Why Do Leftist College Students Hate Families So Much?

It's completely irrational if you follow things to their logical (or at least, likely) conclusion. Left-wing college kids, if they have any identity at all, are usually known for one thing: deviance for the sake of deviance. It's not necessary the good kind of rebelliousness associated with the Ron Paul movement and anti-statism. No, it usually involves hatred of most time-honored customs. One can debate the merits of social conservatism all day, but it's clear that many college-aged folks hate every last bit of it. They're taught that way.

One of those traditions is of course the family structure. This is a social institution that's been around since time immemorial and it has not lasted that long by accident. However, leftist students (and even some libertarians who choose to emphasize leftist social ethics) are very anti-family. They're taught that it reeks of bourgeois lifestyle, coincides the "evil" patriarchal system, and gets in the way of individual expression. The fact that lefties usually hate individualism leaves more than just a grain of irony in this situation, but, at any rate, Marxist intellectuals are willing to push some "rugged individualism" if it means disruption of the existing social order. Suffices to say, families are a bigger threat to statist hegemony than individuals. This is why you'll hear many a women's studies professor preach the indomitable nature of the individual woman. For them, it serves an end (individuals eventually melted into a collectivist utopia).

On a practical level, however, leftist students ought to re-think their aversion to American family structures. Why is that? Because in today's sterling economy, they'll be back in their parents house immediately following graduation, barring some employment miracle. Insofar as the most left-liberal, anti-family students tend to choose the most useless college majors, odds are they'll need to move back in with those dreaded bourgeois parents who never understood them and their mindless rebellion against "capitalism," "the rat race," and mainstream culture. You don't know what you have until you lose it and need it again. That is precisely the painful lesson these folks would endure if their generous guardians did not re-admit them back into the home despite their bratty ways.

The anti-everything, pseudo-Renaissance artist is not likely to make it very successfully in today's economy, not without completely re-tooling his/her profile. In the mean time, it's time to ditch the attitude and black clothing and accept the fact that you need your family a lot more than you think. This goes for middle-aged and elderly folks who fall on hard times as well. You never out-grow the family. Thankfully, the good news is that these folks do not make up every student in academia. It is a positive sign to see people re-learn the values of family and sticking together when things get tough.

As long as Marxist professors try their hardest to proselytize impressionable undergraduates, the ugly kind of anti-social individuals will exist. Then again, I guess these kids are good candidates to just continue their education into master's and PhD programs. I would like to feel sorry for their bank accounts when they take out so many loans to go to school forever. I do not though.

I Utterly HATE Marxists

There's no point holding back about it. I hate Marxists and that includes lite-Marxists. I've tried to find the good in them and treat them with the respect owed a sophisticated opponent, but it just hasn't worked. Very slim partial truths abound for Marxism; not much more than that though. They are the airheads of political philosophy. Keynesians, by comparison, are pure evil. I can at least respect that deep down Keynesians do not believe their garbage, that it is just a front to enhance the power of the ruling elite. The academic ones make good money off their scheme.

I've given Marxism more than a few passing glances, never came close to embracing it, but have given Marxist social commentators their time of day. In earlier times, I was quite impressed with their canny perception of societal ills such as huge wealth distribution gaps, corrupt business practices, the favored status granted to large businesses by the government, etc.

All of this was of course until I found the Austrian School of Economics, which diagnosed many of the same problems AND provided much more convincing explanations grounded in the a priori laws of economics. For example, the Marxists are sharp enough to notice some of the shenanigans involving the railway and oil monopolies over a hundred years ago, yet unlike the Austrian scholars, they mindlessly blamed it on the specter of free market capitalism. It was indeed a specter because there was nothing close to free market capitalism for those industries. Instead, the real-life explanation was that the banks, railroads, and oil folks (many of whom were the same across industries) received special regulations that entrenched their monopolies. If not a monopoly situation, then an industry cartel created by government regulations that can only be followed by a small group of wealthy companies (smaller competition gets destroyed). Furthermore, the fact that there is ever a favored status granted to certain companies over others should be a red flag that it IS NOT a free market, but rather a corporatist one.

