Why Intellectuals Don't Like Capitalism

By Rainer Zitelmann | Townhall.com

Rattankun Thongbun/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Anti-capitalism is back in fashion. Even Marxism, which many had declared dead after the collapse of socialism, is experiencing a renaissance. Books such as those by the left-wing French economist Thomas Piketty are popular. In my home country, Germany, a book called Das Ende des Kapitalismus (The End of Capitalism), whose author advocates the introduction of a planned economy, has climbed the bestseller lists. She cites the British war economy of the Second World War as a potential model. In her opinion, we should introduce this kind of economic system as quickly as possible, as it is the only way we can save our planet.

So, why do many intellectuals dislike capitalism? Many of them fail to understand the nature of capitalism as an economic order that emerges and grows spontaneously. Unlike socialism, capitalism isn’t a school of thought imposed on reality; free-market capitalism largely evolves spontaneously, growing from the bottom up rather than being decreed from above. Capitalism has grown historically, in much the same way as languages have developed over time as the result of spontaneous and uncontrolled processes. Esperanto, invented in 1887 as a planned language, has now been around for over 130 years without gaining anything like the global acceptance its inventors were hoping for. Socialism shares some of the characteristics of a planned language in that it is a system devised by intellectuals.

Once we’ve grasped this essential difference between capitalism, as a spontaneously evolving order, and socialism, as a theoretical construct, the reasons why many intellectuals have a greater affinity for socialism – in whatever form – suddenly become obvious. Since their own livelihood depends on their ability to think and communicate ideas, they feel more in tune with an artificially planned and constructed economic order than with one that allows for unplanned, spontaneous development. The notion that economies work better without active intervention and planning is alien to many intellectuals.

In order to understand why so many intellectuals hold anti-capitalist views, it is important to realize that they are an elite, or at any rate a community of practice that defines itself as such. Their anti-capitalism is nurtured by their resentment of and opposition to the business elite. In this sense, the rivalry between the two groups is simply that – a competition between different elites vying for status in contemporary society. If a higher level of education doesn’t automatically guarantee a higher income and a more privileged position, then the markets that allow this imbalance to happen are seen as unfair from the intellectuals’ perspective. Living in a competitive system that consistently awards the top – economic – prizes to others, a system where even the owners of medium-sized businesses achieve higher incomes and wealth than a tenured professor of philosophy, leads intellectuals to adopt a general skepticism against an economic order based on competition. 

Understandably, intellectuals tend to equate knowledge acquisition with academic education and book learning. Psychology uses the term “explicit knowledge” to refer to this type of knowledge. However, there is a different kind of knowledge, “implicit knowledge”, which you can also call “gut feeling” or “intuition.” This is far more primordial and often more powerful, although many intellectuals are unaware of its existence. Research has shown that this is the route to knowledge acquisition taken by the majority of entrepreneurs. 

By an intellectual’s standards, an entrepreneur who may not have read a lot of books or shown much promise at college or university has nothing to show for himself that would compare to a doctorate or a list of publications. 

Intellectuals cannot understand why someone with an “inferior intellect,” someone who might not even have an undergraduate degree, should end up making a lot more money and living in a much bigger house. They feel offended in their sense of what is “fair” and thus vindicated in their belief in a malfunction of capitalism or the market, which needs to be “corrected” by means of redistribution on a massive scale. By divesting the rich of some of their “undeserved wealth,” intellectuals console themselves with the fact that, even if they can’t abolish the brutal capitalist system altogether, they can at least “correct” it to some extent.

Pro-capitalist intellectuals – economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich August von Hayek, and Milton Friedman, as well as writers such as Ayn Rand, have tried to take up the battle that the business elite itself is unwilling or unable to fight, whether out of lack of courage or intellectual wherewithal and verbal agility. However, such supporters of capitalism have always been outsiders among their fellow intellectuals.

Campus riots and a Chicago convention: Deja vu all over again?

By Michael Barone | Washington Examiner 

Photo by Gabriella Gregor Splaver / Senior Staff Photographer

As the philosopher/baseball player Yogi Berra once (supposedly) said, it’s deja vu all over again. Student protesters are occupying the campuses of famed universities across the country. In New York, Columbia University protesters occupied administrative offices in Hamilton Hall and were cleared out by police, exactly 56 years to the day after student protesters occupied and were thrown out of that building in 1968.

