are moving towards a settlement agreement to resolve claims of widespread foreclosure abuse. The states’ top cops and representatives of the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Treasury Department are pushing the nation’s largest mortgage companies to pay about $20 billion in a deal to end the months-long probes into shoddy and possibly illegal practices employed by Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial.”
—Huffington Post

“Afghan officials said on Thursday that they have arrested two former executives involved in the collapse of Kabul Bank.”
—New York Times

“A bitter cynic might suggest that such prosecutions [in America] have not happened because both political parties are desperately competing for Wall Street cash for the 2012 election, and nothing would doom the incumbent party’s chances more than holding Wall Street royalty accountable, along with the fact that the top levels of government are suffused with former bank officials and lobbyists– but everyone knows that American justice isn’t politicized that way, so that can’t be it (just like everyone knows that political considerations played no role whatsoever in the presidential shield of immunity lavished on high-level Bush officials).”
—Glenn Greenwald

“…Then By Deflation…”

“I think we’re going through those difficult economic times for a purpose, to bring us back to those Biblical principles of you know, you don’t spend all the money. [In the parable of Joseph and the “Good Pharaoh,”] You work hard for those six [read: seven] years and you put up that seventh year in the warehouse to take you through the hard times [harder times?]. And not spending all of our money. Not asking for Pharaoh to give everything to everybody and to take care of folks because at the end of the day, it’s slavery. We become slaves to government.”
–Rick Perry, confusing the “Good Pharaoh” in Genesis with the “Bad Pharaoh” in Exodus

“[Joseph said:] Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a fifth of the harvest of Egypt [in taxes] during the seven years of abundance. They should collect all the food of these good years that are coming and store up the grain under the authority of Pharaoh, to be kept in the cities for food. This food should be held in reserve for the country, to be used during the seven years of famine that will come upon Egypt, so that the country may not be ruined by the famine.”
–Genesis 41:34-36

“It follows that the level of debt matters only if the distribution of net worth matters, if highly indebted players face different constraints from players with low debt. And this means that all debt isn’t created equal – which is why borrowing by some actors now can help cure problems created by excess borrowing by other actors in the past.”
–Paul Krugman

“The Democrats’ stimulus raised economic growth by as much as 4.5 percent in the last quarter and may have increased the number of people with jobs by more than 3 million, according to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report released Tuesday.”
—The Hill.com

“…First by Inflation…”

“The Panic of 1907, also known as the 1907 Bankers’ Panic, was a financial crisis that occurred in the United States when the New York Stock Exchange fell close to 50% from its peak the previous year. Panic occurred, as this was during a time of economic recession, and there were numerous runs on banks and trust companies. The 1907 panic eventually spread throughout the nation when many state and local banks and businesses entered into bankruptcy. Primary causes of the run include a retraction of market liquidity by a number of New York City banks and a loss of confidence among depositors, exacerbated by unregulated side bets at bucket shops…. Production fell by 11%, imports by 26%, while unemployment rose to 8% from under 3%. Immigration dropped to 750,000 people in 1909, from 1.2 million two years earlier.”
—Wikipedia

“Imagine the situation back in what ev-psych types call the Ancestral Adaptive Environment. Suppose that two tribes–the Clan of the Cave Bear and its neighbor, the Clan of the Cave Bull–live in close proximity but follow different hunting strategies. The Cave Bears tend to hunt rabbits–a safe strategy, since you can be pretty sure of finding a rabbit every day, but one with a limited upside, since a rabbit is only a rabbit. The Cave Bulls, on the other hand, go after mammoths–risky, since you never know when or if you’ll find one, but potentially very rewarding, since one felled mammoth provides a yield of, well, elephantine proportions. Now suppose that for a year or two the Cave Bulls have been doing very well, making a killing practically every week. After a while, the natural instinct of the Cave Bears is to feel jealous, and to try to share in the good fortune by starting to act like Cave Bulls themselves. In the ancestral environment, that instinct was entirely appropriate: The kinds of events that would produce a good run of mammoths–favorable weather producing a lush crop of grass, migration patterns bringing large numbers of beasts into the district–tended to be persistent, so it was a sound idea to emulate whatever strategy had worked in the recent past. But transplant our tribes into the world of modern finance, and those instincts aren’t appropriate at all. Efficient-markets theory tells us that all the available information about a company is supposed to be already built into its current stock price, so that any future movement is inherently unpredictable. Rational investors, by this logic, should treat bygones as bygones: The fact that your neighbor made a lot of money in stocks last year while you stayed in cash is no reason to get into stocks now. But suppose that, for whatever reason, the market goes up month after month; your MBA-honed intellect may say, “Gosh, those P/Es look pretty unreasonable,” but your prehistoric programming is shrieking, “Me want mammoth meat!””
—Paul Krugman on Tech Bubble in 1998, before it crashed

“Of course, some people still deny that there’s a housing bubble. Let me explain how we know that they’re wrong. One piece of evidence is the sense of frenzy about real estate, which irresistibly brings to mind the stock frenzy of 1999. Even some of the players are the same. The [Conservative/Free Enterprise] authors of the 1999 best seller “Dow 36,000″ are now among the most vocal proponents of the view that there is no housing bubble.”
—Paul Krugman, August, 2005

“The Hamilton students sampled the predictions of 26 individuals who wrote columns… and evaluated the accuracy of 472 predictions…. Even when the students eliminated political predictions and looked only at predictions for the economy and social issues, they found that liberals still do better than conservatives at prediction. After [the winner] Krugman, the most accurate pundits were Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – all Democrats and/or liberals. Also landing in the “Good” category, however, were conservative columnists Kathleen Parker and David Brooks, along with Bush Administration Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Left-leaning columnist Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post rounded out the “good” list. Those scoring lowest – “The Ugly” – with negative tallies were conservative columnist Cal Thomas; U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC); U.S. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI)[a pro-military Democrat]; U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, a McCain supporter and Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut; Sam Donaldson of ABC; and conservative columnist George Will.”
—ScienceDaily.com

“…Then by Deflation…”

“To repeal the act creating bank notes, or to restore to circulation the government issue of money will be to provide the people with money and will therefore seriously affect our individual profits as bankers and lenders…see your congressman at once and engage him to support our interest that we may control legislation.” -James Buel, American Bankers Association, 1877

“Statistics from the United Nations tell us that the bottom 40 percent of the population of the United States own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth. That is about 120 million people. If each and every one of these individuals “forced” the banks to give them mortgages and loans, and then failed to pay them back, the worst that could happen would be a total national loss of 1 percent of wealth… Also curious are numbers on who actually lost the most in this Great Recession. According to a study by a professor at the University of California, the average American household lost an astounding 36 percent of their total wealth. But the top 1 percent households lost only 11 percent. So the net result is that the wealth distribution is even more unequal than it was it was before the financial crisis. Maybe the top 1 percent should be thanking the poor black folks for “causing” the financial meltdown.”
—InformationClearinghouse.com

“The rocket docket wasn’t created to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes.”
–Matt Taibbi, “Invasion of the Home Snatchers”

“I’ve called for a freeze on annual domestic spending over the next five years. This freeze would cut the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade, bringing this kind of spending — domestic [non-military and non-transportation] discretionary spending — to its lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president. Let me repeat that. Because of our budget, this share of spending will be at its lowest level since Dwight Eisenhower was president. That level of spending is lower than it was under the last three administrations, and it will be lower than it was under Ronald Reagan.”
–Barack Obama, rated “Half True” by Politifact.com

