Left libertarians, like all libertarians, believe that all State control of industry and all State ownership of natural resources should be abolished. In that sense, libertarian Leftists advocate complete and absolute privatization of, well, everything. Governments, or quasi-governmental public monopolies, have no business building or running roads, bridges, railroads, airports, parks, housing, libraries, post offices, television stations, electric lines, power plants, water works, oil rigs, gas pipelines, or anything else of the sort. (Those of us who are anarchists add that governments have no business building or running fire departments, police stations, courts, armies, or anything else of the sort, because governments — which are necessarily coercive and necessarily elitist — have no business existing or doing anything at all.)

It’s hard enough to sell this idea to our fellow Leftists, just on the merits. State Leftists have a long-standing and healthy skepticism towards the more utopian claims that are sometimes made about how businesses might act on the free market; meanwhile, they have a long-standing and very unhealthy naïveté towards the utopian claims that are often made on behalf of government bureaucracies under an electoral form of government. But setting the substantive issues aside, there’s another major roadblock for us to confront, just from the use of language.

There is something called privatization which has been a hot topic in Leftist circles for the past 15-20 years. It has been a big deal in Eastern Europe, in third world countries under the influence of the IMF, and in some cases in the United States, too. Naomi Klein has a new book on the topic, which has attracted some notice. Klein’s book focuses on the role that natural and artificial crises play in establishing the conditions for what she calls privatization. But privatization, as understood by the IMF, the neoliberal governments, and the robber baron corporations, is a very different beast from privatization as understood by free market radicals. What consistent libertarians advocate is the devolution of all wealth to the people who created it, and the reconstruction of all industry on the principle of free association and voluntary mutual exchange. But the IMF and Naomi Klein both seem to agree on the idea that privatization includes reforms like the following:

• Tax-funded government contracts to corporations like Blackwater or DynCorp for private mercenaries to fight government wars. This has become increasingly popular as a way for the U.S. to wage small and large wars over the past 15 years; I think it was largely pioneered through the U.S. government’s efforts to suppress international free trade in unauthorized drugs, and is currently heavily used by the U.S. in Colombia, the Balkans, and Iraq.

• Tax-funded government contracts to corporations like Wackenhut for government-funded but privately managed prisons, police forces, firefighters, etc. This has also become increasingly popular in the U.S. over the past 15 years; in the case of prisons, at least, it was largely inspired by the increasing number of people imprisoned by the U.S. government for using unauthorized drugs or selling them to willing customers.

• Government auctions or sweetheart contracts in which nationalized monopoly firms — oil companies, water works, power companies, and the like — are sold off to corporations, with the profits going into the State treasury, and usually with some form of legally-enforced monopoly left intact after privatization. One of the most notorious cases is the cannibalistic bonanza that Boris Yeltsin and a select class of politically-connected Oligarchs helped themselves to after the implosion of Soviet Communism. Throughout the third world, similar auction or contract schemes are suggested or demanded as a condition for the national government to receive a line of tax-funded credit from the member states of the International Monetary Fund.

• Yet Another Damn Account schemes for converting government pension systems from a welfare model to a forced savings model, in which workers are forced to put part of their paycheck into a special, government-created retirement account, where it can be invested according to government-crafted formulas in one of a limited number of government-approved investment vehicles offered by a tightly regulated cartel of government-approved uncompetitive investment brokers. This kind of government retirement plan is supposedly the centerpiece of privatization in Pinochet’s Chile, and has repeatedly been advocated by George W. Bush and other Republican politicians in the United States.

Klein and other state Leftists very claim that these government privatization schemes are closely associated with Right-wing authoritarian repression, up to and including secret police, death squads, and beating, torturing, or disappearing innocent people for exercising their rights of free speech or free association in labor unions or dissident groups.

And they are right. Those police state tactics aren’t compatible with any kind of free market, but then, neither are any of the government auctions, government contracting, government loans, and government regulatory schemes that Klein and her comrades present as examples of privatization. They are examples of government-backed corporate kleptocracy. The problem is that the oligarchs, the robber barons, and their hirelings dishonestly present these schemes — one and all of them involving massive government intervention and government plunder from ordinary working people — as if they were free market reforms. And Klein and her comrades usually believe them; the worst sorts of robber baron state capitalism are routinely presented as if they were arguments against the free market, even though pervasive government monopoly, government regulation, government confiscation, government contracting, and government finance have nothing even remotely to do with free markets.

