Conservative Communism

[heavenlyboy34]

Dr North has some good points here, IMHO.


Communism for Conservatives (http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north882.html)

Three of the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto (1848) are still universally accepted.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

The ten planks were supposed to be the means of ushering in the classless society of Communism. The next sentence after plank #10 revealed the utopianism of Marxism.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.
Classes did not go away in the Communist paradises. There were the haves and the have-nots. The basis of access into the minority class of the haves was through membership in the Communist Party.

The state never went away. It got stronger and more demanding. It became more pervasive.

Today, the Communist paradises are gone, except for Cuba and North Korea. They have all officially abandoned Communism as an ideology. Yet they all maintain their commitment to the three planks. Why? Because these three planks constitute the Promised Land of the entire world. There is no nation in which these three planks are not operative, at least on paper.

There is no nation that funds itself exclusively by some version of a flat tax: the same tax rate for all taxpayers. Every nation has a graduated income tax. Some are more graduated ("progressive") than others. The Scandinavian nations are at the high end. The United States is at the low end. But the top rates are all at least 40%. This, by the way, is twice the rate of the 20% flat tax that the Pharaoh imposed on Egypt (Genesis 47:24). Egypt, let us not forget, was the archetype of tyranny for the Israelites. God told them that 10% is tyrannical (I Sam. 8:14, 17). To get back to Israel's tyranny, tax rates would have to be cut by at least 75%. But Americans think of themselves as living in the land of the free.

Central banks are all officially state banks. There may be some degree of private ownership, but officially the final jurisdiction is in the hands of the national governments. This may be a contrived illusion for the sake of the voters, but these institutions do derive their power from special legislation from the national governments, or, in the case of the European Central Bank, the European Union. No central bank can survive apart from a grant of monopoly privilege by the supreme civil government.

Tax-funded educational systems are universal. The vast majority of all students are taught in these schools. In most European nations, attendance is compulsory. Only in the last 25 years have home schooling families in the United States gained a semblance of liberty from the local school boards. Some states remain tyrannical. The Home School Legal Defense Association still has lots of families to defend.

So, in these three areas of life, the vast majority of those voters who think of themselves as conservatives still cling to the tenets of Communism. They think nothing of this. They are 30% down the path to Communism, and they don't know it, or just don't care.

The ex-Communist paradises are 30% Communist and have no intention of becoming less Communist.

So, Marx and Engels got 30% of their program accepted by the bourgeoisie world.

Then there was this plank:

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Because of a peculiarity of the tax code, the inheritance tax has been suspended in the United States for 2010. But next year, the old system returns: up to 55%. So, to impose taxes on the rich, the voters have adopted another of the planks, at least in principle.

So, where are we today? Maybe at 32% of the Communist program. Let's round it up to one-third. That's close enough for government work.

ONE-THIRD COMMUNIST

How is it that virtually the whole world has adopted one-third of a program that was so revolutionary in early 1848 that Marx and Engels did not put their names on the original German edition of their famous manifesto? One word: power.

People want to get other people to think the way they do. They want them to do what they instruct them to do. The love of power is universal.

The voters think they can control what is taught in the public schools. Voters think that the textbooks will reflect their values. They think that the teachers will be recruited from their group. They will hold the hammer.

They also think, "Those lower sorts will not pay for their children's educations. Their children have a right to become more like us. This means that they should stop being like their parents. The schools will force those parents to comply."

It's all about "those sorts of people." It's also about "our sort of people." C. S. Lewis put these words into the mouth of a ruthless character in his 1945 novel, That Hideous Strength.

"Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of all the rest – which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones taken charge of. Quite."
A decade before Marx and Engels penned their anonymous little book, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had begun its experiment in tax-funded compulsory education. It abolished tax funding of Congregational churches in 1832. Before the decade was over, it had begun financing a new priesthood. No one saw the irony of this at the time. Few have seen it since then.

Opposition to this or that aspect of the public schools is a waste of time. The reforms come and go, but the system remains intact.