“Back during the campaign, Obama said he would create a $10 billion fund to help homeowners facing foreclosure. “Too many families are unable to refinance because no one will lend to them, and they are unable to sell their homes because the housing market has fallen,” reads as statement of policy from Obama’s 2008 campaign. “As president, Obama will fight to ensure more Americans can achieve and protect the dream of home ownership.” We named it one of our top promises, among the most significant campaign pledges Obama made. And soon after his election, Obama outdid the promise of $10 billion, creating a foreclosure prevention fund that totaled $75 billion, paid for with funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the government sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Officials said the fund could help 9 million homeowners. We gave Obama a Promise Kept. But as many months went by, the program never lived up to its promise. As of January 2011, the program had given permanent loan modifications to only about 500,000 homeowners. The news website ProPublica has extensively investigated the program and reached a number of dismal conclusions…. With millions of homeowners still struggling to stay in their homes, the Obama administration’s $75 billion foreclosure prevention program has been weakened, perhaps fatally, by lax oversight and a posture of cooperation—rather than enforcement—with the nation’s biggest banks,” ProPublica reported. “Those banks, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Citibank, service the majority of mortgages.”
—Politifact.com

More on Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan:

“First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006 after the second-longest tenure in the position….. Although Greenspan was initially a logical positivist, he was converted to Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism by her associate Nathaniel Branden. He became one of the members of Rand’s inner circle, the Ayn Rand Collective, who read Atlas Shrugged while it was being written. During the 1950s and 1960s Greenspan was a proponent of Objectivism, writing articles for Objectivist newsletters and contributing several essays for Rand’s 1966 book Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal including an essay supporting the Gold Standard. Rand stood beside him at his 1974 swearing-in as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors.”
—Wikipedia.com on Alan Greenspan

“[The teachings of Satanism are] just Ayn Rand’s philosophy with ceremony and ritual added.”
-Antony LeVay, infamous founder of “The Church of Satan” and author of The Satanic Bible (1976)

“The [Satanic Bible‘s] “Nine Satanic Statements“, one of the Church of Satan’s central doctrines, is a paraphrase, again unacknowledged, of passages from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.”
—SatanismCentral.com

“When [Ayn Rand’s friend] finally refused to continue their relationship, Rand furiously expelled him from her ‘movement’ and then scuttled the ‘movement’ itself. That was, curiously, all for the better, since under her control the Objectivist movement was taking on more and more of the authoritarian or totalitarian overtones of the very ideologies it was supposedly opposing. In another incident, related by the columnist Samuel Francis, when Rand learned that the economist Murray Rothbard’s wife, Joey, was a devout Christian, she all but ordered that if Joey did not see the light and become an atheist in six months, Rothbard, who was an agnostic, must divorce her. Rothbard never had any intention of doing anything of the sort, and this estranged him from Rand, who found such “irrational” behavior intolerable…. She may be taken, nevertheless, for what she will continue to be: An inspiring advocate for the free market and for the creativity of the autonomous individual.”
–Kelley Ross, “Libertarian” academic

“A heavy smoker who refused to believe that smoking causes cancer brings to mind those today who are equally certain there is no such thing as global warming. Unfortunately, Miss Rand was a fatal victim of lung cancer…. “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out” without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn “despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently”… She didn’t feel that an individual should take help. But alas she did and said it was wrong for everyone else to do so. Apart from the strong implication that those who take the help are morally weak, it is also a philosophic point that such help dulls the will to work, to save and government assistance is said to dull the entrepreneurial spirit. In the end, Miss Rand was a hypocrite but she could never be faulted for failing to act in her own self-interest.”
—Huffington Post

“GOP leaders and conservative pundits have brought upon themselves a crisis of values. Many who for years have been the loudest voices invoking the language of faith and moral values are now praising the atheist philosopher Ayn Rand whose teachings stand in direct contradiction to the Bible. Rand advocates a law of selfishness over love and commands her followers to think only of themselves, not others. She said her followers had to choose between Jesus and her teachings.”
—American Values Network

“He said he had never understood his family until reading [about Ayn Rand]. It made him realize that they had mixed Rand’s strongly anti-government, unquestioningly pro-business, and individualistic worldview with biblical Christianity. Theologians call this “syncretism”—which George Barna calls America’s favorite religion.”
–Christianity Today, “Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Great Recession: Why Christians should be wary of the late pop philosopher and her disciples”

“When you vote for politicians who take from your back pocket to give to others, you think it’s compassionate, you think it’s caring? It’s not. It’s depriving the recipient of his own quest for self-interest. The brilliant writer and novelist, Ayn Rand, has written about this. Let me give you a couple quotes from Ayn Rand on this.”
–Rush Limbaugh, 2009

“Thanks very much for pamphlet. Am an admirer of Ayn Rand but hadn’t seen this study. ”
–Ronald Reagan

And yet……

“The Presidential election of 1976. I urge you, as emphatically as I can, not to support the candidacy of Ronald Reagan. I urge you not to work for or advocate his nomination, and not to vote for him. My reasons are as follows: Mr. Reagan is not a champion of capitalism, but a conservative in the worst sense of that word—i.e., an advocate of a mixed economy with government controls slanted in favor of business rather than labor (which, philosophically, is as untenable a position as one could choose—see Fred Kinnan in Atlas Shrugged, pp. 541-2). This description applies in various degrees to most Republican politicians, but most of them preserve some respect for the rights of the individual. Mr. Reagan does not: he opposes the right to abortion.”
–Ayn Rand, 1978

“The threat to the future of capitalism is the fact that Reagan might fail so badly that he will become another ghost, like Herbert Hoover, to be invoked as an example of capitalism’s failure for another fifty years.”
–Ayn Rand, 1981

And yet…….

“Ronald Reagan would have a very difficult, if not impossible time being nominated in this atmosphere of the Republican party.”
–Mike Huckabee

[March 17, 2011]

“The Hideous Strength: Satan is a Democrat, It is the Blue States That Are Red, & The Evil Empire Strikes Back” appears to be what the magnum opus of your growing frustration and anger at a growing threat to liberty and economic freedom coming from the Democratic Party. Even before reading this page, I had noticed a continuous rightward trend when looking at older articles from the same site. Compared to your 2006 candidacy site, when you were still proclaiming to reject both the left and the right, this article could be considered your “coming out” piece for neo-conservatism. I’m afraid however, that every single point you make in this article is completely and demonstratively false, which I will prove through news reports and independent fact-checkers.

>It is hard to bring myself to vote for anyone else, but I have come to agree with Bradford. There are four areas where the Party may be hopeless. It tends to be ideologically dominated by (1) isolationists, (2) anarchists, (3) gold bugs, (4) conspiracy theorists, and, curiously like Walter Williams himself, (5) defenders of Confederate Secession. These had been a problem for me ever since I joined the Party, but it was brought home in 2008. I had run for office as a Libertarian seven times — four times for California State Assembly, 1994, 1996, 1998, & 2000, and three times for Congress, 2002, 2004, & 2006. In 2008, the LA Country election organizer sent out an e-mail to solicit candidates for the next election, calling for good “anti-war” Party members. Although no sensible person is gratuitously in favor of war, I had to tell him that I was not against the current war, involving Terrorism, in the way that he expected. He thought I might want to run for a State office, where the war might not be an issue, but I declined that also.

Of course no one thinks they are gratuitously in favor of war, but what circumstances make you inclined towards war makes a difference towards your political affiliation. If you were for the Vietnam war, for the Cold War arms race, for the Iraq War, for military bases stationed across the world, and have a predilection to disbelieve there’s any waste in the U.S. military budget, then you need to admit that you’re not really in favor of “limited government” but rather disagree with the left on what exactly “big government” should be spending its money on: weapons or health care. Although I agree with you that it is not smart to be too ideological in our decisions for going to war since Libertarians did not want to get involved with World War II, they at least have intellectual honesty when they say they believe in “limited government.”

