Liberal Moon Jae-in Has Won the South Korean Election. Here’s What It Means for US, North Korea.

As with most presidential elections, South Korean voters predominantly voted their pocketbooks in Tuesday’s national election.

While the election featured the usual struggle between a conservative market-based growth strategy and liberal redistributionism, voters this time were driven in large part by a desire to end their nation’s endemic political corruption.

After 10 years of conservative presidency—South Korean presidents serve a single five-year term—it seemed a foregone conclusion this year that the pendulum would swing to a liberal candidate.

This natural trend was reinforced by the impeachment of conservative President Park Geun-hye, who abused her power by colluding with a friend to fleece the country’s large conglomerates.

Moon Jae-in, a left-of-center candidate, handily won the election. He previously served as chief of staff to President Roh Moo-hyun, whose term was marked by tense relations with Washington over policy differences on North Korea, as well as Roh’s demand for more autonomy in the alliance.

During the campaign, Moon tacked to the center on national security issues to gain conservative votes, but it remains uncertain how he will actually implement his foreign and security policies.

He has described himself as “America’s friend” and said that the U.S. alliance is the “most important foundation for our diplomacy and national security.”

Yet Moon also advocates being able to “say no to the Americans,” strengthening South Korea’s independent defense capabilities, and regaining wartime operational control of South Korean military forces from the United States. Currently, control of South Korean military forces will be turned over to the U.N. commander (always a U.S. general) when the two presidents decide a state of war exists.

He called for South Korea to “take the lead” on Korean matters rather than taking a back seat as the U.S. and China discuss North Korean policy.

Moon is no doubt looking to resurrect many of Roh’s liberal policies, yet North Korea’s increased belligerence since Roh’s presidency may constrain how vigorously he pursues unconditional engagement with Pyongyang.

Some South Korean experts believe North Korea’s hostile actions in recent years—its development and testing of nuclear weapons, its attacks on South Korea in 2010, and its recent assassination of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un’s half brother—have erected a “wall” that will prevent Moon from moving too far left.

Other pundits reject that out of hand, saying that “if a wall exists, Moon will jump over it or dig under it so he can be as far left as Roh.”

While Moon originally opposed the U.S. deployment of the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missile defense system in South Korea, he shifted during the campaign to sitting on the fence, saying he was “open to both possibilities” (of deploying or withdrawing THAAD) and would “pass the issue to the next government.”

He favors maintaining South Korea’s own missile defense system independently from the broader allied network.

Moon sees economic engagement with North Korea as a means of bringing the north back to the negotiating table and eventually achieving “economic unification” of the two Koreas. Rather than making North Korea make the first concession to resume denuclearization negotiations, he said he would “try to make both North Korea and the U.S. act simultaneously.”

Moon also advocates reopening the Kaesong joint economic venture with North Korea as part of broader economic largesse to Pyongyang. Kaesong was a South Korean attempt to provide massive economic benefits in order to induce North Korea to implement economic and political reform and moderate its foreign policy. The economic experiment failed.

Doing so, however, would likely be a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions.

U.N. Resolution 2094 (paragraphs 11-15) requires U.N. member states to prevent financial services that could contribute to North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

U.N. Resolution 2321 (paragraph 32) goes even further in restricting economic ventures with North Korea, prohibiting any financial support to Pyongyang unless it is specifically approved in advance by the U.N. 1718 Committee.

Moon will more eagerly engage with and offer economic inducements to North Korea at a time when the United States and international community are more rigorously implementing U.N. sanctions and enforcing U.S. law.

If the U.S. and South Korea end up pursuing divergent policies, it may undermine efforts to pressure Pyongyang and will increase the potential for friction within the U.S.-South Korea alliance.

In addition, Moon has also promised to renegotiate South Korea’s 2015 agreement with Japan on “comfort women” (referring to women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese in World War II). Doing so will only increase strains in that relationship.

Keeping Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo all pulling in the same direction to address common threats will require deft diplomacy as the new South Korean president and President Donald Trump fill their administrations and formulate policies.

The path ahead could be rough, but North Korea and China will undoubtedly act in their typical confrontational way, which will remind South Korea of who its true friend and protector is.

Commentary by Bruce Klingner. Originally published at The Daily Signal. The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

Veteran Justice Department Officials Weigh Need for Special Prosecutor in Russia Probe

President Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey gave more fodder to Democrats, many of whom were already calling for a special prosecutor to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Matthew Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, is unsure this case measures up to past cases involving special prosecutors.

“Usually, there is some intractable conflict where the Justice Department is unable to do its job,” Whitaker, now the executive director for the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a watchdog group, told The Daily Signal.

“It’s not so much about the level of evidence or the sensibilities of the case,” he continued. “It’s about the confidence in the system.”

In the past, administrations have named special prosecutors that could conduct an investigation independent of the Justice Department, which is part of the executive branch. This is usually the case when there is consensus that the Justice Department cannot objectively investigate a matter, or can’t assure public trust that the probe was done without bias.

Under President Bill Clinton, an independent counsel was named to investigate the Whitewater matter, which eventually led to the investigation of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. After President George W. Bush took office, and the independent counsel statute had expired, the administration named a special prosecutor to investigate the alleged leak of a CIA operative’s name.

Whitaker said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is highly respected. Rosenstein, who recommended to Trump that Comey be fired, will ultimately oversee any Justice Department probe into the Trump campaign and Russia because Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from any investigation that could relate to the 2016 election.

However, Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor who worked for special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski, believes this case is ripe for an independent view.

“This is a classic example for the need of a special prosecutor,” Akerman, who later became the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, told The Daily Signal. “It’s extremely serious when there is Russian interference in an election and the possibility that one of the candidates was in cahoots with the Russians.”

Democrats and critics of the Trump administration allege that the firing came as a result of Comey stating the FBI is investigating potential Russian ties to the Trump campaign.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Wednesday that every investigation that was going on Monday is going on today.

“There is no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia,” Sanders told reporters.

While Sanders said the administration welcomes the investigation, she said a special prosecutor isn’t necessary because the House, the Senate, and the Justice Department are all separately investigating the matter.

When Trump met with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the White House, a reporter asked, “Why did you fire Director Comey?”

Trump responded: “He wasn’t doing a good job. Very simply. He was not doing a good job.”

He was also asked if this affected his meeting Wednesday at the White House with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He answered, “Not at all.”

During the press briefing, a reporter asked a question about Trump meeting with Kissinger and a Russian official at a time when Democrats are talking about Russian ties and making President Richard Nixon comparisons. Sanders said the two meetings were planned well in advance.

Previous administrations, including independent counsel Ken Starr during the Clinton administration and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald during the George W. Bush administration, expanded their investigations beyond the original topic of inquiry.

Both former federal prosecutors say that doesn’t have to be the case.

“The more narrow, the better,” Akerman said. “The scope of this shouldn’t expand beyond possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.”