Marxists are often able to see that something is not quite right, but then take the pre-schooler approach to explaining the causal mechanisms. I would like to think the difference between Austrian scholars and Marxists is mostly an epistemological one: the individual vs. class as the preferred unit of analysis. That would be fine, but it's not. Marxists are genuine idiots who cannot see farther than beyond their noses.

Anyone who is familiar with Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickeled and Dimed, understands that Marxism is alive and well amongst public intellectuals. The Cold War may have dealt a decisive blow to planned economics, but these individuals still linger. The economically illiterate Ehrenreich once waged a pointless, non-scientific, pre-concluded experiment to show that living off minimum wage was less than enjoyable (who would have guessed?). Nowhere in the analysis of her experiment does she consider the idea that the minimum wage laws themselves are the reason so many workers cannot get jobs or are de facto forced into miserable conditions. Nope, the answer is always the same: employers are evil and the minimum wage should be doubled (even if this still wouldn't come close to producing the bourgeois, entitlement lifestyle Ehrenreich thinks is a right). The work of Marxists like Ehrenreich demonstrates how tired, myopic, incomplete, and mis-leading this line of thinking really is.

Note: My writing in this article may seem a bit negative and attacking. This is obviously more of a rant than anything else. For a more academic take on the subject, visit the Mises Institute online.

I cannot complete this rant about Marxists without talking about the lite-Marxists I mentioned at the beginning. Much the way the neo-Keynesians are compared to old-fashioned-Keynesians, these half-baked intellectuals are several magnitudes more frustrating than their progenitors (and not because they are closer to being correct). If you read my earlier post on this blog, you could have probably gotten an idea as to how I feel about squishy, unprincipled thinkers. While their philosophical limbo may be easy to identify and rip apart, these tend to be the folks who are taken most seriously and can convince a lot of lay people of their views.

The brilliant Lew Rockwell really hit the nail on the head once again as it pertains to the fellows I'm discussing. In his article, Down with the Rich, Again?, he points out the glaring inconsistencies of the anti-rich lite-Marxists who at one time hated the wealthy for living extravagantly, but now hate them for not spending enough to help the economy (admittedly, some of them get mixed up with neo-Keynesians, who may in fact be consistent about spending like crazy even before the economic downturn).

I think Lew's article sums this point up well enough. The mindless pseudo-thinkers that dominate the media and universities possess no true beliefs about anything other than a knee-jerk hatred of the (mostly self-made) wealthy. Also, as far as universities go, I've noticed a trend away from the classically-Marxist professor toward a more moderate social-democrat who has it out for the free market due to the fact that the academic labor market is currently a nightmare for today's PhD holders. I'm certainly not surprised they hate competition since their competition is as stiff as it is (blame the state expansion of education credit, by the way). Academia is full of un-scholars who greatly appreciate the foundation of the American welfare state and only criticize it for not being even larger.

Overall, Marxists have had a much greater influence on that status quo than they would like you to believe. Marx had the nerve to complain about alienation of workers (during the 1840's) when most people still worked for themselves (until Lincoln changed that). Alienation of the so-called "working class" is a newer phenomenon. TODAY's world is full of bizarre and dysfunctional relationships between workers and owners because of the economic policies that have re-distributed the wealth toward a power elite, taking it out of the hands of creative entrepreneurs. Nowadays, most people have to put up with that half-wit boss who may have gotten his/her job solely through affirmative action or other preferential treatment. The evil bourgeoisie assailed by modern Marxists is the product of their own policy prescriptions. In summation, I can assure you that the folks in Washington have followed Marxist prescriptions a heck of a lot more than mine (or any other sensible, ethical individual for that matter).

Scary Things that Turned out to be Bullshit

1) Swine Flu
2) Gulf Oil Spill
3) Avian Flu
4) Mad Cow Disease
5) AIDS Threat

All of these things are media fetishes. Do your best not to fall for them. Their trick is to get you distracted from the economy and war disasters (Iraq, Afghanistan, KOREA!!). You might file these up there with the Salem Witch scare and other Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I'm sure you can think of others. Follow the links to see why these phony problems are bullshit. Sometimes the government itself has elitist schizophrenia and admits that they're BS.

