FROM Knocking Over the Wall: The Suppression of Church by State:

Observe what is necessary to bring a minimum of coherence to the argument: an equivocation between "the public primarily" -- the private citizens who work for or patronize these private institutions -- and "the public rules" -- the dictates that government wants to force upon these private parties. The bill "restores the separation of church and state in the insurance market" only in the sense that when the "State" invades that market, the "Church" must go -- state imperialism in practice. Observe also the real motive: the dubious insulation of employees from what Leftism labels the "economic power" of employers. In practical terms, prospective employees who don't like the benefits package offered by a religious employer will flock to his secular competitors -- something that millions of people do every day. (Conversely, there are many religious "customers and employees" who very much want a company that reflects their values -- something that "progressives" have no problem understanding when it involves their values.) Finally, observe the fundamental principle: Socialist imperatives supersede civil liberties -- déjà vu encore une fois.

When you've got a liberal in a receptive mood ...

Dueling Defense Charts: Cato Wins; Heritage Loses

From HERE:

Even the economic inequality of the market substantiates the moral superiority of the Left, since the latter is the singular good that will vanquish the evil of the former. "Greed," like rape and racism, is judged yet another evil spreading throughout society. And the greater the evil of the social masses, the greater the need for the good of the socialist elite. "What you need," reveals Catharine MacKinnon, "is people who see through literature [!] like Andrea Dworkin, who see through law like me, to see through art and create the uncompromised women's visual vocabulary." While the Left condemns the free market for a division of labor based on ability and the alleged concoction of "false needs," its own politics centers on the dire need of the endarkened masses for axiological experts. …

And like all aspects of the Left, it traces back to the same source -- Marx: "[While] its heart is the proletariat," the "head of the emancipation is philosophy," i.e., the theory class of the socialist elite. So much for the endless ruminating as to why "the workers' struggle" so engages intellectuals. In time, that "heart" has come to be identified with the Third World, minorities, women, the environment, but in every incarnation it remains an organ to be controlled by that "head," an epistemological and ethical hierarchy who will rule as philosopher-tyrants. The Republic of Marx (to paraphrase Bakunin)

will not content itself with administering and governing the masses economically. It will also administer the masses culturally, concentrating in the hands of the State the formation of character, the development and spread of ideas, the standardization of language, the control of literature and the arts, the content of education, and finally the codification of the duties of each citizen to the only moral authority -- the State. All that will demand an immense virtue and many heads overflowing with "good intentions" in this government. It will be the reign of ideological virtue, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit humanists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of the Good, and an immense evil majority. And then, woe unto the mass of evil ones!

The Communist state -- even as the embryonic project of the League of the Just, whose proclamation was penned by Marx and Engels -- was never anything so much as an Inquisition launched against, not a handful of heretics, but the whole populace, for whom freedom would be only the freedom to do evil.

Nader has good things to say about Paul.

FROM Requiem for the Left:

For Leftists, all evil is mass evil -- "systemic," "institutional" evil -- against which only they stand. Just look at how over these past decades American racism has contracted in practice (largely because of the revolt against government-imposed segregation) but exploded in Leftist theory. The "rape culture" has also become a "racist society." It's gone from bigotry being the province of an Archie Bunker to this being a nation of Archie Bunkers -- and worse. Contemporary America is routinely described by such figures as Julianne Malveaux ("two hundred million white racists"), Joe Faegin ("every major aspect of life [here] is shaped ... by racist realities"), and Maulana Karenga ("increasing racism and continuing commitment to white supremacy") in terms honestly applicable to only apartheid or Nazism. But it's a progression not without its own logic: The greater the evil of the social masses, the greater the good of the socialist elite.

FROM What’s Really Reactionary:

The situation was paralleled across the Great Pond, where a nation virtually born of a revolution against mercantilism began to sire its own mercantilist enterprise. Mythologized as the "Progressive Era," when the Little Man and his (self-anointed) champions rose up to bridle the "economic power" of Big Business, this was actually -- in the phraseology of Gabriel Kolko -- a "triumph of conservatism," wherein the established "business and financial interests" sought to fend off upstart competitors by resorting to reactionary means: government intervention in the economy.

The "departure from orthodox laissez faire" is by and large the only part of the myth that was true. Instead of a handful of cephalopod monopolies using their "economic power" to constrict competition, the "dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of [the twentieth] century was toward growing competition," which the older corporations could not stop -- without political favoritism, that is. So "it was not the existence of [free-market] monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it." The new state regulatory bodies and their decisions were "invariably controlled by leaders of the regulated industry, and directed toward ends they deemed acceptable or desirable ... [mostly] because the regulatory movements were usually initiated by the dominant businesses to be regulated," e.g., the Interstate Commerce Commission and the railroad industry (and over the decades many others, such as the Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry, the Securities Exchange Commission and the securities industry, the Federal Communications Commission and the various communication fields, the Civil Aeronautics Board and the airline industry, etc.). In addition, there were the huge subsidies, e.g., money and land to the railroads -- as well as the high protectionist tariffs, since, as the New York Times soon grasped,

so-called Anti-Trust law was passed to deceive the people and to clear the way for the enactment of this ... law relating to the tariff. It was projected in order that the party organs might say to the opponents of tariff extortion and protected combinations, "Behold! We have attacked the Trusts. The Republican party is the enemy of all such rings."

And the Progressive Era's patrimony to the present age? We can assign a contemporary "progressive" -- Ralph Nader -- the task of "restatement of the obvious":

The arms-length relationship which must characterize any democratic government in its dealings with special interest groups has been replaced, and not just by ad hoc wheeling and dealing, which has been observed for generations. What is new is the institutionalized fusion of corporate desires with public bureaucracy -- where the national security is synonymous with the state of Lockheed and Litton, where career roles are interchangeable along the industry-to-government-to-industry shuttle, where corporate risks and losses become taxpayer obligations. For the most part, the large unions do not object to this situation, having become modest co-partners, seeking derivative benefits from the governmental patrons of industry.

It is necessary to point out this fact in order to prevent a confusion of socialism and interventionism.

Well, there ARE similarities:

Recall how he spoke of an ideology that "resembles that of communism." Indeed: a crafted mythology as official history; government growth as a declared inevitability; administration of the masses economically (professedly to benefit the lower classes, really to establish a political elite); the use of the term socialization to denote usurpation by the State of the institutions of society; the invocation of "wrecker" saboteurs ("reactionaries" and "conservatives") to prove that statism never fails, but is only failed; militarism in the service of "pacification." Corporate socialism and Communist socialism are of course not twin totalitarianisms, but they are kindred Orwellianisms: Fantasy is Reality -- reality, fantasy.

Affirmative Action, Negative Justice

Justin appeared yesterday in a Rothbard re-print on Mises.org.