Whitaker said past precedents demonstrate why an administration would be concerned about naming a special prosecutor to any case.

“The investigations can go far afield if the prosecutor is outside the regular chain of command, so, that’s viewed as a risky proposition,” Whitaker said. “But the investigation can be narrowly focused.”

This isn’t a matter that needs an independent investigation if the FBI has the proper resources to look into the matter, said Ron Hosko, a former FBI assistant director.

“What would make me feel better is knowing that the FBI will get every tool they need to explore the scope of Russian interference,” Hosko, now the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, told The Daily Signal. “I think Congress is a pile of politics and hypocrisy and is incapable of investigating this."

Report by The Daily Signal's Fred Lucas. Originally published by The Daily Signal. The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

Trump’s Ego Is Actually Too Small

Long before Donald Trump became a controversial political figure, he was a household name famous for his phenomenal ego.

He first rose to fame as a larger-than-life real estate tycoon. By cultivating the media, Trump became the poster boy for the gilded, go-go 80s: a brash, ostentatious capitalist antihero who plastered his name on skyscrapers, plazas, hotels, casinos, and resorts. At one point he even sought to rename the Empire State Building after himself, calling it the Trump Empire State Building Tower Apartments.

And in the 2000s, with his hit reality show The Apprentice, he became the godfather of the “famous for being famous” celebrity culture of that period.

Even now that he is President of the United States, his public persona is characterized, not only by his filter-free utterances and his divisive policy positions, but by his egomania: his braggadocio and his “I-alone-can-fix-it” self-importance.

His fans would disagree, but for the sake of argument, let’s grant that his ego is indeed a character flaw. Is the problem really that his ego is too big? Or is it actually too small?

The Fragile Self

As Nathaniel Branden, the late psychotherapist who pioneered the psychology of self-esteem, once wrote on his blog:

“…sometimes when people lack adequate self-esteem they fall into arrogance, boasting, and grandiosity as a defense mechanism—a compensatory strategy. Their problem is not that they have too big an ego but that they have too small a one.”

And in his book Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Branden wrote:

“Sometimes self-esteem is confused with boasting or bragging or arrogance; but such traits reflect not too much self-esteem, but too little; they reflect a lack of self-esteem. Persons of high self-esteem are not driven to make themselves superior to others; they do not seek to prove their value by measuring themselves against a comparative standard. Their joy is in being who they are, not in being better than someone else.”

If anything, Trump is not self-oriented enough, but rather far too other-oriented. He is unhealthily preoccupied with receiving from others favorable comparisons to others. This is exhibited in his tendency toward vanity: his fixation on receiving due credit from the media and the public for the relative size of his hands, of his crowds, and of his “ratings” (as if his presidency was just an extension of his career as a reality TV star).

It is a fragile ego, and not a strong one, that so urgently needs external props.

Such weakness of ego is especially dangerous in a commander-in-chief of a superpower’s armed forces. The media exacerbates that danger by only giving Trump the adulation he craves whenever he threatens or attacks “rogue nations.” As Gene Healy wrote after Trump authorized a missile strike against the Syrian regime:

“His drive-by bombing has already earned him strange new respect from neoconservative #NeverTrump-ers, who appear to believe that the mercurial celebreality billionaire is at his least frightening when he’s literally blowing things up. Centrist pundit Fareed Zakaria echoed that grotesque logic on CNN: “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States [that] night.”

As much as he disdains the media establishment, Trump revels in this sort of praise. It may not be long before he free-associates about it in interviews: “my airstrikes – which got terrific ratings, by the way….” And when the glow fades, he may be tempted to light it up again.”

Collectivist Crutches

Some of Trump’s biggest fans also evince fragile egos, especially the growing fringe of white nationalists.

As Branden wrote:

“It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior.”

And as Ayn Rand wrote in The Virtue of Selfishness:

"The overwhelming majority of racists are men who have earned no sense of personal identity, who can claim no individual achievement or distinction, and who seek the illusion of a “tribal self-esteem” by alleging the inferiority of some other tribe."

Of course, it is not only the political right that suffers from ego-deficiency. The identity-politics left, like the “identitarian” right, is also preoccupied with collectivist comparisons. The left dwells on an inverted sort of superiority based on group victimhood. Social justice warriors participate in the “Oppression Olympics” as a way to win what Rand called “tribal self-esteem” to make up for their lack of individual self-esteem: to shore up their small, weak egos.

But since the individual self is the only true self, “tribal self-esteem” is a poor substitute for the real thing. A spiritual diet that relies on such ersatz fare results in malnourished egos, as expressed in the pained, frantic screeching of many campus protestors.

These millennial “snowflakes” are condemned as narcissists. But if anything, they too are excessively other-oriented: obsessed with their group identity (defined by their similarities with others), with the inferior societal position of their group compared to other groups, and with receiving due recognition from others about the social injustice of that state of affairs.

The Strong Self

Branden characterized self-esteem as “the immune system of consciousness, providing resistance, strength, and a capacity for regeneration.” He wrote:

“The question is sometimes asked, 'Is it possible to have too much self-esteem?' No, it is not; no more than it is possible to have too much physical health or too powerful an immune system.”

The ugliest aspects of today’s politics largely stem from a problem of emaciated egos, not overweening ones. If we would but reclaim what Branden called “the disowned self,” we would become more enterprising and resilient, less emotionally needy, less prone to wallow in resentment, less reliant on demagogues offering political solutions to economic frustrations at the expense of others, less dependent on group identity as our source of individual self-worth, and, contrary to caricatures of individualism, more civilized and sociable.

Dan Sanchez

Dan Sanchez is Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writings are collected at DanSanchez.me.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

A Handmaid's Tale: Now in Feminist Imaginations Everywhere

And the award for most contrived, unrealistic, and preachy television drama goes to...

I’ve always thought that the best way to ruin a book’s audience is to make a movie out of it. Once the movie is made (and if it is successful), no one wants to read the book anymore. I'm thinking Lord of the Rings here, The African Queen, Gone with the Wind, Forrest Gump.

But ruining the book may be the one and only good thing about “The Handmaid's Tale,” Hulu’s dramatization of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel. It might at least save us the trouble of reading about a young woman who is a concubine in a male-dominated future society brought about through some unexplained and improbable coup.

The book is about a future society run by an evangelical Christian theocracy. This means, of course, that society is militarized (cue ominous drum beats), women are in subjugation to men (cue sinister-sounding minor keys), and, most terrible of all, homophobia reigns (cue screeching violins).

Women are even forbidden to read, which would at least have the advantage of saving them the torment of reading sanctimonious feminist dystopian novels. If the quality of dystopian novels were the only measure of the quality of a society, I’ll take patriarchal dominance any day.

If you haven’t yet seen “The Handmaids Tale,” just imagine what a liberal feminist nightmare would look like. Think of a world in which no absurd feminist stereotype of traditional society goes unemployed. Add characters either looking stern and intimidating, or cowering and looking furtively from left to right, right to left, and back again. And again. And again.