Back then it was famously reported that protester Mark Rudd sat at president Grayson Kirk’s desk smoking his cigars. It’s not clear whether protesters reached president Manouche Shafik’s office, but it seems unlikely that any humidor there contains tobacco.

One thing that has changed in the last three generations is the place of universities in American life. In 1940 only 6% of college-age Americans were enrolled in such schools. Thanks to the G.I. Bill of Rights, that percentage rose sharply after World War II, and with the expansion of old schools and the rollout of state and community colleges, it reached about 25% by 1968.

Higher education also earned huge prestige. Brilliant scientists, many of them Jews, arrived from Hitler’s Europe, created the atomic bomb that ended World War II, and spared the lives of the hundreds of thousands of G.I.s who would have died in an invasion of Japan. Lavishing more money on education, and especially on gifted children and universities, was politically popular and justified as defense spending.

Fast forward two generations. Policymakers of both parties, in states as well as Washington, D.C., concluded that if people with college degrees earned more money than others, enabling more people to get college degrees would mean more money for them too. State legislators expanded universities, and federal policy encouraged and, during the Obama administration, administered loans for college and graduate school.

Meanwhile, the 1968 student rebels and their intellectual progeny started their long march through the institutions. Faculties that once included conservatives as well as liberals, and even some Republicans, became mono-partisan bastions of the political Left. Politically correct tenured faculty imposed ideological tests on new hires as their elders retired.

Students’ politically incorrect speech was punished with expulsion and opprobrium. Schools that had arguably America’s freest speech zones in the 1940s and 1950s became the most restrictive and censorious institutions by the 1990s and 2000s.

Government subsidies of institutions and students pumped huge sums of money into colleges and universities, which responded by raising tuition and hiring even more bureaucrats, to the point that post-secondary schools today employ more administrators than teachers. Over the last generation, there has been a particular increase in diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats, whose Orwellian function is to impose uniformity of opinions, divergent treatment according to ethnic status, and exclusion of those who disagree.

In the process, colleges and universities have squandered much of the prestige that they once enjoyed. It’s not clear any longer that college degrees, particularly in politically correct fields, produce higher incomes. Imposition of feminist-backed behavior codes, just reiterated by Biden administration Title IX proposals, has seen college gender ratios change from two-thirds male in the 1960s to three-fifths female in the 2020s.

Ominously, enrollment in higher education peaked in 2010, declined by 10% even before COVID-19,  and has continued to decline since. And the long-term trend seems almost certain to be downward from there, for the number of births in the nation has plunged since the 2007-08 financial collapse and recession from 4.1 million to 3.6 million. With smaller percentages embarking on post-secondary education, the number of college and university students seems headed downward. What looked like a growth sector back in 1968 looks like a shrinking and declining sector today.

And it’s a sector, unlike the mass of American society, riddled with repellent antisemitism. The pro-Palestinian student protesters say they are anti-Israel, not anti-Jewish, but their frequent attacks on Jewish students are redolent of the antisemitism of German universities in the Weimar Republic. This flows from the view, widely taught on campuses, dividing the world into oppressors and virtuous victims, in which Israel and Jews, in general, are dismissed as oppressors and Hamas terrorists are celebrated as heroes.

This view, of course, is not shared by the vast majority of the public. There has probably never been such a large population so respectful of the rights and contributions of Jews and so repelled by anti-Jewish bigotry. Which is, as political scientist Charles Lipson writes at RealClearPolitics, “bad news for Democrats” since “their party is closely tied to education at all levels” and since the pro-Palestinian “squad” of congressional Democrats is aligned with the protesters. All the more so since the day the police cleared Hamilton Hall, Joe Biden announced student debt cancellation for 317,000 adults who attended art institutes. 

 Disorder tends to hurt incumbents and, as political scientist Omar Wasow and leftish consultant David Shor have pointed out, to the dismay of young leftists, anger at student riots helped elect Ronald Reagan as governor in 1966 and Richard Nixon as president in 1968. The Democratic National Convention this year will be held in Chicago, as it was in 1968, and some are threatening protests there. Will it be deja vu all over again?

