Political Economy. On Helping Gazans AND Israelis: Hernando de Soto Shows How Capitalism Defeated Terrorists in Peru and Can Do It in the Middle East--By Making Lives Better. I add: For America, too.

Capitalism's Promises of Freedom of Choice and Opportunities for Self-Improvement Can Restore and Revitalize America.

Singapore, Hong Kong, and Israel itself provide indisputable examples of how Gazan residents could have been living much better today if Hamas, and before it Yasser Arafat, had allowed them to practice private enterprise and to operate in free markets overseen by strong but limited governance (i.e., capitalism), especially as Gaza has a wonderful Mediterranean coastline and location with great access for trade and investment to and from the economies of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

As confirmation, if any is needed: Of Israel’s approximately 9 1/2 million citizens, two million are Arabs (of whom 80+% are Muslim). They live much, much better than Gazans live under Hamas’s rule, and they largely oppose what Hamas has done. Another half-million Israelis are neither Jewish nor Arab. All told, 27% of Israelis are not Jewish (2023 data from Wikipedia).

Further, Israel unilaterally pulled out of the Gaza Strip entirely in 2005 and forced out all Israeli settlers too; so much for self-righteous denunciations of Israeli “occupation,” “colonialism,” and demands for “self-determination.”

Despite all that, “the leprosy of unreality” that Charles Dickens so eloquently described about another unaccountable power (Monseigneur) so disfigures debate and subsequent actions today that enormous falsehoods and misperceptions must be cleared up before sensible outcomes can be achieved—with Hernando de Soto’s Nobel-Prize-worthy work remaining at the core of the solution.

So I’ve written the following for anyone to use who wants to engage constructively in private conversation or public debate.

Otherwise, the logic of the situation shows potential for terrorism or something much worse. I am thinking of a relatively peaceful but tinder-dry forest that can be turned into a raging inferno by a spark from a smoldering camp fire.

Part I: The “Islam (+Arab) vs. Israel (Jew)” Deception

I’d start with challenging the Islamic legitimacy of totalitarian terrorists by asking: How can they be good Muslims when they kill so many Muslims?

1. Political Islamists Are Totalitarians, Kill Lots of Muslims, and Their Rulers Grow Fabulously Rich

Instead of investing in prosperity, Hamas and its Arafat-led terrorist predecessors (Fatah, PLO) invested billions of dollars of foreign aid money in armaments and in construction materials to build an underground city of tunnels purposed solely to attack Israel—and to richly line their own pockets, to the tune of 11 billion dollars (New York Post, 11-7-23).

The brutal tortures, rapes, mutilations, killings, and hostage-takings of Hamas’s Israeli—and other nations’—victims on October 7 speak not to liberation and prosperity for Gazan residents, but, rather, they speak to the murder of all Jewish people and to murderous intolerances of many other peoples, Gazans—and ourselves—included, because people who kill Jews don’t stop at killing “just” Jewish people.

In fact, political Islamists such as Hamas and Iran often kill Muslims first—to kill off “in-house” competition and establish their own in-house political dictatorship. (Note: “Islamist” refers to political Islam, discussed below. “Islamic” refers to Islam generally.)

Hamas killed dissident Gazans (Arab Muslims) when it seized totalitarian power. It cruelly uses Gazans as human shields and shows off their sufferings to the world as if Israel were the brutal one when it replies to Hamas’s attacks on it. And Hamas has killed Gazans who have tried to flee south from the current fighting. Add to the sufferings all the other Gazans who died or suffered prior to 2005 when Hamas’s predecessor, Arafat’s PLO, waged terrorist war on Israel instead of investing in prosperity for Gazans.

Looking farther afield, an estimated 500,000 to over 1,000,000 Muslims died in the Iraq-Iran war (both are Muslim nations). ISIS was horribly brutal in Syria and Iraq. The Taliban brutally oppresses Muslims in Afghanistan.

When East Pakistan (predominantly Muslim) decided to separate from West Pakistan (very Muslim), West Pakistan attacked it in 1971, causing "immense" damage (Britannica). Eventually, East Pakistan got independence and named itself Bangladesh, while West Pakistan became Pakistan. “Minimum estimates for the number of those killed range between 300,000 and 500,000,” while “the government of Bangladesh records the official death toll of the war at 3 million, including victims of atrocities and those who died from starvation” (Wikipedia). While Hindus were especially targeted, Bengali Muslims, especially Bengali elites and intellectuals, bore the brunt of the atrocities (Wikipedia).

It’s obvious that political Islamist totalitarians make life much worse for most Muslims; they just shouldn’t be allowed to present themselves unchallenged as true or superior representatives of Muslim thought, of Arab interests, or as anti-colonial liberators.

Next, I’d expose historical Nazis influences on them.

2. Nazi FellowTravellers

Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. So is Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which also committed massacres and atrocities on October 7. According to Ed Husain, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service writing in the Wall Street Journal (11-10-23, A15), the Muslim Brotherhood derived a hatred of Jews from “the same intellectual firmament [as] German Nazism and Italian fascism.” I recall a front-page article in the WSJ some years ago saying that Nazis cultivated ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and instilled their genocidal hate in it. Wikipedia writes that Nazi Germany gave substantial sums of money to the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s. And not just them.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem sided with Hitler in the 1930s and broadcast from Berlin during World War II. The terrorist Yasser Arafat (Fatah, PLO) was related by family to the Grand Mufti (Britannica).

In 1935, Persia asked the world’s nations to call it “Iran.” That sounds a lot like wanting to be considered honorary Nazi Aryans.

Third, expose illegitimate assumptions built into the word “Palestinians.”