I’d like to suggest that this confusion needs to be exposed, and combated. In order to combat it, we may very well need to mint some new language. As far as I know, privatization was coined by analogy with nationalization; if nationalization was the seizure of industry or resources by government, then privatization was the reversal of that process, devolving the industry or the resources into private hands. It is clear that the kind of government outsourcing and kleptocratic monopolies that Klein et al condemn don’t match up very well with the term. On the other hand, the term has been abused and perverted so long that it may not be very useful to us anymore, either.

So here’s my proposal for linguistic reform. What we advocate is the devolution of state-confiscated wealth and state-confiscated industries back to civil society. In some cases, that might mean transferring an industry or a resource to private proprietorship (if, for example, you can find the person or the people from whom a nationalized factory was originally seized, the just thing to do would be to turn the factory back over to them). But in most cases, it could just as easily mean any number of other ways to devolve property back to the people:

1. Some resources should be ceded to the joint ownership of those who habitually use them. For example, who should own your neighborhood streets? Answer: you and your neighbors should own the streets that you live on. For the government to seize your tax money and your land and use it to build neighborhood roads, and then to sell them out from under you to some unrelated third party who doesn’t live on them, doesn’t habitually use them, etc., would be theft.

2. Government industries and lands where an original private owner cannot be found could, and probably should, be devolved to the co-operative ownership of the people who work in them or on them. The factories to the workers; the soil to those who till it.

3. Some universally-used utilities (water works, regional power companies, perhaps highways) which were created by tax money might be ceded to the joint ownership of all the citizens of the area they serve. (This is somewhat similar to the Czechoslovakian model of privatization, in which government industries were converted into joint-stock companies, and every citizen was given so many shares.)

4. Some resources (many parks, perhaps) might be ceded to the unorganized public — that is, they would become public property in Roderick’s sense, rather than in the sense of government control.

Now, given the diversity of cases, and all of the different ways in which government might justly devolve property from State control to civil society, privatization is really too limiting a term. So instead let’s call what we want the socialization of the means of production.

As for the IMF / Blackwater model of privatization, again, the word doesn’t fit the situation very well, and we need something new in order to help mark the distinction. Whereas what we want could rightly be called socialization, I think that the government outsourcing, government-backed monopoly capitalism, and government goon squads, might more accurately be described as privateering.

I’m just sayin’.

Further reading:

• GT 2004-06-07: Property to the People: the Leftist case for privatization
• GT 2007-10-25: Radical health care reform

Here’s some Halloween treats for radicals who have been working for alliance between left-friendly libertarians and anti-authoritarian Leftists. These are all articles that have appeared over the past week Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s anti-imperialist Left magazine CounterPunch:

• James Bovard (2007-10-27): Breaking Down an Innocent Man: The FBI’s Right to Threaten Torture

• Jacob G. Hornberger (2007-10-27): Ruling by Decree: The Fraud of the War on Terror

• Anthony Papa (2007-10-30): The Twisted Logic of Drug Laws: The Preppie Killer Could Spend More Time in Prison for a Cocaine Bust Than for the Murder of Jennifer Rubin

• Sheldon Richman (2007-10-31): President Busybody: Bush has Time to Run the World

• Jacob G. Hornberger (2007-11-01): The War on Telephone Privacy: The Meaning of the Nacchio Case

One of the things that I’m especially pleased about with Hornberger’s article is that it’s not just a column covering some point of substantial pre-existing agreement between committed libertarians and committed Leftists (anti-imperialism, civil liberties, etc.). The article has that, and that kind of thing is very important and very valuable. But Hornberger’s article goes even further; not only is he crossing the bridges that are already there, but he is also building some new ones. One of Hornberger’s main analytical claims has to do with the way in which the bureaucratic State’s pervasive and byzantine regulation puts tremendous coercive power into the hands of the Stasi, and the way in which the State’s regulatory carrots and sticks serve to keep the interests of big business and the State firmly aligned:

First, as we have long pointed out, the real value of the regulated society is not any protection it provides to people. All that protection talk is just a sham. The real purpose of the regulated society is to keep the business and banking community in line — meaning in conformity with federal policy. The real purpose of the rules and regulations is to serve as a Damocles sword, ready to fall on any business or bank that refuses to go along with the feds.

… Of course, the feds would argue that the law is the law and that Nacchio broke it and therefore has to pay the price. That, of course, is not the point. The point is that in the regulated society, everyone breaks the law, one way or another, which then provides the feds with the option of prosecuting anyone they want whenever they want.

