QUORA: ‘What is, in your opinion, the best solution to climate change without destroying the economy?’

 QUORA: ‘What is, in your opinion, the best solution to climate change without destroying the economy?’

I posted this answer:

I don’t like the term “solution to climate change.” It implies that climate change should be the principle focus of government policy, overriding all other concerns, including economic growth, individual rights, especially rights to property and free trade, the vital human need for reliable, low-cost, plentiful energy, etc. That’s the Greta Thunberg “solution.” 

There’s a lot more to the issue of climate change than climate. But I also reject the Green New Deal approach, which packages an authoritarian socialist agenda in a nice green wrapping labeled “fight climate change.” So the question becomes, what can be done to mitigate human impact on the climate without destroying individual freedom and the economy—i.e., capitalism. 

Climate change is a long-running natural occurrence. But in recent history it probably has gotten a good push from human industrial activity. As a reasonably informed observer, though not an expert, my view is that the weight of the evidence indicates that today’s climate change is largely but not exclusively driven by human activity. It also appears that a warming climate, while not an “emergency”—it has some positive impacts—could become a problem, perhaps a serious one. (“Climate crisis” is a political catch phrase, not a serious scientific conclusion.)

Given the insurmountable drawbacks of so-called “renewable” energy, solar and wind—namely their unreliability due to intermittency and inefficiency due to dilutedness—my answer would be nuclear power, hands down. Many informed people endorse nuclear power, including Democratic NJ Senator Cory Booker, former director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy under President Obama and Clinton Administration EPA administrator Carol Browner, Microsoft founder and investor Bill Gates, Environmental Progress founder Michael Shellenberger, and Reason science expert Ronald Bailey, author of The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century.

I believe that the principle “first, do no harm” should apply to the climate change issue. Before considering “solutions to climate change,” we should resolve to prioritize human well-being over “saving the planet.” The meaning behind that slogan is that impacting and altering the natural environment by humans is a bad thing, even if it improves human lives. We must keep in mind the fact that whatever negative impact may accompany climate change, life for humans without low-cost, reliable, industrial-scale energy would be a wholesale catastrophe. Individual rights and free markets are keys to the economic growth that the technological progress that are required to address whatever climate change dangers may lurk in the future. 

With that in mind, and assuming CO2 is the main driver of anthropogenic climate change—a controversial issue—nuclear power is currently the only technologically feasible carbon-free power source that is capable of replacing fossil fuels as the main provider of our energy needs. And the transition can be done without the dangerous authoritarian socialism of a Green New Deal or the anti-industrial “clean energy” dogmatism of the Environmentalist movement. Nuclear power is not the only reasonable step that can be taken to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. But it is the best and biggest step we can take to mitigate man-made climate change “without destroying the economy.” 

SUPPLEMENTAL:

I got this Reply from Brian Linderman questioning my link to Alex Epstein’s Pragu U. video on the “insurmountable drawbacks of so-called “renewable” energy, solar and wind.”

There are considerably better sources that explain the real technical drawbacks of variable renewable energy besides Prager which makes wide generalizations about technologies without recognizing that scale and grid networks play a large role in their feasibility.

I’d advise you to get a better understanding of some of these topics:

Followed by a series of links promoting the “viability of renewables,” which I have not read. However, since Lindeman mentioned that the grid networks can mitigate the “technical drawbacks” of solar and wind, I would check out Epstein’s interview with Michael Shellenberger, in which these two energy experts discuss the problems that renewables cause for the grid.

Anyway, here is my response to Lindeman:

Prager runs a wide range of videos, ranging from bad to good (in my view). I am citing Alex Epstein for his energy expertise, not Prager as such. Thanks for the links.

Related Reading:

Climate Change Catastrophists Who Oppose Nuclear have Anti-Humanist Premises

The NJ Star-Ledger is Right on Nuclear Power

The Real Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables--Michael Shellenberger

The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century--Ronald Bailey

Christmas the Secular, Christmas the American

Can non-Christians celebrate Christmas? Many do, and why not? I’m an atheist and I have no problem celebrating Christmas, even though it has no religious significance for me.

