There is remarkably little evidence showing that more education leads to greater national prosperity. Much of the knowledge gained in education is actually not relevant for productivity enhancement, even though it enables people to lead a more fulfilling and independent life. Also, the view that the rise of the knowledge economy has critically increased the importance of education is misleading. To begin with, the idea of the knowledge economy itself is problematic, as knowledge has always been the main source of wealth. Moreover, with increasing de-industrialization and mechanization, the knowledge requirements may even have fallen for most jobs in the rich countries. Even when it comes to higher education, which is supposed to matter more in the knowledge economy, there is no simple relationship between it and economic growth. What really matters in the determination of national prosperity is not the educational levels of individuals but the nation’s ability to organize individuals into enterprises with high productivity.

—Ha-Joon Chang
23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism

It is not necessarily a widespread fear of foreign or domestic threats — real or imagined — that compels the state to abridge civil liberties. When the government takes measures for the sake of security, it is not simply translating the people’s fear of danger into a repressive act of state. Instead, the government makes a choice: to focus on some threats and not others, and to take certain actions (but not others) to counter those threats. Merely think of the attention — and money, staff, countermeasures, and air time — the US government has lavished upon terrorism as opposed to automobile accidents or climate change, even in the wake of Katrina, Sandy, and a host of other life-threatening weather events…

Governments today have a great deal of freedom to define what threatens a people and how they will respond to those threats. But far from being removed from the interests of and ideologies of the powerful, they are often constrained, even defined and constituted, by those interests and ideologies.

To cite just one example: it is a well known fact that African Americans have suffered as much from the American state’s unwillingness to protect them from basic threats to their lives and liberties as they have from the willingness of white Americans to threaten those lives and liberties. Throughout much of US history, as legal scholar Randall Kennedy has shown, the state has deemed the threat to the physical safety of African Americans to be an unremarkable danger and the protection of African Americans an unworthy focus of its attentions…

[T]his constitutes a grievous failure; in America, it has been a semi-permanent boundary of state action. At the most fateful moment of white-on-black violence in US history, in fact, the national government deemed the threat to African Americans a relatively minor item of public safety, unworthy of federal military protection; by contrast, it deemed the threat to employers from striking workers a public emergency, worthy of federal military protection.

—Corey Robin
Yours, Mine, but Not Ours

Later that evening, a big crowd turned out for the meeting, more than usual. Over the last months, Birch attendance had bounced back, and, judging from the crowd in the living room, the looming threat of socialized medicine was enough to pack the place. I took coats, passed coffee, and handed out materials. When everyone had settled, Mother led the Pledge and then announced, “We’ll get right to it.”

She dropped a 33 rpm record on the stereo. “For those of you new to the cause, this is a recording done over a year ago,” she explained. “It outlines perfectly the danger of the new push to force government health care on the elderly. Listen carefully and then we’ll discuss the issue fully.”

In a few seconds, the voice of a rising right-wing star — the dashing, engaging, and charming Ronald Reagan — filled the room. I’d heard this record, Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine, several times before, so I already knew his main point: Americans would never vote for socialism directly, but we could be taken in by things labeled liberalism.

One of those bad liberal things was the current push to impose “statism” through medicine. Americans could fall for this plot because medicine seemed so “humanitarian,” but Reagan knew better. Medical coverage for old people would be the “foot in the door” to socialized medicine.

Real Americans had to wake up and stop this abridgment of freedom. If we didn’t fight hard enough, in sad days to come, old people would sit around and tell their children what it was like in the good old days when “men were free.”

As Reagan’s voice faded, several Birchers clapped enthusiastically.

Mother picked up on Reagan’s themes with additional information on the perils of government health care. “The elderly in America are just fine under the current system,” she explained. “Government health care is unnecessary, expensive, and anti-American. It costs too much and threatens our freedom.”

While the arguments against government-run health care continued, my mind drifted to a story my friend Bob had told me. When he was a toddler, his father took him to a big hospital in the city to visit one of his relatives. The little boy held his father’s hand tight as they walked a long, noisy, crowded corridor. “In here, son,” Mr Besse said. “This is Aunt Maude’s ward.”

Bob gripped his father’s hand tighter. “I don’t like it here,” he said.

“I know. But we have to stay awhile. She’s old and sick. We’re all she’s got. Everyone else is in Sterling, where she used to live. You know, with Grandpa Besse.”

“Send her back there,” little Bob said.

“We can’t,” his dad explained. “This is the only place for her.”

Mr Besse led his son along a row of hospital beds. They stopped in front of a shrunken old lady curled on her side. She never moved or spoke, just moaned. After a few minutes, Mr Besse leaned over, kissed Aunt Maude on the cheek, and turned toward the doorway.