Presto! “The Handmaid's Tale.”

The plot is derivative, the setting unbelievable, and there is not a convincing character in the lot.

There was nothing unrealistic about George Orwell's 1984. It was a brilliant and prophetic novel which succeeded in capturing the  horrors of a totalitarian society. The imaginary world it created was the real world of the Soviet Union, communist China, as well as today’s North Korea.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was, if anything, even more prophetic, postulating a world where—unlike 1984, in which we are enslaved by what we hate—we become enslaved by what we love. Its fulfillment is seen in every product of our omnipresent entertainment media today.

A dystopian story only works when its actual instantiation in some society, somewhere, is actually believable.

But we live in a society in which women now excel men in all but a few academic disciplines, and where even conservative politicians now kowtow to every feminist demand. Other than a few grim professors in university gender and women’s studies departments, or a handful of the most tiresome protesters at anti-Trump rallies, no one really believes that the world of Margaret Atwood’s story is even remotely thinkable.
This post 'A Handmaid's Tale': Now in Feminist Imaginations Everywhere was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Martin Cothran.

National Health Care: Medicine in Germany, 1918-1945

Today we are concerned about issues such as doctor-assisted suicide, abortion, the use of fetal tissue, genetic screening, birth control and sterilization, health-care rationing and the ethics of medical research on animals and humans. These subjects are major challenges in both ethics and economics at the end of the twentieth century. But at the beginning of the twentieth century the desire to create a more scientific medical practice and research had already raised the issues of euthanasia, eugenics, and medical experimentation on human subjects. In addition, the increasing involvement of the German government in medical care and funding medical research established the government-medical complex that the National Socialists later used to execute their extermination policies.

The German social insurance and health care system began in the 1880s under Bismarck. Ironically, it was part of Bismarck’s “anti-socialist” legislation, adopted under the theory that a little socialism would prevent the rise of a more virulent socialism.

By the time of Weimar, German doctors had become accustomed to cooperating with the government in the provision of medical care. The reforms of the Weimar Republic following the medical crises of World War I included government policies to provide health care services to all citizens. Socially minded physicians placed great hope in a new health care system, calling for a single state agency to overcome fragmentation and the lack of influence of individual practitioners and local services. The focus of medicine shifted from private practice to public health and from treating disease to preventable health care. During the German “economic consolidation” of 1924-1928, public health improved under new laws against tuberculosis, venereal disease, and alcoholism, with new advisory centers for chemical dependency and counseling bureaus for marriage and sexual problems.

Medical concerns which had largely been in the private domain in the nineteenth century increasingly became a concern of the state. The physician began to be transformed into a functionary of state-initiated laws and policies. Doctors slowly began to see themselves as more responsible for the public health of the nation than for the individual health of the patient. It is one thing to see oneself as responsible for the “nation’s health” and quite another to be responsible for an individual patient’s health. It is one thing to be employed by an individual, another to be employed by the government.

Under the Weimar Republic these reforms resulted in clearly improved public health. However, the creativity, energy, and fundamental reforms found in social medicine during the Weimar Republic seem in retrospect a short and deceptive illusion. Medical reformers had wanted to counter the misery inherited from the first World War and the Second Empire on the basis of comprehensive disease prevention programs. In the few years available to the social reformers, they had remarkable success. But in connection with these reforms the doctor’s role changed from that of advocate, adviser, and partner of the patient to a partner of the state.

Where traditional individual ethics and Christian charity had once stood, the reformers posited a collective ethic for the benefit of the general population. Private charity and welfare were nationalized. The mentally ill, for example, having been literally released from their chains in the nineteenth century and placed in local communities and boarding houses in regular contact with others (the so-called “moral therapy”), were returned to state institutions to become the ultimate victims of state “solutions.”

With the world economic crisis of 1929, welfare state expenditures had to be reduced for housing, nutrition, support payments, recreation and rehabilitation, and maternal and child health. What remained of the humanistic goals of reform were state mechanisms for inspection and regulation of public health and medical practice. Economic efficiency became the major concern, and health care became primarily a question of cost-benefit analysis. Under the socialist policies of the period, this analysis was necessarily applied to the selection of strong persons, deemed worthy of support, and the elimination of weak and “unproductive” people. The scientific underpinning of cost-benefit analyses to political medical care was provided by the new fields of genetics and eugenics.

Genetics and Eugenics

At the same time as these economic and political developments, the application of nineteenth- century scientific discoveries began to make their way into twentieth-century public health and medical practice. Charles Darwin’s studies on natural selection were of course based upon animal populations living in nature and not human populations living in complex societies. But the biological basis of natural selection gave rise to a concept of “survival of the fittest” in human civilizations. This term was coined by the British social anthropologist Herbert Spencer, and the concept led to “Social Darwinism.”

Darwin’s theories (developed in parallel with Alfred Russel Wallace—another British natural scientist) had been published prior to full elucidation of the principles of genetics. With subsequent understanding and acceptance of the science of genetics, the underlying basis of natural selection could more completely be described. While scientists still did not understand what made up the gene (awaiting Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA in the 1950s) they began to search for outward expression of inner genetic tendencies. In the absence of being able to pinpoint individual genes, they sought outward expression of genetic “types.” These “typologies” were largely based upon external measurements of the body.

Much of this work was carried out by German anthropologists and physicians (often one and the same at that time) in newly acquired colonies in German East and Southwest Africa, prior to the loss of these colonies to Allied protectorates in World War I. Such work resumed following the war, however, and by 1927 the opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics was celebrated in Berlin as the advent of the “German Oxford.” The annual report of the Institute in 1932 stated: “The term eugenics means to establish a connection between the results of the studies in human genetics and practical measures in population policy.”

Under the new “scientific understanding” of human biology provided by genetics and its implementation under eugenics, poverty, for example, would become merely an expression of degeneracy (Entartung) and genetic inferiority. “Inferior” and “superior” became natural terms used by persons of nearly all political persuasions, as readily as the terms “handicapped,” “impaired,” “socially dependent,” or “disadvantaged” are used today.

Life Unworthy of Living

Following World War I there had been concern among some in Germany that the war had decimated the ranks of the qualified and strong while weak, unqualified, and inferior people had been spared. Many felt that scant resources should not be wasted on the sick and suffering. The philosophy of the unimportance of the individual in favor of the people (das Volk) led to the belief that individuals who had become “worthless, defective parts” had to be “sacrificed or discarded.”

Alfred Hoche, a neuropathologist (as Freud had been) and Karl Binding, a lawyer, published a pamphlet in 1922, The Sanctioning of the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living. Binding relativized the legal and moral prohibition, “Thou shalt not kill,” and Hoche alternated between economic and medical arguments. Neurologists in Saxony formally discussed the topic, “Are Doctors Allowed to Kill?” A physician in Dresden pointed out “the contradiction that many persons (reformers) demand an end to the death penalty for crimes, but the same people are for putting imbeciles [sic] to death.” By the time the National Socialist Party came to power in Germany, the mentally ill and the mentally retarded had begun to be sterilized and to be subjected to euthanasia in large numbers in German government institutions.