What’s great about Christmas is that it is both a religious holiday, being based upon the birth of the Christian icon Jesus, and a secular holiday as well. That makes it a holiday for everyone.

How can I say that? I am indebted to philosopher Ayn Rand for resolving that seemingly contradictory proposition. In answer to the question of whether it is appropriate for an atheist to celebrate Christmas, Rand observed:

Yes, of course. A national holiday, in this country, cannot have an exclusively religious meaning. The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property… of the Christian religion.

This makes perfect sense. In this regard, I am also indebted to the framers of the U.S. Constitution. As the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." A national religious holiday in a secular nation founded on the principle of separation of church and state (religious/conscientious freedom) is a logical impossibility. Since to have a secular government means to have one that is neutral with regards to the fundamental beliefs of all of its citizens, an American national holiday by definition cannot be religious.

In fact, what we today call Christmas originally didn't have any connection to Jesus at all, writes Onkar Ghate in U.S.News & World Report:

Before Christians co-opted the holiday in the fourth century (there is no reason to believe Jesus was born in December), it was a pagan celebration of the winter solstice, of the days beginning to grow longer. The Northern European tradition of bringing evergreens indoors, for instance, was a reminder that life and production were soon to return to the now frozen earth.

The Romans celebrated the Winter Solstice with the holiday Saturnalia. In Northern Europe, the holiday was called Yule.

Indeed, as philosopher Leonard Peikoff observes over at Capitalism Magazine, the leading secular Christmas symbol - Santa Claus - actually contradicts some standard Christian tenets:

Santa Claus is a thoroughly American invention. ... In 1822, an American named Clement Clarke Moore wrote a poem about a visit from St. Nick. It was Moore (and a few other New Yorkers) who invented St. Nick's physical appearance and personality, came up with the idea that Santa travels on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, comes down the chimney, stuffs toys in the kids' stockings, then goes back to the North Pole.

...Santa implicitly rejected the whole Christian ethics. He did not denounce the rich and demand that they give everything to the poor; on the contrary, he gave gifts to rich and poor children alike. Nor is Santa a champion of Christian mercy or unconditional love. On the contrary, he is for justice -- Santa gives only to good children, not to bad ones.

When Congress declared Christmas a National Holiday, in 1870, Christmas ceased being a strictly religious observance and became a secular holiday. A legal religious holiday in a nation dedicated to freedom of religion and conscience is a contradiction. (The Founders used the terms “religion” and conscience” interchangeably. They understood religious freedom to include the freedom not to believe in or practice any religion—in effect, not just freedom of religion, but freedom from religion as well.) Being a national legal holiday, Christmas can have non-religious, non-Christian meaning just as validly as a Christian meaning. It’s a matter of individual preference. Otherwise, what’s the point of freedom of conscience?

So, regardless of your personal beliefs, go ahead and enjoy Christmas on your own terms.

On that note, let me extend to everyone a hearty wish for a joyous, safe, and thoroughly non-contradictory…

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Related Reading:

How the Welfare State Stole Christmas, by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins

Don't Need Christ to Celebrate Christmas

Why Christmas Should be More Commercial—Leonard Peikoff

Conservatives’ Christianization of Christmas and the Left’s Multiculturalism Are Both Un-American

David Greenberg of Rutgers posted a guest editorial in the New Jersey Star-Ledger just before Christmas 2017 lamenting the battle over holiday greetings. In a 12/23/17 print article titled ‘“How Christmas Became a Political Hot Potato” (Trump's dreaming of a white man's Christmas - an unhappy holiday for most is the online title, 12/15/17), Greenberg writes, in part:

The holiday season is here again, and as a break from arguing about sexual harassment, we can all look forward to a lovely spell of denouncing and unfriending one another over which holiday greetings to use. 

With Donald Trump as president, we can be sure that no cultural scab will go unpicked. After all, among his many pioneering achievements, Trump is our first president to win the White House— at least in part — on a pledge to roll back the freedom to say “Happy Holidays.” 

