Government Zero: No Borders, No Language, No Culture (23 page)

That’s not how socialism works. In a socialist system, the ruling class extracts everything everyone else produces and offers nothing in return. It’s what I call trickle-up poverty. The ruling class keeps living large off the people, the middle class shrinks, and the lowest class expands.

Many people mistakenly believe there was no income disparity in the communist Soviet Union. That’s not true. If you think Joseph Stalin lived in a one-room apartment like his “comrades,” you’re sadly naïve.

Stalin actually lived like a king in his dacha at Sochi, a luxurious palace in the resort town that recently hosted the Winter Olympics.
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The difference between Stalin’s wealth
and Steve Jobs’s was the latter earned it and the former stole it. Jobs made billions by producing products for which people voluntarily exchanged their money. Stalin pointed a gun and said, “Give it to me or I’ll shoot.” Actually, some dissenters were lucky enough to go to the gulag.

One can’t help noticing the similarity to our vacationer in chief or the First Lady with her seventy-five ladies-in-waiting. Serving in the federal government was a financial hardship for many of our founding fathers. During his second term as vice president, John Adams had to rent a room from Secretary of the Senate Samuel Otis and his wife.
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For the Obamas, it has been a huge step up in lifestyle, just as it was for Stalin.

This is the truth about socialism. It isn’t about equality. That’s just the sales pitch. It’s about rulers and the ruled. It’s about a few people at the top living like royalty while everyone else struggles to get by, all the while being told that thoughts of keeping their own money are selfish and unpatriotic. It’s a scam.

It also always ends in disaster, as it did in Russia, China, and every other country that tried it. It will end in disaster in Europe, too. It’s just happening more slowly there because they have a mixed economy. They’ve attempted to mix capitalism and socialism to get the benefits of both. It hasn’t worked, because it can’t work. The European social democracies will all eventually collapse, just as Greece has. The taller trees just take longer to fall.

Let’s hope it’s not too late to keep the United States from proving no tree is too tall.

That brings us back to what Lenin’s pope and Obama are
really
teaming up to do. The pope will release his encyclical on climate change and lend his full support to the lame-duck
Marxist signing the Kyoto Protocol or something worse at the United Nations. Then the people who failed to convince American voters that socialism was a good idea will have an excuse to impose it on them anyway as the only solution to climate change.

Remember when I said the Church limits papal infallibility to a very narrow range of subjects? Well, encyclicals have traditionally been issued by popes on only the most important religious issues. That naturally limits them to subjects the author knows something about.

Pope Francis has thrown that principle out the window for purely political reasons. His
Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home
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is a thinly veiled political manifesto, combining pronouncements on both economics and climate science the pope has no expertise in whatsoever. In it, he takes all of the scientific and economic fallacies I’ve already talked about and stamps them with the official seal of the Church.

The encyclical opens with some quotes from Saint Francis of Assisi that appear cherry-picked to sound like the leftist, New Age “Gaia” narrative. That’s no accident. The pope’s scientific advisor for this letter is the radical Gaia-worshipper and climate hoax scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. Consider this passage:

Saint Francis’s poetic language here may sound like paganism, but not when taken within the whole context of his writing. He was certainly very concerned about the environment and all of God’s creatures, but he didn’t worship the Earth itself as a goddess, as the pagans did. Neither did he consider it a living organism, as the modern, secular Gaia cult does. But look where the Pope takes that imagery in the next paragraph:

That didn’t come from Saint Francis; it came from the pope. Or, I should say it came from Schellnhuber, as this is straight Gaia cult nonsense, wherein the Earth is alive and human beings are inflicting violence upon her.

Schellnhuber’s beliefs include a whole range of radical ideas that would horrify most Catholics.
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Not only does he embrace the idea that the Earth is a living, conscious organism, but he sees human beings as a threat that must be diminished. He has said the “carrying capacity” of the Earth is below one billion people, although he’s backed away from that statement when confronted.
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Schellnhuber belongs to a whole subgroup of radical liberal environmentalists who believe the human population must be vastly decreased to save their Earth goddess.

In fairness to the Pope, he somewhat disclaims this portion of Schellnhuber’s insane worldview, although I wish he was a bit more emphatic:

The solutions will have to be “generated between these extremes”? What does that mean? Do we just need to eliminate a few billion people, not six billion as Schellnhuber implies with his “carrying capacity” statements? How can there be any compromise at all with these insane theories?

