The Jefferson-Madison Debates: Socialism in Our Time
January 2nd, 2019 // 8:43 pm @ Oliver DeMille
The Mantra of Today’s Media and Universities
“These were the pleasantest days of Sam’s life, these days in the woods, far from everywhere—no automobiles, no roads, no people, no noise, no school, no homework, no problems, except the problem of getting lost. And, of course, the problem of what to be when he grew up. Every boy has that problem.”
—Sam Beaver[i]
“And it was here that I learned the value
of economicness—which means saving.”
—Tucker Mouse[ii]
“…peace in our time.”[iii]
—Neville Chamberlain, 1938
I. The Two Drives: Strong vs. Weak
A century ago, and two centuries ago for that matter, the typical American judged himself according to a code of individual strength, in terms that might seem somewhat barbaric in current society. Today most people try to be more socialized; some would say more socially “acceptable”. Compliance is now largely considered a good thing—something our individualized American from the early 1900s would find objectionable.
The inner reality of many moderns is even more telling. A lot of people now judge themself not by strength, character, or individualistic achievement, but rather the exact opposite—how well they fit in with others. How popular they are. How closely they match the crowd. We are, by and large, supremely socialized now. Socialization has worked for at least two, going on three, generations.
Anyone not quite civilized in this respect, anyone who is still “rough around the edges,” or individualistic, doesn’t fit the mold very well. This is widely considered a serious fault. If you doubt how strong this hold is on most modern families and parents, try the following simple experiment: pull your children out of school and announce that you plan to homeschool, then keep track of how many people ask you “What about their academics?” versus “But what about their socialization?” The first list will likely be short, or non-existent, the second will be long. Indeed, without quite realizing it, our society has adopted socialization as arguably the highest purpose of our educational system. And even of parenting. Or, alternatively, try an even more challenging project: quit your job and start a business. See which people you know think you are courageous and strong for striking out on your own, versus those who consider your choice rash, reckless, even “crazy”.
These two drives—the one to stand apart, to excel as a unique individual, to be one’s true self, versus the other, to fit in, to be like everyone else, to be popular with peers, to be a “peer” at all—have long been at odds. Ironically, despite current popular views, history shows that the drive to stand out is the natural companion of progress, while a widespread drive to feel popular always accompanies societal decline.[iv]
Make no mistake, actual progress in a society is nearly always led by people making choices that don’t “fit in”, individuals who are hungry, driven, enterprising. Positive change in the world is an uphill slugfest, a challenging epic of work, overcoming roadblocks, and more work. It is seldom comfortable. Where the people are comfortable—in their job, career, or community—little leadership is at play. Leadership breeds discomfort, and thereby change.
If you are comfortable, you probably aren’t leading. (Nor are you, for that matter, likely to be experiencing effective leadership from anyone else.) Decline, on the other hand, is typically mired in comfort, until a major crisis or setback arises, when chaos and terror set in. But the path to such events is usually filled with what past generations could only describe as weak, though one still deals with the stresses of trying to meet the approval of others, punctuated with as much free-time entertainment as possible.
Philosophers and scholars have long been fascinated with the idea of “socialization”. It is at times the supreme goal of societies (“is the society savage or advanced?”, “let’s make sure they get socialized”), and on the other hand it typically coincides with growing weakness, mediocrity, sloth. Softness. Whining. Calls for more government help to get by. Ultimately, decline. For Aristotle, this division began with the difference between the community (a group of families, each choosing and acting as individual units, while generally coordinating and working together for common goals—always voluntarily) and the city (the “civis”, root of the word “civilization”, made up of many more people than a community, so many in fact that the most “efficient” way to govern them was for a few elites to rule things from the top down; for the few to tell the many how to live). This has ever been the great divide: bottom-up self rule by individuals,families, and communities, versus top-down rule by a group of elites, usually through government.
The first naturally adopts individualistic goals and mannerisms; the other flourishes as people put aside individualism and desire mainly to fit in. Elizabeth Bennet versus Caroline Bingley, to put a fine point on it. Colonel Brandon vs. Willoughby. It is the Ayn Rand hero versus today’s “acceptable” modern man or woman. John Adams considered this the great battle of humanity, and the choice each of us needs to make in life: either to serve, improve, and progress, or, alternatively, to spend our lives trying to impress others.[v]
The Talmudic tradition traces the history of this division to Abraham—the traveler and nomad, hearty and robust enough to survive in the harsh conditions of the desert and rock-laden Near Eastern mountains, protecting his herds, leading his soldiers as they fought bandits and avoided the control of petty princes in every city. The opposite of Abraham was Lot, and what happened to his once strong nomadic family when they settled into the city life characteristic of Sodom and Gomorrah. Note that his very name, Lot, has become a word meaning group, collective, batch, or bunch. Today’s synonyms of “lot” also include “assembly,” “throng”, “horde”, “swarm” and “mob”. The “lot” is socialized, and where this is true, socialism is usually on the rise.
Alternatively, the Teddy Roosevelt style individualists mentioned above, both men and women, were driven by progress. Specifically, the hard work of progress. For today’s “socialized” seeker of ease, in contrast, comfort rules. Safety. Being cared for. No wonder socialism is gaining popularity. Not surprisingly, under socialism, the biggest goal of youth education is socialization. Learning to follow the orders of superiors and officials. Showing up on time, getting in line, and giving rote answers—well memorized, and well groomed. Socialized. Manicured. Compliant. “Good” students and “good” employees in this regime obey their superiors, focus on scoring well on state-designed tests, and repeat. Whether in school, factory, or corporate high-rise, in the airport or online, the mold is cast—socialization all grown up.
II. Socialism’s Center
Today the biggest catalyst and supporter of spreading socialism is none other than higher education—the colleges and universities, aided and abetted by much of the media. This is ironic, given that universities and independent media were first invented to foment free thinking, individualistic pushback against aristocratic rule, to lead rebellion against elite domination and the stifling social pressure to always please the elites. To speak truth to power. The idea was that ideas, thinking, and knowledge would empower people against elite rule of any kind.
Nearly all of today’s campuses, in contrast, are both the incubators and lifeblood of the Socialist movement. Socialization is the prime rule. Combine this with a world where most parents believe that “each child must go to college”, and we have the recipe for a major societal revolution in the decades just ahead. Indeed, it is already happening.
As I wrote recently, while addressing another topic:
“On the political front, in the post Bernie Sanders era, many Millennials [born between 1984 and 2001] support government-mandated free college, free housing, a monthly wage for everyone whether or not they have a job, and the appeal of ‘socialism.’ Many even like the word or label of ‘socialism’, with over half of Millennials self-identifying as ‘socialist’.[vi]
“But, ironically, they have little appetite for the ‘struggle of the working class to create a socialist society.’ [vii] That’s too much work. And they certainly aren’t looking for ‘the long revolution’ to bring about socialism.[viii] They just want socialist programs handed to them by big government, without any personal struggle, sacrifice, or effort.[ix] Many Millennials seem to feel they ‘deserve’ such programs, without doing anything to earn them.”[x]
Comfort. Being taken care of. Staying in line. Not the struggle to accomplish or build. In a word: socialization.
This is largely the work of modern education, from elementary and high school to the colleges and universities, followed by the continuing adult “education” of mainstream media. Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises warned many years ago that this exact situation was coming.
As he put it: “The typical graduate of colleges and high schools very soon forgets most of the things he has learned. But there is one piece of indoctrination which makes a lasting impression on his mind, viz., the dogma of the irreversibility of the trend toward all-round planning and regimentation. He does not doubt the thesis that mankind will never return to capitalism, the dismal system of an age gone forever, and that the ‘wave of the future’ carries us toward the promised land of [socialism]. If he had any doubts, what he reads in newspapers and what he hears from the politicians would dispel them…. Thus the average man is predisposed in favor of socialism.”[xi]
Mises warned that college too often changes students, convinces them, frequently against the teachings of their parents and childhood communities, that experts are always right, or almost always right, and that government experts, those licensed or approved by the government, are especially right. A result of college is often the alteration of a young individualist who questions things, especially authority, to a socialized person who generally accepts almost everything an expert says—particularly if the expert leads with his/her prestigious or official credentials, or both.
Another result is the all-to-frequent habit of believing most of whatever is mainstream, without any independent, personal research on the topic. A kind of “educated” mythology has become part of our modern reality—created by formative years packed with a plethora of hours sitting passively in class, taking notes of what experts say, then memorizing and being tested, graded, and ranked on the basis of how well one agrees with the experts. Few individuals get out unscathed.
This weakening of the habit of independent thinking and speaking truth to power is one of the typical outcomes for many who finish college, Mises warned. For example: “A few years ago a House of Representatives subcommittee on publicity and propaganda in the executive departments, underthe chairmanship of Representative Forest A. Harness, investigated federal propaganda operations. On one occasion the committee had as a witness a government-employed doctor. When asked if his public speeches throughout the country presented both sides of the discussion touching compulsory national health insurance, this witness answered: ‘I don’t know what you mean by both sides.’”[xii]
Mises was not impressed. “This naïve answer” he noted, “throws light on the state of mind of people who proudly call themselves progressive intellectuals. They simply do not imagine that any argument could be advanced against the various schemes they are suggesting. As they see it, everybody, without asking questions, must support every project aiming at more and more government control of all aspects of the citizen’s life and conduct. They never try to refute the objections raised against their doctrines.”[xiii] They seldom show the other side, even in the halls of higher education. They prefer a populace, including the college-educated masses, who will listen, believe, and go about their work without much questioning.
“Many citizens hold educational institutions responsible for the spread of this bigotry”, Mises argued.[xiv] “They sharply criticize the way in which economics, philosophy, sociology, history and political science are taught at most American universities and colleges. They blame many teachers for indoctrinating their students with the ideas of all-round planning, socialism…. Some of those attacked try to deny any responsibility. Others, realizing the futility of this mode of defense, cry out about ‘persecution’ and infringement of ‘academic freedom.’”[xv]
Whether by denial or deflection, the universities usually manage to change the subject without ever answering the question: Why, in our time, do “liberal professors outnumber conservatives nearly 12-1”?[xvi] Why is only one side presented? Why aren’t all sides allowed the full light of day, and the students taught to compare, contrast, weigh, analyze, and work for their own conclusions? In short, why aren’t they taught how to think? Are these actually schools, or are they more like places of indoctrination?
Why do “39% of [the top] colleges have 0 Republican professors”?[xvii] This is the opposite of diversity, yet instead of considering this situation a glaring weakness, many schools seem proud of their status, of “drowning in blue”[xviii] and “Telling students what to think…not how to think”.[xix] As a researcher for the National Association of Scholars summarized a study of college faculties in 2016, “…78.2 percent of the academic departments in my sample [“51 of the 60 top-ranked liberal arts colleges”/universities] have either zero Republicans—or so few as to make no difference.”[xx]
If only those on the Left are allowed to teach our college students, who shows young people the other sides? Again, who teaches the students (and future or current voters) how to think, to consider different views and arguments, ponder and research, and develop their own conclusions? Who prepares them to think independently when they read or watch the news? Are they expected to treat the media like so many professors—and just accept what they are told? And why would any real teacher train students to “just accept and obey” in the first place, rather than consider, contrast, verify, and think?
