Interesting development at the International Monetary Fund, is it not?

Over the past few days we have seen news reports about IMF head, 62-year-old Dr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, having been embroiled in sex crime allegations. Yesterday we found that he had been charged by the New York police of ‘criminal sex act, unlawful imprisonment, and attempted rape’. The criminal sex act, apparently, consisted of forcing a hotel maid to give him oral sex.

Formerly an academic, Left-wing politician, and French finance minister, he was regarded as a possible Socialist candidate for the French presidency, a position for which he was expected to announce his intention to run soon. He hoped to replace Nicolas Sarkozy as the French head of state.

Now, as per the tradition in Anglo-Saxon countries, a man is innocent until proven guilty (unless, that is, he is facing the tax authorities, in which case he is everywhere and always guilty until proven innocent, and even then he remains under suspicion and kept secretly under the microscope). Yet, when we consider that this gentleman, who is married, was already criticised in 2008 for a steamy affair with Piroska Nagy, a married economist and subordinate member of staff; that the IMF board acknowledged at the time that many female members of staff were unhappy with his behaviour, even after being cleared following an investigation into his role in Mrs. Nagy’s departure and severance package; that around this time the press carried reports about his having acted ‘like a gorilla’ after inviting an unnamed actress to his Paris flat; that in 2007, Tristane Banon, a then 27-year-old French journalist and writer, accused him of attempting to rape her in 2002, an accusation against which he pressed no charges and but which she has now decided to pursue; and that he had to fight charges of corruption in two financial scandals in 1999, related to Elf Aquitaine and a student mutual insurance—when we consider this past history, things do not look very good.

Unless there is a spectacularly rapid denouement in his favour, we can safely consider him finished in French politics. This is the verdict of not only his opponents on the Right, including Marine Le Pen of the Front National, but also those on the Left, who have spontaneously effervesced with theories of a Right-wing conspiracy (Americans who lived through the sordid revelations of Clinton presidency will find this has a familiar ring).

In Europe voters tend to be slightly more forgiving of politicians’ ‘amorous peccadillos’, which I would rather call gross personal betrayals. In the United States, at least until the advent of the Bill and Monica affair, the suggestion of marital infidelity resulted automatically in political fulmination. At least, that is how it was traditionally seen from Europe. But in Europe, a politician could survive revelations of marital infidelity, the latter being regarded, perhaps self-servingly, as a personal matter, unconnected with ability to do the job.

Technically that may be the case in some cases. But my view is that if someone in a position of responsibility cannot at the very least remain faithful to his spouse, despite having sworn eternal honour and fealty in front of family and friends and the law, if that person is capable of this level of betrayal, motivated by nothing more than base instinct and momentary pleasure, how can we expect him to remain faithful to his principles, to put base temptations for the sake of moral rectitude? Irrespective of whether or not he is found innocent now, a man in Strauss-Kahn’s position, one of immense responsibility, involving and affecting thousands of millions of people, would be expected by those of us with a traditional outlook to be of far, far better character than the average man—almost a Hyperborean. Not, in other words, a servant of the Demiurge.

New York Police Department spokesman, Paul Browne,

said the allegations had been made by a 32-year-old woman who worked at the hotel, which has been identified as the Sofitel near Times Square. His accommodation there was described by the New York Times as a luxury suite costing $3,000 per night (£1,900).

"We received a call that a chambermaid in a hotel in midtown Manhattan had been sexually assaulted by the occupant of a luxury suite at that hotel, and that that individual had fled," Mr Browne told the BBC.

"The maid described being forcibly attacked, locked in the room and sexually assaulted," he said.

Speaking to Reuters, Mr Browne gave more details on the allegations against Mr Strauss-Kahn.

"She told detectives he came out of the bathroom naked, ran down a hallway to the [suite] foyer where she was, pulled her into a bedroom and began to sexually assault her, according to her account."

"She pulled away from him and he dragged her down a hallway into the bathroom where he engaged in a criminal sexual act, according to her account to detectives. He tried to lock her into the hotel room."

Mr Strauss-Kahn then made his way to the airport but left his mobile phone and other items behind, Mr Brown said.

"It looked like he got out of there in a hurry."

By the time police established that the occupant of the room was Mr Strauss-Kahn, the IMF chief was on board an Air France plane at John F Kennedy airport, about to depart for Paris.

"Our detectives requested of the airport authorities that they stop the plane from leaving, went to the airport and took him into custody," Mr Browne said.

"If our officers had been 10 minutes later he would have been in the air and on their way to France."

The woman has been treated at hospital for minor injuries, said Mr Browne.

Plato—he who argued for eugenics to breed a better race of leaders—would have stroked his beard and thought, ‘I told you so.’

What strikes me about the BBC’s news reports their sensitivity. In the midst of all the bloodcurdling allegations, we find that they still have time to think about Dr. Strauss-Kahn’s emotional state, and report his lawyer stating that he was ‘tired but fine’. In fact, the reports I have looked at have been extremely temperate and punctiliously balanced, even obscurely sympathetic, given the nature of the allegations and past behaviour.

Who is Dominique Strauss-Kahn?

Of Sephardic and Azhkenazic Jewish origin, he was born in 1949 in a wealthy Paris neighbourhood, son of a legal tax lawyer and member of the Masonic order Grand Orient de France and of a Russo-Tunisian journalist. During the 1970s, Dr. Strauss-Kahn was an academic, having obtained a degree in public law and a PhD and an agrégation in economics.

In his youth he joined the Union of Communist Students (Union des étudiants communistes, UEC), which is part of the Mouvement Jeunes Communistes de France (MJCF, Movement of Young Communists of France), and which is close to the French Communist Party. He subsequently joined the Centre d'études, de recherches et d'éducation socialiste (Center on Socialist Education Studies and Research, CERES), and later became involved with the Socialist Party, led by his friend Lionel Jospin, also founding Socialisme et judaïsme.