National Socialism and the Nation’s Health

No profession in Germany became so numerically attached to National Socialism in both its leadership and membership as was the medical profession. Because of their philosophical orientation toward finding a more scientific basis for medical research and practice, government funding for research, and the practical benefits of acquiring university positions and medical practices from the many banned and exiled German Jewish doctors, many physicians supported Nazi policies. One of the first Nazi laws, passed July 14, 1933, was the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny of Hereditary Disease,” intended to “consolidate” social and health policies in the German population and prohibit the right of reproduction for persons defined as “genetically inferior.” After 1933, the connection between the theory and practice of politicized medicine advocated by many in Weimar Germany became actual in Nazi Germany.

A “Genetic Health Court” consisting of judges and doctors made decisions about forcible sterilization. As “advocates of the state,” doctors prosecuted those persons charged with being “genetically ill” in sessions lasting generally no more than ten minutes and from which the public was barred. In 1935, an adjunct law allowed forcible abortion in such cases up to the sixth month of pregnancy. A total of 300,000 to 400,000 were sterilized and approximately 5,000 (nearly all women) died as a result of these operations. After 1945, it was argued to the Restitution Claims Commission of the German Bundestag that the “Law for the Prevention of Progeny of Hereditary Disease” not be considered in the same category as subsequent National Socialist race laws and other Nazi abuses. The sterilization law had been drafted earlier under the Weimar Republic as part of progressive health reform, and as late as 1961 was defended by an expert at the Max Planck Institute on the basis that “every cultured nation needs eugenics, and in the atomic age, more so than ever before.”

German Youth and Euthanasia

Following the sterilization laws, the National Socialists next implemented a strategy of euthanasia to solve the remaining problem of those whose conception and birth had preceded these laws. The pediatrician Ernst Wentzler, while developing plans to improve care in the German Children’s Hospitals in Berlin, personally decided (as consultant to Hitler’s Chancellery) on the deaths of thousands of handicapped children. Hans Nachtsheim placed delivery orders for handicapped children for his pressure chamber experiments on epilepsy. Joseph Mengele delivered genetic and anthropological “material” from Auschwitz to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and conducted his infamous twin experiments on the child victims of the Holocaust.

Julius Hallervorden at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research at Berlin-Buch carried out several research projects based on euthanasia programs. Hallervorden and others systematically collected the brains of their patients who had been killed, taught the murdering doctors how to dissect, and cooperated closely with institutions where murdered children had previously been given thorough examinations and tests. During interrogation by an American officer in 1945, he stated, “I heard that they were going to do that . . . and told them . . . if you are going to kill all these people, at least take the brains . . . . There was wonderful material among these brains beautiful mental defectives, malformations and early infantile disease. I accepted these brains, of course. Where they came from and how they came to me, was really none of my business.” The collection was until recently kept by the Max Planck Institute (formerly the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute) in Frankfurt and used for brain research.

In a system in which so many were routinely condemned to die, the temptation proved strong to use human subjects in medical experimentation prior to their tragic and terrible deaths.

The Luftwaffe had developed aircraft which could climb to altitudes of nearly 60,000 feet, altitudes unattainable by Allied fighter aircraft. However, tolerance of these altitudes on the part of pilots had not yet been tested. Trials on volunteers at altitudes above 36,000 feet had to be discontinued due to severe pain. For this reason, lethal altitude experiments in pressure chambers were conducted on 200 victims held prisoner in Dachau concentration camp in a program called: “Trials for Saving Persons at High Altitude.”

Many German ships were also being sunk in the North Atlantic and North Sea, and the same group of medical investigators conducted painful ice bath experiments on 300 Dachau prisoners in a research program entitled “Avoidance and Treatment of Hypothermia in Water.” Other medical experiments were carried out with chemical and biological warfare agents and infectious diseases.

Following World War II much of this data was kept classified by Allied military authorities on the basis of national security. Debate continues to this day on the validity of these experiments and the ethical implications of any use of such data.

The Banality of Evil

We now know the end of this historical horror story of massive crimes against humanity and the leader of the thousand-year Reich burning in a bunker in Berlin. But it is not so easy to recognize the steps on the path down the slippery slope when we don’t yet know the end of the story—as today we do not know which social health reforms in combination with which new medical technologies have the potential to plunge modern society over a brink in which disaster might result. Is legalized abortion a new form of medicide? Is doctor-assisted suicide a step toward positive euthanasia? Is modern genetic testing and the Human Genome Project the first step to a new eugenics? Is health care rationing, which is always a result of government involvement in medical care, a step toward the new definition of”life unworthy of living” ? Is our present “quality of life index” a new way of saying it?

Nazi medicine was implemented by a political-medical complex—on the basis of political health care—a scientific and social philosophy imposed by a totalitarian regime. It should never happen again, but could it ever happen again?

In the United States the medical profession operates in a mixed (not a national socialist) economy which does not yet have the institutionalized mechanisms of control and regulation of Weimar Germany and in a democratic political system which thankfully does not have the political ideology of the Third Reich. But the “banality of evil” described by Hannah Arendt in the Third Reich may stem largely from a government bureaucracy in which 90 percent of the people think 90 percent of the time about process—not purpose. Does the modern bureaucratization of medicine hold any real risk for a possible return with new health reforms and new medical technologies—to some of the horrors of National Socialist medicine? Removal of personal responsibility (“I was only following orders”), personal authority, and personal choice in a bureaucratized system may leave less and less room for individual ethics in the conduct of medical science and practice.

Politicized medicine is not a sufficient cause of the mass extermination of human beings, but it seems to be a necessary cause. The Nazi Holocaust did not happen for some inexplicable German reason; it is not an event that we can afford to ignore because we are not Germans or not Nazis. The history of Germany from 1914 to 1945 is a telescoping of modernity from monarchy, war, and collapse to democracy and the welfare state, and finally to dictatorship, war, and death.

Medical ethics is the responsibility of all members of a society, not just doctors and scientists. Medicine and science alone do not have the answers to such questions as: When does life begin? When should it end? Are humans just the sum of their genetic parts or genetic programs? While bioethicists debate, individual medical choices are made a million times a day among doctors, patients, their families, and increasingly the government. The product of all these choices ultimately constitutes the ethical, legal, and social framework in which the practice of medicine and of medical research are conducted. In the end it is the preservation of freedom that will guide us to the best application of new health reforms and technologies in the future.

Marc S. Micozzi, M.D., Ph.D., a physician and anthropologist, directs the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., which recently brought from Berlin the exhibition, “The Value of the Human Being: Medicine in Germany 1918-1945,” curated by Christian Pross and Götz Aly.