Mises already provided the answer: “Yet what is unsatisfactory with the present-day academic conditions—not only in this country but in most foreign nations—is not the fact that many teachers are blindly committed to Veblenian,[xxi]Marxian and Keynesian fallacies, and try to convince their students that no tenable objections can be raised against what they call progressive policies. The mischief is rather to be seen in the fact that the statements of these teachers are not challenged by any criticism in the academic sphere. The pseudo-liberals monopolize the teaching jobs at many universities. Only men who agree with them are appointed as teachers and instructors of the social sciences, and only textbooks supporting their ideas are used. The essential question is not how to get rid of inept teachers and poor textbooks. It is how to give the students an opportunity to hear something about the ideas of economists rejecting the tenets of the interventionists, inflationists, Socialists….”[xxii] This is a very real dilemma, and the numbers are worse today than when Mises pointed them out.
III. What is Free Enterprise?
When Mises refers to “capitalism,” and “free enterprise,” he means something specific. What is it? The fact that so few people with long years of high school and college education, including graduate studies, can easily answer this question puts the quality of our educational systems in doubt. Here is the answer, in Mises’ typically Socratic way of asking questions:
“Do the American voters know that the unprecedented improvement in their standard of living that the last hundred years brought was the result of the steady rise in the per-head quota of capital invested?”[xxiii]
Stop here for a moment and be sure you clearly understand what he is saying. The American Dream, the rising standard of living that has become part of what most Americans consider a normal experience, at least until 2008, was based on freedom and entrepreneurship, but the key thing that makes it work is when freedom and entrepreneurship combine to increase the per-person amount of invested capital in the nation. When this level of available and utilized capital per person rises, the nation gets more prosperous. If it were ever to fall, most people would get much poorer. Quickly. It fell during the Great Depression, and during the crash of 2008-2011. Fortunately, it eventually bounced back—but only because changes were made to government policy that rolled back regulation and rebooted the levels of per-person capital invested in the economy. Mises’ next sentence continues this point:
“Do they realize that every measure leading to capital decumulation jeopardizes their prosperity? Are they aware of the conditions that make their wage rates tower above those of other countries?”[xxiv]
“What is needed is to make the importance of these problems understood by everybody. No party platform is to be considered as satisfactory that does not contain the following point: As the prosperity of the nation and height of wage rates depend on a continual increase in the capital invested in its plants, mines and farms, it is one of the foremost tasks of good government to remove all obstacles that hinder the accumulation and investment of new capital.”[xxv]
This is the key point, in a nutshell. If there is a continual increase in available capital,[xxvi] and effective entrepreneurs to employ it widely,[xxvii] the economy will grow, and if there is freedom, everyone will have the opportunity to benefit from the continual increase in available capital—in fact, their hard work and/or entrepreneurial success in such a system will further increase capital to the benefit of others. This leads to the growth and spread of wealth among the regular people. But when there is not a continual increase in capital along with freedom, then socialism—or some other form of top-down elite control—is at play, and the regular people get poorer and less powerful.
Again, few Americans today know this simple definition. Even fewer can immediately articulate it as the central economic reality of a growing versus declining economy. This is a failure at all levels of education, and an even more shameful reality in a society that spends so much time and money on higher education and media.
Those who claim to be socialists, or progressives or liberals, miss this point when they argue against profit. Mises put it succinctly: “The progressives consider profits as objectionable. The very existence of profits is in their eyes a proof that wage rates could be raised [by government force] without harm to anybody…”[xxviii]
But they “speak of profit without dealing with its corollary, loss. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all entrepreneurial activities. A profitable enterprise tends to expand, an unprofitable one tends to shrink.
“The elimination of profit renders production rigid and abolishes the consumers’ sovereignty. This will happen not because the enterprisers are mean and greedy, and lack these monkish virtues of self-sacrifice which the planners ascribe to all other people. In the absence of profits the entrepreneurs would not learn what the wants of the consumers are, and if they were to guess, they would not have the means to adjust and to expand their plants accordingly.”[xxix]
He continues: “The market system makes all men in their capacity as producers responsible to the consumer. This dependence is direct with entrepreneurs, capitalists, farmers, and professional men, and indirect with people working for salaries and wages….
“The economic system of the division of labor, in which everybody provides for his own needs by serving other people, cannot operate if there is no factor adjusting the producers’ efforts to the wishes of those for whom they produce. If the market is not allowed to steer the whole economic apparatus [free enterprise], the government must do it [socialism].”[xxx]
IV. What is Socialism?
Here Mises addresses another very important question: What is “socialism”? As with “free enterprise”, few people today can give an immediate, clear, and accurate answer. Mises makes it simple:
“Under socialism, production is entirely directed by the orders of the central board of production management [whatever it is called in a specific government, such as The Department of…X]. The whole nation is an ‘industrial army’…and each citizen is bound to obey his superior’s orders.”[xxxi] Note that these superiors are government officials.
Mises: “In the free economy, no production czar tells a man what he should do. Everyone acts for himself.”[xxxii] The word for this system, where no “czar tells a man what to do”, is “freedom”, or “free enterprise”. The word for “each citizen is bound to obey his superior’s orders” is not freedom. It is socialism, or some other type of authoritarian rule. Which begs the question: Why do a number of people who wantmore freedom for the regular people say they like socialism? Answer: They don’t understand what socialism actually is or does.
Free enterprise works because the consumers decide what the entrepreneurs and producers make and distribute. Whatever they purchase influences what businesses will make and offer in the future.[xxxiii] This gives more power to the regular people than any other social system in history. Nations that apply this model become wealthy, in a widespread way that gives more opportunity to almost everyone, and people from other nations flock to immigrate and partake in the numerous benefits of free enterprise. Note that very few people are flocking to leave free enterprise nations and immigrate to socialist countries.
Why then do socialists try to stop entrepreneurs and producers from delivering what the people want? In Mises’ words: “…the socialist writers are at least clear-sighted enough to see that simply to paralyze the market system results in nothing but chaos. When they favor such acts of sabotage and destruction, they do so because they believe that the chaos brought about will pave the way for socialism.”[xxxiv] This is precisely what much of modern media and academia do today.
“But those who pretend that they want to preserve freedom, while they are eager to fix prices, wage rates, and interest rates at a level different from that of the market, delude themselves. There is no other alternative to totalitarian slavery than liberty.
“There is no other planning for freedom and general welfare than to let the market system work. There is no other means to attain full employment, rising real wage rates, and a high standard of living for the common man than private initiative and free enterprise.”[xxxv]
V. Why Is Socialism Sometimes Popular?
Why doesn’t every high school and college graduate clearly understand this? If we put roadblocks in the way of continually increased capital, we only hurt ourselves, and our families. The biggest such roadblocks are government regulations and controls, and the level of taxes necessary to fund a government that is big enough to continually increase such government regulations. The reality is clear and simple: the regular people prosper in a free society where there is a continual increase in capital and opportunity, and the regular people suffer and society declines in a nation where there is instead a continual growth in government regulations.
“Then why isn’t everyone in our society today getting wealthy?” the critics of free enterprise will ask. Answer: Precisely because we are no longer a truly free enterprise system. We now apply more socialism than not. Not as much as some nations, it is true, which is a major reason why immigrants still want to come here, and not there. But we apply much more socialism than is good for true economic success for people at all levels of society—as a result, those at the middle and bottom end of the economy struggle much more than they would in a truly free enterprise system.
Also, our government, as it increases socialist regulation and policy, decade after decade, makes the spread of wealth to the regular people even more difficult. That’s what socialism does. This directly leads to more force-based government, because people are told that we are living in a free system but they don’t experience the benefits of vigorous economic opportunity. When they voice their frustration, too many politicians, professors, and so-called journalists answer that more government intervention in the economy would help everyone. The opposite is the actual truth, but too few people have the educational understanding to realize the lie—especially since it comes from sources they learned in schools to trust, namely academia, media, and Washington.
Mises put it clearly: “Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.”[xxxvi] Socialism always ends up with a small, elite ruling class and a nation full of people with poor or stagnant finances. So why would anyone consider socialism the best approach? Short answer: the socialists lie. Led by many of those in academia, media, and government.
A basic reading of history shows the wisdom of Mises’ words: “As the harbingers of socialism tell us again and again, socialism will not only make all people rich, but will also bring perfect freedom to everybody. The transition to socialism, declares Frederick Engels, the friend and collaborator of Marx, is the leap of mankind from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom. Under capitalism, say the Communists, there is bondage for the immense majority; in the Soviet Union alone there is genuine liberty for all.”[xxxvii]
These promises are all lies, Mises points out. How anyone with a basic knowledge of history can believe such an argument is almost inconceivable. But if the experts push it, and there are none to show another side, only a lot of personal reading and deep thinking is likely to expose the truth.
Instead, in too many cases, in most cases in fact, the message many college graduates remember is something like the following, as described by Mises: “The tycoons are too powerful, too rich and too big. They abuse their power for their own enrichment. They are irresponsible tyrants. Bigness of an enterprise is in itself an evil. There is no reason why some men should own millions while others are poor. The wealth of the few is the cause of the poverty of the masses.”[xxxviii] And, the conclusion: bigger government is the answer, and socialism is the solution.
All of these messages are pure mis-education. They are, however, subtle, and they have proven quite effective in convincing people, built as they are on layers of experts, credentials, and government certifications—and generations of youth trained to believe these sources without really questioning them. The more conveyor-belt schooling a person has, the more he/she has been encouraged to accept the words of experts and dismiss the words of anyone who doesn’t agree with the “accepted” “wisdom”. A few see through this, even with a great deal of formal education; many people don’t.
Mises continued: “Each word of these passionate denunciations [above] is false…. It is precisely the necessity of making profits and avoiding losses that gives to the consumers a firm hold over the entrepreneurs and forces them to comply with the wishes of the people.”[xxxix] This assumes, of course, that the government equally and impartially protects the freedoms and rights of all, big and small. Such an arrangement is called free enterprise. Sadly, socialist and progressive policies nearly always do the opposite.
In truth, it is through lack of real education that the nation falters. Those who don’t individually study history, and search out what really happens when socialism—in any form—is applied, are more likely to consider socialism a good idea. Socialism and widespread ignorance always travel hand in hand. In the long term, socialism has been a disaster for the regular people everywhere it was implemented.
Note the following pattern in history: Socialists win when they convince the people that socialism will make everyone more equally prosperous, and then the nation adopts socialism and the regular people get poorer and poorer. Any leader who actually deregulates the economy and unleashes free enterprise in a nation releases a huge economic boom; the socialists respond to such evidence by changing tactics, ignoring the economy, and loudly attacking the leader’s personality or background. When they win, meaning that another leader is put into office, one who rekindles socialist regulations and controls, the economy slows and the regular people get poorer. The socialist promises of prosperity for everyone never actually come to pass. Again, history is clear on this reality.[xl] But to know this, reading is needed.
Those who do such diligent reading of history usually find the truth. For example, unless a young person has read a book or two by Solzhenitsyn about socialism, and at least one by Bastiat, he or she is uneducated on the topic. Period. Read three books by Solzhenitsyn, and a person is ready to actually begin a real discussion about socialism. Supporters of socialism typically respond to this by trying to differentiate between socialism and communism, arguing that while communism may be bad, socialism is much better. But this is a distraction; the pattern above is common to both.
In Marxism, to be clear, socialism and communism have the same goals, just a different way of getting there. A third variant of socialism, social democracy, which is applied in many democratic nations, particularly in the West, shares the same goals as communism and socialism. Again, the methods vary, but the target is the same. Most importantly, the long-term trajectory of the regular people is the same under all these types of socialism, or similar enough to be considered the same by any honest observer. They get poorer.
This pattern is the same followed by socialists throughout history, and around the world. As noted above, sometimes they call themselves socialists, other times communists, and still other times social democrats, democratic socialists, progressives or liberals. Again, the pattern is the same. This pattern is not, of course, the idealistic theory of socialism, as many socialists like to point out, but it is what actually happens almost every time socialism and its variants are implemented. The exceptions are found only in the short term; in the long term all socialist regimes follow this pattern. In other words, this is the reality of socialism—over and over and over, regardless of the theory.