Consider, for example, the IRS code. Despite never-ending railing among political candidates about how complex the code is, the feds love the complexity. Why? Because they know that no one can ever file a perfect income-tax return and especially not wealthy and influential businessmen. If the feds looked hard enough, they could prosecute anyone they wanted at any time for income-tax violations.

It’s the same with insider-trading laws, Sarbanes-Oxley, hiring illegal aliens, or a multitude of other economic crimes. If they hadn’t gotten Nacchio on insider trading, they would have undoubtedly gone after him for other things. The point is, he refused to go along with illegality and wrongdoing, and they went after him for it.

To add insult to injury, President Bush and some of his federal cohorts in Congress are seeking to give civil immunity to the telephone companies that allegedly chose to become federal informers. They are trying to get Congress to pass a law that would prohibit the customers of the telephone companies from suing for the companies’ allegedly wrongful (and cowardly) misconduct.

In other words, become a federal informer and we’ll protect you. Refuse to do so, and we’ll send you to jail.

What is the difference between neighborhood captains in Castro’s Cuba, who report people’s activities to their government, and U.S. telephone companies who report people’s activities to their government? Don’t they all rationalize their conduct under the same warped sense of patriotism?

— Jacob G. Hornberger (2007-11-01): The War on Telephone Privacy: The Meaning of the Nacchio Case

When libertarians challenge the regulatory State, well-intentioned Leftists will often point to all kinds of sharp dealing, exploitation, and irresponsible behavior that big business engaged in prior to the massive expansion of government regulation during the Progressive and New Deal eras. The case for this is often impressionistic and overstated, and usually glosses over the way in which byzantine State regulations allow for new kinds of market-cornering, agency-capturing, sharp dealing, and legal insulation from corporate responsibility. But too many conventional libertarians miss the point by responding with little more than apologia for big business. The right response is to point out that there is more than one way to deal with nasty business practices. The question is whether the means are going to be coercive or voluntary. Coercive solutions tend to deal with the problem from the top down, through a class of professional bureaucrats; voluntary methods tend to favor dealing with these problems from the bottom up, with you and your neighbors working together in grassroots efforts like fighting unions, organized boycotts, consumer associations, mutual aid societies, or watchdog pressure groups.

The grassroots approach puts power into the hands of ordinary people, who enjoy a lot of choice over what causes to support, how to organize responses, when to participate, when to withdraw, and so on. The bureaucratic approach takes power out of the hands of ordinary people and puts it in the hands of professional lawyers and bureaucrats; it tries to fight the unaccountable power of Behemoth by building up the unaccountable power of Leviathan. But the State has its own reasons for doing what it does, and it’s extraordinarily hard, indeed practically impossible, to keep those reasons aligned with anything like ordinary people’s real interests or concerns. Business and government simply get involved in elaborate power plays, as each tries to convert departments of the other into a captured agency for their own purposes, variously using the tools of campaign contributions, front groups, astroturf, cronyism, tax breaks, tax revenue, regulation, prosecution, extortion, and other forms of mutual back-scratching and mutual terrorizing. This is exactly what happened with the government’s successful efforts to turn telecom companies into multibillion dollar snitches for the Securitate creeps; as usual, the end result is that they all get in it together against the rest of us. That’s not an unhappy accident; it’s the way it’s always going to be as long as State agencies can arrogate power that individual people cannot opt out of.

All power to the people; the bureaus can go to hell.

Further reading:

• GT 2005-10-09: State of grace

Here is something very true from an excellent post by Kai at Zuky:

As I’ve often noted, many white liberals remain oblivious to the depth and breadth of anti-racist work, opting to hide behind the delusion that anyone who votes for Democrats and doesn’t have a pointy hood in the closet is a good guy in the movement toward greater social justice — as though the Democratic Party is some bastion of progressivism and not one of two hands strangling US polity on behalf of the ruling class and the corporate-political establishment which sponsors its power. Some might be surprised to learn that when people of color talk about racism amongst ourselves, white liberals often receive a far harsher skewering than white conservatives or overt racists. Many of my POC friends would actually prefer to hang out with an Archie Bunker-type who spits flagrantly offensive opinions, rather than a colorblind liberal whose insidious paternalism, dehumanizing tokenism, and cognitive indoctrination ooze out between superficially progressive words. At least the former gives you something to work with, something above-board to engage and argue against; the latter tacitly insists on imposing and maintaining an illusion of non-racist moral purity which provides little to no room for genuine self-examination or racial dialogue.