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Dr. Robert Ritter of the German National Department of Health (right) and his associates carried out anthropological measurements and genealogical research. They prepared fingerprints and photographs in order to ascertain the “proportion of gypsy blood” in all of the Sinti and Roma of “Greater Germany.”

Nazi medicine was implemented by a political-medical complex, a scientific and social philosophy imposed by a totalitarian regime.

From The Exhibition, “The Value of the Human Being.”

Marc S. Micozzi M.D.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

How climate activists fake science, in three graphs

There’s been a small gaggle of news stories about a new paper by Iselin Medhaug and colleagues in the May 4 issue of Nature that concludes that climate models are just fine and their sensitivity to carbon dioxide is spot-on.

If one adjusts the data observed during the balance of the “hiatus” in warming, by filling in hot data where there was none, and adjust the model predictions downward that would be the likely result. I’ve gone through the Abstract line-by-line, so you can see these papers the way a climate scientist might.

Between 1998 and 2012,

Actually, the pause was between 1997 and 2014, as shown in even the warm-revised data from the Climate Research Unit from the University of East Anglia:

a time that coincided with political negotiations for preventing climate change,

It appears as though this was put in to signal they have no problem mixing politics with science. They are obviously signaling that the 1998-2012 “hiatus” (well, actually, 1997-2014) isn’t a good excuse for Donald Trump to walk away from the Paris Agreement, which does nothing measurable to stop climate change in the 21stcentury.

the surface of Earth seemed hardly to warm.

See graph above. It didn’t “seem hardly;” it simply didn’t. And it wasn’t just at the surface. Satellite data show that there was no warming in the lower atmosphere from 1995-2014: 

This phenomenon, often termed the ‘global warming hiatus,’ caused doubt in the public mind about how well anthropogenic climate change and natural variability are understood.

Well, isn’t the public silly? Does it have a “mind?” No right-thinking scientist would question the climate models! Just ignore federal climatologist Ben Santer and 16 coauthors published this in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 2011:

Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric [lower atmospheric] temperatures.

The 17th author of that paper is given as F.J. Wentz, or Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems, one of the major centers publishing—you guessed it—global-mean tropospheric temperatures. By late in 2014, here’s what his own data showed:

Hint: there’s not one use of the word “satellite” in this paper!

Here we show that apparently contradictory conclusions stem from different definitions of ‘hiatus’ from different datasets.

Can you guess they’re going to manipulate the climate data, timeframe, and model output to show that everything fits? 

A combination of changes in forcing, uptake of heat by the oceans, natural variability and incomplete observational coverage reconciles models and data.

See above.

Combined with stronger recent warming trends in newer datasets,

Meaning the “pause buster” dataset put out by the U.S. National Climatic Data Center, which substituted sea surface temperature (SST) data that became successively warmer when compared to the satellite-derived ocean data right at the beginning of the pause. They had to do this in a hurry because the team that revised the data had another revision in the works that lowered the successive warming, which would have destroyed the already marginal significance of the pause buster dataset. Also meant is the NASA temperature history (which we show later in this paper) in which they extend the effect of the northernmost land stations up to 1200km out into the Arctic Ocean. They had to know the basic physics that temperature over a mixed ice-water ocean must be close to freezing, regardless what the onshore temperature is, they likely went with it because it shows a dramatic warming of the Arctic Ocean based erroneously on onshore data.

we are now more confident than ever that human influence is dominant in long-term warming.

Data and model output were tortured, and they confessed they were right after all.

Topics:

Energy and Environment

Tags:

climate change, global warming, climate data

This work by Cato Institute is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

By Patrick J. Michaels. Originally published at The Cato Institute.

Socialism is born out of racism

May Day celebrations were held all across the fruited plain, with leftist radicals and unionists worshipping the ideals of communism.

Communism is an ideology calling for government control over our lives. It was created by Karl Marx, who—along with his collaborator, Friedrich Engels—wrote a pamphlet called “Manifesto of the Communist Party.”

In 1867, Marx wrote the first volume of “Das Kapital.” The second and third volumes were published posthumously, edited by Engels.

Few people who call themselves Marxists have ever even bothered to read “Das Kapital.” If one did read it, he would see that people who call themselves Marxists have little in common with Marx.

For those who see Marx as their hero, there are a few historical tidbits they might find interesting. Nathaniel Weyl, himself a former communist, dug them up for his 1979 book, “Karl Marx: Racist.”

For example, Marx didn’t think much of Mexicans. When the United States annexed California after the Mexican War, Marx sarcastically asked, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?”

Engels shared Marx’s contempt for Mexicans, explaining: “In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.”

Marx had a racial vision that might be interesting to his modern-day black supporters. In a letter to Engels, in reference to his socialist political competitor Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx wrote:

It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes who had joined Moses’ exodus from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother on the paternal side had not interbred with a n—–. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product.

Engels shared Marx’s racial philosophy. In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx’s son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Lafargue had “one-eighth or one-twelfth n—– blood.”

In a letter to Lafargue’s wife, Engels wrote, “Being in his quality as a n—–, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.”

Marx was also an anti-Semite, as seen in his essay titled “On the Jewish Question,” which was published in 1844. Marx asked:

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man—and turns them into commodities. … The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. … The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

Despite the fact that in the 20th century alone communism was responsible for more than 100 million murders, much of the support for communism and socialism is among intellectuals.

The reason they do not condemn the barbarism of communism is understandable. Richard Pipes explains:

Intellectuals, by the very nature of their professions, grant enormous attention to words and ideas. And they are attracted by socialist ideas. They find that the ideas of communism are praiseworthy and attractive; that, to them, is more important than the practice of communism. Now, Nazi ideals, on the other hand, were pure barbarism; nothing could be said in favor of them.

That means leftists around the world will continue to celebrate the ideas of communism.

In the event of nuclear war the IRS plans to do this

Bear with me for a moment, because what I’m about to say will be grim at first, but I assure you that it has a strange and perhaps hilarious payoff.

I want you to imagine for moment, what your life might be like after a nuclear war. Put yourself in the place of someone who is clinging to a meager existence after the complete and utter collapse of society. It’s been several weeks since you emerged from your basement or fallout shelter. You are now just scraping by in a desolate community that you once called home.

Your body aches with hunger pangs, as you ration what little food you have, day by day. Your neighbors are a shell of their former selves. The few that have survived, are either mentally unwell, hungry, or are suffering from the effects of radiation sickness. You’re not sure if it’s safe to go outside anymore, as gunshots can be periodically heard in the distance, day and night.

And even if you did leave, you’re not sure if there’s anywhere you could go. The freeways are clogged with abandoned vehicles, the local shops are empty, and fuel is incredibly hard to come by.  You’d never make it far.