He became an elected deputy in 1986, then Chairman of the National Assembly Committee on Finances, and then again Minister for Industry and Foreign trade. Defeated in the elections of 1993, he was appointed Chairman of the Groupe des experts du PS (Group of Experts of the Socialist Party), founded a law firm (DSK Consultants), and worked as a business lawyer.

But not for long. The following year, Raymond Lévy, director of Renault, invited him to join the Cercle de l’Industrie, a Brussels-based industry lobby. Billionaire Vincent Bolloré and Louis Schweitzer entered his circle of friends. Bolloré is a well-known corporate raider and industrialist with media interests and substantial positions in the economies of Ivory Coast, Gabon, Cameroon, and Congo, and also a long-standing friend of Nicolas Sarkozy. Schweitzer was Lévy’s successor at Renault, of which he was CEO until 2005, and also Chairman of AstraZeneca, and non-executive director of BNP Paribas, Electricité de France, Volvo AB, and L’Oréal.

As Minister of Economics he implemented a wide privatisation and a partial deregulation programme, despite this running against the Socialist Party’s official ideology. An increase in GDP and reduction of public debt resulted in personal popularity. In the late 1990s he joined, as finance minister, Lionel Jospin’s socialist government, ‘responsible for steering France towards the era of the Euro’.

He supported the infamous European Constitution of 2005, so arrogantly promoted by bureaucrats and politicians at the time (there was no real examination, just promotion, despite its wide-ranging powers). Said constitution incorporated the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which banned eugenics, prohibited collective expulsions, guaranteed the right to asylum, and adopted totalitarian equality and humanism as a core principle.

As head of the IMF, Dr. Strauss-Kahn proposed giving Special Drawing Rights a stronger role as a method of stabilising the global monetary system, and as a possible replacement for the U.S. dollar as world reserve currency. Some have seen this as a move towards a world currency, consistent with Dr. Strauss-Kahn’s earlier championing of the Euro.

The BBC profiles him as a man of ‘easy charm’ who ‘seduce[s] with words’.

No doubt Kevin MacDonald would find Dr. Strauss-Kahn a case worthy of his attention, but, that aside, the picture that emerges here is clearly that of a typical ‘champagne socialist’: a globalist, former communist, who nevertheless stays in luxury hotels; rubs shoulders with powerful industrialists, billionaires, and heads of state; and lives a fabulously privileged and rarefied lifestyle, out of the public purse—a suave, elegant, smooth-talking philanderer, aligned with a political party whose policy is to take from the talented and hard-working in order to give to the talentless and the indolent, who all the same draws a six-figure salary (plus an opaque pension scheme), in a nearly all-powerful position obtained through presidential favour.

I doubt any of my readers will be surprised by any of this. All the same, it bears highlighting, for the fact that a man with such obvious character flaws, with such glaring contradictions between stated ideology and real-world behaviour, has been so handsomely rewarded by the system, funded out of our collective and individual pockets, is symptomatic of the system’s level of corruption. In a non-corrupt system, where character was as important as ability, such a person would not have been able to talk his way undetected into the highest echelons of international finance; such a person would have been weeded out long before. Champaigne socialists—Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are famous examples—are but one of the various miasmic bacteria that contaminate the Western body politic in our Iron Age. Indeed, the French establishment now worry about the effect this this affair could have at a time of unprecedented distrust for politicians.

Whatever the outcome of this specific crisis, I will not be shedding tears for the political death of this champagne socialist.

The recently released American Community Survey has revealed the wealthiest counties in America.  

Coming in at #1 (above the New York suburbs) is...  Fairfax City, Virginia, conveniently located near the 495 Capital Beltway and Tysons Corner II--median income is $96, 232.

Not bad for government work. 

The Republican Party made tremendous gains in the recent midterm elections, winning an astounding number of legislative and executive seats in states across the country. If the GOP is to accomplish anything, and not squander yet another opportunity, it must fire the soon-to-be Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, and soon-to-be chair of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan.

Congressmen Ryan and Cantor have depicted themselves as reformers dedicated to cutting the deficit and ending corruption. These claims have no basis in their combined 20 years on Capitol Hill.

Congressman Cantor and Ryan voted "yea" on the following:

• the expansion of Medicare Part D (creating a $9.4 trillion unfunded liability over the next 75 years)
• the Iraq War ($742 billion cost),
• the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (annual budget of $52 billion)
• TARP ($50 billion)
• the bank bailout ($700 billion),
• No Child Left Behind (an annual cost $141 million a year by 2007 standards).

Iconic leaders amongst traditionalist conservatives, libertarians, and independents like Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, and Ross Perot all soundly rejected these items.

With our debt becoming so large it threatens to wreck the nation, our currency on the verge of becoming nugatory, the views of Congressman Cantor and Congressman Paul are dangerous.

Recently, Congress Ryan released his “Road Map to America’s Future,” which included entitlement reform, tax reform, and reduction of the debt.  All of which would be a good start… but the proposals remain dubious, to say the least, coming from a party that's been all about guns and butter.

To paraphrase Jack Hunter, watching the two congressmen speak out against "big government" is like watching Ron Jeremy condemn pornography. The freshman class of Congress should take a lesson from the American people and throw the bums out.

You’ll have seen the pictures by now. The broken glass of the Conservative Party’s HQ building in central London, the outnumbered and frankly passive police, the ring of cameramen circled round the still remaining shards of glass as yet another plump-faced student mollycoddled in a scarf steps up for his photo op kicking in a bit of broken glass.

Yes, just like when they mispronounce wines and give each other air kisses, the English middle-classes are at it again, imitating the French -- all the result of some terrible inferiority complex that Agincourt, Waterloo, the Industrial Revolution, the colonization of North America, the creation of the British Empire, and the Beatles vs. Johnny Hallyday have done nothing to dispel.