With Schellnhuber advising him and his own Marxist biases, Pope Francis has produced a gargantuan piece of leftist propaganda that includes just about every hard-left fallacy ever foisted upon the gullible, including the Gaia cult narrative, the climate change hoax, Marx’s thoroughly discredited economic theories, and the standard class warfare our demagogic president promotes every chance he gets.

He even manages to work in a deferential reference to Islam, quoting an Islamic poet in a footnote to a passage on
the “mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face.”
³⁸

There ought to be an impeachment process for popes when they use the power of their office to mislead the faithful so egregiously.

Throughout his treatise, the pope cites excessive consumption as one of the root causes of both environmental damage and global poverty. If you and I would just lower our standard of living, everything would be fine. Of course, the pope doesn’t seem to realize there is something quite hypocritical about a man who flies around the world on a private jet lecturing the rest of us about our standard of living. Like all socialists, he believes he is an exception to his own rules about what wealth everyone else is entitled to.

He certainly has some rules in mind for
your
money. He confirms the real agenda behind the global warming hoax here:

Isn’t that convenient? We need a different “model of distribution,” meaning government redistribution of wealth, because if everyone consumed as much as the “minority” there would be too much waste. This is so illogical it’s hard to know where to start.

First, the Pope conveniently forgets that rich people
consume more because they’ve produced more
for other people
. A billionaire acquires his billions by providing billions of dollars in products to his customers. Who consumes the products the billionaire sells to get his money? It isn’t the billionaire. It is his customers, the mass market.

Second, the pope nonchalantly implies this “minority” doesn’t have a
right
to spend money they’ve earned by providing products of equal value to other people. How can that be? When a businessman exchanges $1 million in products for $1 million in money, why do his customers have a right to consume $1 million in products if he has no right to consume the money he received in exchange for them?

These are garden-variety socialist fallacies, but the pope doesn’t end there. He actually trots out one of Marx’s theories that is so discredited even modern-day Marxists have backed away from it:

Marx’s theory of overproduction was a foundational plank in
Das Kapital
, or
Capital
in English. Marx argued that a capitalist system results in firms producing so much that they force down the prices of their own goods, thereby diminishing profits and ultimately necessitating layoffs. Workers find themselves poor “in the midst of plenty,” unable to afford the
goods they previously produced. This is the root cause of what Marx described as the inevitable “crisis” of capitalism.

This is what the pope refers to when he says irrational production results in “negative results in regional economies.” He very appropriately links alarmism about destruction of the environment to this communist claptrap. After all, promoting Marxism is what the environmental movement is really about.

Academia still hangs on to Marx’s lunatic ravings, even after history has proven him wrong again and again. Over the course of the nineteenth century, consumer prices did fall dramatically as productive capacity and efficiency increased. But it didn’t make workers poorer. It made them richer, especially since wages went up even as prices went down. These facts are not in dispute.

Marx’s theory doesn’t even make logical sense in a classroom. Even if wages had remained the same, what economists call their real wages would have risen, since purchasing power increases as prices fall. This isn’t rocket science. If the cost of apples falls from two dollars per apple to one dollar per apple, you can buy twice as many apples with the same ten-dollar bill.

This century hasn’t been any kinder to Marx. As I mentioned before, worldwide poverty has been cut in half precisely because so many previously socialist countries have dramatically reformed their economies to be more capitalist. Just as workers in nineteenth-century America realized a spectacular rise in living standards as the American economy became more productive, so, too, are Third World nations today seeing millions escape from poverty by essentially doing exactly the opposite of what the pope says they should do.

Regardless, the pope is still pushing the same program as our Marxist president. He wants the most productive people
in America and other First World nations to lower their living standards to accommodate wealth redistribution to Third World nations, even as he and the golfer in chief continue to live like kings, just as Stalin did in his communist paradise. Somehow, this will also save the world from global warming:

This is the same reasoning that produced the War on Poverty in America, which has given us record numbers of people on food stamps and other forms of government welfare. Obama, the pope, and the rest of the Marxist progressives want to employ the same model on a worldwide scale.

Heaven help us if they succeed.

E
arlier this year, a study by Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
¹
dealt what American climate scientists Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger called a “death blow” to global warming hysteria.
²
The study proves what any real scientist already knew: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models that predict significant warming with increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide are wrong.

Nevertheless, the president continues to pursue his Climate Change Action Plan
³
with strong support from progressives, including the pope, who use this imaginary crisis to pursue their all-out attack on private property and free enterprise. This isn’t just my opinion. Maurice Newman, the chief business advisor to Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, said precisely that in an op-ed earlier this year.