As Rand Paul points out, “Would Republicans have given Obama and his party a free pass in carrying out the exact same agenda as Bush? It’s hard to imagine this being the case, given the grief Bill Clinton got from Republicans, even though his big government agenda was less ambitious than Bush’s. Yet, the last Republican president got very little criticism from his own party for most of his tenure. For conservatives, there was no excuse for this.” He also said, “any self-described conservative who ‘misses’ the last president and his version of the Republican Party should probably quit subscribing to that label,” adding, “if judgment is based on spending and the budget, then Bill Clinton should be considered preferable to Bush.”

>For me, enough is enough. It may be often said that the United States should not be the world’s policeman. Unfortunately, somebody needs to be the world’s policeman, and that task tends to fall on the country with the greatest geopolitical reach. That used to be Britain. Now it is the United States.

The World Police is supposed to be the U.N. and NATO. The U.S. only had to pay for a fraction of the total Gulf War costs, which came to something like $7 billion. The Washington Post puts the costs of Iraq War at “$3 trillion and beyond,” nine years after G.W. Bush had White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was fired for suggesting the war might cost $200 billion. This is why Neo-Cons who argue for “limited government” are fundamentally dishonest. Empires are not “limited government.”

>The Royal Navy, which used to hang pirates on the spot, now sometimes releases them (like other NATO forces), for fear of violating their human rights. This is laughable, contemptible, and dangerous. It is the result of foolish and preposterous scruples that put the innocent at risk by confusing the traditional laws of war with those of civil justice. We see something similar in Afghanistan, where, so reports have it, captured members of the Tâlibân are now being read their Miranda Rights.

This claim first came from Republican Representative Mike Rogers during an interview with Fox News. General Petraeus denied this was happening except in a number of limited cases where militants were being tried in civilian courts. FBI director Robert S. Mueller III reiterated Petraeus’ denial in a detailed letter that was forwarded to Rogers.

Meanwhile, Obama has gone further than Bush in claiming executive powers by approving the first-ever assassination of a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, without the due process promised even to traitors by the Constitution. Bradley Manning is being held in solitary confinement on a admittedly trumped up “suicide watch” and forced to strip naked daily. Shamefully, liberals who pitched a fit at the idea of Bush merely tapping phone lines without a warrant are being silent while the President orders a blatantly illegal assassination, dismissing all judicial review of the case, as contested by al-Awlaki’s father, under the pretext of “state secrets.” It’s amazing that neither Democrats who watched Obama run on an anti-torture platform nor Republicans who are so obsessed with making the president’s every move unconstitutional can not find any problem with this either.

>This is a level of stupidity now to lay at the feet of the Democrats, but, of course, the Libertarian Party doesn’t want American troups [sic] there at all.

Actually, public opinion polls show far more than Libertarians want us out of the Middle East. A CBS poll from last year says that people who believe Iraq was a mistake is at 59%, up from 25% in March 2003. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll from 2009 finds that 58% of Americans oppose the war in Afghanistan, with only 62% of Republicans still supporting it. A Washington/ABC poll finds 71% believe we should withdraw from Afghanistan, with only 23% stating we should stay. Republicans who want us to leave include Michael “Obama’s War” Steele and one of your favorite authors, Ann Coulter. Coulter praised Bush for ignoring Afghanistan and quite amazingly declared that “Everyone knows” (except most of the Neo-Cons who read her) “it’s not worth the trouble and resources to take a nation of rocks and brigands,” while simultaneously criticizing the Democrats for never wanting to win in the first place. According to most estimates we are now paying somewhere between 50 and 100 million dollars for every Taliban killed. Neither Jefferson nor the Royal Navy would have paid that kind of money for any Barbary or Somali pirate.

>Better to let the Jihadists go ahead and plan more terrorist attacks against us — after all, many Libertarians agree with the Left that the U.S. invited and deserved the attacks on 9/11.

I find it especially interesting that you phrase “agree with the Left” like a certain group of Libertarians made this decision through peer pressure when in fact nonintervention has always been one of the core pillars of Libertarian philosophy. You know Libertarians didn’t even support WW2 but obviously this incredibly successful and popular decade-long adventure into the Middle East is supposed to be some kind of exception to the rule. Libertarians are pacifist on principle to the point they want to completely cut off all foreign aid, not because current circumstances demand it, but because it is central to their ideology. So the problem really isn’t with them; it’s with you.

Liberals, on the other hand, are not ideological pacifists. The pacifist movement that has protested all American wars starting with Vietnam is but a tiny and uninfluencial part of the Left. If anything, it’s liberals who just lately came around to the fact that terrorists (who of course deserve to die) are able to garner popular support in Muslim countries not because they “hate us for our freedoms,” but because of American foreign policy. Ron Paul is far more open about blaming terrorism on America supporting corrupt dictators, killing civilians in missile attacks, building military bases in Saudi Arabia, supporting Israeli occupations, and continuing perpetual wars, than any Democratic politician. And he didn’t get his idea to close down American military bases throughout the world from the Democrats. This is not the same as the government inviting the attacks, much less believing the people killed on 9/11 “deserved” it, which I know you don’t really believe.

Senior al-Qaida member Said al-Adel summarized “Al Quaeda’s Strategy to the Year 2020” in 5 steps: 1) Provoke the United States into invading a Muslim country. 2) Incite local resistance to occupying forces. 3) Expand the conflict to neighboring countries, and engage the U.S. in a long war of attrition. 4) Convert Al-Qaeda into an ideology and set of operating principles that can be loosely franchised in other countries without requiring direct command and control, and via these franchises incite attacks against countries allied with the U.S. until they withdraw from the conflict, as happened with the 2004 Madrid train bombings, but which did not have the same effect with the 2005 London bombings. 5) The U.S. economy will finally collapse under the strain of too many engagements in too many places, similarly to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Arab regimes supported by the U.S. will collapse, and a Wahhabi Caliphate will be installed across the region.

>Harry Browne, whom I was happy to give my vote for President more than once, said something of the sort immediately after the event. This didn’t quite make me a “9/11 Republican,” but it seriously turned me off about Browne. To the Left, of course, our self-defense and policing of pirates is “imperialism” — by which they cannot mean something like the Râj, since the United States does not wish to conquer and rule countries as did the European colonial powers, but they must think of it that way anyway, since they can only understand political events in terms of their Marxist-Leninist paradigm. A capitalist country engaging in self-defense, or the defense of civilization, is, by definition, “imperialist.”

The fact that you just used Britain as a precedent for United States foreign policy does not exactly help your argument here, unless maybe it’s now an insult to refer to the British Empire as imperial. And I guess all the secret wars in South America and U.S. army bases throughout the world are just all part of an extended police action against metaphorical pirates? The U.S. Empire was necessary for World War II, but armies are not that effective against terrorist splinter cells. The Roman Empire didn’t always conquer and rule over nations directly but often controlled provinces through puppet kings like Herod the Great, and the Jews responded with their own splinter cells, the Sicarii. It’s no different with us. We support whatever leader will provide the most “United States interests” (i.e. profit). If the wars in the Middle East are completely about “defense,” then what’s all the talk about “United States interests” in the region? The U.S. knows that our life blood is in oil so our entire foreign policy is based on what nations have the most oil. That’s why we can invade an oil-rich nation that doesn’t want us there while ignoring the cries of intervention from the people of Darfur who do want us there. Certainly the murderous regime in northern Sudan better qualifies for your Somali pirate metaphor than a Stalinist dictator like Saddam Hussein. Not that invading Iraq succeeded at better securing the Iraqi oil trade, which could possibly be blamed on the total incompetence of how the war was waged, if anything resembling what could be called a victory was ever possible, which is doubtful. Sean Hannity went from being insulted that the war with Iraq was about oil to directly proposing we should take their oil as compensation for our sacrifice.

