ELSEWHERE

Fun! Keith Burgess Jackson is still socking it to Brian Leiter with a new post titled "Leiter's Nietzschean Descent into Madness". Keith's consistent use of cool logic to pull apart what Leiter says seems to have got the abusive old blowhard a bit worried at least.

Riesman on Nazism: "My purpose today is to make just two main points: (1) To show why Nazi Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one. And (2) to show why socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship.... When one remembers that the word "Nazi" was an abbreviation for "der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei - in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers' Party - Mises's identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with "socialist" in its name to be but socialism? Nevertheless, apart from Mises and his readers, practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed".

I thought I might make a brief mention of a book that has just recently come out in English called The Fabricated Luther. The book refutes the weird Leftist claim that Luther was responsible for the rise of Nazism! Since Hitler was a Catholic and had his main base of support in Germany's Catholic South, that always was a lulu but it is good to see the full story about Nazism and Lutheranism set out. The modern-day Left will blame Nazism on everything except what it should really be blamed on: Socialism.

End federal flood insurance: "Federal flood insurance transfers wealth from lower income earners to the more affluent, encourages people to build homes where they should not be built, and promotes disasters such as the one in New Orleans. Congress should not use our money in this way. One way to prevent future disasters such as New Orleans is to have fewer people living in flood plains. But federal policy takes the opposite approach - it pays people to live in flood prone areas through federally funded flood insurance. This has cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars to date, and the policy is made even worse by the fact that it transfers wealth from taxpayers who don't own property, to those who do. It is a form of welfare for the more affluent and politically powerful"

San Francisco irresponsibility: "Lost in the shuffle of post-election analysis this week was news that San Francisco voters approved a military recruiting ban on high school and college campuses.... In so doing, voters showed an astonishing disregard for the give and take of citizenship, and a deep disrespect for American military personnel. Such rash actions arise from a post-Vietnam anti-war activism that is no longer content with objecting to war on principled grounds, and is instead determined to eliminate the military all together. It is deliciously ironic then, that so many of these activists reside on the West Coast, a nice target for, and well within the range of, North Korean nuclear missiles. Who would the good people of San Francisco call upon for defense - the fire department? Or what happens when Islamic extremists take down the Golden Gate Bridge, who would hand down justice - the local library staff?"

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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