Like Clockwork

By J Garrett 

On July 7, 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson, a heavily armed sniper, started firing from the second story of a Dallas community college into a Black Lives Matter protest. He was aiming at the white police officers who were protecting the crowd. He killed five officers and injured nine others that day. That was the culmination of the Black Lives Matter movement that had been protesting police shootings of black men across America in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, St. Paul, New York, Chicago, Washington, DC and many other cities throughout the summer of 2016.

The day before the five cops were gunned down in Dallas, President Barack Obama stoked the animus between police officers and the minority community when he said, “These[police shootings] are not isolated incidents. They are systematic of a broader set of disparities that exist in our criminal justice system. When incidents like this occur, there’s a big chunk of our fellow citizenry that feels that because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same, and that hurts.” Obama was employing his most effective tactic of dividing the country along racial lines for political purposes.

All of that must have worked because for the next three years, 2017 to 2019, the protesting and rioting over police shootings slowly died down and disappeared. Things were so quiet during that time, that it was fair to conclude that the problem had been solved, that no black men were being killed by police officers anymore. We had heard absolutely no news stories about those types of incidents for three years. The internet, social media, cable news did not drive our country to a screeching halt because an unarmed black man had been killed by police officers. Problem apparently solved.

And then, in June 2020, for some reason, police officers started killing black people again. They had taken a three-year hiatus and then went back to business as usual. On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, killed George Floyd by kneeling on his back for 9 minutes as Floyd died of a drug overdose. People were suddenly enraged by the systemic racism that was rampant in police forces across America that no one had noticed for three years. Once again, we were being told that police officers shooting black men was an epidemic in American life even though the public had not heard of one of these incidents since 2016.

Every year, anywhere between 10 to 15 unarmed black people are killed by police officers. Whether that can be considered an epidemic or an aberration or something in between is not the point. The more salient point is that 10 to 15 black people had been killed by police in the years 2017 to 2019, and no one in the media and no one in politics believed that those deaths were important enough to even mention. It was only when a black man died in police custody in May of 2020, that black people being killed by police became a major issue in our country once again.

From June to November 2020, over 500 riots broke out in many of our major cities, over 30 people were killed, thousands of police officers were injured, billions of dollars of property damage, thousands of businesses burned to the ground, federal courthouse were fire bombed, police precincts were set on fire, lives and livelihoods were lost because people believed they had the right to kill and injure and destroy because they were protesting racism in American police departments.
All of that must have worked, because as happened after 2016, police officers once again decided to stop shooting black people. Since 2021, has there been one major news story about a police officer killing a black man? How many BLM protests have there been for social justice in policing in that time? None that I can think of.

And now, in 2024 we have protests going on across the country, mainly on college campuses. Anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protestors have taken over Columbia University, CCNY, NYU, UCLA, USC and many others. In New York, these anti-Israel protestors took over Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, and the NYPD had to be called in to root them out. At UCLA, police had to be deployed to break up a pro-terrorist encampment that had taken over the campus.  

And the pattern emerges once again. Like the swallows to returning to Capistrano, every four years riots break out across our country over the social justice cause of the month. It just so happens that these protests and riots disproportionately occur during a Presidential election year. This is what the left always does leading up to Presidential elections – create as much chaos as possible with the hope that the enflamed emotions over these issues will motivate their base to show up and vote for a non-inspirational and non-charismatic Presidential candidate, such as Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton.

This time next year, there won’t be anyone concerned with the plight of the Palestinians, just as no one seems to care about blacks being killed by cops anymore. No one seems to care about the welfare of illegal immigrant children anymore. During Trump’s presidency, there were plenty crocodile tears shed by our congressmen for so-called “kids in cages”, but none of those teary-eyed representatives – namely AOC – care at all about illegal immigrant children being raped by coyotes or sex-trafficked because of the Biden Administration open border policy. So, in reality, no one really cares about the people they claim to care about; no one cares about the people they protest for.