Countless blogospheric discussions on racism amply demonstrate the manner in which many white liberals start acting victimized and angry if anyone attempts to burst their racism-free bubble, oftentimes inexplicably bringing up non-white friends, lovers, adopted children, relatives, ancestors; dismissing, belittling, or obtusely misreading substantive historically-informed analysis of white supremacism as either divisive rhetoric or flaming; downplaying racism as an interpersonal social stigma and bad PR, rather than an overarching system of power under which we all live and which has socialized us all; and threatening to walk away from discussion if persons of color do not comform to a narrow white-centered comfort zone. Such people aren’t necessarily racists in the hate-crime sense of the word, but they are usually acting out social dynamics created by racism and replicating the racist social relationships they were conditioned since birth to replicate.

Of course not all white liberals are like this. I’d say that a significant minority of white liberals are actually interested in learning about anti-racism once properly exposed to it. This requires enough humility to admit that people of color have something to teach white folks, a concept that many whites struggle with because racism teaches us that whiteness is the seat of authoritative knowledge, while brownness is the repository of murky musical mysticism which whiteness may dip into at will for spiritual support and servile entertainment. Nevertheless, some white folks manage to claw and bootstrap their way out of their own conditioning, opening their hearts and minds to previously unseen worlds from which the voices and stories of people of color emerge; studying and observing the profound effects of racist society on their own perceptual prisms and on the shape of the world; and consciously, steadily working to counteract those effects. Such people become allies to people of color.

From what I can see, though, a solid majority of white liberals maintain a fairly hostile posture toward anti-racist discourse and critique, while of course adamantly denying this hostility. Many white liberals consider themselves rather enlightened for their ability to retroactively support the Civil Rights movement and to quote safely dead anti-racist icons, even though their present-day physical, intellectual, and political orbits remain mostly segregated. They somehow take pride in being more down with the brown than their conservative brethren; indeed they exhibit a certain strange glee in highlighting and exploiting the macaca and call me moments of their political opponents. Armed with diversity soundbites and melanin-inclusive photo-ops, they seek electoral, financial, and public relations support from people of color. Yet the consistent outcome of their institution-building agendas is to deprioritize and marginalize our voices, perspectives, experiences, concerns, cultures, and initiatives. When you get right down to it, the unrecognized political reality is that most white liberals have more in common with white conservatives — social cues, family ties, cognitive biases, cultural backdrops, etc. — than they do with people of color. I’m calling this tangle of contradictions the white liberal conundrum.

— Zuky 2007-10-11: The White Liberal Conundrum

You really should read the whole thing.

(Link thanks to Jack Stephens at Alas, A Blog 2007-10-25.)

Related:

• GT 2004-04-19: Whited sepulchres
• GT 2006-02-22: Congratulations on washing! (or: men and feminism)
• GT 2004-11-11: Whereof one ought not speak

There is no free market for healthcare in the United States.

Every aspect of medicine is tightly controlled by the federal government, and shot through with systematic subsidy and intervention. Federal, state, and local governments restrict who can practice medicine. They restrict where and how medicine can be practiced. They throw people in jail or hit them with massive fines for using the wrong label or practicing alternative forms of medicine or safely performing medical procedures which are considered above their government-licensed station. They tightly regulate which drugs can be produced and where you can get them and whether or not you can import them from somewhere else. They do this partly on the excuse that they know better than you and your doctor do what drugs you should be taking, and partly because they are engaged in a deliberate effort to enforce monopoly pricing for new drugs. The federal government created the circumstances that have forced most American workers either to live with no health insurance at all, or else to depend on their bosses for health insurance; the federal government created and actively subsidized HMOs in order to move more medical care over to a rationing (managed care) model; the federal government provides tax-funded subsidies for healthcare to select patients through Medicare, Medicaid, and S-CHIP; some state governments are now moving to force everyone to participate in a captive market for medical insurance, with more tax-funded subsidies to those who cannot afford it. The health insurance market is in turn heavily regulated by the government and wrapped up as tightly as you can imagine in government-imposed red tape, which systematically constrains choices and suppresses competition. The whole damned thing is run by government bureaucrats, government-insulated corporate bureaucrats, and government-anointed experts.

