Mediaboss Marketing

In 1912, a young man named Max Eastman got a letter: You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay. Eastman had no idea when, how, or why hed been granted this post as head of a small New York socialist newspaper.

But as Jeremy McCarter tells it in his new book, Young Radicals, Eastman followed up, visiting the offices of The Masses. An aspiring poet and socialist with no journalistic ambitions, he immediately took to the business when he saw how to lay out a page, or paste up a dummy. Soon, he was running the paper, then reinventing it. He filled it with funny drawings and new, vibrant voices. He moved the offices to Greenwich Village.

This made Eastman neighbors with John Reed, a young bohemian journalist and another one of the principles of Young Radicals. Reed got help in his early writing from his former Harvard classmate Walter Lippmann, a third key player in the book. Lippmann went on to help found New Republic, where he helped invent a new kind of progressive liberalism. One of his writers was Randolph Bourne, whose sharp, singular essays forged an uncompromising vision of what America could be.

Meanwhile, suffragist Alice Paul was leading the charge to gain women the right to vote, and doing so on a national level, upping the ante from the state-by-state strategy the movement had been employing. Pauls influence was big enough that she faced off with President Wilson himself in the White House.

Soon, all the radicals of McCarters book would have to define themselves in relation to Wilson and the coming war. Their prewar commitment to idealism and a vision for democratic socialism would become somewhat rearranged and reprioritized as they grappled with the reality of the war and their ideological responsibility to take a position on it and the 1916 election.

Bournes adamant opposition to American entry into the war got him fired. The other young radicals made arguments on behalf of Woodrow Wilson as a rational, pragmatic, and reachable president, even though there was a socialist candidate, Allan Benson, in the race. Lippmann, formerly critical of Wilson, was won over by his first term and backed him publicly. Reed voted for Wilson the first time he ever voted for a president, he said because he felt him to be sensible and reachable.

Eastman used his post at The Masses to endorse Wilsons reelection, and caught fire from fellow socialists, including his own staff. How could the editor of a socialist paper endorse a Democrat when their party had a man in the race in Benson? But Eastman held firm, writing that in the face of the war in Europe and the possibility of U.S. involvement, Wilson was the responsible choice.

But just for the record, when Eastman went into the voting booth, he voted socialist.

Read more from the original source:
Young Radicals: A Story of Socialism, Suffragists, and Journalism - Signature Reads

The thing about old socialist politicians, like Bernie Sanders who is 75 and Britains Jeremy Corbyn who is 68, is that they have youth on their side.

Across the pond, the youth vote allowed the British Bernie Sanders to do a lot better than the so-called experts thought hed do in the recent general election. Here in America, we all know how the millenials went ga-ga for our Bernie. He got more millennial votes in the primaries than Hillary and Donald combined.

I recently made a reservation for dinner at a restaurant in a very liberal city in North Carolina using only my first name, Bernie and the young hostess was a little disappointed that it wasnt Bernie Sanders who walked through the door. I know this because she told me she was hoping it was Sanders who was coming in for dinner. She had a pleasant smile on her young face the whole time, but a pleasant smile is pretty much obligatory in the South, especially when youre disappointed.

The fact is a lot of millenials actually like socialism. A 2016 poll conducted by Harvard showed that a majority of voters between 18 and 29 51 percent rejected capitalism while a third said they supported socialism.

And a 2011 Pew poll of millenials revealed that there actually was more support for socialism than capitalism. Forty-nine percent had positive views of socialism while only 46 percent had positive views of capitalism.

How could this be? Doesnt everybody know by now that socialism doesnt work? Havent they heard the famous Margaret Thatcher line that, The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples money?

If they did hear it, they havent taken it seriously. In a New York Times op-ed that ran under the headline Why Young Voters Love Old Socialists, Sarah Leonard, a 29-year old editor at the far left Nation magazine explains: [W]ithin this generation, things like single-payer health care, public education and free college and making the rich pay are just common sense.

Of course it is. Until you run out of other peoples money.

Lets acknowledge the obvious: Getting free stuff is fun mainly because its free! So it shouldnt be a shock that young voters fell head over heals for a (democratic) socialist like Bernie Sanders who promised them a free college education paid for by those miserable rich people who have too much money anyway.

And just imagine if the Democrats somehow manage to come up with a young, progressive, attractive, even sexy version of the old socialist from Vermont next time around. Republicans and more importantly, America could be in serious trouble.