By 1900, the system was universal in the United States. It had spread to much of the West. After World War I, it was universal in the West.

The same was true of the graduated income tax. It was passed in England in 1911. It was said to have passed – technically, it didn't – in the United States in 1913. In that year, the Federal Reserve Act was signed into law in late December. The Federal Reserve System went into operation in 1914.

The ruling class saw that Marx was correct on these three points. The very rich used tax-exempt foundations to escape the inheritance tax. They did this in advance of the inheritance tax. Rockefeller and Carnegie set up foundations before 1913. They set aside their fortunes to achieve goals they chose. Anyway, they thought they did.

THE BUREAUCRATS INHERIT

A strange thing happened on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The bureaucrats began to take over the pools of wealth and power. In the United States, beginning in the 1880s, Civil Service reform began being extended. The Republicans feared the threat of a clean sweep politically, now that the Democrats were beginning to have a shot at local political offices. So, they pushed for the creation of tenured jobs that would be available only to people who passed exams. This immunized them from changes in politics.

In every Western nation, this system spread. Bureaucrats thwarted democracy. That was why the systems were set up: to guarantee that "our sort of people" maintained control over the implementation of rules. They write the rules. In the United States, "The Federal Register" publishes 77,000 pages of fine print rules every year. It adds up!

This has led to a new system of law: administrative law. Civil servants in the executive decide what rulers will implement which laws. They decide the rules of the game. They write the rules to serve the desires of the bureaucrats.

So, Marx turned out to be closer to the truth than his critics. Politics has faded in influence. Politics is like the surface of an ocean. From time to time, there are great storms and great waves. Ships go down. But beneath the waves are growing numbers of sharks, gliding silently far below the turmoil on the surface. They consume anything they can. Marx thought the proletariat would win. Instead, the bourgeoisie did – on a scale that seems irreversible.

Men of similar outlook run the large foundations, the universities, the K–12 schools, thousands of Federal agencies, and the fading mainstream media. Only one thing can remove them from power: budget cuts. This is the lesson of the past century. No reform sticks that is not in the interest of senior bureaucrats. No funds are cut, so no reform changes anything significant.

When a bureaucracy fails spectacularly and in full public view, the political appointee who officially runs it is replaced. Then the agency asks Congress for more money, so that a similar mistake does not take place. Congress forks over the money.

FEMA is still operating. Brownie is long gone. Such is the iron law of bureaucracy.

The bureaucrats need only two things to persevere: (1) guaranteed income; (2) a stream of replacements educated by bureaucrats. In short, they need only planks 5 and 10 of the Communist Manifesto.

RUML'S 1945 SPEECH

Beardsley Ruml in 1945 was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He was also the head of Macy's Department store. In 1942, he had pushed the creation of the Federal withholding tax. That quadrupled tax revenues in one year.

He had gotten his start at the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund.

He had a Ph.D. in psychology.

In 1945, he gave a speech to the American Bar Association. It was on taxation. It remains the most important speech on the nature of modern taxation ever delivered in the United States. Here are excerpts. I strongly recommend that you read them. They will clear up a lot of loose ends.

A government which depends on loans and on the refunding of its loans to get the money it requires for its operations is necessarily dependent on the sources from which the money can be obtained. In the past, if a government persisted in borrowing heavily to cover its expenditures, interest rates would get higher and higher, and greater and greater inducements would have to be offered by the government to the lenders. These governments finally found that the only way they could maintain both their sovereign independence and their solvency was to tax heavily enough to meet a substantial part of their financial needs, and to be prepared – if placed under undue pressure – to tax to meet them all.
The necessity for a government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments, but it is not true for a national government. Two changes of the greatest consequence have occurred in the last twenty-five years which have substantially altered the position of the national state with respect to the financing of its current requirements.

The first of these changes is the gaining of vast new experience in the management of central banks.

The second change is the elimination, for domestic purposes, of the convertibility of the currency into gold.

