RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/22/friedman-freedom-and-the-road-to-serfdom/

I just came across and article which reminded me that Nov. 16 was the 15th anniversary of the death of Milton Friedman, one of the past century’s greatest advocates of freedom. As someone who has followed his writing for most of my adult life, I can barely believe he has been gone that long. On the other hand, the abyss between the freedom he advocated and the world we now inhabit is so vast, I can barely believe he has only been gone that long.

That great gap makes me believe that now would be a good time to think back to some of Friedman’s insightful words. But his prolific output makes it hard to choose (rather than “Free to Choose“) among them when faced with limited space. How much further we have moved along what Friedrich Hayek called “The Road to Serfdom” since then, however, suggests one good source – Friedman’s “Introduction” to the University of Chicago Press’ 50th anniversary edition of the book.

The promotion of collectivism is combined with the profession of individualist values.

Individualism … can be achieved only in a liberal order in which government activity is limited primarily to establishing the framework within which individuals are free to pursue their own objectives.

The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovering for achieving participatory democracy.

Unfortunately, the relation between the ends and the means remains widely misunderstood. Many of those who profess the most individualistic objectives support collectivist means without recognizing the contradiction.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/11/china-and-covid-dancing-with-the-devil/

“Markson’s brilliant investigation leaves us confident enough that Beijing did not deliberately release SARS-CoV-2 upon the world. Once the virus was out there, though, and once the regime had regained its nerve, Beijing did everything in its power to turn an international crisis of their making into a victory. That is the phenomenon we are dealing with here. One of the more admirable figures to emerge in What Really Happened in Wuhan is Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, along with several key White House advisers including Peter Navarro. Though all very different in their expertise and character, common to them all is the understanding that engaging in any kind of relationship with the CCP really is akin to dancing with the devil.”

The potential readership for Sharri Markson’s new book increased in June after American television celebrity Jon Stewart shared his views with a left-of-centre audience on the origins of COVID-19: “Novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who could we ask? The Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?” Not too weird, according to Newsweek magazine, for the viewers who pushed back on social media with ripostes such as: “Honestly can’t tell if Jon Stewart was joking or had a senior moment on Colbert”; “Jon Stewart is flying real close to QAnon territory. Expecting him to go anti-vax any moment now”; and, of course, “like wow, way to throw more gas on the fire of anti-Asian hate”. Stewart’s detractors, though unlikely to be aware of it, were essentially conveying the official line of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Why? Beyond everything else, Markson’s book makes a good start at answering that question as well.

In the first instance, though, What Really Happened in Wuhan establishes the high plausibility of the so-called “lab-leak” theory. It is more than a tinfoil-hat conspiracy dreamed up by the Trump administration, white supremacists, xenophobes, the Murdoch press, anti-Chinese bigots, Cold Warriors and so on—or what Hillary Clinton, in another context, would refer to as a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. One of the many intellectual tragedies of the Cold War was the tendency to conflate anti-communism (or anti-totalitarianism) with a
reactionary worldview. A resultant problem was the inability or refusal of self-styled sophisticated observers from the West to grasp the essential despotism of Soviet society, which existed even in what we might now call Late Communism. Revisionist historians, for instance, went out of their way to amplify the non-tyrannical aspects of everyday life in the Soviet empire to argue a broader point: the internal social and political dynamics of a Western society, though obviously different from a communist one, were of a piece.

https://dailycaller.com/2021/11/16/new-book-reveals-organization-controls-black-lives-matter/

Editor’s note: What follows is an excerpt from Charles Love’s “Race Crazy: BLM, 1619, And The Progressive Racism Movement.” 

If Black Lives Matter is the chaos arm of the movement, the Movement for Black Lives is the operating system. How a group so connected, so influential, and so well-funded can operate with no exposure in the age of social media is both a testament to its power and a sad statement of how far the media has fallen.

It would be so much simpler to have one or two organizations with chapters throughout the country. It would result in easier fundraising and better messaging. But the Black Lives Matter movement is a complicated web of connected groups.It is basically a race-based Ponzi scheme.

…

The most interesting thing about Black Lives Matter is not their IRS status; it is the fact that there is no longer a
Black Lives Matter organization. They maintain a page and the means to accept donations, and that is really all that remains of the original organization. Black Lives Matter is largely controlled by the Movement for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter Global Foundation.

For several months, the country has been beset by protests and riots. It is obvious that they are organized, but many believe they are being funded by the Black Lives Matter movement or others with political interests. There is no doubt that funds are being used to fuel the protests, agitate against the police, and support rioting and looting. That people dealing with the uncertainty of employment during the COVID-19 crisis would use their limited savings to travel around the country to protest, risk arrest, and meet the subsequent cash bail, merely in order to throw a rock at a police officer, is as likely as a spontaneous uprising in Benghazi.

The question is: Who is funding these protests, particularly the clashes with police? After being attacked by the Republican National Convention protestors, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul called for an investigation to trace the corporations funding the protests and riots. I agree with the sentiment, but I believe it will be nearly impossible to trace. There are so many organizations within the movement, most of which have no financial declarations or lists of their members.

And even if Black Lives Matter activists are funding the riots, there is a good chance that no one at the donor level
knows. The BLM movement has a decentralized, bottom-up structure. As I have pointed out, the movement is really a collection of many groups with a common enemy. If you are fighting racism, capitalism, immigration, or any gender issue, you are welcome. Similarly, there is no true leader. Each group operates independently of each other, and each group is made up of leaderless individuals.