By now just about everyone has heard of the zika virus, transmitted by
mosquitos, which is said to cause brain damage in children. As
worrisome as this is, an even bigger brain damage threat to young people is
what I call the academic zika virus, transmitted by left-wing,
politically-correct “educators.” There are exceptions, but
undergraduate education in America has become one big socialist
indoctrination academy that fills students’ heads with cultural Marxist
myths, superstitions, and falsehoods while inculcating an infantile culture
that teaches students to run crying to “safe rooms” if a dissenting voice
should somehow appear on campus. All of this can be yours for a mere 50
grand a year at many universities.
Send your son or daughter off to a college or university this fall and
they will discover that there is no greater cause than supporting the ideas
of Comrade Bernie Sanders, the proud socialist who tried to become president
by offering lots of free stuff, Santa Clause style, to America’s youth, who
voted for him by the millions.
Your child is not likely to be taught the eternal economic truth that
there is no such thing as a free lunch; that neither university
professors
nor doctors and nurses are slaves who are forced to work for free so that
there can be no such thing as “free” higher education or healthcare.
Someone has to pay for it, and that someone will be them.
They will likely graduate without ever hearing that socialism has
destroyed the economy of every country where it has been adopted, including
most recently oil-rich Venezuela, where middle-class people are literally
rooting through garbage in the streets looking for food, barely fifteen years
after its socialist “revolution” under the late communist Hugo Chavez.
They will not learn that socialist governments in the twentieth century
murdered more than 100 million of their own people for dissenting or being suspected
of dissenting to the imposition of socialism and the confiscation of their
property, farms, and businesses by government thugs.
The
Black Book of Communism and Death
by Government, two scholarly, university press books that
horrifyingly document all of this, will not be on any reading list. Yet
their socialist professors with Che Guevara or Mao posters hanging on their
office walls will always take the moral high road while advocating in their classrooms
the ideology that was the cause of the worst crimes in human history.
(When Yours Truly adopted The Communist Manifesto in a class on
“Capitalism and its Critics” one student complained that it was the fourth
time he was required to read the book, but the other three professors
treated it as a roadmap for a future America, not a poisonous historical
relic).
Your student will not learn that Sweden was a very prosperous country in
the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries because it was a limited
government, low-tax society that spawned many great inventors and
entrepreneurs (Alfred Nobel, Volvo, and Saab, Swiss watches), but that that
prosperity was stopped in its tracks when Sweden adopted “democratic
socialism” in mid-century. As a result, Sweden ate up (with taxes) the
wealth created by previous generations, so much so that not a single net new
job was created there from 1950 to 2005 according to the Swedish Economic
Association. And when the Swedish central bank tried to bail out the
floundering Swedish welfare state, it created 500% interest rates. (The same
bank that pretentiously awards the Nobel Prize in Economic Science!).
Your college student will be subjected to the old socialist propaganda
tactic of accusing critics of socialism or socialistic policies of basing
their opposition on hate, not logic or facts. A conservative or
libertarian professor who discusses how welfare harms the work ethic and
causes family break-ups will be accused of hating the poor. An
economist who explains that a $15/hour minimum wage would cause massive
unemployment among teenagers who are not yet capable of producing $15/hour
for a business will be branded a capitalist tool and a paid propagandist. The
same goes for the economist who criticizes price controls. Who could be
against lower prices but a paid corporate propagandist?
An economist may well be fired or denied tenure for pointing out the
well-known fact that if one controls for marriage and choice of occupation,
then there is no male/female “wage gap” caused by “discrimination” at all; in
fact, many studies show that after such controls are made American women are
paid slightly more than men.
Good luck to any professor who, following the pioneering research of Nobel
laureate economist Gary Becker, explains how competition in a capitalistic
marketplace tends to diminish or eliminate wage discrimination based on
race. The simple theory is that if an employer pays two equally
productive employees differently, say paying the black employee half of
what the white employee is paid, he creates a profit opportunity for his
competitors, who will certainly take advantage of it. A man who can
produce say $100,000/year for a business but who is paid only $30,000 because
of discrimination could be offered double the salary by a competing employer
who would then pocket the difference between $100,000 and $60,000. And
another employer would offer him even more, and perhaps another. If
there’s enough labor market competition the wage gap between black and white
employees will eventually disappear.
This very mainstream (in the economics profession, anyway) line of
reasoning typically causes heads to explode in the PC world of academe, for
one of its most cherished superstitions is that “the legacy of slavery” has
forever left black people at an economic disadvantage, no matter how
educated, skilled, talented, etc. they become. They still need to be
“adopted” for life by the government and cared for like feeble little
children.
Very few students will learn that more capitalistic (and therefore more
prosperous) countries are overwhelmingly cleaner, environmentally
speaking, than socialist countries. They will not learn that the worst
ecological disasters of the past century were in the socialist countries of
the Soviet empire, China, and elsewhere, and that event today, socialist
governments in countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, have been
responsible for turning large parts of their countries into environmental
cesspools.
Peaceful, voluntary exchange in the marketplace, including an
international trade that promotes mutual understanding, enriches traders from
both countries and deters war, will be relentlessly demonized and
condemned. All business people will be placed in the same moral
category as Bernie Madoff, and your student will be taught that since the
profits of capitalism are rooted in such immoral behavior, it is imperative
that business owners be taxed as heavily as possible in order to
“redistribute” their ill-gotten gains. Their own parents, who might
have started a successful business of their own and saved the profits to pay
astronomical tuition at “the best” schools, may well be described as crooks
and con artists – along with all other business people.
These are just a few examples of the avalanche of lies that today’s
college students are routinely exposed to at America’s socialist
indoctrination academies. When dissenting views are expressed on
campuses, they are usually the result of the efforts of a small group of
conservative or libertarian students who have secured private funding for an
“outside lecturer” after being quickly and rudely turned down by university
administrators after naively asking them for say, $500, for a speaker after
their university paid six-figure speaking fees paid to leftists like Hillary
Clinton (who reportedly cut UCLA a break by cutting her normal fee to a mere
$300,000).
Whenever such funding is acquired by conservative or libertarian students,
it is often the case that the speaker will be met with screaming protesters
who will attempt to censor his views with their bad behavior while
administrators look the other way. The administration may imply that
the speaker is some kind of Nazi by informing the campus community that a
“safe room” will be set aside where students can isolate themselves from such
“hate speech.” Or, after the speech the speaker will be condemned as
“insensitive” to minorities, which is the academic Left’s way of calling
someone a racist without incurring the legal liability of a defamation lawsuit.
In any event, college students are treated like scared little babies whose
delicate ears need to be shielded from the horrors of free speech.
This totalitarian attack on academic freedom and free speech has now
become routine in America’s socialist indoctrination academies, who have
adopted the advice of the old Marxist Herbert Marcuse, who began arguing in
the 1960s that only “the oppressed” in society deserve free speech.
Allowing “the oppressors” to speak freely only exacerbates the amount of “oppression”
in society. A devoted communist, Marcuse wanted to ban all criticisms
of communism on college campuses, and he has succeeded to a very large
extent.
There are islands of sanity in the sea of insanity that is the
American academic world. Economic departments tend to be not quite as
crazy as some other disciplines, and if your son or daughter is a serious
engineering or pre-med student, he or she will spend less time being
brainwashed by leftists who dominate the social sciences and the humanities.
Even so, they will most likely be treated like skunks at a picnic if they
voice “politically incorrect” opinions to their classmates.
Now sit down and write that $50,000 tuition check; school starts right
after Labor [Union] Day.
The Best of
Thomas DiLorenzo