>Although Lincoln was an heir to Whigs and Federalists, and the defeat of secession did remove one of the threats that helped keep the Federal Government within its Constitutional limitations, the Civil War involved a noble cause and, especially through the Civil War Amendments (13th, 14th, & 15th), improved the Constitution. Focusing on the supposed evils of the Union cause, and ignoring that the cause was to abolish one of the greatest evils in history, slavery, not only conveys a message of perversity and moral confusion but, again, like the conspiracy theories, distracts attention from its proper focus, namely the outright destruction of Constitutional government in letter and spirit by the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt, despite building the Jefferson Memorial and putting Jefferson on the nickel, completely overthrew the Jeffersonian understanding of American government — replacing it with the ideas, like unlimited Federal spending, that had been advocated by Jefferson’s greatest enemy, the Federalist Alexander Hamilton. The New Deal undid the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800 and lodged a cancer in American government. The disease has grown steadily ever since, and never more rapidly than since 2008

Jeffersonian Democracy was overthrown by Jackson when he gave the power of elected office to all white men, not just educated property owners. Although Lincoln’s victory inaugurated Jefferson’s dream to rid the country and himself of slavery (in that order), the Civil War simultaneously overthrew the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian understanding of American government on limited Federal power.

Since “the safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society” was to “inform their discretion” through public education, Jefferson enacted the “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” and the “Bill for Amending of the Constitution of the College of William and Mary.” As Forbes magazine points out, Jefferson and Adams both supported government-run health care, with Jefferson signing the “Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen” into law in 1798. When he was president, he also presided over a $20 million bill (big money in his time) to create federal roads. And although Jefferson hated federal debt, he borrowed gold in England for the $15 million Louisiana Purchase because it was necessary.

>The modern Republicans lack the courage of their (presumed and sometimes expressed) convictions. They usually praise the New Deal and make no real effort to restore Constitutional government. This has effectively made them co-dependents and enablers for the Democrats. Ronald Reagan at least promised to abolish the Department of Education, but then didn’t, and didn’t even seem to try very hard to do so.

Actually, he promised to cut not just the Department of Education but also the Department of Energy, then instead added one of the most expensive departments, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, which today has a budget of almost $90 billion, more than the other two departments combined. Not surprisingly, federal spending didn’t fall under Reagan; it rose. The federal budget on education is less than $50 billion and the United States has gone from 1st to 17th in education in the last 20 years and is continuing to plummet, but I guess your ironclad certainty that all the Founding Fathers (except maybe Hamilton) consider spending money on education to be tyranny trumps all of that.

>Yet now everyone “knows” that the Censure was for persecuting innocent people with false charges, especially those gifted and honest (Communists) in Hollywood. On a recent anniversary of the censure vote, an anchor on Fox News (Shepard Smith), supposedly the cat’s paw of Conservatism, announced that McCarthy had “ruined the lives of hundreds of people”. This was hardly possible in the brief period when McCarthy had any real power [note]. A recent McCarthy scholar enjoys statements like this at his lectures, because he then asks the audience, “Name one.”

From BBC:

Nevertheless, an accusation by McCarthy could cost someone his job, his reputation, and (in one case of suicide), his life.

From CNN:

And for all the publicity and ruined lives stemming from the McCarthy’s interrogations, not one person who appeared before his hearings went to jail.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

“Long-sealed transcripts of the Joseph McCarthy hearings, released on Monday, amplify much of what is already known about the most notorious investigation in congressional history: how witnesses were badgered – and lives ruined – by charges of communist subversion that proved to be largely groundless. And while he informed the 395 witnesses of their right to constitutional protection, he described any attempt to do so as an admission of guilt – and encouraged employers to fire them. The hearings took on the tone of an inquisition. They ranged from investigations into the books in the State Department’s overseas libraries, where more than 300 titles were then banned or burned, to allegations of subversion in defense plants, never substantiated. Stanley Berinsky, a worker for the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, N.J., was grilled about the political affiliations of his mother. “Did you ever ask her if she was a communist? …When you went to see her, weren’t you curious?” Some 42 engineers were suspended as a result of this investigation, and 40 were later offered their jobs back.”

He may have ruined lives, but at least McCarthy didn’t support the IRA.

“It tells me that goosestepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them!” -Henry Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

>an anchor on Fox News (Shepard Smith), supposedly the cat’s paw of Conservatism

For a time, Bill O’Reilly and Rupert Murdoch tried to claim Greta Van Sustren, whose husband is now advising Sarah Palin, as a “liberal.” O’Reilly would also mentioned Alan Colmes (who wasn’t replaced with a liberal after he left) while forgetting to mention Sean Hannity (who now has two shows) in order to make the absurd insinuation that the roster was 50/50. Now O’Reilly has stopped claiming that and began following the new party line that conservative opinion is only confined to opinion shows, which is also ludicrous. Virtually every Republican presidential candidate is employed with them, a situation unparalleled by any other news organization. The disgraced Oliver North has his own “War Stories” program on Fox News. Watergate crony and admitted would-be murderer G. Gordon Liddy hocks gold on the channel when he isn’t serving as a guest panelist. London Bureau chief Scott Norvell said, “Even we at Fox News manage to get some lefties on the air occasionally, and often let them finish their sentences before we club them to death and feed the scraps to Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly.” But I guess none of that matters since one of the less partisan news anchors insulted Ann Coulter’s hero.

>And after the eloquence of Ronald Reagan, the “Great Communicator,” the Republicans have been unable to provide better Presidents than the inarticulate and uninspiring two Bushes — who both began their Presidencies with oblique swipes at Reagan (the “kinder and gentler nation” and “compassionate conservatism”) and who governed through constant (thankless) compromises with Democrats. The Bushes both proved to be the kind of “Country Club” Republicans, going along out of good manners, that all too easily become RINO’s, “Republicans in Name Only,” and then perhaps, like the despicable Arlen Spector, open Big Government Democrats.

If Reagan was alive today, he would be considered a RINO too. As the conservative site redstate.org points out, Reagan granted amnesty to illegal aliens, raised taxes multiple times, spent us into a deficit, helped facilitate the Savings and Loan Crisis through deregulation, and the worst sin of all, he compromised with Democrats. He also bailed out Social Security in 1983 after attempting to privatize it and set up a progressive taxation system to keep it funded into the future. He hiked defense spending by over $100 billion a year to a level not seen since the height of the Vietnam war. Although Reagan broke the illegal air traffic union strike after securing their vote, and organized labor declined during his administration, he was the first former union leader who became president and believed that “where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.” Back before the tragically successful smear campaign against all climate scientists, physicists, science journal publicists, etc. as closet Communists, Reagan proposed the business-friendly alternative to taxing carbon emissions which led him to be known as the father of “cap and trade.” He gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. He “cut and ran” from Lebanon. His administration sold weapons to terrorists in Iran and then used the money to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. And he tripled the national debt.

Considering the sharp movement to the right that Republicans have recently made, I would say it is easier to attribute the popularity of the “RINO” designation to what a conservative writer at FrumForum describes the “Fox Geezer Syndrome”:

“I would try to engage [my mother], but unless I shared her particular judgment, and her outrage, she apparently thought that I was a dupe or a RINO… It wasn’t that I disagreed with their opinions – though I often did – but rather that I found the vehemence with which they expressed those opinions to be so off-putting…. I started to wonder how common this Fox Geezer Syndrome was. I began to poll conservative friends of my generation who had right-wing parents. At least eight different people – not an Obama voter among them, and one of them actually a George W. Bush political appointee in Washington – told me that yes, they had observed a correlation between the fevered emotionalism of their elderly parents’ politics, and increased exposure to Fox News.”

