At Enron, top executives lied about the earnings of their company in order to make illegal profits via insider trading in the range of millions to tens of millions of dollars. As a side effect of this fraud, Enron’s stock price was wildly inflated, causing anyone who had invested in it to lose quite a lot of money when the truth came out. Additionally, many people lost their jobs when the fraud came to light, because it was realized that the company was not as profitable as it had seemed to be. Although, another way to look at that aspect is that those people benefited from the fraud (at the expense of Enron shareholders) in the form of temporary jobs that would not have existed had Enron been using proper accounting procedures.

Now compare this with Oil-for-food. Designed to be a mostly charitable enterprise whereby Iraq’s oil was exchanged for food and medical supplies to help Iraq’s poor and ill, especially its children. Through a scheme of cost inflation a system of kickbacks is created whereby everybody involved in the deal (Iraq, the medical / food dealers, the oil brokers) makes a tidy profit, to the tune of several billion dollars total. Additionally, lax administration of the program allows Saddam to purchase directly items such as luxury automobiles and swimming pools. Saddam’s regime then uses its billions of excess cash to buy, not food for its citizens, but modern weapons from France, Russia, Germany, Ukraine, etc. By all accounts the perpetrators of this fraud took food and medicine away from children and the poor and translated it either into cash in their pockets or weapons for a regime that had been universally condemned by the UN.

I’m still trying to figure out exactly why one story (indeed, the lesser fraud) would get so much more attention than the other.

For any interested in the Hicks book Amazon.com has done us the favor of reproducing the introduction to the book online. I have inserted the address in the “URL” section of this post. In case that trick doesn’t work it is here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1592476465/ref=sib_fs_top/104-1728241-4502326?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S00H&checkSum=szXV9icAY%2BKZA4H2Klgw5OQlSyoBR1ukgkZwMvP224s%3D#reader-link

The left’s roots are in the (largely) German counter-enlightenment, a movement of philosophers who were unable to accept the ascendancy of reason over religious faith that was a basic cornerstone of the enlightenment.

This explains the crypto-religious nature of the modern left; the self righteousness, the stubborn refusal to yield to contrary empirical evidence, and their extreme vitriol leveled against anybody deemed a heretic.

He explains that socialism’s abject failure, both economically and in terms of human rights, has forced the left to adopt the postmodern concepts of subjectivism and relativism…there is no absolute truth, thus they manage to avoid the cognitive dissonance that arises between their vision and the hard realities of history.

Hicks writes:

“The modern histories of religion and socialism exhibit striking parallels in development.

-Both religion and socialism started with a comprehensive vision that they believed to be true but not based on reason (various prophets; Rousseau).

-Both visions were then challenged by visions based on rational epistemologies (early naturalist critics of religion; early liberal critics of socialism).

-Both religion and socialism responded by saying that they could satisfy the criteria of reason (natural theology; scientific socialism).

-Both religion and socialism then ran into serious problems of logic and evidence (Hume’s attack on natural theology; Mises’s and Hayek’s attacks on socialist calculation).

-Both then responded in turn by attacking reality and reason (Kant and Kierkegaard; postmodernists).”

“Postmodernism is a result of using skeptical epistemology to justify the personal leap of faith necessary to continue believing in socialism.”

We all have seen the inherent contradictions in the postmodern left’s rhetoric:

“-On the one hand, all truth is relative, on the other hand postmodernism tells it like it really is.

-On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other hand Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.

-Values are subjective-but sexism and racism are really evil.

-Technology is bad and destructive-and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.

-Tolerance is good and dominance is bad-but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.

There is a common pattern here: Subjectivism and relativism in one breath, dogmatic absolutism in another.”

It’s ironic that the modern American liberal is a product of a movement bent on the destruction of the classical liberal idea of capitalist democracies, and their secular based religious antipathies not withstanding, have their roots in a philosophy that rejects reason in favor of religious faith.

I would, however, like to shove this in the face of all the people who cited the moral stance of the French as a reason to oppose the war.

The classical term “Liberal” comes out of the Enlightenment, the premise of which is viewing the world through the rational assessment of empirical reality. It is fair to say that what we call a “Liberal” today does not engage the world through that process. In recent years the term “Liberal” has been tarred and feathered by folks such as Rush Limbaugh to the point where “Liberals” openly avoid the term and instead call themselves “Progressives”, or worse “International Progressives”.

In my view they are not “Liberals” at all, they are “Postmodernists”. Postmodernism has many facets, but one of the principals is the idea that we today have moved “beyond History”. That is, that we today have achieved what the human endeavor has aimed at all along, and we no longer are bound to the karmic wheel of war, pestilence, and famine. We have achieved the “Postmodern Utopia”. Indeed, books have been written about this concept, see “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama. Will and Ariel Durant would laugh long and loud at this assertion.

Recommended reading on the subject: “Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault” by Stephen R. C. Hicks.

See http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/traits.html

How many of these traits are spot-on for “progressives”?

Also check http://www.halcyon.com/jmashmun/npd/dsm-iv.html#npd

Right On!

And a Pulitzer for Claudia Rosett!

These people are pure emotion driven. They have no internal coherence and they are, above all else, selfish. Their primary drive is to be able to think happy thoughts about what wonderful people they are. And their goodness is epecially remarkable given that they are surrounded by a cesspool of evil (republicans and conservatives).

“Liberalists?” What the hell is that? This is in par with calling the Islamic terror war a “struggle against violent extemists.” There is nothing even remotely liberal about these people. They would have consigned the Iraqi people to the rule of a fascist dictator or Islamic theocratic head-choppers. They have no claim whatsoever to the moral and intellectual heritage of liberalism. They are too morally and intellectually repugnant to be allowed such a claim.

It is time to call these people what they are – Marxists. They are not liberals or “liberalists.” They are statist, anti-liberal Marxists. If you want to get more specific, they are Gramscian Marxists. They want to replace free market outcomes with centrally planned coercive government redistribution of resources from their disfavored groups to their favored groups. They want to suppress national sovereignty and religion. And their means to achieve their desired outcome is by cultural warfare.

Repeat after me, Roger. They’re Marxists.