Yet whenever state Leftists and Progressives call for expanding programs such as S-CHIP, or for thoroughgoing nationalization of healthcare, this is what almost invariably happens: they pick out some horrible thing that has happened, or very nearly happened, to somebody under the present state-corporatist system of healthcare, compare it to what would have happened under a more state-socialist system of healthcare, and then say that this proves that getting healthcare through a state-socialist system is better than getting healthcare on the free market. Since we don’t have a free market in healthcare, and the horrible things that happen, or very nearly happen, in the U.S. medical system aren’t happening in a free market, this is simply a red herring.

Thus, I completely agree with Myca at Alas, A Blog when she says that we need radical healthcare reform and that our current system is abso-fucking lutely sadistic and nonsensical. But I don’t know what any of that has to do with the free market. As I said over there:

Myca: If you oppose universal health care and you do not explain clearly by what mechanism you will give medical care to poor people, you will be banned.

Well, I will give medical care to poor people (other than myself) by continuing to do what I already do. I scrape by on about US $13,000 a year and I give about 1/3 of that to groups that provide direct economic and medical aid to other poor people (Direct Relief, abortion funds, Planned Parenthood, battered women’s shelters, rape crisis counselors, etc.). I’m able to give that much partly because I don’t have any children to care for and partly because I have wealthier family members that I know I could ask for help in an emergency. But even without those advantages, I’d be able to give this kind of money more comfortably if it weren’t for the government’s constant draining of my resources through taxes to pay for red tape, corporate welfare and armed thugs. In any case I do think that I, at least, am doing something more to own my beliefs than just waving my hands around. As for explanation and defense:

Myca: I've heard over and over again that our current system is not a free market, and that's cool, but then it's incumbent on the person claiming that a free market would provide healthcare to those without money to show precisely how that would happen, because I don't see it.

OK, but that’s not what’s been argued so far. What keeps happening is a comparison between something horrible that happens, or almost happened, under the U.S. state-corporatist system, and what would happen under some other state-socialist system of healthcare. But comparing the characteristics of one tightly-controlled government-regimented system of healthcare to those of another tightly-controlled government-regimented system of healthcare illuminates very little about how a free market would work, because neither of the options under comparison has very much to do with free markets. If you want to argue that state-socialism is better than state-corporatism, fine, but you should leave the free market out of it. If you want to argue that a free market in healthcare would still have features that make it worse than state-socialist healthcare, that’s fine too, but it requires some further argument that hasn’t yet been given in any detail.

As for the beginnings of an argument that you give in this comment:

Myca: Roughly, because the free market has no mechanism in place to provide health care to people who are unable to pay for it.

I’m not convinced. Because, well, of course it does. The mechanism is the same mechanism that exists in state-corporatist or state-socialist healthcare systems: people who are unable to pay for healthcare themselves can get it by getting other people to pay for part of it or all of it. The question is what means of getting other people to pay for it are available–and whether these means are voluntary or coercive.

Any State-run system of medical care that you happen to like could, in principle, be provided by voluntary mutual aid on a free market. The State has no special ability to make medical care free, or to summon up money from nowhere to pay for it; for the State to cover the medical costs it has to get money, labor, or supplies from somebody else, and whatever the State takes could be given voluntarily. Suppose that you like the way that money is collected and distributed in the French medical system; then on a free market, nobody is going to stop you from creating a nonprofit French Mutual Society for Medicine that uses the same bureaucratic mechanisms to collect, allocate, and pay out money. The only limitation is that, whatever system you cook up, you cannot force people to pay in, and you can’t force people to use your system for their own healthcare costs.

You might claim that unless everybody is forced to pay in, there wouldn’t be enough money to go around. But consider the billions of dollars that are voluntarily pissed away every two years trying to elect a slightly more progressive gang of weak-kneed establishment politicians, and what might happen if those resources were redirected towards direct action rather than electioneering and lobbying. Let alone the amount of money that might go to healing people rather than killing them if individual people, rather than belligerent governments, had control over the dollars currently seized in taxes.

You might instead claim that even if there is enough money to go around, this kind of model puts poor people at the mercy of donors for their healthcare. But I could just as easily respond that using the State to cover healthcare costs puts poor people’s at the mercy of the political process, which certainly offers no guarantees that the least powerful and least connected people in a society are going to get what they need, or even get decent human respect. In either case, people who aren’t very powerful need to organize and struggle to protect their interests from people who are more powerful than they are. The question, again, is what means of struggle are (1) morally preferable, and (2) strategically effective.