Mises concludes the point: “Men must choose between capitalism and socialism. They cannot avoid this dilemma by resorting to a capitalist system without entrepreneurial profit. Every step toward the elimination of profit is progress on the way toward social disintegration.”[xli]
VI. The Trifecta: Socialization, Sociality, Socialism
Moreover, as too few people understand, only when capital is plentifully available and the regular people are free to entrepreneur such capital into prosperity does a nation flourish economically. This doesn’t just happen automatically, despite the fact that many “educated” people have come to believe it does.
Mises: “Profits are never normal…it is not the capital employed that creates profits and losses. Capital does not ‘beget’ profit as Marx thought. The capital goods as such are dead things that in themselves do not accomplish anything. If they are utilized according to a good idea, profit results. If they are utilized according to a mistaken idea, no profit or losses result. It is the entrepreneurial decision that creates either profit or loss. It is mental acts, the mind of the entrepreneur, from which profits ultimately originate.”[xlii]
“In choosing between capitalism and socialism people are implicitly choosing between all the social institutions which are the necessary accompaniment of each of these systems…. If control of production is shifted from the hands of entrepreneurs, daily anew elected by [the choices] of the consumers, into the hands of [government officials], neither representative government nor any civil liberties can survive.”[xliii]
Of course, in the current environment, the quick skim of history that passes for “education” in too many schools, including many colleges and universities, doesn’t prepare us very well. We must read deeply. Thus the idea that free enterprise is the lifeblood of freedom, and that socialism is just another means of elite domination, is a contrarian viewpoint today. It also, however, happens to be true.
This dichotomy has nearly always been with us, to be accurate. Courtiers in Egypt and later Rome shook their heads at the independence-oriented choices of the Israelites, medieval aristocrats scoffed at the same freedom-loving traits in entrepreneurial merchants, and the British wondered why the American colonists would adopt such “rebellious” and “unsociable” views in the 1770s. Why not just pay the tea tax and get along with everyone? Why rock the boat? Why put limits on government? What kind of people are these Americans, anyway, with their insistence on principles over obedience, and independence over sociality?
Yet the Americans called such “sociality” what it really was—submission to the rule of elites. In our day the same independent approach is still frowned upon by elites, and other people who have been convinced or conditioned to spend their lives trying to impress elites and aspire to elitist cultural standards and values. Why try to impress and follow elites? Because: too much of modern “education” presents it as the classy, normal, tasteful, acceptable thing to do. The socialists have done their work.
Spreading this kind of socialization in our nation was time-consuming and difficult, but now socialization has become the norm—in action, if not in name.
Sad.
Washington and Jefferson didn’t approve of trying to impress such “Tory” thinking in their time, and I highly doubt they would approve of trying to impress elites today. We should follow the Jeffersonian wisdom on this, not to get along, or to fit in, and not to impress elites, but because freedom is worth taking a stand. It’s the right thing to do.
VII. Will Socialism Succeed or Fail in Our Time?
And let’s be clear: socialism is absolutely the opposite of freedom. The more socialism spreads in a society, the more the regular people struggle to make ends meet, and the more their standard of living decreases.The longer socialist policies endure, the worse it gets, and the less power the regular people have to improve their situation. This is the repeated legacy of socialism. In the communist application of socialism it happens quickly, while it occurs more slowly under social democracy. But it happens, eventually, in all forms of socialism—at least, it always has.
Again, some will argue that this occurs because societies fail to implement the “real”, or “pure” form of socialism. “If only we apply socialism the right way this time,” they argue, “things will work out differently.” But nobody has done it the “right” way in a lasting system. Instead, over and over, those trying to implement socialism have repeated the same predictable mistakes. Given this reality, why would anyone want to repeat such a consistent error of history by adopting any level of socialism?
Ironically, I think many Millennials who say they are “socialists” actually mean that they don’t like the current system. Since they are told in school, inaccurately, that in the current system we are already following a free enterprise approach, that this is the source of their generation’s problems, and that socialism is a different model that brings more prosperity to the regular people, they naturally cheer for socialism. The reality that every socialist-promoted “fact” in the last sentence is a lie can only become part of the dialogue if Americans take the time to deeply learn the truth, ponder the options in detail, think critically, and choose wisely. Most of academia and the media, despite promises to the contrary, actually act against this approach.
Socialism, by whatever name, is now the mantra of most schools, universities and media outlets. The future of our nation literally depends on effectively overcoming this reality. This is going to call for people who stand up, stand out, and reject the orthodoxy of trying to impress elites and elite-promoted values.
Notice #1: Efforts to impress the elites end up allowing more socialism and hurting us all, including our economic opportunities, our freedoms, our families, and our future.
Notice #2: The elites won’t be impressed anyway. The only thing that actually impresses them (and simultaneously frustrates them) is when the regular people stand up and implement real freedom. Free enterprise does this; socialism does the opposite.
Notice #3: Every step toward further socialism decreases the power and long-term prosperity of the regular people, and gives more power to a small class of elite rulers. The socialists say the opposite, but they have been wrong every time socialism was implemented in history. It’s time to reject their lies, even those that are well-intentioned.
Notice #4: Unless Millennials, and other generations as well, actually learn what socialism does to the regular people (not what it claims, but what it actually does to them), they are on track to repeat this tragic mistake of history.
Notice #5: Whenever any politician or party promises anything for free, it is being subsidized by elites, nearly always the very elite corporations and corporate interests that socialists claim to despise. Why do elites subsidize free things (college tuition, healthcare, housing, raised minimum wage, etc.)? Answer: Because they find ways to pass this expense on to the regular people, and, also, this approach gives them the power of masters over the people they subsidize (slaves, or slaves in training). That’s actual socialism.
In free enterprise, private property ownership and entrepreneurship is the basis of freedom, prosperity, security and progress. According to socialism, in contrast, private property ownership and entrepreneurship is the “root of all degeneration in society.”[xliv]
A philosophy that believes private property is evil is going to take it away from the regular people—making them poor. That’s socialism. Pure and simple.
And then, as time passes, it will make them increasingly poor. And since a lot of people like material things (like land, food, shelter, clothing, etc.), and want them, a system dedicated to taking these things away from most people is going to force, hurt, kill, torture—whatever it takes to get all the property taken away, and keep it that way.
As a result, regardless of what the promoters say when they are trying to implement socialism, the large majority of people actually living in a socialist system will have little freedom, less prosperity, and little, if any, security or progress.
In addition, a few of those who are given the power to oversee the process (government officials) are going to want to keep a little or a lot more than everyone else—for themselves and their family. This is what always occurs under socialism. In actual free enterprise there are rich and poor, and many in the middle (and opportunity for those at the bottom and middle to rise); in actual socialism there are a few very, very rich and extremely powerful at the top, and everyone else is very, very poor (with no opportunity to rise).
Please do yourself and your posterity a huge favor, and tell this all to a Millennial.
NOTES
[i] The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White.
[ii] The Cricket in Times Square, George Selden.
[iii] The actual quote was “…peace for our time”, but it has been misquoted to the point that Chamberlain is often given credit for both sayings.
[iv] See, for example: Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers; Will Durant, The Lessons of History; William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning; Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Geoffrey West, Scale; Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks; Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles; Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilization.
[v] See John Adams, Discourses on Davila.
[vi] American Institute for Economic Research, Max Gulker, December 2017, “Over Half of Millennials Identify as Socialist: Here’s How to Change Their Minds”
[vii] See, for example: The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg, June 30, 2018, “The Millennial Socialists Are Coming”; The American Interest, Ben Judah, “What Is Millennial Socialism?”; chicagotribune.com, Heather Wilhelm, July 9, 2018, “Why are millennials so hot for socialism?”
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Ludwig Von Mises, 2008 Liberty Fund version, Planning for Freedom, 141.
[xii] Ibid., 125.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] The Washington Times, October 6, 2016.
[xvii] One News Now, May 5, 2018. Study by the National Association of Scholars (NAS).
[xviii] Ibid.
[xix] Ibid.
[xx] Ibid., Mitchell Langbert.
[xxi] See, for example, The Theory of the Leisure Class.
[xxiii] Ibid., 33, emphasis added.
[xxiv] Ibid., emphasis added.
[xxv] Ibid., 37, emphasis added.
[xxvi] Ibid., 33-37.
[xxvii] Ibid., 151.
[xxviii] Ibid., 12-13.
[xxix] Ibid.
[xxx] Ibid., 13-14.
[xxxi] Ibid., 53.
[xxxii] Ibid.
[xxxiii] Ibid., 143.
[xxxiv] Ibid., 14.
[xxxv] Ibid.
[xxxvi] Ibid., 83.
[xxxvii] Ibid., 111, note that Mises wrote this before the fall of the Soviet Union.
[xxxviii] Ibid., 161.
[xxxix] Ibid.
[xl] Op Cit., Toynbee through Huntington, as outlined above.
[xlii] Ibid., 151.
[xliii] Ibid., 172.
[xliv]See Maxim Trudolyubov, 2018, The Tragedy of Property, 71-72.
Category : Aristocracy &Blog &Business &Citizenship &Community &Constitution &Culture &Current Events &Economics &Education &Entrepreneurship &Featured &Generations &Government &History &Independents &Information Age &Leadership &Liberty
The Jefferson-Madison Debates: The Problem with the Supreme Court Today
November 13th, 2018 // 7:31 am @ Oliver DeMille
I.
The Supreme Court is the biggest potential danger to the United States.
Too strong? Not really. Thomas Jefferson warned a long time ago that the Supreme Court would eventually be the downfall of the Constitution and even the United States.[i] His concern was simple: there are no effective checks or balances on the Court. When push comes to shove, the Court can rule whatever it wants by majority decision. And that’s that.
It is also why the demonstrations were so intense during the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings and confirmation vote, and the election a month later. It is the main reason such undue pressure—some natural, some funded by Leftist billionaires—was brought to bear against certain Senators during the hearings and in Senate and House races during the election. And why savvy observers on both Left and Right, as well as many Independents, feel uneasy even after the hearings and elections are over. An indelible image remains for anyone who closely watched the protests: Americans standing and clawing helplessly on the giant doors of the Supreme Court building, apparently wailing in forlorn agony.
Why the anguish? Why the writhing and screaming, the threats and promises of more theatrics to come? Why the secretive tactics of politicians and the widening divisions of American politics? It’s more than just anti-Trumpism, or extreme party squabbling. Something else, something deeper, is at play here. But what is it, exactly? What’s all the fuss about?
Answer: Jefferson had it right. The truth is that the Supreme Court has too much power. It can rule whatever it wants. And whatever it decrees isn’t even called a “decree”, or “edict”, but rather a “finding” or “judgment”. It all sounds objective, clinical, innocuous, but the power is real. Indeed, the modern Court “finds” what the Constitution means, and announces such “findings” to the rest of us, to the peons. This isn’t what the Framers had in mind. Make no mistake, the “peons” are everyone that’s not a majority Justice on the Court. Five people can rule us now, on pretty much anything.
This brought the Left to its extreme tactics in 2018. A fifth Right-leaning vote would lead to the biggest nightmares people on the Left can imagine: a government that outlaws abortion, rules unfavorably on homosexuality, or implements laws that raise one race or religion above others or certain races or religions below the rest. Such laws might be extreme or mild, but even the so-called “mild” ones seriously threaten the deepest values of the Left. Imagine a “mild” law that requires your [race, or religion, or whatever it is] to obey a more harsh set of laws than any other race or religion, or face annual penalties. Suddenly it’s not so mild.