He laid it out as well as anyone ever has. The function of the central bank is to make sure that the government is not dependent on buyers of its debt. This has been the rationale of central banking ever since the Bank of England was created in 1694.

Of course, its real purpose is to keep the largest banks solvent. But he was talking about the official explanation.

Roosevelt's abolition of the gold standard in 1933 was the key. Had Ruml looked forward to August 15, 1971, when Nixon ended the last trace of the international gold exchange standard by closing our gold window, he would have understood its implications: eliminating the final restraint on the independence of the Federal government from outside control.

He went on.

Federal taxes can be made to serve four principal purposes of a social and economic character. These purposes are:
1. As an instrument of fiscal policy to help stabilize the purchasing power of the dollar;

2. To express public policy in the distribution of wealth and of income, as in the case of the progressive income and estate taxes;

3. To express public policy in subsidizing or in penalizing various industries and economic groups;

4. To isolate and assess directly the costs of certain national benefits, such as highways and social security.

This is a good summary of politics and taxes today, just as it was in 1945.

Taxes are about funding the debt, distributing wealth, subsidizing and penalizing groups or industries, and funding popular programs.

This Rockefeller agent, capitalist, and supreme central banker told the lawyers how the modern welfare-warfare state had implemented one-third of the Communist Manifesto.

The system runs on central banking, progressive taxation, control over education, and the abolition of the gold coin standard. Ruml covered three of the four. But he was speaking to lawyers. They are part of the education hierarchy.

CONCLUSION

When the Tea Party breaks publicly with points 2, 5, and 10 of the Communist Manifesto, I will be impressed. Until then, I remain an amused bystander.

I have seen conservative political movements come and go: the Goldwater movement, the Reagan revolution, the Contract With America. None of them has publicly repudiated planks 2, 5, and 10.

The Tea Party seems ready to repudiate #5. That's a move in the right direction. It has caught my attention.

When a conservative movement is 20% Communist, it has a way to go.

[Natalie]

A guy at my school wrote a good article for YAL about how we go by 8 or 9 of the points of the Communist Manifesto.

http://www.yaliberty.org/yar/marxist-america


Has The Communist Manifesto replaced the Constitution?

By: George Hawley

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded two years later, Americans sighed a breath of relief. Seemingly overnight, our debilitating fear that a horde of T-72’s would blitz through the Fulda Gap evaporated; the world realized a nuclear holocaust would not be the Cold War’s coup de grace. What’s more, the Cold War’s conclusion freed millions of souls from Soviet oppression. We were right to be relieved. American conservatives, who were eager to take credit for USSR’s demise, were feeling particularly triumphant at that time. We had finally reached the “end of history,” and “democratic capitalism” reigned supreme. It remains to be seen, however, whether post-Cold War conservative chest thumping was truly justified.

Although all freedom lovers should celebrate the downfall of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the peaceful death of the Soviet Empire did not necessarily indicate the demise of Marxism as a force in the world. In fact, a strong case can be made that the United States is more Marxist now than ever before. It is true that a socialist revolution did not occur, as Marx predicted, via an apocalyptic struggle between workers and the bourgeoisie, but a socialist revolution of sorts nonetheless occurred. To those who believe Marxism has been relegated to “the dustbin of history,” I can only point to the words of Marx himself. The world we inhabit is not so different from the one Marx envisioned.

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, which provided an introduction to the Marxist theory of “historical materialism” and famously provided the clarion call, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world unite!” The world remembers Marx’s sharpest phrases, as well as the mountain of corpses his disciples constructed in the subsequent 140 years. More frequently forgotten, however, are the specific policies Marx promoted in his seminal work. Section II of the Manifesto explicitly declared what the Communists sought to achieve. Even a cursory examination of the United States today refutes the notion that Marxism is an exhausted intellectual force.