“To this day, I remember the smell and the moaning,” Bob had told me. “Those poor people languished there until they died. Without money, charity wards were their only option.”

I looked at the folks in the living room and assumed that none of them would die in the charity ward of Cook County General Hospital. Hating government-run health care was easy when your doctor made house calls and your hospital stays were in private rooms.

—Claire Conner
Wrapped in the Flag: a Personal History of America’s Radical Right

There is probably one thing, and one thing only, on which the leaders of all modern states agree; on which Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mohammedans, and atheists agree; on which Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, Communists, Liberals, and Conservatives agree; on which medical and scientific authorities throughout the world agree; and on which the views, as expressed through opinion polls and voting records, of the large majority of individuals in all civilized countries agree. That thing is the “scientific fact” that certain substances which people like to ingest or inject are “dangerous” both to those who use them and to others; and that the use of such substances constitutes “drug abuse” or “drug addiction” — a disease whose control and eradication are the duty of the combined forces of the medical profession and the state. However, there is little agreement — from people to people, country to country, even decade to decade — on which substances are acceptable and their use therefore considered a popular pastime, and which substances are unacceptable and their use therefore considered “drug abuse” and “drug addiction.”

My aim in this book is at once simple and sweeping. First, I wish to identify the actual occurrences that constitute our so-called drug problem. I shall show that these phenomena in fact consist of the passionate promotion and panicky prohibition of various substances; the habitual use and the dreaded avoidance of certain drugs; and, most generally, the regulation — by language, law, custom, religion, and every other conceivable means of social and symbolic control — of certain kinds of ceremonial and sumptuary behaviors.

Second, I wish to identify the conceptual realm and logical class into which these phenomena belong. I shall show that they belong in the realm of religion and politics; that “dangerous drugs,” addicts, and pushers are the scapegoats of our modern, secular, therapeutically imbued societies; and that the ritual persecution of these pharmacological and human agents must be seen against the historical backdrop of the ritual persecution of other scapegoats, such as witches, Jews, and madmen.

And third, I wish to identify the moral and legal implications of the view that using and avoiding drugs are not matters of health and disease but matters of good and evil; that, in other words, drug abuse is not a regrettable medical disease but a repudiated religious observance. Accordingly, our options with respect to the “problem” of drugs are the same as our options with respect to the “problem” of religions: that is, we can practice various degrees of tolerance and intolerance toward those whose religions — whether theocratic or therapeutic — differ from our own.

For the past half-century the American people have engaged in one of the most ruthless wars — fought under the colors of drugs and doctors, diseases and treatments — that the world has ever seen. If a hundred years ago the American government had tried to regulate what substances its citizens could or could not ingest, the effort would have been ridiculed as absurd and rejected as unconstitutional. If fifty years ago the American government had tried to regulate what crops farmers in foreign countries could or could not cultivate, the effort would have been criticized as meddling and rejected as colonialism. Yet now the American government is deeply committed to imposing precisely such regulations — on its own citizens by means of criminal and mental health laws, and on those of other countries by means of economic threats and incentives; and these regulations — called “drug controls” or “narcotic controls” — are hailed and supported by countless individuals and institutions, both at home and abroad.

We have thus managed to replace racial, religious, and military coercions and and colonialisms, which now seem to us dishonorable, with medical and therapeutic coercions and colonialisms, which now seem to us honorable. Because these latter controls are ostensibly based on Science and aim to secure only Health, and because those who are so coerced and colonized often worship the idols of medical and therapeutic scientism as ardently as do the coercers and colonizers, the victims cannot even articulate their predicament and are therefore quite powerless to resist their victimizers. Perhaps such preying of people upon people — such symbolic cannibalism, providing meaning for one life by depriving another of meaning — is an inexorable part of the human condition and is therefore inevitable. But it is surely not inevitable for any one person to deceive himself or herself into believing that the ritual persecutions of scapegoats — in Crusades, Inquisitions, Final Socutions, or Wars on Drug Abuse — actually propitiate deities or prevent diseases.

—Thomas Szasz (1 September 1973)
Preface to Ceremonial Chemistry

When the Fourteenth Amendment was written, it was written to give credit to the African Americans, recognize them. The way it should be. It was after a terrible Supreme Court decision, called the Dred Scott decision, that did not recognize them as humans virtually — it was outrageous. Well the Republican Congress said we’re not putting up with that. And it was written “born, naturalized, for whom we have jurisdiction.” It’s been hijacked. We have a path to citizenship and it’s not breaking into the country. The Fourteenth Amendment was never intended to be used the way it’s used. It was intended for those… Did you know that when the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1866 and ratified in 1868 it did not recognize the American Indian as citizens? And reason was because they were born on a reservation and members of a tribe and they were concerned about that jurisdiction language of the Fourteenth Amendment…

That was written by the same Congress that wrote the Civil Rights Amendment in 1866 that was a response to the Dred Scott decision. And then that same Congress that wrote the Civil Rights Amendment 1866, which has similar language but a little different that makes it very clear, and they should have used that same language. That same Congress that wrote the Fourteenth Amendment because they wanted to give the Civil Rights Amendment Constitutional protection, which I think was the right thing to do. They made it very clear in the debate on the floor.

—Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce
John King USA

[W]e need a political revolution in this country and that’s not just rhetoric. What I mean by that is that we need — and a president certainly can play a very, very important role in this — we need a massive change in citizen participation and in political consciousness. There was a poll that just came out I think yesterday. Gallup tells us that… I believe it is 63 percent of the American people cannot name which parties control the US House and the US Senate. So you have consciousness so low, a significant majority of the American people who are very concerned about what’s going on for themselves and their kids, they don’t know who controls the House and the Senate. They can’t name which party controls both bodies. You have what the political scientists tell us is a situation where in this coming election, 60 percent of the American people will not bother to vote. That means 70-to-80 percent of low-income workers and young people will not vote. So before you can talk about changing America, you have to change the political consciousness and the way that people relate to the political process.

Now, there is a group that relates very strongly to the political process, [and] that is the billionaire class that is now prepared to spend many hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates to represent their interests.

So you ask me, what can a president do? The main thing, I think, that the president can do is understand that no kind of progressive agenda can take place unless the American people are involved in that struggle and are prepared to put real pressure on the establishment to make it happen. It’s not going to happen in back rooms. It’s not going to happen in White House negotiations. If students, for example, want to see the cost of college go down and want to see their very high levels of debt be significantly reduced, they’re going to have to take it up with the members of Congress. They’re not doing that now. If low-income workers want to see the minimum wage raised, it cannot be a situation where only 20 percent of low-income workers vote. They’re going to have to be actively involved. That’s what a president can do…

What I am telling you, as somebody who likes Obama and respects Obama, is that the key mistake that I believe he made, and it’s perfectly understandable, is he got into office, and he said, two years after he was in, “I’m gonna sit down and negotiate with the Republicans. I know I can’t get everything. We’ll work on some kind of compromise.”

What he didn’t catch on to is that the Republicans had no intention of compromising with him and they have no intention of compromising at all. They have an agenda. It is an extreme right wing agenda backed by the Koch brothers and other billionaires, and the only way you defeat that right-wing agenda is when the American people rise up and demand real change. It can’t be done within the confines of Congress. It has to be part of a strong and active grassroots movement.

—Bernie Sanders
Longterm Democratic Strategy Is “Pathetic”

Of course the problem of the last three decades is not the “vicissitudes of the marketplace,” but rather deliberate actions by the government to redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent. This pattern of government action shows up in all areas of government policy.

For example an explicit goal of our trade policy is to put our manufacturing workers in direct competition with low paid workers in the developing world. This has the predicted actual result of driving down the wages of manufacturing workers and less-educated workers more generally. At the same time we deliberately depress their wages we largely protect the most highly paid professionals (eg doctors, lawyers, and dentists) from the same sort of international competition.

The government has strengthened and lengthened patent and copyright monopolies. This allows for absurdities like a treatment with the hepatitis C drug Sovaldi costing $84,000 when the drug would sell on the free market for less than $1,000. There would be no hand-wringing moral dilemmas about treating people with hepatitis C at less than $1,000 per person. If we just had a free market the government would not be putting people behind bars for 16 months for allowing people to download recorded material.

The vicissitudes of the market would also not have bailed out the Wall Street banks, ensuring that many of the top 0.1 percent or 0.01 percent did not lose their fortunes due to their own greed and ineptitude. It also wouldn’t exempt the financial sector from the same sort of taxes imposed on all other industries. And the vicissitudes of the market would not have a Federal Reserve Board that is prepared to raise interest rates in order to keep people from getting jobs and keep workers from having enough bargaining power to get wage increases.

—Dean Baker
The Vicissitudes of the Market Would Be a Big Improvement

There is a reason why one man is born black and with other disadvantages, while another is born white with great advantages. The reason is that we once had an estate before we came here, and were obedient, more or less, to the laws that were given us there. Those who were faithful in all things there received greater blessings here, and those who were not faithful received less…

There were no neutrals in the war in Heaven. All took sides either with Christ or with Satan. Every man had his agency there, and men receive rewards here based upon their actions there, just as they will receive rewards hereafter for deeds done in the body. The Negro, evidently, is receiving the reward he merits.

—Joseph Fielding Smith, LDS President
Doctrines of Salvation, 1954

He’s a vacuous opportunist. I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.

—Adolph Reed Jr
Obama No (28 April 2008)