>Republicans were therefore faced with the unenviable choice between Constitutional Government and their own conservative, paternalistic desire, so clear with alcohol Prohibition, to protect people from their own vices. Their choice, of course, has almost universally been to go along, as in so many other things, with the Democrats, scrap the Constitution, and take credit for drug prohibition. Some conservatives, like William Bennett, have even made the absurd argument that alcohol Prohibition was actually successful. Since much of the public, thanks to years of propaganda from the Democrats and their subsidiaries, public education, the press, and the intelligentsia, no longer has much understanding or sympathy for the principles of limited government, the Republicans may actually be taking the more politically popular position.

How are Republicans “going along” with Democrats and (falsely?) “taking credit” for drug prohibition when drug prohibition is manifestly part of the “family values” ideology of conservatism? This sounds suspiciously like the accusation that liberals are “leading” Libertarians to pacifism. It was Reagan who started the War on Drugs and it’s the liberals in California who decriminalized and almost legalized marijuana but for the outside support of Utah conservatives.

>Few gave her a chance of winning the general election — as the Democrat has been helped when local television “forgot” to run O’Donnell’s ads the weekend before the election! — and her nomination set off considerable tut-tutting by Republican insiders and commentators like Karl Rove and Charles Krauthammer, who chided Republican voters for nominating a weak, ideological candidate.

From MSNBC:

“Qualls said the campaign approached him Thursday about running the program this weekend. He said the campaign had a Friday deadline for getting him the video but didn’t deliver it until Sunday night. Qualls, a Republican who said he voted for O’Donnell in the primary, called on O’Donnell to clarify that the campaign was at fault so the incident doesn’t hurt his reputation. He said he has been bombarded by nasty phone and e-mail messages, some including threats. “I want something coming from her office saying something on this,” he said. “Don’t make me look like I forgot … I got like 200 e-mails from people cussing me out.”

O’Donnell’s campaign released a statement Monday afternoon calling it a “misunderstanding.”” Apparently, you didn’t get it.

When O’Donnell was unable to give specifics regarding what tax and spending decisions she would have done differently Chris Coon, her manager called the radio channel up and demanded the interview be surrendered to them and threatened a lawsuit if it was released. She falsely implied she was getting a Masters at Princeton, was unsure whether the separation of church and state is protected by the Constitution, and argued that Obama’s appointment of czars broke the Constitutional ban on granting titles of nobility, an astonishing display of stupidity even if she hadn’t shared a platform with drug czar Bill Bennett. Her first claim to fame was hosting a campaign against masturbation on Mtv and following a trip to the Middle East, told reporters that she found the censorship of “smut” there to be “refreshing.” Hardly seems like a favorite candidate of someone whose unabashed dedication to Libertarian principle led him to proclaim that he was in favor of “Nude Family Recreation” while running for office.

>Meanwhile, the Democrats are put off their game. At first they wanted to think that the Tea Party was a cat’s paw of the Republican Party — “astroturf” instead of genuine “grass roots” to Nancy Pelosi (takes one to know one?). When it became undeniable that the Tea Party was as angry with the Republican Establishment as with the Democrats, then Democrats decided to smear them as racists, Klansmen, lunatics, extremists, etc.

The Tea Party name was first started in Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, which was literally tossed out of the “big tent” of the Republicans for the same reason I happen to like him: he was an honest ideologue who, unlike every other Republican candidate, wasn’t a Wall Street sellout. Back then the Tea Parties were attended by young anti-war Libertarians who were against both Republicans and Democrats. This all changed after the Republicans lost the election.

Had the movement originated or been popularized following the Bush bailouts that Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin and most Republicans at the time supported, then the Tea Party might have survived as an intellectually honest group. Instead, the Tea Party really only gained steam after Obama was elected president and Santelli went on his rant about Obama’s “Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan,” which was less than 1% of the size of the bank bailouts, though it helped perpetuate the notion that the crisis was caused by lazy minorities who bought houses they couldn’t afford. This new group of Tea Partiers, despite being made up almost entirely of elderly pro-war Fox News Neo-Cons, attempted to pass themselves off as neither Republican nor Democrat to escape the much publicized “brand problem” the Republicans had in 2009, yet out of 100 Tea Party candidates, not one registered as a Democrat. You appear to attempt a distinction between them and Republicans yet you say yourself that “I’m not happy with the social conservatism of some of them,” which is the exact same thing you say about Republicans. What can you say about the Tea Party other than they’re Republicans who aren’t RINOs?

The Tea Party then became infiltrated by establishment figures like Sarah Palin, Steve Forbes, Matt Kibbe, the Koch Brothers, and Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, an AstroTurf lobbyist group that helped Verizon oppose telecommunications regulation that now works to fight off the financial reform that Ron Paul supported. The change from Ron Paul’s Tea Party to the Republican-funded Tea Party was so unnoticed that it was easy for the myth to spread that the Tea Parties came from “nowhere” so that even a supposed “Libertarian” like yourself is ignorant of its roots.

You hardly have to go to Nancy Pelosi to be told the Tea Party is “astroturf.” Ask Karl Denninger, one of the earliest organizers of the Tea Party, who said, “Tea Party my ass. This was nothing other than the Republican Party stealing the anger of a population that was fed up with the Republican Party’s own theft of their tax money at gunpoint to bail out the robbers of Wall Street and fraudulently redirecting it back toward electing the very people who stole all the fucking money!” When asked by Randi Rhodes if the Tea Party was corporately owned now, even Ron Paul didn’t disagree.

Since the real problem with the deficit is with Medicare/Medicaid and Defense they don’t want touched, it’s no surprise that following the Tea Party victory, it was hard enough to even get the purely symbolic $100 billion in cuts past the House and now Boehner is saying even the new figure, $61 billion, may not make it through. But even $100 billion wouldn’t make up for the $210 billion the CBO says it would cost if the Tea Party was somehow successful in their purely symbolic attempt to repeal health care, itself an exception to their promise not to enact any legislation that would add to the deficit.

After attending several Tea Party rallies and talking with a large number of elderly white people, many of whom were using medicare-paid scooters and oxygen and/or turned out to be on the government dole in some way or another, Matt Taibbi came to the conclusion that: “They’re full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry’s medals and Barack Obama’s Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them.” This is epitomized by Rand Paul, who wants to gut the Americans With Disabilities Act and abolish the departments of Education and Energy while keeping his own government compensation since “Physicians should be allowed to make a comfortable living.”

>But nothing is more remarkable than what happened to Joe the Plumber. Eliciting an embarrassing statement from Obama made Joe an enemy. Democrats and the Left immediately went after Joe. So we learned that “Joe” wasn’t his real name (he is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, obviously using his middle name for dishonest purposes). He wasn’t a licensed plumber (he worked for one). He owed some back taxes (like several people nominated to be in the Obama Adminstration). Some Democrat Ohio bureaucrats even began (illegal) investigations, to try and find anything else to discredit him. The pointlessness and infantile vindictiveness of this is just astonishing. In fact, it doesn’t matter if Joe the Plumber turned out to be Charles Manson. The issue is what Obama said, and what it said about him. Joe himself was irrelevant

Anyone who says the issue was what Obama said and that Joe himself was irrelevant must have been in a coma at the time and was informed about it afterward. Reporters fawned over Joe’s every breath. His name was mentioned over 20 times during the debate. Republicans printed out “I am Joe the Plumber” bumper stickers. John McCain called him his “hero.” And the mainstream media talked about him all day because it meant they could cover hollow non-issues instead of boring campaign speeches. Even now, after the media grew tired of him, he’s still involved in Republican politics.

And the criticism was not against Wurzelbacher’s adopting the “Joe the Plumber” moniker. Obviously, he can call himself whatever he wants. It was the way the McCain campaign oversimplified “Joe the Plumber” as a childish symbol for all upper middle-class Americans when the title didn’t even fit him. Nor was the question itself entirely honest since he didn’t have the money to buy the plumbing business in the first place. And in the end, it wasn’t liberals but McCain that Joe blamed for having “screwed up my life.” The Right had a similar reaction to Cindy Sheehan being popularized by the media as a simplistic symbol for the Iraq War protesters, and the media reacted just the same way as in this case since personal stories draw a bigger crowd than real news.