“I’m a good Christian,” he insisted on the campaign trail. “If I become president, we’re gonna be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ at every store. ... You can leave ‘Happy holidays’ at the corner.”

How on Earth did such an innocent gesture become so politically charged?

Of course, the Christian Right has been railing about “Happy Holidays” for a long time. It’s part of their campaign to fight an imagined “War on Christmas” and to lecture us to “keep Christ in Christmas.” But Greenberg makes the valid point that Christmas has become increasingly secular:

The secular consensus gained strength in the 1960s and ’70s, as the Supreme Court ruled prayer in public schools to be unconstitutional and otherwise reinforced the traditional wall between church and state. 

As recently as a few years ago, Trump bade his fellow Americans “a wonderful holiday” and “happy holiday season” — precisely the sort of inclusive messaging that he would assail as a candidate.

This is true. I would add that, since Christmas was made a legal holiday by both the Federal and state Governments, it is by definition a secular holiday. How can a religious observance be a legal holiday in a nation dedicated to the separation of religion and state? It can’t—not without violating the constitutional protection of religious freedom and freedom of conscience, which reads "Congress shall make no law respecting an estabishment of religion." This issue went before U.S. District Court in Ganulin v. United States, in which the Court ruled that the recognition of Christmas as a legal holiday for purposes of a paid day off did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because “the Christmas holiday has become largely secularized” and that the government was “doing no more than recognizing the cultural significance of the holiday.” The attempt by any political leader to Christianize Christmas is therefor un-American and a violation of the very Constitution that our political leaders pledge to preserve and protect. People are, of course, free to celebrate the Christmas season in any way they like, with or without Christ, with or without religion, and with or without the greeting “Merry Christmas”. The First Amendment also forbids Congress from "prohibiting the free excorcise [of religion] therof." That’s America.

But the Left’s “solution” to the Christian Right’s pushback against “Happy Holidays” is at least as bad, if not worse. Greenberg goes on:

As the Republican Party adopted a right-wing populism on cultural issues, it was only a matter of time before this delicate balance was upset. The country grew polarized. 

Democrats championed multiculturalism and drew on their civil libertarian bona fides to paint themselves as the natural home for Muslims, Hindus and members of other religions whose ranks were swelling. On the right, Christian leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson led evangelicals into the political fray, forming a bedrock of a new GOP coalition.

Multiculturalism is a rejection of American culture, which is rooted in individualism.

More precisely, multiculturalism obliterates the very idea that America has its own unique culture. It rejects the idea that all people are created equal by virtue of our common humanity as beings possessing the capacity for reason. America's unique culture of individualism declares that every single one of us should be judged on the content of our character, not our race, cultural background, national origin, or other insignificant attribute. Of course, every person is free to follow her own cultural traditions without interference, within the context of American individualism. But that is not how the Left portrays America. They don't say that America is an individualist nation that allows for the peaceful observance of many different traditions. They say America is a multicultural nation. Under a veneer of “inclusiveness”, multiculturalism sneaks in collectivism by tribalizing America into racial, cultural, or ethnic group identities, undercutting American culture and the individual rights that naturally flow from that individualist culture. The corollary of this is to undercut the principle of inalienable individual rights, held equally by all individuals, and protected equally at all times by government under the law—and to switch the concept of rights from the individual to the group, paving the way for government to favor some groups over others at the expense of political equality.

Whether the religious conservatives’ attempt to Christianize the secular end-of-year Christmas season is a reaction to the Left’s multiculturalism, or the other way around, both are an attack on Americanism. I reject both viewpoints. America is neither a Christian nation nor a multicultural nation. It is an American nation—a nation of the Enlightenment including the values of reason, individualism, freedom of conscience, and free market capitalism.

In honor of America’s unique, singular culture of secular individualism, let me say HAPPY HOLIDAYS and to all!

Related Reading:

A ‘War on Christmas?’ No: A War on non-Christians

Move Over, ‘Happy Holidays’: Starbucks’ Cup Opens a New Front in the ‘War on Christmas’

Christmas: A Holiday for All

"Learning Experience", or Anti-Americanism?