But the student riot in London is also the latest example of how the old hard Left manages to keep breathing a little oxygen, in particular the Socialist Worker’s Party. (Yes, I used the singular possessive because I’m sure there can only be one genuine worker in the entire party, the chap who industriously churns out such alliterative masterpieces as the widely distributed “F**k Fees” placard.)

Being hard Left, they are, of course, a tiny minority of people with rather disgusting psychological habits, reviled and ignored by the general public if voting statistics are anything to go by -- and they are. Their true milieu and political ecosystem is the world of the 1930s, but since that swamp has gradually dried out into a desert, they have shrunk to irrelevance. Rather than doing things in their own name, and finding the proverbial two men and a dog called “Trotsky” in attendance, the SWP, like other small hard Left groups, has evolved into a political parasite, trawling the streets of Britain’s cosmopolitan microcosm like a proverbial Bad Samaritan looking for any angst out there so that they can latch onto it and feel the warmth that has long since departed their own movement.

The following address was delivered to the HL Mencken Club's annual meeting in Baltimore, October 22, 2010. 

Let me do a little scene-setting. It is March of 1910 — just 100 years and change ago. William Howard Taft is in the White House; Edward the Seventh, very nearly Taft's equal in girth, was on the British throne. China's last Emperor was in the Forbidden City, and the Russian Empress was under the spell of Rasputin.

Mark Twain and Leo Tolstoy were still alive. The population of the U.S.A. was 92 million, including 450,000 veterans of the Civil War (North and South) and 162 households recorded in the census of that year as "living in polygamy." Thirteen percent of us were foreign born. Total government spending was eight percent of GDP.

The automobile was settling in, airplanes were still a novelty, Picasso was painting, Mahler was composing, Nijinsky was dancing, Caruso was singing, H.G. Wells was writing, and Mary Pickford had just started in the movies. The year's hit pop song was "Let Me Call You Sweetheart."

Adolf Hitler was living in a homeless shelter in Vienna, Lenin was writing angry pamphlets in cheap rooming houses, Stalin was on the run from the Tsar's secret police, FDR was a lawyer on Wall Street, Churchill was Trade Secretary in H.H. Asquith's cabinet, Gandhi was agitating for civil rights in South Africa, and Mao Tse-Tung was in high school. Barry Goldwater was in diapers and Ronald Reagan was a twinkle in his Dad's eye.

There was a lot of 20th century still to run.

H.L. Mencken was 29 years old, in his fourth year at the Baltimore Sun. He'd been a reporter and drama critic for the Baltimore Herald, which went belly-up in 1906. He'd also contributed some light, jokey pieces to the Herald: not quite opinion columns in the modern sense, but that was because Mencken had not yet invented the modern newspaper opinion column. He'd published a book of verse, a book about Shaw's plays, and a study of Nietzsche.

In March of this year, 1910, he published another book, Men versus the Man. Terry Teachout, in his 2002 biography of Mencken, gives the book the merest passing mention, thus:

He … conducted an epistolary debate on individualism with a socialist acquaintance that eventually appeared in book form as Men versus the Man … Men versus the Man shows how his political thinking had solidified — hardened, really. The law of the survival of the fittest, he declares, is "immutable," thus making socialism an absurdity; human progress is the product of the will to power, and all social arrangements failing to take this fact into account are doomed to failure; inequality is natural, even desirable, both in and of itself and as an alternative to mob rule; the world exists to be run by "the first-caste man."

That's not a bad summary. I am, however, a lazy and inattentive reader, and had forgotten all about Men versus the Man probably even before I set down Teachout's biography.

Then in early September this year an occasional e-correspondent of mine sent me an email with some comments on, quote from him, "a fun book that I hadn't heard of before." It was that same book, Men versus the Man.

These comments piqued my curiosity more than Teachout's had. Off I went to the second-hand book websites, and there it was. It cost me $21.85, much more than I'd normally spend on a book. If I want a new book, I cadge a copy from a literary editor or from the author: if I want an old book I log on to Abebooks.com, and consider myself cheated if I pay more for the book than for the postage. With Mencken though you can be sure of a decent intellectual return on investment, so here it is.

The book I got is actually a photo-scan of the copy from Cornell University library, the text now being in the public domain. Our university libraries seem to be doing a fair amount of this kind of thing, and I can't think of a better use of their time.

Well, what's it all about? As Teachout says, the book is laid out in the form of an epistolary debate. There are twelve letters altogether, around twenty pages per, six from Mencken's socialist friend and six responses from Mencken himself.

The friend is Robert Rives La Monte. An entire hour of Internet browsing turned up nothing about this gentleman other than that he was the author of a handful of books and pamphlets on socialism in the early 20th century. (I shall quote from another one of them in a little while.) In desperation I even tried using his name as a search argument in Google Images: it's surprising how often you can find nothing written about a person, and yet turn up a picture. Google Images did offer some rather pleasing erotic paintings by an obscure French artist utterly unrelated to my quarry, but nothing else.

Mencken, in a remark I'll quote at the end of this talk, speaks of La Monte in passing as living on a country estate, so perhaps he was an early specimen of the limousine liberal; but Mencken is not very reliable on matters relating to people he disagreed with, so we cannot say for sure.

La Monte therefore remains a shadowy figure to me, and so must to you.¹ The important thing about him for our purposes here tonight is that in 1907 he had published a book preaching socialism; Mencken must have read it; the two of them engaged in these six exchanges in 1909; and the following year they put them out in book form.

Plus ça change …

So here we have six letters from La Monte, a Marxist socialist, and six letters in response from H.L. Mencken, a Nietzschean individualist, the correspondence conducted 101 years ago.

The intellectual fun of reading material like this is in sorting out what, after the lapse of a century, has changed, and what has stayed the same.