For those on the Right, the danger is just as real. If the Court can do any of the things just listed above, a five-decision majority by some future Court, or the current Court with just one Justice switching sides on a specific decision, can also create the nightmares of the Right: drastically regulating religion and the way people worship, or outlawing religious practice, entirely outlawing guns except for those carried by government agents, taxing at extreme rates or government fixing of prices in the economy, ending state sovereignty and making all states the same (becoming mere enforcement hubs of the national government), or outlawing all education except mandatory public schools.
If a future Court rules 5-4 on any of these things (say massive regulation of religion and forcing people to worship a certain way outlined by Washington D.C., or outlawing all firearms except those carried by police and secret government agents), members of the Right may well find themselves clawing and wailing at the front doors of the Court. Or, not unlikely for some people, refusing to obey, and facing the violent consequences. If Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016 and appointed a second Justice to the Court in 2018, how would the Right have responded? And if Trump gets to appoint a third Justice, or even a fourth, the backlash will likely be even more extreme.
There are at least two major issues at play in all this:
- First, we’ve had partisan majorities on the Court before—so why is this such a big problem right now?
- Second, what can be done about this situation? How can we fix the problem, before it becomes a violent battle within our nation, a new Civil War of some kind?
II.
The answer to the first question makes the second even more relevant, because the types of issues currently at the center of the division are matched in U.S. history only by the rift between North and South prior to the Civil War. The Court mirrored the nation in this divide, and bad Court decisions just before the War fueled the problem. However, no single Court decision caused the Civil War, largely because the national divide was sectional—meaning the large majority of people in Southern states, and the large majority in Northern states, respectively, were willing to allow the different states to do their own thing, different from any universal national decree, and the Court went along with this. Thus the battles were mostly fought outside the Court.
Today’s scenario is different. The national division is now found in every state, and while some states lean Left or Right, there is no clear Sectionalism, no geographical region in the nation where almost everyone loves the values of the Left and hates the values of the Right, or vice versa. There are, of course, Blue coastal states that typically vote Left, and a Red state interior that votes largely Right, but in each state there is also a significant rural-versus-urban division in values, as well as a large number of Independent voters who side some Left and some Right (at differing levels and without formal organization). Likewise, there are significant generational divisions in terms of Left-versus-Right values, which manifests in most organizations, and even families.
Given this new arrangement, a Civil War in today’s world would literally pit neighbor against neighbor, and in many cases sibling against sibling and lots of Boomer/Gen X parents against a number of Millennial/Gen Z offspring and youth. This divide extends across the nation, to every state and almost every neighborhood and home. This is the exact kind of potential conflict the Supreme Court was created to prevent. Unfortunately, by forcing itself into numerous unconstitutional arenas that it was supposed to leave to other branches and levels of government, the Court has sacrificed much of its original moral authority. It has far too much power in some things, and not nearly enough moral power now to address some of the main reasons for which it was established. This is both ironic and dangerous.
Some observers argue that the real danger now, as opposed to just before the Civil War, is that the Court has become hyper-partisan. This is a problem, but it isn’t the problem. More on that later.
First, it’s worth noting that hyper-partisan divides on the Court are inevitable. The Framers didn’t want political parties, but they knew there would be strong political divisions at times—and that on occasion this would extend to the Court. When such divisions are based around core values, the Framers wanted the Constitution or the voters to have the final say–not five individuals in black robes. The Court was designed to address the two sides of any specific case, as needed, but not to create a general legislative framework or law for everyone.
Moreover, the Court isn’t equipped to deal with the realities of hyper-partisanship. It is structured in a particular format that doesn’t translate to the nuanced needs of fixing the nation’s political and values divide.
Specifically, the Court hears cases and decides a winner and loser in each case. This doesn’t lend itself to long-term solutions of problems that require deftness, flexibility, and widespread individualization. That’s why the Framers put all legislative powers in the hands of Congress, state legislatures, and local representative and even fully democratic bodies (e.g. Townships and Town Meetings, at the neighborhood level of local governance). Legislation is needed to address multiple, leveled, complex negotiations and outcomes. No decision of the Court can do this, not even with well-articulated dicta (since the words of the majority opinion are open to wide interpretation, without the benefit of floor debate, hearings, rebuttals, direct amendments, etc.).
For example, consider one of the largest value divides in current American politics. The Left often hurls claims of “racism” or “sexism” when fighting battles with the Right; the Right tends more to claims of “Socialist” when battling the Left (it once appealed to “Atheist” as well, but this has lost much of its sting in recent decades). If such a battle were taken directly to the Court (it’s hard to imagine a case so perfectly aligned), the decision of the Justices, whatever the arguments of the two sides, would choose a winner and select a loser.
The winner would immediately tend to promote its entire ideology as vindicated by the Court; the loser in this case would try to narrow the scope of what the Court actually decided, but the moral loss would be real, and no doubt a lot of the nation would refuse to accept the decision. And for good reason: If the Court declared you a “racist”, a “sexist”, or a “socialist”, would you just shrug and agree? Most people wouldn’t, regardless of how much they revere the Court in other matters. Their mind and gut (or pride) would tell them that the Court got it wrong in this instance, because you know better than the Court whether or not you’re actually a racist, sexist, or socialist. If you’re not, the Court “finding” is just plain wrong, no matter how many Justices decide against you. On the issue of core values, the Court has little appeal to truth, regardless of how much authority it claims.
The reality of such a divide is much better worked out in the legislative branch. Specifically, the claims of some on the Left that many on the Right are racist and sexist turn out to be mostly false, but partially true. There are a some racists on the Right. But, to be clear and accurate, most people on the Right are not racists. Same with sexist. Also, to be clear, there are some on the Left who are racists as well, along with some sexists.
On the other side of the argument, claims from the Right that most Leftists are socialists turn out to be largely false, but partially true. There are some socialists on the American Left. In the younger generation, there are more who claim to be socialists than in older generations. And there are also a few socialists who claim to be on the Right. Moreover, there are a lot of people who define the word “racist” differently than others, and the same applies to “sexist” and “socialist”, further muddying the waters. Indeed, there are nuances to all such claims.
A Court (no matter how erudite) that is required to decide cases by majority, giving a win to one party in the case and a loss to the other, can’t effectively deal with this level of ambiguity and legislate for the whole nation. The Court is well equipped to deal with one thing: an individual case, with its own set of facts, applicable laws, details, nuances, unique circumstances, etc. This is why the Framers gave us the kind of independent, supreme, and empowered court that they did—to deal with each case as needed. Not to legislate for the entire nation, all in the name of precedent.
The problem with precedent is obvious: no two cases are the same. Trying to apply the “findings” in one case to almost any other case changes, by definition, the actual “findings” to a more general legislation, and the Court has no constitutional authority to legislate. Articles I, II, and III are clear about this. Except, of course, for the legislative authority the Court has unilaterally usurped over the years. The use of any such authority by the Court is, of course, unconstitutional, illegal, and wrong. We’re using here the definition of “unconstitutional” used by the American Founding generation, meaning in conflict with the words of the actual Constitution and Amendments. The Court has also usurped this word, defining “unconstitutional” as whatever the Court says is unconstitutional. How convenient for them. And, let’s be honest, this is itself unconstitutional according to the original meaning of this word as used and intended by the Framers.
III.
Hyper-partisanship is a problem because it catalyzes extreme views and even extreme actions. When the Court becomes part of the frenzy, it loses its power to peacefully resolve the greatest problem of all free nations—irreconcilable divisions about the use of force, law, and state-imposed violence against citizens (including large groups of citizens, be they protestors, political parties, etc.). The purpose of the Court was to reconcile just such divisions without requiring bloodshed. This is why the Framers gave the Court final judicial power in any given case arising in the nation.
The problem with such levels of power is that…well…the holders of such power might use it poorly. Corruptly. Ignorantly. Or, unwisely. To see the potential danger of this possibility, imagine the mobs and violence that would ensue in certain parts of the United States if the Court reversed Roe v. Wade and made all abortions illegal. Or, alternatively, ruled that ownership of any gun is illegal, or that people of one skin color (yours, for example) don’t have any more rights under the Bill of Rights, or that all members of one religion (yours, again) may no longer legally practice their faith. Wherever you stand politically, one or more of these probably sounds drastic to you—worth fighting against, possibly even worth dying for.
The problem is that the Court, as currently understood by most Americans (including some of the Justices), has the authority to do any of these, or all, along with a number other things equally drastic. So when the Court seems to be swinging one way or the other, a lot of people are going to feel deeply threatened. Their most cherished values seem to be in peril. In some cases, they truly are in peril.
Let’s get personal. If the Court decided some certain things, you would likely be willing to fight to the death to stop them. One of those things might be on the list above, or it may not. But something could probably cause you to stand up and fight, and whatever that thing is, the Court has the power to decide it. Its power and reach is basically unfettered, at least in theory. It likely won’t do the kinds of things that make large masses rise up in blatant or even violent refusal. But it has that power. That’s the rub. The protestors clawing at the door of the Court could have been you, given the right situation. And such a situation may still come. For many on the Left, it is a daily worry that such a thing might happen. For many on the Right, the same worry weighed them down for 8 years under Obama (after all: with a Left-leaning President in the White House, one who openly ridiculed religion and gun ownership, among other things, and a Centrist carrying the swing vote on the Court, they reasoned that almost any decision was possible—and they would be even more worried with a significant Leftist majority on the Court).
Ultimately, few Americans should feel safe in their deepest values when the Court can do as it pleases. Jefferson warned of this when he first read the Constitution. And hyper-partisan efforts typically exacerbate the problem. For example, when the Democratic majority in the Senate strategized to get rid of the power of the filibuster and push things through with just a simple majority vote, it mocked Republicans who felt a major loss of their own minority power. Some warned that the time would come when Democrats would feel the other side of this same decision. It happened less than a decade later, when voters put Republican majorities in both House and Senate. At this point, Democrats mourned the loss of filibuster power—but it was too late.
Today many Republicans feel a sense of relief that the Court leans Right, at last. But things have a way of swinging to the other side of the pendulum—at some point the Court may lean strongly Left. As long as the Court has too much power, half the nation is going to live under threat of serious peril.
Something needs to give.
IV.
What can be done to fix the problem? First, a number of proposals have already been made. Jefferson put it succinctly:
“At the establishment of our constitutions [both federal and state], the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous…that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors [cases] only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions nevertheless became the law by precedent, sapping by little and little the foundations of the Constitution, and working its change by construction, before anyone has perceived that that indivisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance.”[ii]
Strong words. The Framers wanted to reject the old-world practices of judicial precedent and political parties, and they tried to write the Constitution in a way that would elect officials without political parties and create a Supreme Court and judiciary that decided individual cases but created no precedent from any case or dicta. A clear reading of the Constitution, particularly Article III, shows this—as do the Federalist Papers and writings of the leading Framers and other Founding Fathers. Jefferson continues:
“There is no danger I apprehend so much as the consolidation of our government by the noiseless, and therefore un-alarming, instrumentality of the Supreme Court.”[iii]
No bigger danger to the United States? This is serious business. Today, as mentioned, the same threat is even bigger. Jefferson wrote that “One single object” would significantly improve the Constitution, specifically, “that of restraining judges from usurping legislation. And with no body of men is this restraint more wanting than with the judges of what is commonly called our general government [the federal government], but what I call our foreign department.”[iv]
Note that Jefferson calls the federal government “our foreign department”, since if the Constitution is followed the only powers of Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Supreme Court are to protect the nation from outside attack and keep the peace between the states. Everything else is left to the states, or the people in a more local setting. And, of all three branches of the federal government, Jefferson was most worried about the usurpation of power by the federal courts.