My Commentary On State/Church Separation: "What's hard to understand about 'separation'"?

Dems Want to Remove the 13th Amendment’s ‘Exception’ to the Ban on Slavery: Fine. Why Stop There?

Section 1 of the 13th Amendment reads:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. [Emphasis added.]

Thus did America formally abolish slavery in the United States, with that one exception. Now some lawmakers want to amend the 13th Amendment to do away with that exception.

CNN reports that Democratic lawmakers introduce[d] a resolution to amend the 13th Amendment to end forced prison labor:

Congressional Democrats want to amend a section of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, to end what they refer to as another form of slavery -- forced prison labor.

Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Rep. William Lacy Clay of Missouri introduced a joint resolution this week that would remove the 13th Amendment's "punishment clause," or language that excepted convicted prisoners from the ban on slavery and involuntary servitude.

"Our 'Abolition Amendment' seeks to finish the job that President Lincoln started by ending the punishment clause in the 13th Amendment to eliminate the dehumanizing and discriminatory forced labor of prisoners for profit that has been used to drive the over-incarceration of African Americans since the end of the Civil War," Clay said in a statement.

CNN goes on to explain that the “punishment clause,” also known as the “exception clause,” was a loophole that created a pretext for the Jim Crow South to convict blacks on trumped-up charges in order to re-enslave them. Senator Jeff Merkley called the "punishment clause" in the 13th Amendment “indisputably racist in origin and in impact.” It’s doubtful the crafters of the 13th Amendment had racist motives. Perhaps some did. But the 13th Amendment was the culmination of the Abolitionist Movement, which was rooted in the Declaration of Independence’s Equality of Rights principle But the perverse incentives that the “punishment clause” introduced cannot be denied, in my view.

I am not well-informed on the pros and cons of eliminating the punishment clause. But my “instinct” is to lean toward supporting its removal, especially given that the architects of the new amendment would allow “work programs for prisoners [to] continue on a voluntary basis.” 

However, the Democrats’ resolution raises wider questions. Why outlaw forced labor only for convicts? Why should not-for-profit forced labor be continued? Why should forced labor be legal for non-convicts? I have in mind two widely supported not-for-profit, non-convict examples of forced labor—one proposed, one already implemented; mandatory universal national service and mandatory community service as a condition for high school graduation. 

No amount of mental acrobatics or rationalization can shroud the fact that both mandatory national service and mandatory community service is forced, and therefore slave, labor. Given that most states have some form of high school community service requirements, and that mandatory national service had wide support among the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination field, and that half of Americans support it, I’d like to know on what basis anyone can support the removal of the “punishment clause” of the 13th Amendement while supporting mandatory community service as a condition for high school graduation and mandatory universal national service.

There would seem to be an obvious element of hypocrisy here. But, on closer examination, perhaps not. Perhaps opponents of the punishment clause don’t like the fact that the forced labor appears to be mainly targeted against African-Americans. Since its creation in 1828, the Democratic Party has supported involuntary servitude. In the decades leading up to the Civil War, the Democrats defended Southern slavery against the Abolitionists. Furthermore, being democrats, they supported the right of majorities to impose slavery by popular vote. Afterward, they supported Jim Crow and lynching. In the 20th Century, the Democrats led the effort to legally segregate America. After that, the Democrats turned their attention to the systematic design to enslave America through step-by-step socialism, beginning with the welfare state and culminating in Democratic Socialism. 

So maybe there’s no contradiction in eliminating the punishment clause while supporting mandatory community service for school children and mandatory universal national service for 18 year-olds. It seems that the Democrats can support slavery as long as it is not racially discriminatory.