I don’t think it’s crazy to see voluntary, bottom-up mutual aid as both morally and strategically preferable to top-down political regimentation. Voluntary mutual aid may not actually produce a healthcare system that looks much like the nationalized healthcare systems common in western social democracies, but I think that the differences would largely be for the better: less bureaucracy, more alternatives, and more control in the hands of the patients themselves. Unlike the corporatist system in place today, medical costs would be drastically lower, thanks to the removal of the government-created monopolies and cartels that currently control every aspect of the insurance, medical, and pharmaceutical industries. And unlike the corporatist system in place today, medical costs might be covered not only by charities or churches or bosses (gag), but also through grassroots associations such as mutual aid societies and labor unions. (There is some actual history here; lodge practice medical arrangements in the U.S., U.K., and Australia used to provide healthcare to working-class folks at a rate of about one day’s wages for one year of healthcare, before the growing trend was halted and obliterated by the politically-connected medical establishment, with the backing of the State.)

Hope this helps.

I’d also like to add that, in principle, I actually reject the claim that it's incumbent on the person claiming that a free market would provide healthcare to those without money to show precisely how that would happen, because I don't see it. I’ve said something about details here because I know something about the issue that might be illuminating, but generally speaking, part of the point of advocating a free market across the board is that in a free society you do not need to be an expert in everything. No individual person and no committee of people needs to plan out precisely how any social system will work–which is a good thing, because nobody has comprehensive knowledge and organizational skill and entrepreneurial creativity in every field of human endeavor. Advocating free markets for shoes or bread does not make it incumbent on you to spell out all the details of how enough of these will go around to keep people from going around shoeless or from starving in the streets, because that is really a matter that can be left up to the cobbler and the shoe-wearer, or to the baker and the eater–who can be expected to know a lot more than some policy wonk about how to handle their own business and meet their own needs.

Further reading:

• Roderick Long, Formulations (Winter 1993): How Government Solved the Healthcare Crisis
• Sheldon Richman, FFF Commentaries (August 2001): A Stupid Way to Get Health Insurance
• GT 2006-04-13: How physicians learned to stop worrying and love big pharma
• GT 2005-10-20: Patents kill, part II
• GT 2004-04-26: Patents kill
• GT 2007-01-22: Roe v. Wade Day #34
• GT 2006-04-10: Bureaucratic rationality #4: State Ownership of the Means of Reproduction edition
• GT 2006-01-28: Bureaucratic rationality #3: Indecent Exposure edition
• GT 2004-11-22: For your own safety
• GT 2003-12-31: EC OTC in OZ

As if deliberately setting out to taunt me, Kate Tennier of Toronto wants to coin retro-progressive as a political neologism. Lloyd Alter, also of Toronto, has come up with an accompanying survey, Are You a Retro-Progressive? With all due respect to deliberate primitivism and trend-story thinking person’s terms, I don’t think they’ve quite gotten it. So, I offer my own survey, below.

Are you a retrogressive retro-progressive?

Do you agree or disagree with the following quotations? For each that you agree with, give yourself one point.

We know enough about agriculture so that the agricultural production of the country could be doubled if the knowledge were applied. We know enough about disease so that if the knowledge were utilized, infectious and contagious diseases would be substantially destroyed in the United States within a score of years; we know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation.

(That’s Progressive academic Charles R. Van Hise, quoted in Paul (1995), p. 78.)

… the way of Nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born.

(That’s notable Fabian H.G. Wells, in 1905, quoted in Paul (1995), p. 75.)

A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit — in other words social failures — would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.

(That’s the noted environmentalist lawyer and author Madison Grant in his eugenicist magnum opus, The Passing of the Great Race (1916), pp. 50–51.)

Bonus question. When you see the following picture…

… do you think (a) Quaint, anti-consumerist, and ecologically responsible, or (b) an ad-man’s glossy idealization of an underlying reality of unpaid labor, soul-killing drudgery, and patriarchal control? If (a), give yourself one point. If (b), your second-wave feminism isn’t trendily retro enough for a movement that rhetorically identifies itself with the leading white male technocrats of the 1900s-1930s.

If you scored three or more, congratulations. Your beliefs are closely in line with those of the retro Progressive movement. Now that’s some of that old time religion!

Further reading:

• GT 2007-03-22: The Progressivism of fools
• GT 2006-04-22: Over My Shoulder #20: Damon W. Root (2006), review of David W. Southern's The Progressive Era and Race