But what exactly were the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, doing that was so bad? Why was Jefferson so concerned? He says that the Judges and Justices “are practicing on the Constitution by inferences, analogies, and sophisms as they would ordinary law.”[v] He declared that the Justices didn’t seem to realize that the Constitution was written to them as much as to other branches of government.
To repeat: the Constitution was written to limit the Court, too, and the Framers and those who ratified the Constitution believed that the Court and Justices would be required to obey it. Justices have the authority to use inference, analogies and other arguments to apply the laws of the land, made by Congress, or by state legislatures, but they have no authority whatsoever to do this to the Constitution. The Constitution itself forbids it. The Court is supposed to apply the Constitution to any case it hears, and it can review and apply ordinary laws—those made by Congress, following the Constitution—to a case as well, but neither the Justices nor federal judges get to restructure or redefine the Constitution by informing the rest of us what the document means. The Court, according to the Framers, is just as bound by the Constitution as the President, the House, or the Senate. It can’t just announce that the Constitution means whatever a majority of the Court wants it to mean—or “finds” it to mean. At least, that’s what the document itself allows.
Jefferson warned that ignoring this part of the Constitution would lead in the wrong direction: “Our government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit, by consolidation first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the federal judiciary; the other two branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments.”[vi]
What exactly does he mean by “consolidation”? Answer: the Court at the time was announcing that it had the Constitutional authority to determine the meaning of the Constitution—each word and phrase (the Court would later claim that their power applies even to ideas not actually mentioned in the document). Jefferson questioned where in the Constitution this authority was given? What Article, what section, what phrase. The response, from members of the Court, was that this was the natural course of the Court’s power. In other words, no such power exists in the Constitution itself, but the Court could do it anyway because that’s just what Courts do.
Jefferson disagreed. He maintained that, while the Courts in Britain had at times wielded such power, the U.S. Constitution specifically and purposely changed this type of jurisprudence. The Framers (and those who ratified the Constitution in all 13 colonies) didn’t want the judicial branch in the United States to follow the British model, to consider itself above the law, able to “find” and “decide” what the Constitution means. Again, the federal judiciary was designed by the American Framers to apply the Constitution, to hold the Executive and Legislative branches, and the states, to the bounds of the Constitution in any given case.
But neither the Framers nor the words of the Constitution give the Court any authority to define or determine its own power, and certainly not the authority to consider itself above the Constitution or re-frame the meaning of words and phrases in the Constitution by judicial review or decision. No such power exists in the Constitution, and it was written this way on purpose. Nevertheless, the early Court adopted such powers, usurping them, and the Executive and Legislative branches submitted to such power, not based on the words of the Constitution (indeed the words are the opposite) but based on the fact that so many American lawyers were steeped in the customs and habits of English law.
As mentioned above, Jefferson saw this as the biggest threat to the American system and Constitution. Following the English approach, instead of the Constitution, was a major mistake. And it was unconstitutional.
Why did anyone allow it to happen? The Court did it to expand its power. This is easy to understand—government entities almost always try to expand their power. But what about the other two branches, who were designed to check and balance each other and the Court?
Answer: By allowing the Court to do this, the Executive and Legislative branches in Washington received a huge benefit—the “consolidation” (Jefferson’s word) of power away from the states and local governments and into the House, Senate, White House, and federal bureaucracies. In essence, as Jefferson warned beforehand and later pointed out when it actually happened, the Congress and Executive Branch looked the other way and allowed the Court to unilaterally crown itself the final power in the nation—to say what the Constitution means and doesn’t mean, by a majority decision of just 5 people, with no check or balance that can contradict it. As a reward, the Congress and Executive Branch get to rule the nation in all things, as long as the Court agrees, instead of being limited by the specific words of the United States Constitution.
This is our problem today. Jefferson’s warning has come to pass, “by little and little”,[vii] just as he said it would. He even forecast how the Court would do this, by calling foul what it was already doing in his time: “…it has proved that the power of declaring what the law is ad libitum [optional, up to the decision of the judge], by sapping and mining, slyly, and without alarm, the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force cannot dare to attempt.”[viii] According to the Constitution and its Framers, its words and meanings were not optional: the government, including the Court, had to follow it. But the Court decreed differently. Jefferson, and anyone who simply reads the Constitution for its original meaning, disagrees.
“Consolidation” also meant that once the Court centered power away from the states and locales and vested most of it in Washington D.C. (the opposite of the Framers’ intent), the Court would continue “consolidating” power from the Executive and Legislative branches to the Court. Again, Jefferson’s own words:
“We already see the power [of the Court]…advancing with a noiseless and steady pace to the great object of consolidation. The foundations are already deeply laid by their decisions for the annihilation of constitutional state rights, and the removal of every check, every counterpoise, to the engulfing power of which themselves are to make a sovereign part.”[ix]
In short, the Court decreed itself the sovereign, the final power and highest authority in the United States—above the Legislative, above the Executive, above the States, even above the Constitution itself. If the Court gets to decide what the Constitution means and doesn’t mean, and everyone else must obey the Constitution, the Court is the crown. In this case, in fact, the Court is the only power in the nation that doesn’t have to obey the Constitution, since it can simply change what the Constitution means whenever five Justices agree.
Jefferson’s response? He warned, in strong language:
“Before the canker become inveterate, before its venom has reached so much of the body politic as to get beyond control, remedy should be applied.”[x]
And what is the “canker”, the “venom”? The nation ruled by the Court.[xi]
Clearly, Jefferson had a lot to say on the topic. After all the blood and sacrifice given by his generation, he wanted the Constitution to last, and he predicted that the flawed, and unconstitutional, use of power by the Court would eventually spell our nation’s decline. If five people can rule, some group of five eventually will exercise this power in the wrong ways—either by malice or error, as Jefferson put it.[xii] It may take a long time for this to happen, but when it does, the nation’s freedoms will be forfeit. Indeed, once such power is used, it will be used again and again.
We are on the cusp of such usage. And given the growth of partisan rancor over the decades, we now seem closer than ever before. Such a watershed event may occur while five Justices lean Right, as they do now, or at a later date when 5 lean Left. But if [when] it happens, the United States will be no longer a limited federal democratic republic; or free.
The fact that the wrong side of this debate is now being taught to nearly all law students in nearly all law schools is a serious problem. Most law students, and almost everyone else close to the legal profession, now fully adopt and promulgate the British system of jurisprudence, as applied to the United States–the very thing that Jefferson was so worried about–instead of the actual meaning of the U.S. Constitution as written by the Framers and ratified by the states and the people. The result is an internal coup, subtle but real—like Squealer in Orwell’s Animal Farm, sneaking into the barn at night and changing words in the laws that all the animals agreed upon when they were first inscribed in chalk on the barn wall. No wonder Jefferson called it “sly”, “silent”, “usurping”, “sapping” of our “foundations” toward our “destruction.”
Remember his solemn warning:
“There is no danger I apprehend so much as the consolidation of our government by the noiseless, and therefore un-alarming, instrumentality of the Supreme Court.”[xiii]
V.
The remedy Jefferson recommended is simple: Follow the Constitution.
Specifically, as it relates to our time:
- Demand that the Court (or any lower court) stop pretending it has Constitutional authority to tell everyone what the Constitution means. The United States Constitution does not grant the Court any such authority. Read it. No such grant is found. This tradition is simply a holdover from the way English lawyers were trained; and most early American lawyers were trained in the same way. But while the English Constitution allows this, the U.S. Constitution does not. (Again, we’re referring to the U.S. Constitution as written, and ratified, along with Amendments, not as defined and redefined by the Court.)
- Citizens can read the Constitution for themselves, and see what the Constitution means. After all, the Constitution was written by the people to the government (including the judiciary), telling the government (including the Court/courts) what things it can and cannot do.
- The Supreme Court, as outlined in the Constitution, should apply the Constitution, as applicable, to all cases. Any such application must apply to that case only—it must not create a precedent (any precedent is a legislative act, which the U.S. Constitution doesn’t allow the Court). This same Constitutional limit must be binding on all courts operating under the Constitution. Again, many early American lawyers trained in the English system got this wrong by applying their English training to the United States. But where significant parts of English law promoted stare decisis, or precedent, the U.S. Constitution patently does not.
- A lower court may look to a higher court or even a Supreme Court decision and judicial dicta for wisdom; but any court decision—by any court, including the Supreme Court—must only apply to that one case. This makes it constitutional, by the Framers’ definition–the only definition that the people of the United States ever ratified.
The greatest obstacle to this change (ironic that the “change” is simply to follow the actual Constitution and Amendments) is the same in our day as it was in Jefferson’s time: Nearly all attorneys, judges, Supreme Court Justices, law professors, and legal scholars are trained almost solely in the other way of doing things—where the Court is allowed, even expected, to unconstitutionally defy the words of the Constitution and follow the now-accepted tradition of the Court acting above the Constitution. Most of them literally believe that, for all practical purposes, the Constitution means whatever the Court decides it means. Many, if not most, believe that it actually should be this way. They refer to this as the American style of jurisprudence.
If by “American” we mean the intent of the Framers who wrote the Constitution, and the people and state representatives who ratified it, nothing could be further from the truth. There is a way provided in the Constitution to amend it, to change it, and this has nothing to do with what Jefferson called the quiet “sapping and mining, slyly, and without alarm, the foundations of the Constitution”[xiv] by Court decisions, dicta, and precedent.
Remember how strongly Jefferson opposed this. He forcefully declared:
“At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous [members of the government]…that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors [cases] only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions nevertheless became the law by precedent, sapping by little and little the foundations of the Constitution, and working its change by construction, before anyone has perceived that that indivisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance.”[xv]
He really means this. It’s a serious problem. And Jefferson noticed the danger at its infancy. Today we face it full-grown and spread across the nation, now part of nearly every civics textbook, social studies curriculum, U.S. history lesson, college university, law school, late-night talk show, movie, television legal drama, media outlet and government branch, agency, court, and institution. The idea that the Court is above the Constitution, that in fact the Constitution is whatever the Court decides, has become part of a national myth. Yet it is both unconstitutional[xvi] to the core and antithetical to the intent of the Framers. In this much worse iteration, it presents itself to the world as fact. No debate needed. No discussion. End of story.
Five rulers.
No recourse.
What a predicament. We live now, unfortunately, in interesting times, as the old Chinese proverb warned. In truth, from the vantage point of the Framers’ intent, we experience a serious Constitutional crisis in this nation every time the Court delivers a decision that in any way assumes the Court gets to decide or alter the meaning of the Constitution. If the Framers had intended this arrangement (for the Court’s authority to include changing the Constitution in any way), they would have characteristically required a 2/3 or even a 3/4 decision by the Court on any such question, and additionally required a 2/3 or 3/4 consent by at least one other branch of government. They demanded this for amendments, and for treaties, both of which they knew could change the Constitutional law of the land. But they didn’t require anything like this in Court decisions, simply because such decisions were only designed to apply to one case, never intended to legislate by precedent—itself a major unconstitutional change to the Constitution.
Had judicial defining and redefining of the Constitution, or creating legislation by precedent, been the intent of the Framers, all the founding commentary about amending the Constitution would apply. Federalist Papers 39 and 85 are among the best explanations of what is needed to amend the Constitution, and why, and what should be considered in any amendment process, or anything else that changes the Constitution—yet these documents wholly ignore Supreme Court decisions. Why? Again: Because any Court decision was, according to the Constitution, and the Framers, applicable only to a given case—creating no precedent whatsoever.
VI.
As far as I can tell, this leaves us three options. I would be very interested to consider others that readers come up with, or find, but these are the three I can currently conceive.