The thing that has most obviously changed is socialism. La Monte is preaching the old-time religion of unmodified Marxism, with its iron-clad faith in modes of production as being prior to every aspect of human nature and human history.

Everything about human society — everything we should nowadays call "the culture": law, religion, ethics, customs, science, literature, crime, the family, the nation — is mere superstructure, built on the foundation rocks of property relations. Quote from La Monte:

So long as science was a mere shuttlecock tossed hither and thither by varying class interests nothing worthy of the name of science was so much as possible. Not until the Social Revolution shall have wiped out class lines forever, will a true science, that is a broadly human, instead of a class, science, arise. [p.144]

Or again:

Here, we Socialists have the advantage of you, for we do know, in the language of Friedrich Nietzsche, "how ideals are manufactured on earth." We do know that human ideals are determined by the modes of production and exchange; and, therefore, we know that the commercial ideal of boundless wealth will persist just as long as the means of production and distribution remain private property, and we do know that the Social Revolution, now close at hand, which will transform these into common or collective property will usher in the new and glorious ideal of social service … [p.211]

If you change the economic fundamentals, therefore, you will transform society, and liberate human nature to flourish in freedom, fulfilling the potential it always had, and always has, in every one of us.

The working people of the industrial world of course know this. How can you be oppressed and not know it? They are gathering in strength, and will soon come into their birthright.

It all sounds preposterously naïve to us now, a hundred years later. The naïvety of it in fact became apparent to socialists rather soon. The disillusioning event was World War One, when the workers of the industrial world, instead of responding to the crisis by casting down the mighty from their thrones and exalting the meek and humble, obediently, and in fact enthusiastically, marched off to war under their upper-class officers, singing patriotic songs.

World War One was a terrible shock to socialists. La Monte himself recorded the shock in a book he wrote in 1917, title The Socialist Attitude on the War.

Most of us have realized at least subconsciously, that we were at heart dreamers … The choicest product of our uncurbed imaginations was a kind of Marxian Economic Man, a sort of … marionette without red blood or emotional impulses, who responded solely to economic stimuli. Just show this curious monster where lay his economic interest … and he could be depended on to pursue it ruthlessly . . . Since August 4th, 1914 even the dullest of us are beginning to realize that men and women of flesh and blood do not act like economic marionettes.

That belongs to what my friend Roger Kimball calls "the literature of disabusement." It was obvious that Marx had not gotten things quite right.

The way Marxists recovered from this blow, and the subsequent history of socialism in the Western world, are I think sufficiently well known to all of us here. Through the 1920s all sorts of awkward questions were tackled by theorists like George Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. Was Marx right in his methods but wrong in his data? If all non-economic facts were part of the secondary, transformable superstructure, then wasn't Marxism itself part of that superstructure too? Most of all: If the consciousness of the working classes was formed by their economic condition at the bottom of capitalist society, why had they so eagerly marched off to fight for their bourgeois masters?

Much brainpower was devoted through the 1920s and 1930s to working out satisfactory answers to these kinds of questions — answers that would leave intact the essential Marxist critique of capitalist society and the even more essential (one cannot help thinking) dream of a New Jerusalem populated by New Men.

Obviously some sort of feedback loop was present and had somehow been missed by Marx. The culture of bourgeois society might be a flimsy and malleable "superstructure," but once in place it worked on the minds of the proletariat somehow, giving them "false consciousness," a notion already found in an embryonic form in the works of Engels. Instead of being a marionette who, once his economic interest had been pointed out to him, "could be depended on to pursue it ruthlessly," the proletarian became, in the Western Marxism that developed through the middle decades of the 20th century, a dumb marionette helplessly lost in illusions foisted on him by bourgeois culture.

Since Johnny Prole wasn't capable of bringing forth the New Jerusalem in this sedated condition, some surrogate proletariat had to be found. It accordingly was, in groups so marginalized and oppressed that they, or at least useful numbers of them, were immune to false consciousness: women, blacks, homosexuals, Muslims, and so on. Recruitment into these legions of the oppressed continues to the present day, with "immigrants" the most recently enlisted. Speaking personally, as an immigrant myself, I find this baffling; but no doubt I am suffering from false consciousness.

There has thus been a great change in the nature of socialism since 1910. From the naïve romanticism of La Monte, via the great disillusioning of World War One, to the reconstructive efforts of Lukács and Gramsci in the 1920s, the labors of the Frankfurt school through the thirties and forties, to the sixties New Left and the Political Correctness, romantic xenophilia, and deference to transgressive sexuality of our own time, it's been a long hundred years for socialists.

What of Mencken's ideas? They belong more to a tendency, an outlook, than to a systematized school of thought like Marxism; but is that tendency still with us? If so, has it undergone any modification since 1910?

Well, plainly the broad tendency Mencken represented is still with us, or else why would we be assembled here under his name? And yes, its actual expression has undergone some changes this past hundred years, though I think in scope and scale nothing like those that have been forced upon socialists by the repeated muggings they have suffered at the hands of reality. Being rooted at least approximately in reality, Mencken's ideas have been more robust, much better able to take care of themselves.

But modification, yes. The most obvious change has been in our thinking about the relations between biology and human society. The modern phase of that thinking had been fired off by the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species fifty years before the Mencken-La Monte exchanges.

Just dwell on that span of time for a moment. Fifty years separates us from 1960, so that Mencken was to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection approximately as we are to the first stirrings of the sociobiology revolution in the human sciences, taking that revolution as having begun with William Hamilton's papers in 1964.

The rediscovery of Mendel's work on inherited characteristics was, for Mencken and La Monte, in the very recent past, too recent for them to have assimilated it. Mencken doesn't mention Mendel at all in this book, and La Monte only mentions him to betray the fact that he completely misunderstands Mendel's discoveries. The actual biochemical mechanisms of inheritance were of course completely mysterious to both writers, the discovery of DNA 40-odd years in the future.