>When the press discovered that Christine O’Donnell had said that she dabbled in witchcraft as a teenager, the Democrats exulted — even though one would think that “Wiccan” voters would be a natural Democrat constituency. Conservative Christians worried about Satanism would be unlike to vote for Democrats anyway.

Other than California congressman Pete Stark, the Democrats can’t even elect an atheist (barred from seven states, including Texas), much less a Wiccan. Even Bill Maher, who first released the video, said the Wiccan thing was irrelevant. The fact that she believed there were mice with human brains in laboratories or that evolution meant monkeys should be talking today is what should be getting people talking.

When O’Donnell was unable to give specifics regarding what tax and spending decisions she would have done differently Chris Coon, her manager called the radio channel up and demanded the interview be surrendered to them and threatened a lawsuit if it was released. She falsely implied she was getting a Masters at Princeton, was unsure whether the separation of church and state is protected by the Constitution, and argued that Obama’s appointment of czars broke the Constitutional ban on granting titles of nobility, an astonishing display of stupidity even if she hadn’t shared a platform with drug czar Bill Bennett. Her first claim to fame was hosting a campaign against masturbation on Mtv and following a trip to the Middle East, told reporters that she found the censorship of “smut” there to be “refreshing.” Hardly seems like a favorite candidate of someone whose unabashed dedication to Libertarian principle led him to proclaim that he was in favor of “Nude Family Recreation” while running for office.

>But in general, since most Tea Partiers are pretty ordinary folk, as Bill O’Reilly would say, the Democrats just ended insulting and putting off a great many mainstream and independent voters.

Yeah, tea party protesters are “ordinary folk,” unlike the Wisconsin protesters, who are portrayed by Fox News as a “mob” of “violent,” “rabid leftists” and “frothing radicals” that caused $7.5 million in damage (really about $350,000). They’re also unlike the Iraq protesters that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Joe Scarborough, Tom Delay, Rick Santorum, and Bill Bennett attacked as treasonous anti-Americans helping Saddam Hussein despite the fact that EACH of them protested against Clinton going into Kosovo. Of course, each would have been shocked if anyone had insinuated that they were helping Milosevic, despite the fact there was an actual genocide happening at the time, unlike in Iraq. G.W. Bush, Hannity, and Santorum hilariously complained that we had no “exit strategy” for Kosovo and Rush later said you can’t be for the troops and against the war, so I can only presume he was also against the troops who fought in Kosovo, except that he also pretended that he — and ALL Republicans — were supportive of the war following its success.

>Thus, it is widely understood that the fraudulent stimulus (“porkulus”) bill begun under George Bush and rushed through (as urgently needed) under Barack Obama has not and will not make much difference (except negatively) for the economy. It is a political show designed to get votes.

The stimulus is necessary because the current financial crisis has caused a liquidity trap. A full 40% of the stimulus package were tax cuts — the biggest 2-year tax cut in history — even though liberal economists believe tax cuts are less effective. According to the CBO, the stimulus raised economic growth by as much as 4.5% in the last quarter, and according to the CBO, IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers, and Moody’s Economy.com, the stimulus succeeded in its purpose in creating 1 to 3 million jobs, though it certainly failed if it was meant as a “political show” since it was so widely unpopular with the general public.

>When Andre Marrou was the Libertarian candidate for President in 1992, a reporter asked him what the program of the Libertarian Party was. He answered, “the restoration of Constitutional government.” That was a good answer and a good idea, but unfortunately it has never been the program of the Libertarian Party. The “principle” upon which the Party is founded, and to which members have been expected to subscribe in the “Pledge,” is a utopian notion that government can be built out of purely voluntary relationships. Thus, the Party does not believe in things like taxes or eminent domain, or even, really, national armed forces. Since all these things, and more, are recognized in the Constitution, one cannot say that the Libertarian Party has any particular interest or commitment to the principles or historical considerations of Constitutional government. This means that the philosophical inspirations and touchstones for the movement are not primarily Locke, Jefferson, Madison, or even F.A. Hayek, but, as R.W. Bradford said, Rand and Rothbard.

The fact that you are coming out with all of this now fits rather nicely with my hypothesis that you have unofficially converted to neo-conservatism. It’s rather typical for the most devoted follower of an ideology to complain that the people in their group “lack the courage of their convictions.” Maybe you should check this list of differences between libertarians and neo-cons to see where you fall.

[Libertarianism vs. Neo-Conservatism]

More later…

Jeff Querner

Friedrich Nietzsche and Jakob Friedrich Fries

he name “Friesian” comes from the German philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries. I explained in an earlier post how Kelley Ross railed on Nietzsche for being anti-Semitic while at the same time downplaing Fries’ own contribution to Nazi ideology. The funny thing is, you could read half the articles on his site and not know who Fries is. Fries’ own bibliography page is ironically minute for such a massive site. It’s shorter than his Nietzsche page and his Nietzsche and the Nazis page. This may have more to with the fact that Fries, along with Kant, were the main influences behindLeonard Nelson‘s ethics, Sir Karl Popper‘s economics, as shown by his family tree of Kant-Friesian Philosophies.

Yet for all his talk of epistemology and the foundations of value, it appears that he basically makes most judgment calls based on a person’s economic philosophy. Thus, Noam Chomsky is a “lunatic” for his “crusade against capitalism,” but Ayn Rand, whose Objectivist movement began “taking on more and more of the authoritarian or totalitarian overtones of the very ideologies it was supposedly opposing” is nevertheless “An inspiring advocate for the free market and for the creativity of the autonomous individual.”

Ross writes that he suspects the “major reason for the popularity of Nietzsche among trendy intellectuals of the last century has been his critique and dismissal of Christianity.” This is certainly true of high schoolers, but “trendy intellectuals” are typically more interested in his dismissal of Plato and his themes of the Apollonian versus the Dionysian. Ross goes on to say that “Nietzsche’s anti-Christian critique simply follows from his anti-Jewish critique. Trendy intellectuals, however, would never want to admit that Nazi anti-Semitism owed any genuine, rather than merely a confused and misrepresented, debt to Nietzsche.” He then takes a rather long critque aimed against Jewish Christianity and argues that because Nietzsche was “incautious in his use of his terminology” by calling Jewish hatred “evil” instead of “bad” after complaining that the idea of “evil” was based on “slave morals,” it must mean that Nietzsche hated all Jews.

On his “Nietzsche and the Nazis” page, he points out that the Nazis adopted Nietzsche’s philosophy as their own: “Nazis were not stupid and that Nazi ideology appealed to a larger literate, educated, and informed audience of Germans. If the Nazis and their supporters got Nietzsche wrong on important issues, how intelligent and educated can they have been?” Thus, he concludes that the “Nazis seem to be reasonably faithful Nietzscheans.”

Ross also criticizes another philosopher, Stephen Hicks, for being “in an apologetic mode when it comes to anti-Semitism and Nietzsche’s attitude towards the Jews.” Hicks points to a quote saying: “the Jews are beyond doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race now living in Europe” and could actually take over Europe if they wanted to, but Ross interprets this as an “anti-Semitic fantasy, since the Jews are neither a race nor ‘pure’ (Russian Jews with red hair, while Yemeni Jews look like Arabs), and were never in any position to “have the ascendency, in fact literally the supremacy, over Europe if they wanted it.”