“This is not about facts or logic. It’s about a new world order under the control of the UN,” he wrote in the
Australian
. “It is opposed to capitalism and freedom and has made environmental catastrophism a household topic to achieve its objective.”
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Scientific evidence refuting the progressive climate change
scam continues to mount up, yet progressive politicians, media, educators, and politically captured scientists continue to advance the theory as if it were scientifically proven fact. This is what happens when the government hijacks science for political purposes. It’s happened before and it’s happening right now in America.

Science was hijacked by the government in the Soviet Union under Obama’s role model, Joseph Stalin. For more than three decades, the Soviet scientific community entered a dark age now known as Lysenkoism. It was a period when all scientific discovery and advancement halted and regressed, thanks to the political dominance over Soviet science by a man named Trofim Lysenko.

I remember studying genetics in the late 1950s, when genetics was a huge subject. We were all fascinated by learning the structure of DNA. James Watson and Francis Crick put out
The Double Helix
ten years later. It was one of the most exciting periods for science in my lifetime. But there was one place in the world where Watson and Crick’s great accomplishment wasn’t being celebrated.

In the Soviet Union under Stalin, people were forbidden to believe that genes exist, just like people in Obama’s America are forbidden to believe that man-made climate change
doesn’t
exist. Marxists have to stamp out the truth or no one would tolerate their rule. That’s why Stalin needed a fake scientist to push Lysenkoism in the USSR and why Obama needs fake scientists to push global warming in the USSA.

Lysenko rose to prominence during the 1930s. The Soviet
agricultural system was dying and people were starving because of communism. Russia had once been an exporter of wheat, but after Stalin collectivized the farms, production plummeted.

So the perversion of science in the Soviet Union was a direct result of the economic failures of communism. The pattern might sound familiar. First, Stalin attacked the middle-class farmers. Calling them kulaks, he said they were exploiters. He accused them of robbing from the people by charging too much for the produce of the land.

Does this sound familiar? Does it sound like the fairness doctrine—the litany you hear from Al Sharpton and the brigades of spineless sea creatures on the left about “fairness”?

Once Stalin had successfully demonized the middle-class farmers, he stole their land and turned it into government-owned-and-operated farms. But the government can’t manage anything. It couldn’t do it in Russia and it can’t do it here.

How’s the postal service working? It’s so great that Federal Express and other private services are used by most businesses. Are you looking forward to Obamacare, which is Stalin-care in drag? You think government will give you better doctors, shorter wait times, or lower costs? The Russians did. That’s why thirty million Russians starved to death as a direct result of collective farming and other idiotic socialist ideas.

So, along comes this crackpot Lysenko, who says he has found a new way to increase agricultural production in Russia. It was based on a Lamarckian view of heredity, meaning it was based on the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck preceded Darwin by several decades and is an important figure in the history of science. However, the basis for many of his theories, that
acquired
traits can be passed on to offspring, was acknowledged as mistaken even in Lysenko’s day.

The idea that acquired traits can become hereditary is almost as ludicrous as the theory that man is causing global warming with industrial activity. One of Lamarck’s examples of an acquired trait was the long necks of giraffes. Lamarck theorized that giraffes living in areas where they needed to reach the leaves on high trees stretched their necks in attempting to reach them and somehow this stretching was passed on to their offspring.

He didn’t say Darwinian natural selection occurred, where over many generations the giraffes with longer necks survived at a higher rate than those with shorter necks and eventually only the long neck trait survived. No, Lamarck believed that when a giraffe stretched its neck,
that giraffe itself
passed on the newly acquired trait to its own offspring.

It’s like believing a person with an average physique who changes his body style with intensive weight training can pass on the body builder’s physique he acquired to his children. Today, it sounds so ridiculous that one wouldn’t even require scientific proof to dismiss it. But it was the only acceptable theory in the Soviet Union for decades. This is what happens when science becomes the stepchild of politics.

Lysenko rejected the theories of evolution based on Gregor Mendel’s work, which is the basis for all modern genetic theory. As I said, Lysenko actually believed genes didn’t exist, a view shared by Stalin. Stalin denounced genetic theory as “idealist,” a pejorative he used often for anything that didn’t please him. It was one of his favorite “snarl words” for anything that didn’t fit into his confused worldview.
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Stalin also believed the combination of Mendel’s ideas with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection sounded too much like the competition inherent in capitalism. How biological processes can possibly have any relevance to economics
is hard to imagine, but Stalin wasn’t the only one who held this view in the Soviet Union back then.