So you remain in your home, which looks like it’s been through a hurricane. The roofing is stripped, the windows are shattered and boarded up, and the paint is ever so slightly peeled and darkened after enduring the distant heat of a nuclear blast. You sit at home, and wish that everything could go back to the way it was before; when society functioned, the streets were clean, food was plentiful, and the government still existed.

Then you hear a knock at the door. Your heart is pounding, because you’re not sure if you should be afraid of who is on the other side, or grateful that some kind of disaster relief has finally arrived. You cautiously approach the door and look through the peephole. Much to your surprise, there is a strange man patiently waiting outside. He’s wearing a tattered business suit, broken glasses, and a bicycle helmet. Who could this be?

You slowly open the door just a few inches, and with a furrowed brow, you quietly ask him what he wants. He holds up a blue and white ID badge that says “IRS” in thick black letters. He asks you, without a hint of jest, if you’ve filed your tax return this year.

Sound outlandish? It is, but don’t tell that to the IRS. It turns out that since the Cold War, the Internal Revenue Service has established plans for how their bureaucracy would operate after a nuclear war. Their contingency plans are published in their employee handbooks, which the New York Times reported on back in 1989.

An addition to the Internal Revenue Manual, which is supposed to guide the conduct of all I.R.S. employees, declares that if the bomb is dropped, ”operations will be concentrated on collecting the taxes which will produce the greater revenue yield.”

An I.R.S. spokesman, Johnell Hunter, said today that the new section -titled ”National Emergency Operations” – had been added to the manual in response to a directive to Government departments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Within 30 days of an attack emergency, the agency would expect to resume assessing and collecting taxes. At that time, the manual states, many employees might find themselves reassigned to carry out essential functions ”regardless of and without any effect on the current positions or grades of the employee.”

Previous iterations of this plan sound no less insane. In 1982, the Washington Post reportedon their  “Design of an Emergency Tax System” which talked about how the US government would continue to collect revenue, even if the tax system was completely destroyed. The author of the report suggested enforcing a 20% sales tax on all goods and services.

So try to imagine how this would go down. After the apocalypse the IRS thinks that it’s going to send their agents and officers out into an utterly devastated and lawless country, and ask starving people to cough up money that is most certainly worthless. I mean, that’s the only way that taxes could be collected right? It’s not like you could put a check in the mail. You couldn’t call them, and share the routing number of your bank account (if it even still exists). You couldn’t file your taxes online. The IRS would have to come to you.

And in an economy that would at least temporarily revert back to bartering, how would they collect any kind of tax, much less a 20% sales tax? If you traded a blanket with your neighbor in exchange for five cans of food, are they going to tell you that you owe them one of those cans? And how many people I wonder, would assume that they’re being scammed when an IRS agent knocks on their door?

Even if the IRS survives a nuclear war, I have a feeling that their employees who are sent out to collect taxes, wouldn’t live for very long.

 

Joshua Krause was born and raised in the Bay Area. He is a writer and researcher focused on principles of self-sufficiency and liberty at Ready Nutrition. You can follow Joshua’s work at our Facebook page or on his personal Twitter.

Joshua’s website is Strange Danger

This information has been made available by Ready Nutrition

College Majors that Report the Highest Underemployment

Forbes recently ran an interesting article that analyzed college degree programs and underemployment.

The article was based on a survey released by PayScale, which collected data from nearly one million workers between March 2014 and March 2016. Here are the 12 majors that reported the highest rates of underemployment (a situation in which someone is working, but not in a desired full-time capacity).

1. Physical Education Teaching

Underemployed: 56.4%

2. Human Services

Underemployed: 55.6%

3. Illustration

Underemployed: 54.7%

4. Criminal Justice

Underemployed: 53.0%

5. Project Management

Underemployed: 52.8%

6. Radio/Television & Film Production

Underemployed: 52.6%

7. Studio Art

Underemployed: 52.0%

8. Health Care Administration

Underemployed: 51.8%

9. Education

Underemployed: 51.8%

10. Human Development & Family Studies

Underemployed: 51.5%

11. Creative Writing

Underemployed: 51.1%

12. Animal Science

Underemployed: 51.1%

I found this information helpful in a few ways. For starters, these underemployment rates are startlingly high, much higher than I would have guessed.

Second, several of these majors seem a bit vague and abstract. Project management and human development sound like utilitarian degree programs and they might be fine careers. But if students select these majors and fail to receive specialization, they are no better off than the creative writing major (in fact, they might be worse off) who likely knew that their degree wouldn't be all that competitive.

Last, I was surprised to see education and criminal justice on this list. It doesn’t seem too long ago that these fields were in much higher demand. It goes to show how fluid job fields truly are.



This post College Majors that Report the Highest Underemployment was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Jon Miltimore.

FBI in turmoil over Comey firing, scramble on for new chief

By Julia Edwards Ainsley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI was reeling after President Donald Trump unexpectedly fired its director James Comey, with agency staff scheduling an emergency high-level meeting for Tuesday night amid speculation about who would replace Comey in the top job.

An FBI official, who was not authorized to speak to reporters and so asked not to be identified, said the staff meeting would explore next steps for the law-enforcement agency.

Trump sacked Comey amidst a probe into the Trump 2016 presidential campaign's possible collusion with Russia to influence the election outcome, sparking backlash from some Democrats in Congress who said the decision had the appearance of a cover-up and some Republicans who called the timing troubling.

The official said the FBI had no idea the Trump administration was considering dismissing Comey and the news “took even top officials by surprise.”

An FBI spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was expected to step in for now, but he was unlikely to be nominated by Trump for the director's post, said two former FBI officials.

Comey, who was appointed by former Democratic President Barack Obama, had 6-1/2 years left in his term as director of  an agency with 56 U.S. field offices and more than 30,000 employees.

The new director must be appointed by Trump and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.    

Comey is the third high-profile law-enforcement official to be fired under Trump. Preet Bharara was fired as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and Sally Yates was fired as acting attorney general.

Trump, a Republican businessman and former TV celebrity, was elected on Nov. 8 and took office on Jan. 20.

One possible contender for director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is Dana Boente, No. 3 at the Justice Department and former acting attorney general, said the two former FBI officials.

Other potential choices include Republican Representative Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor who led a congressional inquiry into former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s role in the 2012 attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Close campaign allies of Trump include former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, Sheriff David Clarke. But both men would be seen as highly political nominees for an agency designed to be independent.

"The White House has to avoid all the politicos if they are going to get a nominee through the Senate," said one of the former FBI officials.

Boente was tapped to temporarily lead the Justice Department's Trump-Russia investigation after Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a Trump appointee, stepped down because of his dealings with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.

Rod Rosenstein replaced Boente in that role when the Senate confirmed him as deputy attorney general last month. Rosenstein served as a federal prosecutor under both Republican President George W. Bush and Obama.

A lengthy memo from Rosenstein on Tuesday faulted Comey for his handling of an FBI probe of Clinton's private email server.