Option One: End the practice of judicial precedent. This immediately puts decisions about core values back in the hands of the voters. The Court will no longer legislate. The fear of 5-person rule will disappear.
The courts will become a more powerful line of defense for the accused, a place where someone who believes the laws are bad [or don’t apply] in a given case, and that true justice will take this into account in their specific case, can turn for remedy with more efficacy. The courts will also stand once again for the actual Constitution (not the ad libitum version of it they make up as they go), holding other branches and all levels of government to its standard—not whatever they can “mine” from history, individual views, or any other source.
Again, this was the original intent of the Framers. On a practical level, of course, this is a major shift. Every law school would have to be entirely revamped, and every practicing lawyer and legal thinker would need to scrap much of what they’ve learned and refocus their legal knowledge in a whole different direction. Every citizen, potential juror, would also need a new education on freedom. A good change to our society, no doubt. But far from easy.
Option Two: If we can’t—or choose not to—end the practice of legislation by judicial precedent, which (as mentioned) is really an alternative legislative power that largely skirts the voting electorate, we will need to amend the Constitution to include the kinds of checks and balances the Framers always required to change the Constitution. Specifically, on any Court decision that redefines, in any way, the meaning or scope of the Constitution and Amendments from their original meaning, the Court will need to decide by a 3/4 majority, and receive the consent of either 2/3 of Congress or 2/3 of State Legislatures, or both. The numbers could be flipped, meaning Court decision by 2/3 with the consent of 3/4 of state legislatures and/or 3/4 of Congress (or, if not these precise arrangements, something similar).
These are high marks, to be sure; but they are exactly the standard the Framers required for any actual, lasting change to the Constitution. The other kind of change to the Constitution, from treaties, demanded similar arrangements, as outlined in Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. If the Court is going to be allowed to change the Constitution and meanings of words or phrases in the Constitution by precedent, or infer meanings as it chooses, the Framers would demand such changes/amendments to meet at least the same standard—and we as their inheritors should accept no less.
Option Three: If we don’t fix the problem, we will, as Jefferson forecast, see a major decline in freedom and eventually lose our Constitutional system. Rule by five individuals in black robes is much closer to full implementation right now than in Jefferson’s time; and under the current system, given this flaw in the way the Court is allowed to behave, it will inevitably come—unless we address this and make changes. Make no mistake, unless changed this will ruin the entire system, and our entire nation.
The sad part of this all seems to be that, given human nature, when the Left had a majority on the Court, it was content with the system that favored its views; more recently the Right has discovered the same type of comfort with a Right-leaning majority on the Court. Eventually, however, this system will not hold. Government power always tries to centralize, and then expand and dominate. It has already centralized to the Court and those it holds close as allies. No limits, checks, or balances stand in the Court’s path to the crown. Sovereignty has already consolidated from the people and states to Washington, where it has been rapidly expanding for decades.
Now, 5 Rulers need only exert their power. History proves that, unless this power is limited, or at least effectively checked and balanced, it will eventually be used in ways detrimental to all. Unless something changes in this model, the corrupt execution of this power is inevitable.
*To learn the 3 specific, effective things we as citizens can do about this issue, that will really make a difference, read FreedomShift by Oliver DeMille—available here >>
[i] Collected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Bergh, vol 15, p 241.
[ii] Ibid., p 486.
[iii] Ibid., p 241.
[iv] Ibid., vol 16, p 113.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid., vol 15, p 31.
[vii] Ibid., vol 15, p 486.
[viii] Ibid., vol 16, p 113.
[ix] Ibid., vol. 15, p 355.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] See ibid., vol 1, p 120.
[xiii] Ibid., vol 15, p 241.
[xiv] Ibid., vol 16, p 113.
[xv] Ibid., vol 15, p 486, emphasis added.
[xvi] The original meaning of “unconstitutional”, not the “new” definition of “unconstitutional” self-servingly adopted by the Court.
Category : Aristocracy &Blog &Citizenship &Community &Constitution &Culture &Current Events &Education &Generations &Government &History &Independents &Leadership &Liberty &Politics
Jefferson-Madison Debates: Mobs, Mobs, Everywhere
October 24th, 2018 // 7:31 pm @ Oliver DeMille
Rising Emotions, Rising Problems
If you’ve watched the news recently, you’ve seen a lot of protestors. They protest policies. Proposed policies. People. Statues. History. Elected officials. Nominated officials. The police. Men. Women. Business and University heads. Visiting speakers. Other races. Other religions. Government officers having dinner with a spouse. The national anthem. Wall Street. Bill Clinton. George Bush. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. Obamacare. The latest war. The list goes on and on.
When the Left agrees with something a big protest is promoting, they frequently call it a Peaceful Protest, even if the reality is a bit less than “peaceful”. If they disagree with the group, like during the height of Tea Party demonstrations, they call it a Mob. The Right often does the same thing–Peaceful Protests if they agree, Mobs if they don’t.
Of course mobs, demonstrations, and protests have been around a long time. In ancient Greece, they were seen as the most dangerous threat to any established government. In modern-day Europe, they frequently take on a highly violent tone–at times moving from Protests to full-blown Riots in just minutes. And who can forget the symbolic power of great protests in history, like students gunned down at Kent State, or the man who stayed in front of the tank in Tienanmen Square and put his own life on the line for change?
But are mobs, or protests, effective? Do they typically achieve the things the marchers want? Indeed, do they ever really obtain the stated goals? Tienanmen Tank-Man isn’t running China today, the Tea Parties didn’t get Obamacare repealed or Obama to scale down his rhetoric. Trump isn’t caving in to protestors either, and the Supreme Court is made by elected officials, not mobs. Even the truly violent riots in Europe have resulted mainly in hiked-up budgets for police and military response units. The one exception to this rule seems to be on American campuses, where many universities routinely change policies, leadership, direction, and even what they teach as facts (!) in the classroom in the face of mob demands. Elsewhere, however, protestors seldom bring lasting change.
What Next?
I recently read a very thought-provoking article on this topic, and I recommend it for all Madison-Jefferson Debate readers. If you’re like me, you won’t agree with everything you read in it, but you’ll agree with some, and it is full of ideas that are poignant and timely. The article is in the October 2018 issue of The Atlantic: “James Madison vs. the Mob”, by Jeffrey Rosen.
Enjoy the read. And ponder, debate, and think about this. It’s a true sign of our times…
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/568351/
Category : Blog &Citizenship &Community &Constitution &Culture &Current Events &Economics &Education &Featured &Generations &Government &History &Independents &Information Age &Leadership &Liberty &Politics &Postmodernism
The Madison-Jefferson Debates: What Isn’t True
August 7th, 2018 // 1:22 pm @ Oliver DeMille
Reality or… Not?
Some things just aren’t true, even if we think they are. Even if we are assured that “everyone” says they’re true; and even if the experts—almost always unnamed—have formed a consensus on the matter. Actually, the more you get know the experts, the more you realize they aren’t in consensus on almost anything.
Now, let’s be clear. A lot of what we’re told is true. But not everything. And that’s why sometimes it’s important to take a step back and really dig into things. Research. Find out. There are whole websites dedicated to setting the record straight about urban myths, generally accepted “truths”, quotes that are attributed to someone who never said those words, etc. We give “Pinocchios” to politicians who fib, and “Fact Checker” is a growing career field in the Information Age. (Is it really? Or does it just seem like it? Ask the question on Google and you can spend hours studying the various listings. Or ask the same question on social media and wade through hundreds, or even thousands, of opinions.)
Falling for Everything
Here are few items that most people consider truth. Unassailable. Set in stone. Incontrovertible.
- Lie Detector Tests
- DNA Evidence
- Election Polls
- Carbon Dating
Which are sure? Which are certain? Not all. Do you know which of these are fully accepted by the experts in the field—no exceptions? Answer: none. All of the above are rejected by at least some experts, even where a majority of experts agree. Have you studied the arguments, evidence, tests and conclusions on each? Or any? Note that even where the science is firm, like with DNA evidence for example, the way experts present such science is at times incomplete or misleading. Or, another example, even if the statistics used in a pre-election survey are accurate, the wording of a specific survey question can skew the entire result; and what if survey respondents are afraid or ashamed to tell the truth, like in the 2016 U.S. presidential election when many voters didn’t want people to know they planned to vote for Donald Trump? In such cases, the math and the science can be technically correct, but the way experts use them turn out “wrong”, because all the variables aren’t controlled.
In short, on many things we simply know less than we need to. And yet most people are comfortable making decisions based on things they know very little about—just taking someone’s word for it. It’s a habit for most people.
But things are not always what they seem. Truth isn’t always what the experts claim. This doesn’t mean that every crackpot theory questioning the experts is correct. But it does suggest that we should be independent thinkers who read the original data or studies where possible and scrutinize things for ourselves. Independent thinking is required to maintain independence. This is obvious, isn’t it? But most people don’t follow this approach.
Time to Think
For our Madison-Jefferson conversation this week, I’m recommending the attached article. It is a great read, and an important one. It demands that we look at things more deeply, and think more wisely. It calls us to research more, question more, dig deeper, and not just accept conclusions at face value. It is one of those articles everyone should read and deeply consider. Agree or disagree, this article will make you think!
Enjoy…
How Social Science Might Be Misunderstanding Conservatives >>
Category : Aristocracy &Blog &Business &Citizenship &Community &Constitution &Culture &Current Events &Economics &Featured &Generations &Government &History &Independents &Information Age &Leadership &Liberty &Mission &Politics &Producers &Prosperity &Science &Statesmanship &Technology
The Jefferson-Madison Debates: The Third Layer
July 17th, 2018 // 7:08 am @ Oliver DeMille
“When technology advances too quickly for education to keep up,
inequality generally rises.”
—Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee
“Your true greatness comes when you focus not
on building a career but on finding your quest.”
—Vishen Lakhiani
“Engaged students are 16 times more likely to report being academically motivated than students who are not engaged. Finding ways to engage the 40% of students who are not engaged would have a significant impact on their academic motivation.”
—Quaglia Institute
Foundations
Education is like a map. Or, more precisely, it mirrors the entire field of maps and map-making.
Understanding the massive change now occurring in how we make and learn from maps is in many ways directly applicable to the coming changes in education. And like in education, many people in the older generations (born before 1980, or even 2001), don’t understand that a major revolution is ahead—one so big that what we call a “map” today won’t even qualify as a map in twenty years. (And much of what we call an “education” today won’t even count as education two or three decades from now.)
The pre-modern map (Layer One) emphasized the physical traits of the earth: continents, oceans, seas, rivers, mountain ranges, islands, etc. More advanced pre-modern maps included things like ocean currents, the altitudes of mountain peaks, and the trade routes most effectively used by overland and shipping merchants.
During the modern era, we added governments to our maps (Layer Two): national borders, towns, cities, capital cities, provinces, states, counties, etc. This was part of the great shift from pre-modern to modern. Governments and their jurisdictions became as prominent in world affairs as the natural physical features of the earth. People using maps needed to know what government they’d be dealing with in a given spot as much as where the ocean currents would take them and what mountains or rivers they’d need to traverse.
Further Up and Further In
The current shift from modernism to post-modernism is equally momentous. Our maps now require another set of symbols, colors, and words—to tell us what we need to know about our world. The physical features on the maps (continents, oceans, rivers, mountains, lakes, etc.) are still there, as are the political borders that tell us what government controls each area on the illustration.
But now a third layer of understanding is superimposed on top of the physical and political levels of each map. Most people haven’t even seen such maps yet, so they think of a “map” as something made up of Layer One (mountains, rivers, oceans, etc.) and Layer Two (borders, cities, etc.). They barely fathom what else could be needed.