However, there was a more pressing, practical reason for Stalin to support Lysenko’s crackpot theories: the faster results he promised to deliver in increasing agricultural production. Since Lysenko claimed plants could pass acquired traits to offspring, he could achieve new species of plants, including wheat that would grow in colder temperatures, a lot faster than the real scientists studying genetics. Stalin needed quick results to combat the famine he caused with his disastrous socialist policies.

Do you see the connection between socialism and pseudoscience? The people were against farm collectivization, just like Americans today are against carbon taxes or open borders. This resistance, along with the inherent problems of socialism itself, combined to destroy agricultural productivity. Stalin needed a miracle from his scientists not only to make agriculture more productive, but to convince the people not to completely revolt against socialism.

The problem was that real science didn’t promise miracles, any more than it does today. Any improvement to Soviet crops through genetics would take many generations, which was time Stalin didn’t have. He needed immediate gratification. So, just as people suffering from the mental disorder called liberalism ignore economic reality, Stalin threw his support behind a man who ignored scientific reality. What real scientists said would take years or decades, the crackpot Lysenko promised to do in months. As David Joravsky tells us, they even started to believe their own nonsense.

There was only one problem. It wasn’t true. Regardless of how much Stalin or Lysenko wanted to deny the existence of genes or affirm the theory of acquired traits, any experiments based on those idiotic beliefs were bound to fail, just like everything the academic socialists in Washington do fails.

They did fail, but Lysenko was either too incompetent or too obstinate to recognize it. Not being a real scientist, Lysenko was able to break all the rules of the scientific method I described to you and not realize, or at least not admit to himself, that anything was wrong.

It is just like when the unemployment number falls because they stop counting people who have given up looking for work, not because they found jobs. Our Marxist in chief actually believes he’s done something good. That’s part of the mental disorder. Liberals aren’t just stupid. They’re delusional.

Regardless of the absurdity of his theories, Lysenko rose to become the most powerful scientist in the Soviet Union, all because his crackpot theories fulfilled a political purpose. Science ceased being a search for truth and became a search to validate Stalin’s policies, just as climate science is no longer a search for truth, but a search to validate cap-and-trade and more regulation on businesses.

While Lysenko never had any support among real scientists, he was passionately supported by government journalists, just like the climate change con artists are supported by the media today. They only wanted to report what the government
wanted them to report, that communism was working fine. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

With Stalin and the press behind Lysenko, anyone in the Soviet Union who stood up to him was publicly denounced, the way Obama denounces people today. They lost Communist Party membership, the way you are thrown out of clubs today if you express conservative views. They lost their jobs, the way you can lose your job if you talk about affirmative action being a disaster for America or about the lie of global warming.

You didn’t know you could lose your job if you didn’t go along with the global warming con artists? Didn’t your local newspaper carry that, either? Well, it happens all the time in the new Soviet America. It didn’t start with Obama. Mr. Scam Artist himself, Al Gore, was doing it over twenty years ago.

In 1993, Gore fired physicist William Happer from his job as director of energy research for the U.S. Department of Energy. Happer had testified to Congress that the scientific data didn’t support the alarmist fears being propagated at the time about ozone depletion and global warming. “I was told that science was not going to intrude on public policy,” said Happer. “I did not need the job that badly.”
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It can get even worse. Just as he purged anyone who resisted his political and economic agenda, Stalin purged scientists who rejected Lysenko’s crackpot hereditary theories. He certainly wasn’t going to let science intrude on public policy, either.

We don’t have purges yet here in the United States, but only because the radicals promoting climate change know they
can’t get away with it. But listen to their rhetoric. They call Tea Partiers “terrorists” and openly call for “climate change deniers” to be jailed. Wrote Adam Weinstein in Gawker:

Don’t be so quick to dismiss people like this as the lunatic fringe. The Nazis and Bolsheviks were fringe right up until the day they took over. This is just how it started with Lysenko. The press just loved him because his dumb theories validated Stalin. The Soviet press played a major role in bolstering Stalin’s persecution of scientists who disagreed with him.

The same forces that were at work in the Soviet Union under Stalin are attacking scientific truth in America today. This is what Obama has done to science, to medicine, and to reality itself. We are living in a new Soviet era in America.

Let me speak to you as a scientist for a moment. That’s right: I am a scientist, who has actually done scientific research
scientifically
. I earned a bachelor’s degree in biology, two master’s degrees in ethnobotany and anthropology, respectively, and a Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomedicine from the University of California, Berkeley. In order to earn these degrees, I had to not only collect and analyze data, but draw scientifically valid conclusions that other scientists concurred with.