But heres where millenials get off easy: No one is calling them out for what a lot of them are which is, greedy.

Heres how Thomas Sowell, the great thinker from California put it: I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money youve earned, but not greed to want to take somebody elses money.

So what we have is a greedy generation that feels entitled to all sorts of things including other peoples money. If this is the future, give me the past.

George Bernard Shaw had it right a long, long time ago when he said: A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Who knew that Paul was 25 and voted for Bernie?

Memo to millenials: You wont be young forever. And when you get older and have jobs and pay taxes, who do you think is going to pay for all those free goodies you once demanded when you were young and forgive me not-too-smart? The bill for all that free stuff along with interest is going to come due at some point, right? And the next generation of millenials is also going to want free stuff. Youll be paying for that too.

One more piece of wisdom from Thomas Sowell, wisdom that young voters in the embrace of socialism might want to consider: If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone elses expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else.

Having second thoughts yet, millenials, about the virtues of socialism?

Visit link:
Young Voters for Old Socialists - BernardGoldberg.com

Wouldnt we all prefer to live in an economy that brought out the best in us? Socialists often argue that their ideal system is more moral than the selfish greed of market life. But some of the best defenses of the free market argue that it in fact encourages virtuous behavior.[i]

Its in everyones interest to be honest and hardworking, for example, since news of ones not being so can easily spread throughout the marketplace and harm ones ability to make money.[ii]

Virtue must come primarily from outside the marketplace.

Other defenders of the free market, however, argue that while the free market depends on a culture of virtue, it cannot provide the sole foundation for that culture. Instead, virtue must come primarily from outside the marketplace, from institutions whose primary purpose lies beyond economic productivity. The most important advocate of this view was 20th-century economist Wilhelm Rpke.[iii]

Rpke defended the free market, but he did not think that the free market left to itself could produce the conditions favorable to its perpetuation. Instead, he argued that a free market order could not grow and flourish without the fertile soil of a sound moral fabric.

Rpke understood that the free market, at least to some extent, encourages morality and that the free market is clearly superior to a socialist economy: In capitalism we have a freedom of moral choice, and no one is forced to be a scoundrel. But this is precisely what we are forced to be in a collectivist social and economic system because people there are forced to act against their own nature, he writes.[iv]

If the collectivist economy is to function, it needs heroes or saints.

Why? Rpke explained that if the collectivist economy is to function, it needs heroes or saints, and since there are none, it leads straight to the police state. In all socialist economies or modern welfare states, moreover, the allegedly higher morality behind social programs is propped up by police and penalties [that] enforce compliance with economic commands.[v]

As a result, heavy tax burdens paid under threat of force make people unable to care for those closest to them as much as they may like, therefore effectively legislating what people in many cases would judge to be immoral. By contrast, only under political and economic freedom do people have the ability to be good, for to be good, an action must be committed freely.

An even more reliable source of virtue than the market, however, are local institutions whose primary purpose is not the exchange of goods and services. Ropke argues that social factors such as family, religion, and tradition provide the economy with an indispensable bourgeois foundation in which people exercise virtues such as

individual effort and responsibility, absolute norms and values, independence based upon ownership, prudence and daring, calculating and saving, responsibility for planning ones own life firm moral discipline, respect for the value of money, the courage to grapple on ones own with life and its uncertainties, a sense of the natural order of things, and a firm scale of values.[vi]

Such local institutions have as part of their primary purpose the inculcation of virtue and the enjoyment of higher-order goods, and they teach people a firm scale of values that reminds us that the creation of wealth and the spending of money are lower-order goods. In other words, the free market is a positive good that can nevertheless do little to show us the meaning of life.

Disregarding this truth, Rpke believed, tended to make the pursuit of material well-being drift into the demand for immediate material enjoyment, the economic manifestation of which was a Keynesian unconcern for the future that regards it as a virtue to contract debts and foolishness to save.[vii] Placing too much of a burden on the free market to provide us with the source of our social morality paradoxically undermines the perpetuation of sound economics and the free market itself.

To summarize, the free market does encourage some level of social morality, while collectivist economic systems undermine it. Yet Rpke argued, correctly I think, that we cannot rely primarily on the free market and certainly not on the free market alone to produce the social morality the market itself needs to thrive.