The post-modern Layer Three is based on what Parag Khanna calls “Connectography.” For example, look at a traditional map of Africa. The Nile is there, and the Cape. The Horn of Africa is obvious, along with the Sahara. There are regions of jungle, and large swaths of savannah. Then there are the many nations and their borders—most of them originally established by European plantation owners. Capital cities are listed in bold letters, the names of nations in larger type.
But where is Layer Three? At its most basic, Layer Three shows highways, airports, and hospitals. In a more detailed Layer Three map, you might find illustrations showing the route of pipelines, Internet cables, or even power lines. These were the simple beginnings of Layer Three maps. A little more advanced Layer Three maps don’t just tell you what road to take, they tell you how long it will take to arrive in current traffic—or redirect you if an accident occurs and is now blocking traffic. They are cast in real-time and they are always changing—truly interactive. Layer Three is a major upgrade.
But more is coming. For example, narrow the map of Africa to Kenya or Ghana. Where are the hotspots of Internet usage? Where are the Internet deserts? What about smartphone usage rates? What food is shipped to a place, and can you get the kind of banana and cereal you want while you are visiting? If you want salmon for dinner, will what you are served be farm raised or wild? – Come from the Atlantic or the Pacific? What nation’s laws governed the fishermen who caught your dinner? Such information tells you a great deal about the probable quality and freshness of what you’ll be eating, and whether or not to even order it.
Put these on the map, and you’ll begin to see how Kenya, Ghana, or any other nation in Africa, or anywhere else in the world, is actually connected. Not understanding such connectivity—or its absence in a certain area—is akin to not knowing what the political lines denoting borders signify on the map. Such ignorance basically renders the user of the map illiterate.
Consider an almost-absurd example, to illustrate:
“Are these lines just very straight rivers?” a total map novice might ask. The laughter that follows is kindly, but surprised. “How can anyone not know about government borders on a map?”
In the future, however, this will apply to much more than national borders.
A Missing Piece
Another Layer Three example is very important: For example, on the map of Kenya, what natural resources are owned by or contractually promised to Chinese companies or the Chinese government? Versus what resources are owned by or contracted to U.S. firms? Or Canadian?, Dutch?, Japanese?, Italian?, British?, French?, German?, Korean?, Indian?, etc. What multi-national companies have their own security forces at work in these places—governing, citing, controlling? Where have they blocked mobile phone and Internet service—and why? If you know the Layer Three map of Africa this way, you’ll understand the world in ways other people simply cannot grasp. As Khanna put it: “China’s relentless pursuit of [natural resource contracts around the world] has elevated…to the status of a global good on par with America’s provision of security.”[i]
In other words, if anything happens militarily in the world, the U.S. is sure to get involved (or at least consider getting involved); and if anything happens concerning natural resources—oil, minerals, food, wood, precious metals and gems, water, etc.—China is sure to jump in. It likely already has contracts signed and sealed. In fact, put alliances and treaty requirements on the map, and something stands out: China owns numerous economic resources around the globe that the U.S. does not. Moreover, as of 2015 the United States was bound by treaty to defend 67 nations in the world; China was only bound to protect 1.[ii]
In short, a lot of global resources and money are slated to flow to China in the decades ahead (it has already begun), while huge assets and cash are scheduled to flow away from the United States. One has an economy that is programmed to head up, the other down. If you don’t consult a Layer Three map, this information is unknown.
Look at the map with the Layer Three approach, however, and the future becomes immediately clear: It belongs to China. The U.S. and Europe[iii] are falling further and further behind. This is obvious on a Layer Three superimposition.
But remove Layer Three and all you have are the continents, oceans, lakes, mountains, political borders, cities and towns. Nothing about Levels One or Two tell you that China is on the rise—with contracts across the globe, and a growth rate in ownership of natural resources and supply chains for these resources that all but assure them monopoly status in the decades ahead. And this example, China, is only one of the many hugely important things missing from Layer Two maps—which are the only ones most of us ever engage.
To reiterate: the pre-modern and modern maps fail us. They don’t even tell us what we need maps to communicate (rather than merely travel) in order to help us make the best local decisions. As a result, the old maps are almost worthless. They are historical relics, but not the most effective tools of decision-making or strategy.
For that, we need Level Three maps superimposed on the older models. As Joshua Cooper Ramo put it: “Ball up your right hand into a fist. Take your left hand and open the fingers wide. Hold the hands a few inches apart. You can think of your left hand as the vibrating, living network of connection and your balled-up fist as concentrated power. Right hand, Google Maps; left hand, millions of Android phones. This is the picture of our age.”[iv] But it is only an early picture. By the time you read this, will Google Maps and Android phones be replaced by something more advanced? Not unlikely.
What is Not Seen
Again, most people today have no idea this is happening. At least not at this scope, or pace. Many feel a general sense of a rising challenge, even a threat, from China, for example. But they don’t know what it means, why it is real, or how it is developing. They have no clue how to prepare for or address it.
The same is true of education. To wit: geography is still taught in two layers—much like it was in the 1960s. Technology makes it easier to teach and learn, but Layer Three tools and Layer Three thinking are absent in all but a very few out-of-the-box classrooms or learning environments. As Toffler put it, too many of today’s young are being raised to show up on time, do repetitive tasks without complaining, follow instructions, and memorize a great deal of knowledge without deeply understanding it. This is the focus of most schools.
These three lessons—punctuality, repetitive work, and rote memorization—routinely pass for what we call “education.” They are, in fact, the key lessons of schools in modernism. The pre-modern era emphasized “the 3 R’s: readin’, ’ritin’, and ’rithmetic,” and these prepared the young for success in the agrarian economy. Likewise, the three lessons above were often effective training for landing and keeping a job during the industrial age.
But today’s emerging information economy demands something different. Success now demands the Third Layer of education. It includes the kind of knowledge learned from the 3 R’s and also post-World War II schooling in history, literature, math, science, and social studies, but it also superimposes a Third Layer of education as well, which is more attitudinal and skills based: initiative, innovation, creativity, resilience, ingenuity, tenacity, recognizing opportunities, go-getter-ness, and entrepreneurial risk-taking.
The Third Layer is as different from most modern public and private schooling as the typical 1960s, 1980s, or 2000s high school or elementary was from the one-room schoolhouse. If the pre-modern age gave us Mary and Laura in the Little House series, studying at home or the local school (which was also the town hall, town theater, and community church), the modern age gave us the high school of Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, High School Musical, Dead Poet’s Society, One Tree Hill, 90210, or even 22 Jump Street.
All are outdated now. All fail to prepare our nation’s youth for the actual economy of the 21st century. We are still training the young to succeed in a world they can only study about in history books. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to note that the more time they spend in the modern school system, including the increasingly outdated university campus, the less prepared they’ll likely be to compete effectively in the rough-and-tumble emerging global marketplace with its worldwide competition and demands.
For example, a university degree isn’t what it used to be: The average graduate from the class of 2016 had $37,000 in student debt and couldn’t get a decent job in his or her field—or in any other equivalent field. There are of course exceptions, but the numbers of those leveraging college degrees into effective careers significantly decreases each decade (Note: in North America, Europe, and Latin America, but not in China). In short, today’s young adults are too often receiving a Layer Two education in a world that demands Layer Three knowledge, choices, and skills.
Past, Present, and Future
Few current students are being taught the skills of success that are needed in the new economy. The real economy. Layer Two schools simply do not teach initiative, ingenuity, or innovation. They don’t purposely teach chutzpah, audacity, grit, wise risk-taking, entrepreneurialism, or nerve.
Note that these are precisely the character traits that made America the world’s superpower. And Britain before her, and earlier, Spain and Portugal. These are the very traits that put Egypt at the top, then the Greek city states, and later Rome. These are the characteristics that gave the Gauls, Franks, Anglos and Saxons their edge.
They didn’t have Layer Three maps, to be sure, but they engaged in their era’s “Layer Three” education of the youth, teaching them the skills of resourcefulness, inventiveness, and daring in the face of difficulties. Some of these societies emphasized good purposes (such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, etc.), while others embraced less noble goals (aristocratic rule of an elite class over the rest of the people, dominance over neighboring nations, a pursuit of wealth through violence, etc.).
But whatever their dreams—good or bad—it was Layer Three skills (initiative, boldness, pluck, enterprise) that lifted every great-power nation in history to the top. As the society that now holds this spot, we (North America, and to a lesser extent Europe) are stunningly lax about teaching these traits. We increasingly downplay them as unimportant and even unattractive. Even “against the rules”. As a result, we have lost our edge. We have largely lost our drive. Too many modern Americans have lost our shared vision and purpose. Unity is a thing of the past.
Indeed, Americans were once unified in the goal to spread freedom, opportunity, and prosperity to the world. Now, the best we seem to be able to muster is a hope to afford college for our kids, and that they’ll get a safe, secure career with good benefits—and as little fuss or struggle as possible. Most colleges themselves seem committed to shielding our young adults from challenges, difficulties, thinking, and any diverse or challenging ideas. This is not the behavior of a nation on the rise. It is the opposite. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, we are castrating the stallions of the younger generations, then hoping they’ll be fruitful.
But apply Layer Three to the map. Where in the world do we find whole populations burning passionately with drive, initiative, innovation, nerve, entrepreneurial risk-taking, resilience, a hunger to achieve, audacity, ingenuity, resolve, and tenacity? Where do we find the largest concentrations of people who thrive in the face of uncertainty and embrace whatever is hard, and flourish even in an environment of impermanence and difficulty?
When you find a lot of people who have these traits, note where they live. Not in North American or Europe (at least not in large concentrations). In our modern American schooling/career system, for example, our major focus seems to be avoiding uncertainty, impermanence, and difficulty—yet these are the unavoidable realities of the global economy.
Through the Magnifying Glass
Look even closer. Enter this data electronically on a map and you’ll find these traits in China. Indeed, the heartbeat of China is a new “eye of the tiger.” A similar fire burns in India, and a less populated but angrier flame blazes across the Middle East. Layer Three also shows us the rise of such passion in parts of Latin America, Africa, and Russia. These are trigger-points of the decades just ahead.
Where such passion does show up in North America—from California to British Columbia, from Texas to New Hampshire to Newfoundland to Florida, it is usually personal, career-oriented, and commercial. A better job. A marketable education. A promotion.
These hardly match the resolve or intensity of China and its new economic allies across the developing world. They want to lead the world, change the world, and do great things. They want victory, and they see their lives as part of a battle.
In Europe the irony is even more pronounced. The Layer Three map shows numerous pockets of extreme passion in the nations of the E.U.—but zoom in, and you’ll note that most of the people with this kind of fire in the belly are usually recent immigrants from the Southern half of the globe.
The one great exception in North America and Europe is the entrepreneurial class, those who Steve Jobs called the dreamers, the rebels, and the risk-takers. They graduate from college and reject job offers from the Fortune 500 to pursue risky start-ups or launch non-profit charities. Or, increasingly, they skip college altogether, or drop out, and get started on their business or charitable ventures even younger, with an edgier, more idealistic and relevant education.
Their Layer Two parents and grandparents try to talk them out of such endeavors, but these young people have a hunger that typical education and careers won’t fill. They are a Remnant, throwbacks to the earlier Americans who got on the Mayflower, worked and died in Jamestown, went West by horseback or wagon to explore, start, create, and change things. They are the New American Founders, enlightened and ennobled by hindsight of the mistakes of the past, and impassioned by their view of the future – and we desperately need them.
We need a generation of them.
Now.
In the Now
If you are one of their parents or grandparents—worried that your youth are making such choices, decisions that make no sense to you—you can relax. Yes, the kind of risky leadership they are engaging is scary to the older generations who were raised to seek security. But the Third Layer maps clearly show that we no longer live in an era of security.