In these kinds of circumstances, and among people like Mencken and La Monte, neither of whom had any real scientific training,^[2] scientific ideas tend to get misappropriated for emotional, polemical, or political purposes. In Mencken's case this most conspicuously happened with the collection of ideas that later came to be called "social Darwinism."

Herbert Spencer is the villain here. If there is a prize awarded in Hell for the coining of phrases that lead men into gross error, Spencer must be the winner in the nineteenth century division for having given us the phrase "survival of the fittest." The subtle and fruitful notion of Darwinian fitness, which you actually need a lot of math to appreciate in all its elegance and explanatory power, got dragged over into economics and politics and was soon synonymous with robber barons and Nietzschean blonde beasts. (That latter, by the way, a confusion which would have infuriated Nietzsche, who actually understood Darwin quite well.)

Mencken was a social Darwinist in this regrettable sense, and freely deployed the phrase "survival of the fittest" in defense of his social ideas. Nobody would do that nowadays.

Unfortunately this is not because, or only very partially because, proper understanding of biology is now more widespread. It is much more an aspect of what my friend Peter Brimelow calls "Hitler's revenge." We defeated the Nazi armies and killed their ideology; but the horrors that ideology had generated left us terrified that it might rise from the dead. To prevent that happening, we ruled out of polite discourse all the intellectual streams that had fed into the Nazi pond, of which social Darwinism was certainly one.

That we might be throwing out some babies with the bathwater was not considered. That the ideas of social Darwinism — however wrong-headed the implication that they had something to do with actual Darwinism — that those ideas might have some merit, was no longer a thinkable thought.

The Trotskyists of my college days, defending Marxism against the charge that it inevitably led to tyranny and mass murder under despots like Stalin, Mao, and Castro, used to chide us that "an idea should not be held responsible for the people who hold it." That Hitler was, as he undoubtedly was, a variety of social Darwinist, killed off social Darwinism stone dead. Somehow the fact that Stalin was, as he undoubtedly was, a variety of socialist, did not kill off socialism. These are the paradoxes of intellectual history.

To show how sensibilities have changed, here is Mencken writing in a way nobody, not even Mencken's greatest fan, would write nowadays.

As a matter of fact, the typical low-caste man is entirely unable to acquire that power of ordered and independent reasoning which distinguishes the man of higher caste. You may, by dint of heroic endeavors, instil into him a parrotlike knowledge of certain elemental facts, and he may even make a shift to be a schoolmaster himself, but he will remain a stupid and ignorant man, none the less. More likely, you will find that he is utterly unable to assimilate even the simplest concepts. The binomial theorem is as far beyond his comprehension as an epigram in Persian. And this inability to understand the concepts formulated by others is commonly but the symptom of a more marked incapacity for formulating new concepts of his own. In the true sense, such a being cannot think. Within well-defined limits, he may be trained, just as any other sentient creature my be trained, but beyond that he cannot go.

The public school can never hope to raise him out of his caste. It can fill him to the brim — but then it must stop. He is congenitally unteachable. A year after he has left school, he has forgotten nearly all that he learnt there. At twenty-one, when the republic formally takes him into its councils, he is laboring with pick and shovel in his predestined ditch, a glad glow in his heart and a strap around his wrist to keep off rheumatism. [p.160]

We're some distance there from No Child Left Behind.

This is not even to mention Mencken's opinions of, for instance, the "foul, ignorant, thieving, superstitious, self-appointed negro preacher of the Black Belt, whose mental life is made up of three ambitions — to eat a whole hog at one meal, to be a white man in heaven, and to meet a white woman, some day, in a lonely wood." [p.234]^[3]

 … plus c'est la même chose

So much for what has changed this hundred years. What, on the evidence of Men versus the Man, has stayed the same?

The short answer is: underlying notions. Human thinking about human nature and human society has only a small number of modes, most of which first showed up among the ancients. The actual expression of any mode is to some degree a creature of time and fashion, but the fundamentals really don't vary.

The most fundamental of the fundamentals in La Monte's case is the faith he expresses, using the language of original unmodified Marxism, in innate human equality. To be sure, he says, we observe much inequality, both in men's conditions and in their capabilities; but those observed inequalities are distortions brought about by an unjust social order.

That was by no means a nonsensical opinion in 1910. My own mother, just sixteen years later, though an intelligent and bookish child, had to leave school at age fourteen and go into domestic service. Mum was one of 13 children of a coal-miner, and her family needed her to generate some income. Many a talent was stunted by social deprivation in Mencken's time, though I believe this was less true in the United States than in England, or perhaps anywhere.^[4]

It does not follow that every coal miner's daughter was a stifled genius. That was the implication taken by the socialists, though. Human nature, they believed, has no structure, human capabilities have no relation to biology. Released from the constraints of late-capitalist society, the human spirit would blossom — not merely in general, but in every single particular human being. Every person would be a Shakespeare, a Mozart, a Faraday … though it was left unclear which one he would decide to be: perhaps all, either in series or in parallel.

This conception has survived all the intellectual storms endured by 20th-century socialism, all those muggings by reality. It's on display at a theater near you right now, in the movie Waiting for Superman. Here I bring forward my favorite quotation on this subject. It is New York Times reporter Deborah Solomon, interviewing Charles Murray two years ago on the publication of Charles' book Real Education. Quote from Ms. Solomon: "Given the opportunity, most people could do most anything."

La Monte agrees.