The ten program points from The Communist Manifesto:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

Although Americans still enjoy basic property rights, the state’s power of eminent domain (reinforced in 2005 by the Supreme Court case Kelo v. City of New London) ensures that our right to our own property is subject to the state’s whims. Zoning laws determine how property may be used. Heavy property taxes require you to pay what amounts to an annual rent on land you ostensibly own. Yes, you may own property, but only if the state does not think that property can put it to better use and only if you can afford to keep paying the state for the privilege.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

The Constitution’s 16th Amendment, ratified in 1913, provides the federal government the power to levy an individual income tax. As Marx wanted, that income tax is highly progressive and redistributive. The top earners in the United States pay a far higher tax rate—up to 35 percent of their income—than the rest of the population.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

Although all rights of inheritance have not been abolished, the federal government and several of the states impose large estate taxes – called “death taxes” by opponents. When Americans die, much of their accumulated wealth is simply confiscated by government rather than being inherited by their descendants. The federal estate tax goes as high as 45 percent—and of course, if the estate is not liquid, the inability of heirs to pay the tax in cash can result in the loss of property. This is another way family businesses and childhood homes get taken away.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

As the United States has not experienced a massive exodus of wealth, this is not presently a major issue. But if America’s economic decline continues, and people with means rationally decide to leave the country, do not be surprised if this Marxist notion finds a new multitude of proponents. Already the United States employs the highly unusual practice of taxing its citizens who live abroad.

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

The Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913. The Federal Reserve is America’s central bank. Although privately owned banks still exist, the Fed sets interest rates, regulates private banks, provides financial services for the U.S. government, and controls the money supply. Although our system of public and private cooperation is more convoluted than Marx might have imagined, the Federal Reserve has much more in common with Marx’s vision than with a truly free banking system.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

The Federal Communications Commission, established in 1934, grants television and radio licenses and has broad regulatory powers. Thanks to new technologies, the government’s ability to influence our communications and media consumption has taken a blow in recent years. Nonetheless, the expansion of NSA wiretapping powers, efforts to reinstate the “Fairness Doctrine,” and FCC demands that the media take steps to “promote diversity” make it clear that the state is not about to abide truly free communication. What’s more, if passed, the recently introduced “Cybersecurity Act of 2009” will grant the federal government broad powers to censor free speech on the internet and violate internet-users’ privacy rights if the president declares, for whatever reason, a “cybersecurity emergency.” The FCC also seems to be moving closer to regulating the Internet under the guise of “net neutrality.”

Meanwhile, the United States Department of Transportation, created by Congress in 1966, has broad powers to regulate transportation and create highways. Offices within the Department of Transportation include the Federal Aviation Administration (thank the FAA the next time you experience arbitrary hassles at the airport), the Federal Highway Administration, and the Federal Railroad Administration. Most means of transportation not controlled and maintained by the federal government are controlled and regulated by the states. Marx would be pleased.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

One of the less publicized consequences of the recent auto industry “bailouts” is the degree to which the government now has much broader powers to influence decisions made by American car manufacturers. The federal government owns majority shares in General Motors. The distinction between public and private is being slowly eroded thanks to our current economic crisis.

Although most major American industries are still under private ownership, it cannot be understated the degree to which Big Business and Big Government are in bed with each other. Rent-seeking runs rampant and appears to be getting worse over time, regardless of which party controls Congress or the White House. Furthermore, President Eisenhower’s warning about the “military-industrial complex” is more relevant today than ever—defense contractors are dependent upon, in some ways as good as owned by, the federal government, while they in turn as good as own many congressmen. It is true that our current corporatist arrangements are not Marxist per se, but it would be equally erroneous to say the United States enjoys a truly free market.

8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

Mercifully, our nation’s leaders have (so far) ignored this particular suggestion.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

Again, we have not witnessed such a development, and it is unlikely that we ever will. If anything, our population is more crowded into major urban centers than ever before.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

Both demands have been met. Education is not only “free” (that is, paid for with other people’s tax dollars) but compulsory. For most of America’s history, public education was generally decentralized, with the most important decisions regarding policy and curriculum made at the local and state level. This is increasingly less the case. Although conservatives once promised to abolish the Department of Education, President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act pushed us perilously close toward complete nationalization of K-12 education.