[i] McCloskey is the best contemporary advocate of this thesis. See, for example, Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (University of Chicago Press, 2006); Deirdre McCloskey, Avarice, Prudence, and the Bourgeois Virtues, in Having: Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life, edited by William Schweiker and Charles Mathews (Eerdmans Publishing, 2004), 312336; and Donald McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtue, American Scholar, Vol. 63, No. 2: 177191.

[ii] McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtue, 182.

[iii] Rpke was a German economist who fled the Nazi regime first to Istanbul and then to Switzerland, where his writings would provide the intellectual groundwork of the wirtschaftswunder the German economic miracle that saw West Germany move rapidly out of the destruction of total war to being the most robust economy in Europe in only a few decades. He was present at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society along with such great thinkers as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

[iv] Wilhelm Rpke, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (ISI Books, 1998), 121.

[v] Ibid., 120.

[vi] Ibid., 98.

[vii] Ibid., 100.

See the rest here:
Does the market make us good? Does socialism? - Learn Liberty (blog)

In a Sunday article for the New York Times, Sarah Leonard argues for socialism. Socialist leaders such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, Leonard says, are working with a coalition of young leftists to serve millennials.

An editor at The Nation, Leonard's case fixes on three points. First, that millennials need stronger union power in order to attain better living standards. Second, that capitalism has failed. Third, that larger government is beneficial.

Leonard is wrong on each count.

She starts by lamenting that "...there is no left-wing party devoted to protecting the interests of the poor, the working class and the young." Leonard blames declining union influence over political parties. Unions, she says, are the best way to empower the poor, the lower skilled, and the young.

I think not.

At a basic level, unions serve their members, not society. When, for example, a transport union shuts down commuter access to a city, it is not doing so to help commuters. It is doing so to extract wealth from those consumers, via the transport company, and redistribute that wealth to its members. Moreover, when unions demand absolute protections for older workers, they make it near-impossible for companies to hire younger workers. As I've explained, there is a damning correlation between greater union power and increased youth unemployment.

Voters seem to realize this problem. On Sunday, the newly elected president of France won a huge parliamentary majority. His key promise? Unshackling France's labor market from union power.

Leonard does not accept this reality.

Instead, deriding "...precarious and non-unionized labor," she lurches into an attack on the sharing-economy of Uber, AirBnb, and others.

Most millennials take the opposite view. An Airbnb study from last July showed overwhelming millennial support for the industry. Contrary to Leonard's suggestion, conservatives actually have an opportunity to earn millennial support by defending these industries!

Next, Leonard jumps to the crux of her argument: "The post-Cold War capitalist order has failed us..."

"Especially since 2008," Leonard says, "we have seen corporations take our families' homes, exploit our medical debt and cost us our jobs."

Here Leonard implies that "the system," rather than individuals, is responsible for all the ills of the world. It's that favorite socialist trick: do not blame the person in the mirror, blame anyone else. Her attack on the private sector is particularly odd. After all, the private sector accounts for the vast majority of jobs in the United States. Which, incidentally, is one reason why union power is declining so substantially. People believe unions hurt them.

Leonard's final point is the most important. She claims that "within this generation, certain universal programs single-payer health care, public education, free college and making the rich pay are just common sense."

The problem here is Leonard's inversion of "common sense."

For one, the U.S. already has one of the world's most progressive tax systems. The top 5 percent of U.S. earners hold 36 percent of national income, but account for 60 percent of total federal tax revenue. Think about that. About 5 percent of taxpayers pay for more than half of the U.S. government.

Still, when it comes to Leonard's "common sense" case for big government, her main failing lies at the intersection of millennials and math. As I noted recently, we already spend far too much. "As the CBO shows... the national debt will reach 106% of GDP by 2035 and 150% by 2047." And that's assuming none of the new spending Leonard calls for! It's a joke. The existing debt already poses big problems. Why double down on failure?

Of course, Leonard is right about one thing. Millennials are increasingly supportive of socialism. And if nothing else, her piece should be a wakeup call for conservatives. Employing math, history, and meaningful dialogue, we must prove why and how socialism would be disastrous.

Read more from the original source:
Why socialism would be disastrous for millennials - Washington Examiner

The Endless Bizarre Allure of Socialism CNSNews.com But most people today think socialism is big government, with business still privately owned but with lots of redistribution and intervention (I've argued, for instance, that even Bernie Sanders isn't a real socialist, and that there are big ...

See original here:
The Endless Bizarre Allure of Socialism - CNSNews.com