Socialism will abolish poverty and satiety, and make joyousness the dominant note of humanity; it will make it impossible for self-interest to clash with social welfare, and will thus make the Golden Rule work universally and automatically. "May we not expect," asks Kautsky, "that under such conditions a new type of mankind will arise which will be far superior to the highest type which culture has hitherto created? An Over-man (Über-mensch), if you will, not as an exception but as a rule, an Over-man compared with his predecessors, but not as opposed to his comrades, a noble man who seeks his satisfaction not by being great among crippled dwarfs, but great among the great, happy among the happy — who does not draw his feeling of strength from the fact that he raises himself upon the bodies of the down-trodden, but because a union with his fellow-workers gives him courage to dare the attainment of the highest tasks." [p.223]

This faith in the infinite malleability of the individual human being has survived all these decades unscathed, from the Taft presidency to Obama's, from Mary Pickford to Miley Cyrus. And of course it long predates La Monte. In the form of the tabula rasa concept, it goes all the way back through intellectual history to Avicenna and Aristotle.

It was socialists who carried it forward through the 20th century though, and made it into an obscurantist hindrance to our understanding of ourselves. E.O. Wilson pointed this out in his 1978 book On Human Nature:

The strongest opposition to the scientific study of human nature has come from a small number of Marxist biologists and anthropologists … They believe that nothing exists in the untrained human mind that cannot be readily channeled to the purposes of the revolutionary socialist state. When faced with the evidence of greater structure, their response has been to declare human nature off limits to further scientific investigation.

And if equality between individuals is a cherished principle, how much more equality between populations, however isolated and inbred. The socialist propagandist Stephen Jay Gould laid down the marker here, in a 1984 essay:

Say it five times before breakfast tomorrow; more important, understand it as the center of a network of implication: "Human equality is a contingent fact of history."

Mencken is having none of that; and as as today's race deniers, world-uplifters, educational romantics, and enthusiasts for unlimited immigration from absolutely everywhere all share their core assumptions with Robert Rives La Monte, however naïve his faith in the proletariat, so today's race realists, anti-globalists, educational reductionists, and immigration restrictionists can draw nourishment from Mencken, however coarse his disdain for what he unabashedly calls "the low-caste man."

Having introduced there Mencken's favorite term for the persons at the wrong end of his social Darwinism, I had better let him explain what he means by "caste." First, the "high-caste" man:

What virtues do I demand in the man who claims enrollment in the highest caste? Briefly, I demand that he possess, to an unusual and striking degree, all of those qualities, or most of them, which most obviously distinguish the average man from the average baboon. If you look into the matter, you will find that the chief of these qualities is a sort of restless impatience with things as they are — a sort of insatiable desire to help along the evolutionary process. The man who possesses this quality is ceaselessly eager to increase and fortify his mastery of his environment. He has a vast curiosity and a vast passion for solving the problems it unfolds before him. His happiness lies in the consciousness that he has made some progress today in comprehending and turning to his uses those forces which menaced him yesterday. His eye is fixed, not upon heaven, but upon earth; not upon eternity, but upon tomorrow. He enters the world infinitely superior to a mere brute … By his life and labors, the human race, or some part of it, makes some measurable progress, however small, upward from the ape. [p.113]

This is in contrast to the "low-caste" man, whom Mencken characterizes by "chronic and ineradicable suspiciousness, orthodoxy, stupidity, lack of foresight, and inability to learn." [p.109]

It is interesting that Mencken uses the word "caste" in this context. He was a writer who chose his words carefully, and it seems to me odd that he chose this one. The essence of caste is social separation and endogamy; yet Mencken makes it clear elsewhere that he favors social mobility.

Dealing thus with countless individuals, it sets them off, roughly, into castes, but there are no palpable barriers about these castes. A man born into the lowest may die in the highest. A race as generally inefficient as the African may produce an occasional Hannibal or Dumas,^[5] and a race at the top of the scale may have its hordes of idiots. In one century, when the general environment of humanity puts a premium upon a certain kind of skill, the race best displaying it may rule the world, and two centuries later, when changes in environment make some other kind of skill more valuable, that same race may sink to practical slavery. The great reward is always to the race, as to the individual, which best masters the present difficulty and meets the present need. [p.239]

This is a generous and broadminded view of social structure. While individuals have their particular inborn traits, and races their general ones, a person of great ability might rise from any kind of background, and there is no sign that Mencken would wish by any means to prevent that person's rise.

A socialist would say that we all have the same innate abilities in potential, but that those abilities wither and die under conditions of social oppression. You may not wish — Mencken plainly does not wish — to hold down any person from expressing his ability, but (says the socialist) the unjust society that you and Mencken so smugly accept will do the holding-down anyway. These are the same notions we see today in cant denunciations of "our failing schools" and the like.

While much has changed, therefore, much has stayed the same.

Will this argument ever end? There is some prospect that it might, possibly within our lifetimes … or some of our lifetimes. Information science, neurophysiology, molecular and computational genetics, population studies, and paleoanthropology are probing deeper and deeper into human nature. Some of the results have been over-sold and some of the difficulties — I think I'll say most of the difficulties — under-estimated, but there is visible progress in our understanding since technologies like brain imaging and gene sequencing came up this past twenty years.

The argument of Men versus the Man is one we are still having today. The content of the argument is the relative desirability of two approaches to our social life. On the one hand is proposed a society of men: a society in which none is allowed to rise too high above another, a society that subtracts great resources from the more able in an effort to raise up the less able. On the other hand is a society of the man: a society in which individuals are left to do what they can with their inherited capabilities, in conditions of maximum personal freedom and minimal state control.

The argument has been going on in one form or another for a couple of millennia. It is reasonable to hope that we might soon — in less than another century, I'd hope — attain sufficient understanding of our species to know beyond doubt which kind of society is more stable and enduring, which less likely to foster cruelty and injustice.

Mencken versus Men versus the Man

Nine years later, which is to say in 1919, Mencken made a passing reference to Men versus the Man. This was in an essay on the Norwegian-American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, the man who gave us the phrase "conspicuous consumption." La Monte was quite taken with Veblen and had quoted him many times and at length in his sides of the exchanges with Mencken.