Related Reading:

The Growing Threat of Mandatory National Slavery . . . Excuse Me, ‘Service’

General McChrystal’s Un-American Call for Universal National Service

The Creed of Sacrifice vs. the Land of Liberty—Craig Biddle

Democrats’ “National Service” Plans Immoral, Un-American—Ben Bayer

Pete Buttigieg's National Service Plan Is a Really Bad Idea Whose Time Might Have Come—Nick GillespieI

Presidential Candidate John Delaney Has a Plan for America's Young Adults. It's Called Forced Labor.—Scott Shackford

The "Community Service" Injustice

It’s MeFirst, or Slavery. Take Your Pick

QUORA: ‘How does Black Lives Matter differ from the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s? Which is stronger?’

QUORA: ‘How does Black Lives Matter differ from the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s? Which is stronger?’

I posted this answer:

In a word, philosophy.

The mid-20th Century Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King was a fight to get America to live up to its ideals of equality of individual rights before the law. Following in the footsteps of Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, King reaffirmed American ideals. In a speech titled What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, [Douglass] drew “encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions,” when he said the American Constitution is “a glorious liberty document.” In his “I Have a Dream” speech, King too drew encouragement from “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” when he observed that these Founding documents represented “a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” 

The Civil Rights Movement was fundamentally individualist and anti-racist. King famously advocated the proposition that all people “will not be judged by the color of their skin,  but by the content of their character.”

Black Lives Matter, in its ever-changing “ABOUT” page, makes no mention of America’s ideals. Instead, it makes unsubstantiated claims that, in 2020 America, blacks are “systematically targeted for demise,” face “deadly oppression,” face the prevalence of “state-sanctioned violence,” and that there is an alleged need of blacks to be “liberated.” They promote the anti-American, Confederate myth of “white supremacy.” BLM is not about specific instances of injustice perpetrated by and against individuals. It is not, as many Americans believe, anti-racist. There is no room for the individual in it’s collectivist worldview. Racism is a subset of collectivism. BLM is fundamentally collectivist and racist, and therefore fundamentally at odds with the Civil Rights Movement and America’s Founding ideals of the natural equality of all human beings.

Coleman Hughes, a leading intellectual of the 1776Unites project, put it well in contrasting Black Lives Matter with the Civil Rights Movement:

What anti-racism meant in the early 1960s when the great triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement were being made, the meaning of anti-racism has changed entirely. It’s no longer about contrasting racism with the ultimate superficiality of skin color. It’s no longer about the ethos that race is only skin deep, and that the reason racism is wrong is because we are all of the same species and [skin color] is nothing. Anti-racism today means [skin color] is everything, and people with your [white] skin color have oppressed me—not just my group but in some deep sense me—for centuries, and I need you to recognize that. [BLM] is about how skin color is injected with meaning by the history of colonialism and white supremacy, and so forth. It’s a very different ethos: I think it’s much more dangerous. In the 1960s Martin Luther King . . . famously dreamed about white kids and black kids holding hands. Just a couple of years ago there was an op-ed published in the New York Times called “Can my Children be Friends with White People?” by a black author. It’s the exact rebuttal and reversal of Martin Luther King. It’s a regression . . . a regression into tribalism. [The moral case against Black Lives Matter,

 17:00 - 20:00]

Whereas the Civil Rights Movement envisioned an America united by the final realization of it’s Founding values, BLM sees an America divided by perpetual tribal conflict between victims and oppressors and a return to a tribal “cycle of revenge” to “even the historical score.”

I was born in 1949. I grew up at a time when blacks really were oppressed -- legally oppressed by their own government. Racism and bigotry were “mainstream” in the culture. People rarely pushed back against prejudicial slurs--not just slurs against blacks but against Jews, Italians, Irish, homosexuals, et al. People were defined by their group identity. I know. I was there. Since the 1960s, things have improved dramatically. I know. I am part of that improvement, too. I’m one of the ones who rethought every influence I grew up with, explicitly shedding any “accidental racism” and collectivism that infected my soul and character.*

Over the past 50 years, racism has been thoroughly marginalized in the culture, to the point that today racial slurs are immediately called out in private and in public. Since the 1960s victories of the Civil Rights Movement, many blacks have flourished economically, educationally, and so on. Belying BLM’s dark vision of black oppression in America, black African immigration to America, and black immigration generally, is surging. Black African immigrants in particular are “more likely than Americans overall to have a college degree or higher.” Civil Rights Movement leaders would applaud. BLM ignores the progress, preferring to roll back the cultural and political clock to an era that no longer exists, for crass political purposes.