 (Reporting by Julia Edwards Ainsley; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Howard Goller)

Time for Trump to Fulfill Promise and Withdraw From Paris Climate Agreement

President Donald Trump has promised to make a “big decision” in the next two weeks on the Paris climate accord after promising to “cancel” the agreement during the campaign last year.

Fundamentally, the Paris Agreement is a costly and ineffective approach to addressing global warming. There are compelling economic, environmental, and legal reasons for Trump to make good on his campaign promise, and the commonly heard arguments for remaining in the agreement do not pass muster.

The Paris Agreement, signed by more than 170 countries, aims to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The means of accomplishing this goal largely center on reducing carbon dioxide emissions by transitioning the global energy economy away from affordable, dependable conventional sources of energy.

Countries involved in the agreement each submitted nationally determined contributions, setting their respective obligations for keeping temperatures in check.

As a member nation, the U.S. also submitted its goals under the Obama administration. The domestic regulations listed by the Obama administration aimed to reduce greenhouse gas levels across the entire economy by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2025.

The U.S. regulations alone would increase energy costs for U.S. families and businesses, causing an overall average shortfall of nearly 400,000 jobs and total income loss of more than $20,000 for a family of four by the year 2035.

Compliance with the Paris Agreement will cost the global economy trillions of dollars over the next 80 years. Yet the results will be almost zero reduction in projected warming, even if every country met their respective carbon dioxide reduction targets as promised under the agreement.

Even former Secretary of State John Kerry made some revealing claimsregarding the ineffectiveness of Paris:

The fact is that even if every American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what—that still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world. If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions—remember what I just said, all the industrial emissions went down to zero emissions—it wouldn’t be enough.

The emissions targets are not legally binding, and Trump has already issued executive orders calling on his agencies to unwind some of the domestic regulations that are part of the U.S. national domestic contribution.

Some of those who recognize the failings of the Paris agreement and the significant costs of the regulations nonetheless argue that it is better to remain in the agreement and have a seat at the table, since there are no repercussions for failing to meet the targets.

They believe that withdrawal could have damaging diplomatic ramifications and cede leadership to other countries.

But even if Trump eliminates all of the domestic regulations, there are still significant costs for remaining in Paris. Chief among those costs are legal risks, a ceding of leadership to other countries, and various forms of cronyism.

Legal Risks

Remaining in the Paris Agreement while failing to the Obama administration’s pledges would give environmental activists new arguments in their inevitable legal challenges to Trump’s domestic energy agenda.

As Heritage Foundation legal scholar Alden Abbott recently explained, even if environmental activists’ challenges fail in court (as they should):

… such challenges would absorb scarce public resources and cause delay in implementing sound environmental policies, while creating unwarranted public confusion as to the international ‘legality’ of the administration’s actions. Furthermore, continued U.S. membership in the Paris Agreement might be cited as an extra public policy ‘plus factor’ in challenges to environmental regulatory reforms, based on federal administrative law, rather than on the agreement. Such a ‘plus factor’ theory would have no basis in law, but it would further complicate defense of the administration’s actions.

Ceding Leadership

Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement will be met with consternation from foreign leaders, but that certainly doesn’t make it a bad decision.

The reality is that the United States is, and will remain, a global superpower. Withdrawal from Paris will not change that. In fact, it will fortify it by demonstrating that the U.S. is willing and able to resist diplomatic pressure in order to protect American interests.

The only way to truly protect American interests is to withdrawal from the agreement altogether.

Withdrawing will also prevent future administrations from using the existing U.N. framework to avoid getting the Senate’s advice and consent in the treaty process, which is what President Barack Obama did in the Paris Agreement.

Furthermore, history has shown that refusal to join international climate commitments in the past did not cripple relationships with foreign countries.

For instance, despite strong pressure from the U.N. and European governments, President George W. Bush did not ratify or implement the Kyoto Protocol, in which 37 industrialized countries committed to legally binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Although criticism was loud, the Bush administration was able to overcome it and successfully work with other governments on numerous international issues of mutual concern. The same will hold true for the Trump administration.

Catering to Special Interests and Big Business

The media is spinning a narrative that Paris is different from past international climate negotiations because businesses and investors support international action on global warming—even industries like big oil and big coal.

But it is nothing new for big business to support policies that, at first glance, seem to be against their business interests.

Just as industry has thrown its support behind cap-and-trade legislation or a carbon tax, special interests within industry will inevitably help craft a policy in which their bottom line is protected—or at least hurt less than their competitors.

For instance, the American Enterprise Institute’s Tim Carney writes,

Enron was a tireless advocate of strict global energy regulations supported by environmentalists. Enron also used its influence in Washington to keep laissez-faire bureaucrats off the federal commissions that regulate the energy industry.

Furthermore, there is a giant pot of taxpayer money available from the Green Climate Fund for the taking.

Negotiating a deal that may protect certain industries with subsidies and carve outs will only continue to leave American taxpayers and energy consumers exposed to harmful international climate policies.

The bottom line is that this international framework for addressing global warming is a costly and ineffective approach, and the alleged diplomatic costs of leaving the Paris Agreement—and the benefits of staying—have been far exaggerated.

Trump should now make good on his promise and withdraw.

Commentary by Nicolas Loris and Brett Schaefer. Originally published at The Daily Signal. The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

Venezuela’s Road to Literal Serfdom

In his classic 1841 book on financial bubbles, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay observed, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

Mackay covered religious and political delusions, too. “We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple," he recounts, "and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity.”

Venezuela is sowing its harvest of “groans and tears." Due to the breakdown of civil society in the country, even war-plagued Syrians feel more safe in their homes than do Venezuelans. Venezuelans are so hungry that they cried at the sight of food in Columbia. Recently the hungry broke into a zoo to kill a horse for its meat. Literally, they have become serfs that may be required to work 60 days or more in agricultural fields.

Venezuela has the world's worst rate of economic growth, and the worst inflation rate. It has become like "a gangster state that doesn't know how to do anything other than sell drugs and steal money for itself." Socialism has virtually destroyed civilization in Venezuela making it seem like a "hurricane [has] swept things away."

When the history of this tragic period in Venezuela is written, the population will have plenty of “culprits” to blame. In blaming many will eschew their own responsibility. Some will blame Chavez; others will blame Maduro. Some will follow their beloved leaders and continue to blame the "elite" and the capitalists. The true believers will continue to insist there is no inherent flaw in socialism; they will simply say mistakes were made that will not be made again.

We are not the victims of the world we see. Our delusions, our beliefs have consequences. The fact that our delusions are often invisible to us does not make them any less powerful or any less consequential. Again, Mackay observed that a population subject to delusions “only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

Venezuelans have not yet recovered their “senses.”  Caracas radio host Glen Martinez stubbornly insists that the “reforms” that Chavez instituted will never be reversed. “We are not the same people we were before 1999,” Martinez said. Many share Martinez's sentiments; daily the true believers still march and  promise to spill their blood in support of the government.