I'm going to read you Mencken's 1919 remarks, in part because they makes a nice coda to my talk here tonight, and in part because I just love the sound of Mencken's voice, and it seems fitting to send you to dinner with that voice ringing in your ears. Here we go: Over to you, Harry.

Back in the year 1909, being engaged in a bombastic discussion with what was then known as an intellectual Socialist (like the rest of the intelligentsia, he succumbed to the first fife-corps of World War I, pulled down the red flag, damned Marx as a German spy, and began whooping for Woodrow Wilson and Otto Kahn), I was greatly belabored and incommoded by his long quotations from a certain Prof. Thorstein Veblen, then quite unknown to me. My antagonist manifestly attached a great deal of importance to these borrowed sagacities, for he often heaved them at me in lengths of a column or two, and urged me to read every word of them. I tried hard enough, but found it impossible going. The more I read them, in fact, the less I could make of them, and so in the end, growing impatient and impolite, I denounced this Prof. Veblen as a geyser of pishposh, refused to waste any more time upon his incomprehensible syllogisms, and applied myself to the other Socialist witnesses in the case, seeking to set fire to their shirts.

That old debate, which took place by mail (for the Socialist lived in levantine luxury on his country estate and I was a wage-slave attached to a city newspaper), was afterward embalmed in a dull book, and got the mild notice of a day. The book, by name, Men vs. the Man, is now as completely forgotten as Baxter's Saint's Rest or the Constitution of the United States. I myself am perhaps the only man who remembers it at all, and the only thing I can recall of my opponent's argument (beyond the fact that it not only failed to convert me to Marxism, but left me a bitter and incurable scoffer at democracy in all its forms) is his curious respect for the aforesaid Veblen, and his delight in the learned gentleman's long, tortuous and (to me, at least) intolerably flapdoodlish phrases.

Here tonight, ninety-one years further on, I am glad to have brought to light, even under these regrettably obscure circumstances, that book Mencken believed "completely forgotten"; and to have tried, at least, to illustrate that even so slight a production of our patron's mind, so long left to gather dust on the high back shelves of university libraries, might have something to tell us today.

It is difficult not to see the government as evil when we see its designated wealth confiscation agency floating proposals for an evolution of payroll tax collection that evinces certain Soviet aspirations.

'Centralised Deductions' is the HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC)'s new great idea: ostensibly in an effort to improve data quality and accuracy, they are now proposing that employers pass on each employee's gross salary to a centralised calculator / tax account at the HMRC, which would then deduct income tax, national insurance contributions, and any student loan repayments, and then pass on the remainder to the employee, with HMRC paying directly into the employee's bank account.

In other words: the employer sends the whole of the employee's paycheque to the government, and the government then pays the employee after biting off everything they want from it.

As reported by CNBC in their article from 20 September:

Currently employers withhold tax and pay the government, providing information at the end of the year, a system know as Pay as You Earn (PAYE). There is no option for those employees to refuse withholding and individually file a tax return at the end of the year.

The problem, as far as HMRC is concerned, is that the present system is outmoded and outdated, not having been changed in 66 years.

The proposal by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) stresses the need for employers to provide real-time information to the government so that it can monitor all payments and make a better assessment of whether the correct tax is being paid.

An HMRC discussion paper from July sees the real-time information system as the first step of a two step plan.

If the real-time information plan works, it further proposes that employers hand over employee salaries to the government first.

According to HMRC, this would have a number of advantages, including:

5.11. The Centralised Deductions concept offers significant further benefits for individuals with income subject to PAYE. Most would pay the right amount of tax in year including those with multiple employments, short term employments, students and pensioners and so few would need any end of year adjustment.

5.12. Individuals would no longer need to understand tax codes, which are a means of hiding an individual’s personal circumstances from the employer. As employers would no longer be deducting tax, codes would no longer be needed. Individuals would be able to see a simple calculation showing the personal allowances and reliefs due to them.

5.13. HMRC would be responsible for ensuring deductions were correct and would be responsible for ensuring individuals had access to timely information about them.

5.14. Information about deductions might no longer appear on an employer generated payslip [emphasis added]. To compensate, one option would be to give individuals access to their consolidated tax account which would show how deductions had been calculated. This information could be made available in a number of ways – many would want to view it online but others might prefer alternative means.

5.15. HMRC would, at any time in the year, be able to confirm what deductions had been made and that they were correct or make necessary adjustments.

5.16. There would also be potential to simplify tax for those who have to complete a self-assessment tax return. HMRC would be able to send them self-assessment returns pre-populated with information about employment income and pensions, reducing the time needed to complete the return.

5.17. Recent research by HMRC4 suggests 66 per cent of individuals use their bank when checking whether and how much they have been paid. They would not notice any change under Centralised Deductions.

5.18. Nevertheless, such a reform would require individuals to get used to a new means of dealing with pay issues. They would continue to deal with their employer on questions about amounts and timing of gross payments, statutory payments and third party deductions, but questions about tax and NIC deductions would be the responsibility of HMRC. The handling of cases where the individual had a query about the deductions will be considered very carefully as part of this consultation exercise. Much of the information wanted by individuals in this situation could be provided through self-service, online or elsewhere. But there is potential to add to the administrative burden for both individuals and HMRC if people are unclear about who to contact with a question. This would require careful design to avoid significant additional cost to HMRC or employers.

(Emphases are mine.)

Leaving aside the fact that, as pointed out by George Bull of Baker Tilly in the CNBC article, the HMRC "does not have a good track record of handling large computer systems and has suffered high-profile errors with data"; and leaving aside the fact that the system would be enormous and enormously costly; "[i]f there's a mistake and the HMRC collects too much money, the difficulty of getting it back could be high with repayments of tax taking weeks or months."