The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union was a great strike against tyranny, but it did not signal the end of Marxism. Although totalitarian communism is not the threat to human freedom it once was, we continue to move unabatedly toward greater collectivism and centralization. The United States bears a closer resemblance to Marx’s “utopian” vision than most Americans care to acknowledge. Marx was mistaken about the means required to meet his ends; we now know that socialism can be realized without a bloody revolution. As the great economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, socialism is also perfectly compatible with democracy—an insight further reinforced by the American public’s apparent acceptance of many Marxist policies.

One thing remains unchanged: Marxism is incompatible with liberty. This is true even if Marxist goals are achieved incrementally and democratically rather than through blood-soaked insurgencies. The increasing centralization of power in Washington, D.C. is a threat to our prosperity and all of our fundamental freedoms. Although Marxism remains a relevant intellectual force, anti-Marxist scholarship remains equally relevant. Socialism unfortunately survived the Cold War, but the anti-socialist critiques of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard are no less valid than they were at the time they were written. Centralized government control of our nation’s economy and basic infrastructure is no less problematic than it was a century ago—a fact reinforced every time the state’s “solutions” to our economic troubles only makes things worse.

Most conservatives and many libertarians were content to rest on their laurels when the Soviet Union fell; they assumed America’s triumph signaled the victory of freedom over Marxism. They were wrong. Marxism is very much alive. Many Marxist policies are now so thoroughly institutionalized that few American politicians and pundits dare challenge them. In 2008, the American electorate was given the choice between two socialist visions that differed only at the margins. Despite a few hopeful signs, such as the recent “Tea Party” demonstrations, it is clear that freedom advocates still have a long road ahead of them.

[Jace]

Dr North has some good points here, IMHO.


Communism for Conservatives (http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north882.html)

Three of the ten planks of the Communist Manifesto (1848) are still universally accepted.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

The ten planks were supposed to be the means of ushering in the classless society of Communism. The next sentence after plank #10 revealed the utopianism of Marxism.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.
Classes did not go away in the Communist paradises. There were the haves and the have-nots. The basis of access into the minority class of the haves was through membership in the Communist Party.

The state never went away. It got stronger and more demanding. It became more pervasive.

Today, the Communist paradises are gone, except for Cuba and North Korea. They have all officially abandoned Communism as an ideology. Yet they all maintain their commitment to the three planks. Why? Because these three planks constitute the Promised Land of the entire world. There is no nation in which these three planks are not operative, at least on paper.

There is no nation that funds itself exclusively by some version of a flat tax: the same tax rate for all taxpayers. Every nation has a graduated income tax. Some are more graduated ("progressive") than others. The Scandinavian nations are at the high end. The United States is at the low end. But the top rates are all at least 40%. This, by the way, is twice the rate of the 20% flat tax that the Pharaoh imposed on Egypt (Genesis 47:24). Egypt, let us not forget, was the archetype of tyranny for the Israelites. God told them that 10% is tyrannical (I Sam. 8:14, 17). To get back to Israel's tyranny, tax rates would have to be cut by at least 75%. But Americans think of themselves as living in the land of the free.

Central banks are all officially state banks. There may be some degree of private ownership, but officially the final jurisdiction is in the hands of the national governments. This may be a contrived illusion for the sake of the voters, but these institutions do derive their power from special legislation from the national governments, or, in the case of the European Central Bank, the European Union. No central bank can survive apart from a grant of monopoly privilege by the supreme civil government.

Tax-funded educational systems are universal. The vast majority of all students are taught in these schools. In most European nations, attendance is compulsory. Only in the last 25 years have home schooling families in the United States gained a semblance of liberty from the local school boards. Some states remain tyrannical. The Home School Legal Defense Association still has lots of families to defend.