This is not to deny that racism still exists in America today. It does. But today, America has never been less racist. Racism has lost its cultural and political power. I am not just relying on my personal experience and observation, important though it is. Scholars such as John McWhorter see it, too. Unfortunately, Black Lives Matter and, more deeply, Critical Race Theory, are aiming—shockingly, to me, with some success—to re-mainstream racism in America.

This is not to minimize the lingering vestiges of our government’s prior forced segregation policies and laws. But progress is evident to anyone willing to see it. And we have the Civil Rights Movement to largely thank for that. 

Black Lives Matter not only differs from the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s. These two movements are opposites at the deepest levels of principle and goals. And we can only hope that Black Lives Matter is nowhere near as strong as the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement brought progress. Black Lives Matter, with its neo-Marxist roots, promises only destruction and regression.

* [I have my discovery of Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, to primarily thank for that transformation. Her individualist philosophy, which I discovered in the late 1960s, was a profound influence as I shaped and reshaped my character. In particular, I was profoundly impressed by her essay Racism, which I often reread because it is deeply relevant to this day.]

Related Reading:

The Criminal Socialist Agenda Behind the ‘Anti-Racism’ Movement

‘Anti-Racism’, or the re-Mainstreaming of Racism

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: The NJ State Budget

The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’: NJ Governor Murphy’s Strange and Discriminatory ‘Baby Bonds’ Scheme

The Founding Fathers, Not ‘Diversity,’ is the Solution to ‘Our Racialized Society’

 

Don’t Allow the Left to Own ‘Diversity’

 

SEC’s Boardroom ‘Diversity’ Rule Is Racist, Unnatural, and Politically Motivated

 

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice—Craig Biddle

 

DelBarton Student’s 'Diversity' Initiative, Though Well-Meaning, is Based on Counter-Productive Premises

Starbucks/USA Today’s Racist “Race Together” Campaign

A New Textbook of Americanism — edited by Jonathan Hoenig

Fighting Racism With Collectivism is No Way to Exterminate Racism

From The Objective Standard: Smith College President Says “All Lives Matter”; Racist Left Goes Ballistic, Review of Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter to the Race Grievance Industry by Taleeb Starkes, and To Black Lives Matter, No Lives Matter

Related Viewing:

The Market for Victimhood by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

AOC’s Deceptive Retort to Betsy DeVos

Speaking at the 2020 Federal Student Aid Training Conference on December 1, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos warned of the insidious hidden effects of government-funded higher education. As Market Watch reports:

We’ve heard shrill calls to ‘cancel,’ to ‘forgive,’ to ‘make it all free.’ Any innocuous label out there can’t obfuscate what it really is: wrong.

The campaign for ‘free college’ is a matter of total government control. Make no mistake: it is a socialist takeover of higher education. 

DeVos speaks the truth. 

It’s not an overt takeover, of course. And that’s not what she meant. Government agents are not going to come in, kick the administrators out, and literally install government administrators in their place. It’s actually much more insidious than that, because the control takes place largely behind the scenes. But make no mistake. It’s government control. Making college “free” means the government will have to pay colleges directly. With the responsibility to pay comes the responsibility, and power, to set conditions for both the college and the student. “Who pays the piper, calls the tune.” 

So, how does DeVos’s opponents respond? One opponent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, fires back with:

“Tuition-free public college is a dangerous socialist takeover of higher ed, as opposed to the far superior capitalist takeover of higher ed, which reliably buries millions of Americans in trillions of dollars in debt & graduates them into low paying jobs without good healthcare.”

This self-described socialist is apparently ignorant of the difference between socialism and capitalism—or wants deliberately to deceive us on the true natures of both. 