Even young people who follow the traditional path of college and career suggested by their elders will find that for most people it doesn’t endure in the new economy. We are in an era of tumult, change, and uncertainty—and this is only going to increase for the next few decades.
Those who try to live by Second Layer rules will fall further behind. College degrees won’t bring most of them secure jobs, and seemingly secure careers will suddenly be lost to recessions, new technologies, outsourcing, mergers, regulatory changes, companies sold to foreign investors, and competition, along with a host of other unforeseen realities.
Indeed, those who will do the best in the new economy—whose contributions and livelihoods will end up being the most secure—will be the new entrepreneurial class. The innovators. The roll-with-the-punches change agents. Those who can think, lead, initiate, and wisely assess risk. We are indeed entering the Age of Risk, and this massive shift in the world economy is here to stay. Business has already caught on and is changing things to meet the new reality. But education is still in denial, along with most in government.
Sadly for those who allow themselves to be swayed by the current denial of many in the educational sector and Washington, people caught in Second Layer thinking will be the losers of the next thirty years. The winners will be Third Layer risk takers who tenaciously create ways to succeed in the new environment. Who make a way.
Many of them are already looking at the world through the lenses of Third Layer maps and mindsets, and they understand something very real: The future is theirs. Moreover, our future is in their hands.
The more we can do to help and support them, the better things will turn out for all of us. The successes and failures of our entrepreneurs will determine the future. Just as it has determined the past.
Fall or Rise
This reality causes serious concerns. Anyone who takes a good look at the current university campus model of learning finds a number of problems. Not the kind of challenges that demand reform, mind you, but rather a systemic, structural network of problems that will require a true educational revolution. The need for change is, to put it lightly, drastic.
Just consider the following commentaries by some of today’s top thinkers on the topic of the emerging economy and its ties to the type of education we now need. For example, MIT’s Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee wrote, in a section of their book labeled “Failing College”:
“Richard Arum and Josipa Roska…and their colleagues tracked more than 2,300 students enrolled full-time in four-year degree programs at a range of American colleges and universities. Their findings are alarming: 45 percent of students demonstrate no significant improvement on the CLA [Collegiate Learning Assessment, which tests ‘critical thinking, written communication, problem solving, and analytic reasoning’] after two years of college, and 36 percent did not improve at all even after four years.
“The average improvement on the test after four years was quite small…. What accounts for these disappointing results? Arum, Roska, and their colleagues document that college students today spend only 9 percent of their time studying (compared to 51 percent on ‘socializing, recreating, and other’), much less than in previous decades, and that only 42 percent reported having taken a class the previous semester that required them to read at least forty pages a week and write at least twenty pages total.
“They write that, ‘The portrayal of higher education emerging from [this research] is one of an institution focused more on social than academic experiences. Students spend very little time studying, and professors rarely demand much from them in terms of reading and writing.’
“They also find, however, that at every college studied some students show great improvement on the CLA. In general, these are students who spent more time studying (especially studying alone)…”[v]
The authors also wrote: “The good news, though, is that technology is now providing more…opportunities than ever before. Motivated students and modern technology are a formidable combination. The best educational resources online allow users to create self-organized and self-paced learning environments—ones that allow them to spend as much time as they need with the material, and also to take tests that tell them if they mastered it.”[vi]
Futures Past
The quality of learning in such online venues is very often extremely high. For example, when a graduate level AI course at Stanford was opened to participants on the Internet for free, over “160,000 students singed up for the course. Tens of thousands of them completed all exercises, exams, and other requirements, and some of them did quite well. The top performer in the course at Stanford, in fact, was only 411th best among all the online students. As Thrun [the instructor] put it, ‘We just found over 400 people in the world who outperformed the top Stanford student.’”[vii]
Likewise, “…Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, notes that college degrees aren’t as important as they once were. Bock states that ‘When you look at people that didn’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.’ He noted in a 2013 New York Times article that the ‘proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time’—on certain teams comprising as much as 14 percent.”[viii]
Mindvalley founder and CEO Vishen Lakhiani wrote: “I’ve personally interviewed and hired more than 1,000 people for my companies over the years, and I’ve simply stopped looking at college grades or even the college an applicant graduated from. I’ve simply found them to have no correlation with an employee’s success.”[ix] Sadly, too many people still hold on to old educational models that no longer deliver what they once did, or what they now promise.
Lakhiani put it this way: “But here’s the problem. Most of us are using systems that have long [since] become obsolete. As Bill Jensen said in his book Future Strong: ‘Even as we enter one of the most disruptive eras in human history, one of the biggest challenges we face is that today’s systems and structures still live on, past their expiration dates. We are locked into twentieth-century approaches that are holding back the next big fundamental shifts in human capacity.’”[x]
Bestselling author Neil Pasricha told the following story: “A senior partner at a prestigious global consulting firm once said to me after a boozy dinner: ‘We find Type A superachievers from Ivy League schools who need lots of reward and praise…and then dangle carrots just over the next deadline, project, and promotion, so they keep pushing themselves. Over every hill is an even bigger reward…and an even bigger hill.’”[xi] This is enlightening. It’s not the actual education the big corporations are looking for as much as a sense of over-achievement and needing lots of rewards and praise.
Look at this same scenario from the student’s viewpoint. Is this really the career environment we want our young people to pursue? Is this the life we want for them, or the use of their talents that will best benefit the world—or bring them the most fulfillment and happiness? Sometimes, the answer may be yes. But very often, it isn’t.
Billionaire Paypal co-founder and educational innovator Peter Thiel said it even more bluntly: “Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?”[xii] After happily reminiscing that he eventually took the entrepreneurial path of founding tech companies instead of following his major in graduate school, Thiel said[xiii],
“All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past.”
The Next Normal
The modern college/career system, which is increasingly Level Two education in the new economy, is more and more outdated. In the book Platform Revolution, technology experts Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary argue that the old-style university model is surviving largely because government regulations keep true innovators from competing on anything close to a level playing field.[xiv] If this were to change, no doubt online educational platforms would do for education what Amazon has done for bookstores (and other retailers), Uber has done for taxi services, Wikipedia has done to the encyclopedia publishing industry, and online news sources have done to many newspapers.[xv] Again, over 400 online students tested better than the top Stanford student in the exact same class.
Parker, Alstyne, and Choudary wrote: “The long-term implications of the coming explosion in educational experimentation are difficult to predict with certainty. But it wouldn’t be surprising if many of the 3,000 colleges and universities that currently dominate the U.S. higher education market were to fail, their economic rationale fatally undercut by the vastly better economics of platforms.”[xvi]
Just imagine much cheaper and higher quality higher educational offerings for all. Consider the work by Khan Academy,[xvii] Minerva,[xviii] Peter Thiel, and other educational innovators. If the government ever ends the current educational monopoly supporting the old-style conveyor-belt approach to higher education, the results will likely dwarf the kind of change we witnessed with the advent of cable television programs, or when Ma Bell was deregulated and replaced by an entirely different kind of telecommunications.
Parker and his colleagues also noted:
“In the years to come, the spread and increasing popularity of teaching and learning ecosystems will have an enormous impact on public school systems, private schools, and traditional universities. Barriers to entry that have long made a first-class education an exclusive, expensive and highly prestigious luxury good are already beginning to fall.
“Platform technologies are making it possible for hundreds of thousands of students to simultaneously attend lectures by the world’s most skilled instructors, at minimal cost, and available anywhere in the world that the Internet is accessible. It seems to be only a matter of time before the equivalent of a degree from MIT in chemical engineering will be available at minimal cost in a village in sub-Saharan Africa.
“The migration of teaching to the world of platforms is likely to change education in ways that go beyond expanded access—important and powerful as that is. One change that is already beginning to happen is the separation of various goods and services formerly sold as a unit by colleges and universities. Millions of potential students have no interest in or need for the traditional college campus complete with an impressive library, a gleaming science lab, raucous fraternity houses, and a football stadium.”[xix]
They’d rather pay a lot less and get a better learning experience.
Focusing In
“Education platforms are also beginning to unbundle the process of learning from the paper credentials traditionally associated with it.”[xx] The authors note that many students now “…appear to be more interested in the real-world abilities they are honing than in such traditional symbols of achievement as class transcripts or a diploma.”[xxi] They want to learn knowledge and skills that help them achieve their life and financial goals, not traditional symbols that no longer really work in the 21st century economy.[xxii] Results-Based Learning is increasingly in demand.
For example, “A high ranking on TopCoder, a platform that hosts programming contests, will earn a developer a job at Facebook or Google just as fast as a computer science degree from Carnegie Mellon, Caltech, or MIT. Platform-based students for whom a traditional credential is important can often make special arrangements to receive one—for example, at Coursera, college credit is a ‘premium service’ you pay extra for.”[xxiii] Another example is Duolingo, a crowdsourcing foreign language platform that is teaching more people a foreign language than all the students studying foreign language “in high school in the U.S. combined.”[xxiv]
“Once there is an alternative certification [to college degrees] that employers are willing to accept,” Parker and his colleagues affirm, “universities will find it increasingly difficult…. Unsurprisingly, developing such an alternative certification is among the primary goals of platform education firms such as Coursera.”[xxv] Other organizations are trying to build such educational platforms as well, including Udacity, Skillshare, edX, and others.[xxvi] Even top specialty schools, like MIT and Julliard, are offering open enrollment online courses. (Their selling point is often focused on “Learn from the MIT faculty,” or “Learn from the Julliard faculty,” a nod to the new reality that mentoring is becoming even more important than institutionalism.)
No doubt more innovative higher educational options will thrive (and at the high school level as well), until some of them restructure modern education like eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Uber, the Internet, or Google have done for other fields. As far as student learning is concerned, numerous self-produced online tutorials, on platforms like YouTube and others, provide excellent educational opportunities—both to learn and teach.
All of these developments and trends are part of Third Layer education, and they are almost universally moving away from outdated traditions, methods, and beliefs of conveyor-belt-style education and schools. A new economic era is already here, and for those who know what to look for, new educational models are rising to support what is now needed. Third Layer, Results-Based learning is the future of effective education. The focus is on individualized learning, thinking, and applying rather than conveyor-belt schooling.
The new maps are here, if we’re willing to look.
(This topic is addressed in more detail in Hero Education by Oliver DeMille, available here>>)
[i] Parag Khanna, 2016, Connectography, xvii.
[ii] Harper’s Index, Harper’s Magazine, September 2015.
[iii] The Brexit and election of Donald Trump didn’t seem to make much difference in this trend. See, for example, Geoffrey Smith, “The Brexit Crisis That Wasn’t,” Fortune, October 1, 2016; See also, Jeff Immelt, “After Brexit, Global is Local,” Fortune, August 1, 2016, 71-72.
[iv] Joshua Cooper Ramo, 2016, The Seventh Sense, 122.
[v] Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, 2014, The Second Machine Age, 197-198.
[viii] Cited in Vishen Lakhiani, 2016, The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, 24.
[xi] Neil Pasricha, 2016, The Happiness Equation, 150.
[xii] Peter Thiel, 2014, Zero to One, 36.
[xiv] See Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Sangeet Paul Choudary, 2016, Platform Revolution, 263-268.
[xvii] For example, see commentary in Brynjolfsson, 199.
[xviii] For example, see commentary in Parker, 268.
[xxvi] See, for example, ibid., 265.
Category : Blog &Business &Citizenship &Community &Culture &Current Events &Economics &Education &Entrepreneurship &Generations &Government &History &Independents &Information Age &Leadership &Liberty &Mini-Factories &Mission &Politics &Producers &Prosperity