Does Austrian Economics Fill Me With Hope and Optimism?

No, Austrian Economics does not. It depresses me to the point of despair. The saving grace is that it cannot provide hope anyway. Economics does not do that and it only provides despair when combined with other cognitive faculties such as value judgment.

Austrian Economics is a school of thought that professes a value-neutral approach to economic learning. This means that the study of economics has nothing to do with a "good" or "bad" outlook for society. It is simply the study of what is logically possible given conditions of scarcity, the type of money system, the presence/lack of market distortions, etc.

There is nothing in the Austrian School that says there should (or should not) be any hope for the future. If it is the case that the central bank is rapidly inflating money supply, which pushes us closer to disaster, the Austrian School will have predicted it without elaborating what exactly is meant by disaster, or what kind of human misery it entails. This is perfectly acceptable too since misery is not at all an economic concept.

Nevertheless, the writing is on the wall. A purely economic lens will surely not allow us to decipher it, but any understanding of the real terms (socially and politically) provides us some insight into the horror. It's not hard to see that runaway inflation might lead to a lot of nasty things: starvation, homelessness, crime like you've never seen it before, perhaps genocide, perhaps sex slavery. Economics of any sort cannot predict these things (it might come close with starvation, maybe). However, after we figure out the inevitable consequences of certain policies, all we have to do is use our knowledge of the past as well as our imaginations to figure out that there is a very grim future.

Learning Austrian Economics is a good thing. It is unlikely that it will be applied soon enough to avert "shit from hitting the fan," but you can at least have the gratification of knowing that you "called it" and that you did not die economically illiterate like most other bozos. Beyond that, I would not count on an expertise of Mises's Human Action to bring about personal prosperity (other than intellectual enlightenment). They can only hire so many people to work at the Mises Institute, after all.

Teachers as Prison Guards

I think someday when I have children and they reach school age I will try something interesting, if not a bit surreal. On the first day of kindergarten, rather then pretend it to be some sort of journey that the child will be embarking on, I will give the child the full, honest truth from the get go.

I will walk the child up to the teacher and explain things this way: "See this person, junior, this is your prison guard, you are not to use the bathroom without her permission. You shall regain your auto-urination "privileges" once your sentence is complete in about 12 years, until then, the guard controls your bowel movements. You will speak only when spoken to, eat when told to eat, and you will not to leave the premises without permission along with an escort. Good luck, junior."

How do you think the teacher would react? Could she protest? Was anything I would have said not grounded in truth?

Congressman Hot Dog Really Pissed Off (kind of has a point)

Even though almost any change might be a welcome diversion from the current Democrat-dominated federal government, the looming possibility of a Republican return does not sound all that reassuring. It's more like Revenge of the Sith or The Empire Strikes Back. The two parties take turns being the Sith/Empire; the empire is always striking back. In November, it may be the Republicans' chance to play the role of Sith.

This became even clearer when I saw the desperation on the face of Congressman Anthony Hot Dog (D-Fifth Circle of Hell) while giving this rant about his wishy-washy opponents. I definitely do not endorse his views on health care, but I see his statements (shouting, to be exact) as a prediction for the future. He is worried about losing power, and, what frustrates him the most is that he'll be losing it to a crowd of politicians who will eventually pursue the same policies. Obviously, he believes he could do just as a good job screwing up the country as them.

The likely truth is that Republicans are bound to flip-flop on the health care issue and get right back to boosting state interference, just as soon as they regain the power to do so. In that regard, Congressman Hot Dog should be glad that his position is destined to prevail, but, of course, it won't do any good to him if his folks are not the ones in power to enact it.

I don't even know if the inevitable waffling on health care will come in 2010. The GOP will likely want to jam anything that looks like the Obama agenda until he's ousted in 2012. At that point, however, it will definitely be business as usual, with a continued descent into ever-more socialized medicine. By the way, how much more socialized can our health care system get? It's already the most expensive due to government manipulation. What is the low point anyway, being held at gunpoint to drink water?

Bottom Line: do not trust either party in its current establishment form.