Capitalism logically cannot "take over" higher education, or any other industry, because its government is limited in the scope of its power. Capitalism is by definition individual self-governance and determination under a government limited to protecting the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property of all individuals. The government under capitalism—there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a “capitalist government”—does not have aggressive coercive power. In particular, it does not have any role in financing education, whether through direct or subsidized loans, grants, gifts, or scholarships, or of administering education.  

Socialism, on the other hand, is by definition government control. The socialist government respects no individual rights, including the right to individual self-government. So, when the state pays for higher education, with money taken by force of taxation from its citizens, it sets the terms. And the power doesn’t have any limits beyond what government officials can get away with at any given time. When the government sets the terms, it decides who goes to what college, what courses must be taken, and so on. Ultimately the career path of the graduate is controlled. Just ask the Cuban Doctors who are "tired of being a slave": "You are trained in Cuba and our education is free, health care is free, but at what price? You wind up paying for it your whole life," one Cuban Doctor put it. When the government pays your education tab, it has that to hang over your head for life. When the likes of AOC push for "free college," they know full well that the “price” college graduates will pay will likely be far more insidious than monetary debt. What can the graduate answer when the state says, "We paid for your education. Now you must do your social duty," which means, duty to the state.

Under capitalism, the individual sets the terms: If he likes the school's offering, and is accepted, he attends that school and is responsible for paying the tab. Whether he is "buried in debt & graduates into a low paying job" or goes on to a successful career while paying off a reasonable level of debt will be determined by his own choices and work ethics. To the socialist, this is a "capitalist takeover of higher ed" because the entitlement mentality it appeals to believes that "the world owes me a living," including "free college." 

Of course, the government is already heavily involved in financing higher education in America. That is why college costs so much to begin with, and why there is such a disconnect between many students' debt and their subsequent earning power. Investopedia reports that today, the Federal Government owns over 90% of all student loan debt, up from 55% in 2010—right before the Obama Administration’s federal monopolization of student lending, which expelled the private lenders from that market—and 0% in the early 1990s. * That is not capitalism. That is a creeping socialist takeover of higher education. Eliminating that lending and paying colleges directly out of the federal treasury would complete the takeover. What, AOC, is the cause that “reliably buries millions of Americans in trillions of dollars in debt & graduates them into low paying jobs without good healthcare?” Your precious Democratic Socialism, that’s what. Higher education in America is nowhere near capitalism.

To be sure, Betsy DeVos is not calling for an end to federal student lending or aid, as she should. She simply wants to “overhaul” it. I give her credit for calling attention to this creeping socialist takeover of higher education. But not too much credit. What would a real “capitalist takeover” look like. It would start with the abolition of the entire federal student loan program.

When AOC and her ilk speak of a capitalist takeover, they speak of individuals controlling their own educational affairs without government interference. When she speaks of “free college,” she calls for government control. DeVos is right. Government-paid “free college” is socialism, and represents a manifestation of “a socialist takeover of higher education.” I’ll take a capitalist takeover anytime—a genuine capitalist takeover; not what we have now, with the student loan monstrosity and overpriced colleges. Let’s have the real thing—the complete separation of higher education and state.

Ocasio-Cortez is either an ignorant fool or a liar—or both. Nonetheless, thank you, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for highlighting the fundamental choice we Americans face—socialist slavery or capitalist freedom in higher education.

* [ . . . although the Federal Government had been in the business of guaranteeing private student loans since at least 1965, Investopedia reports.]

Related Reading:

QUORA: Why do capitalist governments bail out large corporations? Isn’t this a practice of a socialist government?

Criminal Socialism vs. a Free Society

End, Don't Reduce, Federal Student Higher Education Funding

Rather Than quibble Over Federal Student Loan Interest Rates, the Feds Should Get Out of the Student Loan Business

On "Nightmare" College Debt

Obama’s “Free” Community College Scheme

NJ Assemblyman Joseph Cryan's Bill to Control College Costs is the Wrong Solution

QUORA: ‘Is capitalism voluntary?’

QUORA *: ‘What makes someone a socialist?'