Also, as another commentator has already pointed out, such a system would leave people at the mercy of the government: fiscal harassment already being a known government tactic for dealing with troublesome citizens, such level of access to a citizen's money and bank account would make it much easier to use withholding of payment or contrived bureaucratic 'errors' as a retaliatory measure were such a citizen to speak out.

It bears pointing out the date of the report 27 July 2010 - this is after the last general election, which means this is not yet another instance of socialist Labour perfidy but one that must be credited to the -- now apparently even more socialist, notwithstanding cosmetic policy reversals elsewhere -- Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. This is the same government that recently announced a 'ruthless' war on tax evasion, and which is desperate for cash after 13 years of Labour profligacy and a decade during which the welfare state grew by another 40%.

 

Having seen the top tax bite increased to 50% for those earning above £150,000 ($225,000); and having seen the coming into effect today of the Equality Act (2010), which consolidates and extends 'anti-discrimination' rules and regulations for employers; is it any surprise that both individuals and businesses are leaving the country and relocating themselves and their wealth in places with less voracious tax regimes and less invasive government bureaucracies?

More and more I am considering emigration to Antarctica -- it is a little cold, and perhaps a little Spartan, but at least for now it seems it is still safe.

Yesterday the BBC reported that the U.K. Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander has launched a 'ruthless' tax evasion clampdown. He talks about the desire to avoid taxes being "morally indefensible."

What is morally indefensible is government officials squandering taxpayers' money and running up huge deficits on spurious wars, demagogic entitlement programmes, and bankster bailouts.

What is morally indefensible is government officials robbing people of their wealth by printing money every time they promise more than they can deliver.

What is morally indefensible is government officials helping themselves to the public purse to fund their lifestyles, as was so egregiously found last year in what became known as the Parliamentary Expenses Scandal.

Is it any surprise, then, against such a backdrop, that hard-working citizens would rather conceal their assets than hand it over to an incompetent, wasteful, irresponsible gang of government officials? Is it any surprise that businesses would rather pay professional tax advisors than allow themselves to be suffocated and swallowed whole by the money-gobbling government anaconda?

Okay -- perhaps the Liberal Democrats opposed the war in Iraq; but they support the war in Afghanistan, if critically; they support redistributive taxes and entitlements; and they support regulation and red tape. If they have supported the Conservative-led cuts in spending, it has been only because the fiscal situation inherited from Labour was so dire that absent immediate action there would have been hell to pay. We should not have had to wait until the economy had fallen off a cliff.

Even more disturbing is Danny Alexander's wording:

Just as it is right to ensure that every benefit is fully justified, so we must ensure that every tax bill is paid in full. There are some people who believe that not paying their fair share of tax is a lifestyle choice that is socially acceptable. Just like the benefit cheats, they take the resources from those who need them most. Tax avoidance and evasion are unacceptable in the best of times but in today's times it is morally indefensible.

Never mind that "those who need them most" tends to be governmentspeak for "those who deserve them the least but whose vote we seek to purchase through government handouts"; Alexander conflates avoidance, which is legal, with evasion, which is illegal.

Tax avoidance being the use of legal means to minimise tax liabilities; evasion being to 'cheat' the system in order not to pay tax.

In my novel, Mister, I have a confrontation on this same issue between the money- and status-obsessed Mister and the corrupt police inspector, 'Obama'. Of course, Obama claims the two are one and the same, and that the money collected through taxes is 'owed' to the government, because it is money that "belongs to the government."

The government, in fact, does not own anything -- at least, in theory. In theory it uses money given to it by the citizens for the purposes of running and maintaining public services for and on the citizens' behalf. In theory, the government needs the consent and approval of the citizens before they can take and spend any money of theirs. In practice the government extorts, willy-nilly, any amount of money it sees fit by means of intimidation and violence in order to perpetuate itself and extend its power -- if the citizen occasionally benefits, it is purely incidental. When is the last time your objections to how your tax money is being spent were noted?

Phrases like "paying their fair share", therefore, sound intolerably specious -- particularly from a politician known to practice tax avoidance himself and who only three years ago was investigated for non-payment of capital gains tax.

When the Labour Party lost the May 2010 election, I did not exactly share their sadness. This was not because I saw the incoming government as representing fundamental change; rather, this was because the Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had already proven so fantastically destructive that it was difficult to imagine anything topping five more years of Labour inferno.

The electoral repulsion of Gordon Brown triggered a leadership contest within this wretched party, an event about which Derek Turner has already written very amusingly for Taki’s Magazine. Absent evidence of complete disarray, crisis, depression, despair, tiffs, quarrels, clashes, faction, division, schism, disunity, schizophrenia, paranoia, catatonia, paralysis, and radical soul-searching, a Labour leadership election is a potent soporific. Who wants to listen to a freak show of fossilized Marxists pontificating about fairness and equality? Life is too short.

But when the electorate holds back from crushing them into oblivion, when the government ends up being a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives, the prospect of a Labour comeback cannot be dismissed: their next leader might well end up being our future Prime Minister.

From VDARE

H/T LewRockwell.com for drawing my attention to White & guilty: ‘Whiteness’ workshop helps expose your inner racist Jonathan Kay National Post Friday April 02 2010

I strongly commend this essay to anyone over 35 who does not have children in the Education Gulag. The extent and fanaticism of the coercive indoctrination on race issues to which the young are subjected is beyond belief – and needless to say abhorrent to a free society.

Kay does a good job of elucidating the Marxist origins of this poisonous rubbish:

The instructor’s Cold War-era Marxist jargon added to the retro intellectual vibe. Like just about everyone in the class, she took it for granted that racism is an outgrowth of capitalism, and that fighting one necessarily means fighting the other… "classism is a form of oppression." The real problem faced by visible minorities in our capitalist society isn’t a lack of understanding, "it’s the fundamentally inequitable nature of wage labour."

Perhaps this is less varnished in Canada.