So, why do we take these people seriously anymore? What they are doing has nothing to do with the cause they claim to be standing up for. Not one person who has been protesting on college campuses this spring gives a damn about the Palestinians in Gaza. The Palestinians are mere pawns in their game of power. When December rolls around, all these protests and all these emotions will have disappeared. There are wars going on across the Middle East all the time and innocent civilians are killed all the time, and this is the only time that there’s outrage, that there are protests. All of this is purely political.

Our country was on fire from June to November of 2020, every night there was a new riot splashed across our TV screens. Where was all that emotion, where was all that call for social justice in 2021, 2022, 2023 when black people were shot by police? No where. Everyone suddenly stopped caring because it was a waste of time and resources to protest and riot in 2021 because it would have no effect on the presidential election in 2024.

How many black people have been killed by police officers since the BLM riots stopped in 2021? We don’t know because no one has said a word about one black man being killed by cops in 3 three years. No one has protested. No one has rioted. Why? Because they do not care. BLM has never cared about black people dying. The BLM activists, antifa, people on the left, never cared about black people being killed by police officers. They only cared about their ability to exploit their deaths in order to gain politically. And they are waiting right now with much anticipation for a black man to resist arrest, attack a police officer, so the officer draws his firearm. That will be a great day to them. They will have a reason to take to the streets, to loot, burn, riot, injure and even kill, with the sole purpose of pushing Joe Biden across the finish line in November.

Department of Education’s New Title IX Rule Just as Bad as Expected

By Sarah Parshall Perry | The Daily Signal

Under the Biden administration’s sweeping new Title IX rule, any K-12 school or institution of higher education that receives any federal funding would have to open girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms to biological boys who claim to “identify” as girls. (Photo: Getty Images)

The Department of Education just released its long-delayed Title IX rule—a rewrite of the 50 year-old civil rights law so vast that it promises to turn Title IX’s guarantee of sex equality in education completely upside down.  

Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 is all of a single sentence. It simply bars sex discrimination in any federally funded education program. It does not matter how much federal funding a school or institution of higher education receives. And it does not matter whether such funding from the federal government is direct or indirect. So yes, even the vast majority of private schools must comply with the rule.   

But this simple longstanding prohibition on sex discrimination has been manipulated by the Biden administration to both undermine constitutional freedoms—like the freedom of speech—and erase the very women that Title IX was enacted to protect.  

The Department of Education has unilaterally expanded the prohibition against discrimination based on “sex” to include a prohibition against discrimination based on: “sex stereotypes, sex-related characteristics (including intersex traits), pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.” 

Under the Biden administration’s sweeping new Title IX rule, any K–12 school or institution of higher education that receives any federal funding would have to open girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, housing accommodations, sports teams, and any other sex-separated educational program or offering to biological boys who claim to “identify” as girls. Similarly, boys’ facilities would have to be accessible to biological girls who “identify” as boys. 

And the law’s decimation of equality doesn’t stop there. The regulations also eliminate due process protections for students accused of sexual misconduct (like the right to call witnesses, introduce evidence, or be represented by counsel during an investigation), and violates the First Amendment to the Constitution by forcing teachers and fellow students to use of a student’s “preferred pronouns.”  

The regulations also require K-12 schools to accept a child’s gender identity regardless of biological sex without providing any notice to, much less seeking the approval of, the child’s parents. 

And while the Education Department has punted, at least for the moment, on its second Title IX rule—one that applies only to athletics—the Biden administration’s representation that sports are not included in today’s rule is a complete head fake. By expanding the definition of “sex” to include “gender identity” and applying the rule to all “extracurricular activities,” male and female athletic teams will be a thing of the past. Indeed, the word “athletics” appears in the new rule at least 31 times. 

Furthermore, the Department of Education’s reading of Title IX lacks any support in the text of the title, its implementing regulations, and the law’s congressional history.

Congress had a chance in 1987 to amend the Title IX “sex” definition to include “gender identity,” when it amended Title IX under the Civil Rights Restoration Act. But it did not.  

Executive agencies are empowered only to promulgate “rules” or “regulations” that implement or interpret laws passed by Congress—not to create completely new laws.

Apparently, the Department of Education has forgotten that.   

Now the question isn’t if legal challenges will follow, but how fast they’ll come.  

The Independent Women’s Law Center has already indicated it is readying a lawsuit against the Department of Education. Others are likely to follow. Let’s hope so.