On his bibliography page about Fries, he writes:

“In criticizing Fries, Shlomo Avineri… has correctly pointed out that German nationalism was already displaying some of its worst tendencies, including the book burning at the Wartburg Festival, and anti-Semitism — with Fries himself contributing an anti-Semitic tract. The horrifying overtones of this led Avineri to dismiss Fries and the Burschenschaften, not as “liberal, idealistic,” but as proto-Nazis; and he attributed the affinity between them all to the subjectivism and irrationality of Fries’ thought… Politically, there is certainly enough blame to go around. The mix of ideas found later in National Socialism owes as much to Hegel as to the evils advocated or practiced by Fries and the Burschenschaften. From the Neoplatonic (and perhaps Aristotelian) doctrine that God only knows universals, Hegel produced the modern totalitarian idea of the state, where the individual as such is “abstract” and irrational — only the State, as the historical expression of Geist, “spirit” or “mind,” is real and rational…. The new element into the mix was later the anti-Semitism of Marx himself, for whom Jews now were class enemies, symbolic and more, of Capitalist exploitation…. So if Fries was simply anti-Semitic, this means all his thought is just discredited? Right? Well, anti-Semitism, while repellent in Fries or anyone, tends to be excused or ignored when found in those who are more politically favored or fashionable, or where the rest of their ideas are regarded as worthy in themselves and unrelated to attitudes towards the Jews. Thus, anti-Semitism expressed or practiced by Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche, Gottlob Frege, or Martin Heidegger is therefore hardly even noticed by their advocates…. Anti-Semitism as a form of racist ideology was essential to the political theory of the Nazis; yet such racism is missing in Heidegger [which is what I thought until recently; but now see the revelations of Emmanuel Faye] and also in Fries — especially since such ideology didn’t exist yet in the early 19th century. It is not missing in Nietzsche, who freely uses expressions like die Herren Rasse, the “Master Race,” or “Race of Masters.”

So Fries may have been anti-Semitic (really anti-Jewish), but the German philosopher Hegel contributed just as much to Nazi ideology because his statist philosophy denegrated people as individuals, which apparently is the first step to becoming a totalitarian state, while Voltaire and Marx were just as anti-Semitic yet everyone gave them a pass.

So in November of 2010, I wrote:

Letter 3: “‘Drudgery’ these days will more accurately describe the lives of the wealthy than of wage-earners”

You have written several articles denouncing Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi and defending Jakob Fries against himself being a proto-Nazi. The opposite is true.

Nietzsche made numerous statements criticizing Anti-Semitism, Pan-Germanism, racism, and nationalism and even broke off all communication with his editor, his good friend Richard Wagner, and even his own sister over their own anti-Semitism and pro-Aryan ideals. Following Nietzsche’s death, his sister re-edited and published his post-humous work, The Will to Power, which Nietzsche had originally abandoned. After the Nazis came to power, she created the Nietzsche Archive, which received financial support and publicity from the Nazis so that it could be used to promote their ideology, but Nietzsche himself was horrified at the idea that his works were being used by anti-Semites within his own lifetime. In Christmas of 1887, he wrote his sister, saying:

“You have committed one of the greatest stupidities—for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy…. It is a matter of honor with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well!) is as pronounced as possible, but the relation to Förster, as well as the aftereffects of my former publisher, the anti-Semitic Schmeitzner, always brings the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must belong to them after all…. It arouses mistrust against my character, as if publicly I condemned something which I have favored secretly—and that I am unable to do anything against it, that the name of Zarathustra is used in every Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheet, has almost made me sick several times.”

In The Gay Science, he writes:

“No, we do not love humanity; but on the other hand we are not nearly “German” enough, in the sense in which the word “German” is constantly being used nowadays, to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine…. We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being “modern men,” and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the “historical sense.”

He wrote that the reason he broke with his editor because he didn’t want his writings

“completely buried and unexhumeable in this anti-Semitic dump.”

Because of this, he was forced to self-publish Beyond Good and Evil, which says:

We “good Europeans,” we also have hours when we allow ourselves a warm-hearted patriotism, a plunge and relapse into old loves and narrow views–I have just given an example of it [in Wagner’s Mastersingers]– hours of national excitement, of patriotic anguish, and all other sorts of old-fashioned floods of sentiment…. This process of the EVOLVING EUROPEAN, which can be retarded in its TEMPO by great relapses, but will perhaps just gain and grow thereby in vehemence and depth–the still-raging storm and stress of “national sentiment” pertains to it, and also the anarchism which is appearing at present–this process will probably arrive at results on which its naive propagators and panegyrists, the apostles of “modern ideas,” would least care to reckon…

In the same chapter he writes:

It must be taken into the bargain, if various clouds and disturbances–in short, slight attacks of stupidity–pass over the spirit of a people that suffers and WANTS to suffer from national nervous fever and political ambition: for instance, among present-day Germans there is alternately the anti-French folly, the anti-Semitic folly, the anti-Polish folly, the Christian-romantic folly, the Wagnerian folly, the Teutonic folly, the Prussian folly (just look at those poor historians, the Sybels and Treitschkes, and their closely bandaged heads), and whatever else these little obscurations of the German spirit and conscience may be called.

In The Geneaology of Morals, he says that anti-Semites

“…are all men of resentment, these physiologically impaired and worm-eaten men, a totally quivering earthly kingdom of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible, insatiable in its outbursts against the fortunate, and equally in its masquerades of revenge, its pretexts for revenge. When would they attain their ultimate, most refined, most sublime triumph of revenge? Undoubtedly, if they could succeed in pushing their own wretchedness, all misery in general, into the consciences of the fortunate, so that the latter one day might begin to be ashamed of their good fortune and perhaps would say to themselves, “It’s a shameful to be fortunate. There’s too much misery!”

In a letter 1887 letter to Theodor Fritsch, he writes:

“Believe me: this abominable “wanting to have a say” of noisy dilettantes about the value of people and races, this subjection to “authorities” who are utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind (e.g., E. Dühring, R. Wagner, Ebrard, Wahrmund, P. de Lagarde—who among these in questions of morality and history is the most unqualified, the most unjust?), these constant, absurd falsifications and rationalizations of vague concepts “germanic,” “semitic,” “aryan,” “christian,” “German”—all of that could in the long run cause me to lose my temper and bring me out of the ironic benevolence with which I have hitherto observed the virtuous velleities and pharisaisms of modern Germans.
— And finally, how do you think I feel when the name Zarathustra is mouthed by anti-Semites?”

Regarding racists and German nationalists, he said:

“every great crime against culture for the last four hundred years lies on their conscience.”

A quick note he wrote to his friend Overbeck shortly before his insanity says:

“Just now I am having all anti-Semites shot.”

Rather than being an anti-Semite, it would be more true to call Nietzsche an anti-anti-Semite. This is hardly a liberal whitewash. Even the fact-eschewing Conservapedia, which humorously suggests Nietzsche may have gone insane because of his atheism, says that he denounced German nationalism, “abhorred” anti-Semitism, and that it was his sister who provided the “distorted version of culled and misquoted statements which later provided an intellectual fig leaf for the Nazis and Italian Fascists.”

The glorification of battle and warriors by Nietzsche, as in “On War and Warriors” in Thus Spake Zarathustra is symbolic of philosophical battles, proven by the fact that it is immediately followed up by an attack on the state as “The New Idol,” as explained by Walter Arnold Kaufmann in his book, Nietzsche, philosopher, psychologist, antichrist (p.386). Other scholars have pointed out that the “tough guy” rhetoric was probably psychologically conditioned by the fact that Nietzsche was very sickly and suffered throughout his life from partial blindness, headaches, and gastrointestinal problems, forcing him to constantly relocate himself to more conducive climates, a fact that in itself dismisses your allegation that Nietzsche had “contempt for the sick and suffering.” Most of your other complaints regarding Nietzsche are similar to the generic moral complaints leveled against Darwin and Freud in that his writings describe how he believed the world is and not what he believed the world should be. For example, Nietzsche did not believe people should adopt “master morality” as you imply, but that the revaluation of morals would correct the inconsistencies in both “master” and “slave morality.”