So, in these three areas of life, the vast majority of those voters who think of themselves as conservatives still cling to the tenets of Communism. They think nothing of this. They are 30% down the path to Communism, and they don't know it, or just don't care.

The ex-Communist paradises are 30% Communist and have no intention of becoming less Communist.

So, Marx and Engels got 30% of their program accepted by the bourgeoisie world.

Then there was this plank:

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Because of a peculiarity of the tax code, the inheritance tax has been suspended in the United States for 2010. But next year, the old system returns: up to 55%. So, to impose taxes on the rich, the voters have adopted another of the planks, at least in principle.

So, where are we today? Maybe at 32% of the Communist program. Let's round it up to one-third. That's close enough for government work.

ONE-THIRD COMMUNIST

How is it that virtually the whole world has adopted one-third of a program that was so revolutionary in early 1848 that Marx and Engels did not put their names on the original German edition of their famous manifesto? One word: power.

People want to get other people to think the way they do. They want them to do what they instruct them to do. The love of power is universal.

The voters think they can control what is taught in the public schools. Voters think that the textbooks will reflect their values. They think that the teachers will be recruited from their group. They will hold the hammer.

They also think, "Those lower sorts will not pay for their children's educations. Their children have a right to become more like us. This means that they should stop being like their parents. The schools will force those parents to comply."

It's all about "those sorts of people." It's also about "our sort of people." C. S. Lewis put these words into the mouth of a ruthless character in his 1945 novel, That Hideous Strength.

"Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of all the rest – which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones taken charge of. Quite."
A decade before Marx and Engels penned their anonymous little book, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had begun its experiment in tax-funded compulsory education. It abolished tax funding of Congregational churches in 1832. Before the decade was over, it had begun financing a new priesthood. No one saw the irony of this at the time. Few have seen it since then.

Opposition to this or that aspect of the public schools is a waste of time. The reforms come and go, but the system remains intact.

By 1900, the system was universal in the United States. It had spread to much of the West. After World War I, it was universal in the West.

The same was true of the graduated income tax. It was passed in England in 1911. It was said to have passed – technically, it didn't – in the United States in 1913. In that year, the Federal Reserve Act was signed into law in late December. The Federal Reserve System went into operation in 1914.

The ruling class saw that Marx was correct on these three points. The very rich used tax-exempt foundations to escape the inheritance tax. They did this in advance of the inheritance tax. Rockefeller and Carnegie set up foundations before 1913. They set aside their fortunes to achieve goals they chose. Anyway, they thought they did.

THE BUREAUCRATS INHERIT

A strange thing happened on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The bureaucrats began to take over the pools of wealth and power. In the United States, beginning in the 1880s, Civil Service reform began being extended. The Republicans feared the threat of a clean sweep politically, now that the Democrats were beginning to have a shot at local political offices. So, they pushed for the creation of tenured jobs that would be available only to people who passed exams. This immunized them from changes in politics.

In every Western nation, this system spread. Bureaucrats thwarted democracy. That was why the systems were set up: to guarantee that "our sort of people" maintained control over the implementation of rules. They write the rules. In the United States, "The Federal Register" publishes 77,000 pages of fine print rules every year. It adds up!

This has led to a new system of law: administrative law. Civil servants in the executive decide what rulers will implement which laws. They decide the rules of the game. They write the rules to serve the desires of the bureaucrats.

So, Marx turned out to be closer to the truth than his critics. Politics has faded in influence. Politics is like the surface of an ocean. From time to time, there are great storms and great waves. Ships go down. But beneath the waves are growing numbers of sharks, gliding silently far below the turmoil on the surface. They consume anything they can. Marx thought the proletariat would win. Instead, the bourgeoisie did – on a scale that seems irreversible.

Men of similar outlook run the large foundations, the universities, the K–12 schools, thousands of Federal agencies, and the fading mainstream media. Only one thing can remove them from power: budget cuts. This is the lesson of the past century. No reform sticks that is not in the interest of senior bureaucrats. No funds are cut, so no reform changes anything significant.