There is no better book than Friedrich Hayek’s classic The Road to Serfdom to explain the popular delusions that helped to virtually eliminate the market economy and civil society in Venezuela. Writing during the depths of World War II, Hayek intended his book as a warning “to the socialists of all parties.” What happened in Venezuela can happen wherever a critical mass of the population begins to hold certain delusionary beliefs.

Popular Delusion 1: Freedom Means Freedom from Necessity

Hayek points out that freedom in Western countries traditionally meant “freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men.”

Socialists point to a “new freedom” which is “freedom from necessity” which releases us “from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us.”

Hayek adds, “the demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for an equal distribution of wealth.”

Believing that these two types of freedom can be combined is delusional. Hayek points out that the new idea of freedom “gave the socialists another word in common with the liberals and they exploited it to the full....Few people noticed [that the word freedom was being used differently] and still fewer asked themselves whether the two kinds of freedom promised really could be combined.”

Popular Delusion 2. Only Coercive Planning Can Coordinate Activity

Almost every individual and organization plans. Writes Hayek, there is no “dispute about whether we ought to employ foresight and systematic thinking and planning our common affairs.”

Hayek thought that to plan or not to plan is not “the real question.” Instead, we should ask if “the holder of coercive power should confine himself in general to creating conditions under which the knowledge and initiative of individuals is given the best scope so that they can plan most successfully; or whether a rational utilization of our resources requires central direction and organization of all our activities according to some consciously constructed ‘blueprint.’”

The humanitarian disaster in Venezuela has been a long time in the making. In 2010, the hungry waited while "2,340 shipping containers with more than 120,000 tons of rotting food (estimated to feed 17 million people for one month)" sat at the government run port of Puerto Cabello.

Believing that the “coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority,” can coordinate and adjust our individual activities is delusional. With this delusion comes disbelief that a market economy can solve problems and advance society. Those who cherish such delusions may find themselves hungry.

Popular Delusion 3: Economic Choice is Not Necessary

Hayek enumerates the warning signs that a society is on the road to socialism. On the road to socialism, people blame “the system” for their troubles and “wish to be relieved of the bitter choice which hard facts often impose upon them.” They “are only too ready to believe that the choice is not really necessary, that it is imposed upon them merely by the particular economic system under which we live.”

Chavez was a master blamer; for many years, the population found their own hatreds nourished by his. Capitalism was a frequent target of Chavez’s lies: “[Capitalism is] an infernal machine that produces every minute an impressive amount of poor, 26 million poor in 10 years are 2.6 million per year of new poor, this is the road, well, the road to hell."

Like other tyrants, Chavez didn't neglect the old, reliable villain of the Jewish people. He railed, “The descendants of those who crucified Christ... have taken ownership of the riches of the world, a minority has taken ownership of the gold of the world, the silver, the minerals, water, the good lands, petrol, well, the riches, and they have concentrated the riches in a small number of hands.”

In blaming "the system," Hayek observes that even well-meaning people ask, “If it be necessary to achieve important ends," why shouldn't the system "be run by decent people for the good of the community as a whole?”

As Jeffrey Tucker has observed, “socialists are scarcity deniers.”  Socialists exploit the fact that, in Hayek’s words, “we all find it difficult to bear to see things left undone which everybody must admit are both desirable and possible." In societies turning to socialism, there is no appreciation of scarcity. There is no appreciation that “things cannot all be done at the same time, that anyone of them can be achieved only at the sacrifice of others.”

Thus, there is support for coercive planning, because individuals “feel confident that they will be able to instill into the directors of such a society their sense of the value of the particular objective.” In other words, there is the delusion that planners will follow their wishes and they will receive more of the goods that they want, sparing them from the necessity of making a choice. Why choose between spending your own savings on housing or education if you've been assured that you are entitled to both at society’s expense?

It is delusional to assume that the role of an effective political leader is to control the uncontrollable. To believe that scarcity can be eliminated and hard choices averted is delusional.

Popular Delusion 4: There is a “Common Purpose”

It is essential to understand why there can be no such thing as the “common purpose.” All coercive plans will be win-lose, benefiting some and harming others. Hayek explains, “The welfare and happiness of millions cannot be measured on a single scale of less or more. The welfare of the people, like the happiness of a man, depends upon a great many things that can be provided in an infinite variety of combinations.”

The hard to give up delusion of socialists is that there are coercive plans that will benefit all. Venezuelans have seen the means of production nationalized in the name of the common good and with every intervention their standard of living fell further.

Nothing can be done for its own sake in a totalitarian state. “Every activity must derive its justification from a conscious social purpose” determined by the totalitarian rulers. “There must be no spontaneous, unguided activity, because it might produce results which cannot be foreseen and for which the plan does not provide. It might produce something new, undreamt of in the philosophy of the planner.”

Popular Delusion 5: The Ends Justify the Means

Those who would coerce believe they know what is best for you. If a few eggs have to be broken, that’s a small price to pay for the socialist omelet.  Hayek warns that the idea of "the ends justify the means" leads to amoral totalitarianism: “There is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole’ because ‘the good of the whole’ is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done.”

Since there is no majority to agree on a specific plan of action to promote a nonexistent “common good,” the worst get on top in a centrally planned economy.

The “worst” will take advantage of the fact that agreement can be more readily forged by focusing on a “negative program.” This negative program revolves around stirring up primitive hatred contrasting “us and “them.”  If Venezuelans were not susceptible to the stirring of delusional passions, Chavez and Maduro would’ve been unsuccessful in obtaining “the unreserved allegiance of huge masses.”

The “masses” that the “worst” seek to mobilize will include those who themselves are not grounded on principles. Hayek cautions that those having “imperfectly formed ideas are easily swayed;” their “passions and emotions are readily aroused.”

The End of the Road

“To make a totalitarian system function efficiently,” Hayek observed, “it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.”

The end game is a population that doesn’t realize it is on the road to literal serfdom. Hayek writes: “If the feeling of oppression in totalitarian countries is in general much less acute than most people in liberal countries imagine, this is because the totalitarian governments succeed to a high degree in making people think as they want them to.”

This is why a totalitarian state seeks to eliminate private schools and socialize education.

In 2012 the Chavez government implemented "Resolución 058." “The resolution states that all decisions in every school — public or private — must involve parents, teachers, students, workers, and the community” in order to "construct a new model of socialist society." This model includes the belief that the State is the source of well-being.

Venezuelans will have to recover from their delusions “one by one.” A point in time will come that, due to their suffering, a critical mass of Venezuelans will no longer think as the government wants them to think. In the meantime, let us remember that Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom to warn that the descent into socialism can happen anywhere. Let us have empathy for the suffering of the Venezuelans; and as Hayek would have hoped, let us also watch and learn.

Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. He delivers leadership workshops to organizations and blogs at BarryBrownstein.com, and Giving up Control.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.