You also manage to make the lame complaint that Nietzsche saying “the Jews are beyond doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race now living in Europe” which could actually take over Europe if they wanted to, is itself an “anti-Semitic fantasy,” because the Jews aren’t a race (Some Jews would disagree; are they anti-Semitic?) and because the Jews couldn’t conquer Europe if they wanted to (So what? Most anti-Semites would balk at such a statement regardless).

Despite this hair-splitting regarding Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism, your defense of Jakob Fries is nowhere near as descriptive. You admit that Fries was a German nationalist who wrote an anti-Semitic tract, but are horrified that some historians call Fries a proto-Nazi, yet you somehow fail to point out that Fries’ anti-Semitic tract advocates Jews being marked with a distinct sign so that they could be identified in public! How un-Nazi of him!!

The tract itself was a reply to another tract published in 1816 by Friedrich Ruhs published which argued that Jews had “human rights” but not “citizen rights,” and that unless the Jews convert to Christianity, they should be forced to remain separate from the general population and pay protection money to the state. This was not far enough for Fries, who said Jews were unworthy even of state protection and should either abandon their religion, dismantle the legal authority of the rabbis, quit their occupations in finance and trade, or be exiled from Germany just as the Pharaoh of Egypt had done.

Though you quote Nietzsche in excess to try to make some far-reaching arguments on his anti-Semitism, your Friesian site strangely lacks many quotes from Fries himself. Here is one I think you should post on your site:

“The first concerns the prejudice that the Jews were persecuted by us with blind rage and unjust religious zeal during the Middle Ages as well as down to the present. This, Herr Ruhs has incontrovertibly disproved. To be sure, due to the more coarse manners of an earlier age, people alternated between rash, superstitious patronage and cruel excesses in their behavior toward the Jews. Princes almost always favored them too much, while cruelty originated from the common people. This cruelty, however, was not due to an inexplicable hatred for those who lived by deceit–those insidious second-hand dealers and exploiters of the common people. The ideas that the Jews were excessively oppressed in civic matters derives from this [erroneous belief that the Jews were treated with blind hatred]. If they were only to receive more civic rights, it is held, they would thus improve themselves. Ruhs has clearly shown that the opposite is true by using examples from history. Both in Germany and abroad the Jews dwelt in free states where they enjoyed every right, and even countries where they reigned–but their sordidness, their mania for deceitful, second-hand dealing always remained the same. They shy away from industrious occupations not because they are hindered from pursuing them but simply because they do not want to.

“The second prejudice is the kind that can easily deceive human understanding with regard to the most important things. An abstract, general expression is replaced with the reality of a particular one. In this case, the [terms] Jews, Jewry and Judaism are interchanged. We declare war not against the Jews, our brothers, but against Judaism. Should one we love be stricken by the plague, is it not proper that we wish him deliverance from it? Should we abuse those who, stricken by the plague, lament its horrors and conjecture how to free themselves from it? Judaism is a residue from the uncultured past, which instead of being restricted should be completely extirpated. In fact, improving the condition of the Jews in society means rooting out Judaism, destroying the whole lot of deceitful, second-hand peddlers and hawkers. Judaism is the sickness of a people who are rapidly multiplying. Jewry will acquire power through money wherever oppressive, public ransoms become necessary; wherever the well-bring of the citizen is so endangered that indebtedness on a small scale grows ever worse. Finally, the Jews also gain power where many unproductive countries are wasteful. The idle, stagnant capital of these countries is devoured by the Jews like worm gnawing on rotting matter.” -“On the Danger to the Well-Being and Character of the Germans Presented by the Jews”, 1816

Fries also claimed every farmer and city dweller hated the Jews because

“they corrupt the people through their depravity and steal their bread from them.”

Definitely not the person I would choose to name my philosophy website after.

As if it isn’t bad enough these words come from a philosopher of theology and ethics, these screeds by Ruhs and Fries were echoed throughout Germany’s taverns, helping spark the 1819 Hep-Hep Riots, which brought a great deal of death and destruction upon the Jews. Four hundred Jews had to be led out of Wurzburg by armed escort to live in tents until the carnage died down, but it did not end there, as Jewish persecution spread rapidly from that city to Frankfurt am Main, Koblenz, Darmstadt, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Heidelberg, and Berlin. Although the German authorities thankfully attempted to protect the Jews against the rioters against Fries’ better judgment, the riots themselves gave the authorities the ability to argue that if this much unrest was caused by the mere suggestion that Jews be granted equal rights, then the actual granting of rights would bring catastrophe.

You also try to claim that Fries’ anti-Semtitism was no worse than that of Marx or Voltaire in order to prove it was as much a problem on the Left as it was on the Right. This is also false.

A student of Hegel and teacher of Marx, Bruno Bauer, wrote an essay called “The Jewish Question,” arguing that Prussian Jews seeking emancipation could not achieve their desire until Germany was emancipated from all religion, both Jewish and Christian. Marx replied with his own critique called “On the Jewish Question,” arguing in favor of Jewish emancipation by using the United States as an example of a politically emancipated state that has “neither a state religion nor a religion declared to be that of the majority, nor the predominance of one cult over another.” Despite Marx’s overall objective of defending the religious tolerance Fries objected to as well as the fact that Marx himself came from a formerly Jewish family, he did argue that capitalism was the triumph of Judaism and that the Jews worshiped not God but money. It’s overall importance, however, is so minor that the Jewish Encyclopedia does not bother to mention it, although it does include a short article on the anti-Semitism of Fries (despite his obscurity, and with nothing regarding [h]is philosophy).

Voltaire likewise bitterly attacked religious bigotry in a treatise on religious tolerance following the trial of a persecuted Protestant in Catholic France, yet after being duped out of 20,000 francs by a Jewish banker, accused Jews of being greedy and selfish, saying that their only ideals are children and money. The Jewish Encyclopedia says that while the incident “hardly had the effect of filling him with anti-Jewish sentiments,” it did give him “an opportunity to display his humorous satire and give him a chance to attack the Bible,” after which he wrote an apology for the Jews explaining that he had no intention of antagonizing them.

You likewise claim that Nazi ideology is descended as much from Hegel as Fries because Hegel conceived of the totalitarian concept of the state as “Geist” where the individual should be subsumed into the state, but this contradicts Hegel’s multiple references on how the privacy of the family was sacred and that the independence of civil society from the state was one of the important features of his times, though obviously not in Nazi ideology. Hegel argued that full civil rights should be extended to the Jews so as to prevent them from remaining “in that isolation with which they have been reproached” so as to bring them to their “desired assimilation in terms of attitude and disposition.” Hegel also criticized the idea of explaining human behavior through “exterior and accidental” characteristics of the body. Hegel was even accused by German nationalists of being unpatriotic and Hitler himself rejected Hegel’s philosophy in his Table Talks of 1940.

To summarize, Nietzsche, Marx, Voltaire and Hegel believed that Jews should be allowed to practice their religion freely despite the anti-Semitism of the their times, while Fries chose to spur it on even more by arguing that human rights were too good for them. One can draw a straight line from Fries’ vile rhetoric to the oppression and death of innocent Jews killed in the Hep-Hep riots, and his ideas on nationalism and on marking and expelling the Jews from Germany are in perfect adherence to Nazi ideology. The most you can place at the door of Nietzsche, Marx, Voltaire and Hegel are some hurt feelings. You ask, “So if Fries was simply anti-Semitic, this means all his thought is just discredited?” Fries is not “simply anti-Semitic,” but the answer to your question is no: just his thoughts on politics, theology, and ethics.

Jefferey Querner