When a bureaucracy fails spectacularly and in full public view, the political appointee who officially runs it is replaced. Then the agency asks Congress for more money, so that a similar mistake does not take place. Congress forks over the money.

FEMA is still operating. Brownie is long gone. Such is the iron law of bureaucracy.

The bureaucrats need only two things to persevere: (1) guaranteed income; (2) a stream of replacements educated by bureaucrats. In short, they need only planks 5 and 10 of the Communist Manifesto.

RUML'S 1945 SPEECH

Beardsley Ruml in 1945 was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He was also the head of Macy's Department store. In 1942, he had pushed the creation of the Federal withholding tax. That quadrupled tax revenues in one year.

He had gotten his start at the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund.

He had a Ph.D. in psychology.

In 1945, he gave a speech to the American Bar Association. It was on taxation. It remains the most important speech on the nature of modern taxation ever delivered in the United States. Here are excerpts. I strongly recommend that you read them. They will clear up a lot of loose ends.

A government which depends on loans and on the refunding of its loans to get the money it requires for its operations is necessarily dependent on the sources from which the money can be obtained. In the past, if a government persisted in borrowing heavily to cover its expenditures, interest rates would get higher and higher, and greater and greater inducements would have to be offered by the government to the lenders. These governments finally found that the only way they could maintain both their sovereign independence and their solvency was to tax heavily enough to meet a substantial part of their financial needs, and to be prepared – if placed under undue pressure – to tax to meet them all.
The necessity for a government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments, but it is not true for a national government. Two changes of the greatest consequence have occurred in the last twenty-five years which have substantially altered the position of the national state with respect to the financing of its current requirements.

The first of these changes is the gaining of vast new experience in the management of central banks.

The second change is the elimination, for domestic purposes, of the convertibility of the currency into gold.

He laid it out as well as anyone ever has. The function of the central bank is to make sure that the government is not dependent on buyers of its debt. This has been the rationale of central banking ever since the Bank of England was created in 1694.

Of course, its real purpose is to keep the largest banks solvent. But he was talking about the official explanation.

Roosevelt's abolition of the gold standard in 1933 was the key. Had Ruml looked forward to August 15, 1971, when Nixon ended the last trace of the international gold exchange standard by closing our gold window, he would have understood its implications: eliminating the final restraint on the independence of the Federal government from outside control.

He went on.

Federal taxes can be made to serve four principal purposes of a social and economic character. These purposes are:
1. As an instrument of fiscal policy to help stabilize the purchasing power of the dollar;

2. To express public policy in the distribution of wealth and of income, as in the case of the progressive income and estate taxes;

3. To express public policy in subsidizing or in penalizing various industries and economic groups;

4. To isolate and assess directly the costs of certain national benefits, such as highways and social security.

This is a good summary of politics and taxes today, just as it was in 1945.

Taxes are about funding the debt, distributing wealth, subsidizing and penalizing groups or industries, and funding popular programs.

This Rockefeller agent, capitalist, and supreme central banker told the lawyers how the modern welfare-warfare state had implemented one-third of the Communist Manifesto.

The system runs on central banking, progressive taxation, control over education, and the abolition of the gold coin standard. Ruml covered three of the four. But he was speaking to lawyers. They are part of the education hierarchy.

CONCLUSION

When the Tea Party breaks publicly with points 2, 5, and 10 of the Communist Manifesto, I will be impressed. Until then, I remain an amused bystander.

I have seen conservative political movements come and go: the Goldwater movement, the Reagan revolution, the Contract With America. None of them has publicly repudiated planks 2, 5, and 10.

The Tea Party seems ready to repudiate #5. That's a move in the right direction. It has caught my attention.

When a conservative movement is 20% Communist, it has a way to go.

Hmm. Maybe I have been wrong about you.

Thank you for posting this. It should be required reading. The Communist Manifesto is somewhat of a Rosetta Stone to the goals of the globalist central bankers. I have met many conservatives who hate communists, but don't even realize they agree with most of that book.