3. The “Palestinian” Deception

If Arab nations hadn’t continued their Nazi-cultivated hatred of Jewish people after WWII, and if they hadn’t then waged losing wars on Israel in 1948 and subsequently—while encouraging Arabs to flee Israel—there wouldn’t be any “Palestinian” refugees today; nor would there be any today if Arab nations after 1948 had absorbed the refugees they had created, as Israel had absorbed Jews who were driven out of, or were fleeing, many Arab nations.

Not to be ignored is the fact that Jews have been in “Palestine” for over 3,000 years (most notably David and his direct descendant Jesus). Although driven out several times, they kept returning. Add those Jews to all the Arabs and others whose forebears never fled when Arab countries attacked the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, and one can estimate upwards of 3 million to 4 million Israelis are “Palestinians” too. If Jews are counted who returned to Israel after they had been driven out of Arab nations post 1945, and who had long before then been ending prayers with words equivalent to “next year in Jerusalem”—which signifies Jews’ “right of return,” equivalent to claims of “Palestinians’ right of return” —then upwards of perhaps 7 million Israelis are “Palestinians.”

The very term “Palestinian” as it is used by Hamas supporters amounts to assuming and asserting illegitimately what they cannot prove; namely, that Jewish people and anyone else who oppose Hamas (including non-Jewish Israelis) are outsiders who have no place “from the river [Jordan] to the sea [Mediterranean],” a thoroughly Nazi, “final”-genocidal sentiment.

Fourth, expose that everyone is at risk.

4. Targeting Not “Only” Zionists, Israel, and Muslims

Hamas has long killed LGBT+s as a matter of course; so does Hamas’s sponsor, Iran. (So much for useful idiots who proclaim “Queers for Palestine!”)

Now political Islamists are rioting, shouting and displaying Nazi hate speech and swastikas, and bodily threatening or assaulting Jewish people outside of Israel—just for being Jewish. So much for the claim that their hostility to Israel is not genocidal antisemitism.

Next it will be Christians; actually, they already are under broad attack. Christians have been pretty much suppressed in Bethlehem, for example. North African totalitarians in Muslim clothing have killed and enslaved darker-skinned peoples, some Muslim and some Christian, living farther to the south. Remember “Darfur”? Similar Islamist totalitarians are doing it in Nigeria and other countries.

And never forget, Iran’s rulers, who heavily sponsor multiple terrorist groups besides Hamas, call Israel “the Little Satan;” they call the U.S. “the Great Satan;” and they routinely chant “Death to America.”

Fifth, be clear that the true debate is not about Islam but rather about what interpretation of Islam is valid.

5. Political (Warlike) Islam VS. Religious (Peaceful) Islam

All these killings of Muslims by other Muslims highlight two clear divisions: 1) between “political Islam” (aka “Islamism”) and “religious Islam,” and 2) between violent and peaceful Islam.

I recall an op ed in the Wall Street Journal by a Muslim cleric (Shia) who was described as a high religious authority in Iraq, and as one of Iraqi Muslim scholars who consider themselves to be as authoritative on Islam as anyone in Iran. He wrote that a struggle was taking place between “religious Islam” and “political Islam,” the latter being driven by the totalitarian Iranian clerics. In roughly the same time period, the news section of the WSJ reported talk by Saudi and other Arab leaders of supporting religious Islam against Iran’s political Islam.

In another WSJ op ed, a Muslim cleric identified as the top Islamic authority in Egypt explained why the violence of Al-Qaeda and ISIS was wrong: Muhammed initially sought to persuade Jews and Christians to join him peacefully, but only when they attacked him did he go to war with them; but today, no one is waging religious war on Muslims. Therefore Muhammed’s peaceful approach is the valid one for Muslims today.

Professor Ed Husain, in the above WSJ article, cited the teachings of Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, “among the highest authorities in global Sunni Islam.” “So long as Muslims enjoy religious liberty protections, the sheikh intones, they have no need for a caliphate or Islamic state….After September 11, 2001, moderate Muslim leaders [such as Sheikh Bayyah] declared that terrorists were in hell, not heaven; they were murderers, not martyrs….No Muslim before the 20th century would have belittled his faith’s sacred text by regarding it as a political manifesto.”

I interpret that last sentence to mean that political Islam is evil because it makes people submit to fallible, self-serving people rather than to Allah, all in the name of Allah of course, as if political Islamist totalitarians were equal or superior to Muhammed himself. I impute, subject to correction, that religious Islam requires submission directly to Allah, with advice and guidance from scholars, Imams, Mullahs, similar authorities, and translations of the Koran (including into modern Arabic), but without government-enforced compulsion.

Mr Hussain cautions: “Destroying Hamas will require an alternative, more attractive worldview” than Hamas’s claims of anti-colonial liberation and heaven-blessed martyrdom.

I am not an Islamic scholar, but I think the prospect of living much better is the best counter argument to Hamas. And the revelation that Hamas leaders avoid becoming martyrs themselves, and instead live in great luxury in Qatar, further discredits them and Hamas; similarly, for Iran’s terror-master rulers.

6. Summarize:

Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, Iran, and others of their ilk are hate-filled, ideologically shaped totalitarians masquerading as Muslims who came to power first by killing or otherwise oppressing Muslims who disagreed with them. That’s why no other Arab or Muslim nation still has taken in “Palestinians”—because they are ruled by murderous totalitarians (Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank too).

When mobs in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere excitedly chant “From the river [Jordan] to the sea [Mediterranean], Palestine will be free,” they are in fact supporting terrorist Hamas and gravely hurting rather than helping Gazans and other Muslims. They leave no room for Jewish people anywhere and are promoting physical attacks on Jewish people everywhere—Not just in Israel. They are going globally by promoting and/or justifying terrorist attacks and social instability in many nations the world over—all in the name of Palestine “liberation” from “Nazi”-Israeli oppression and “genocide,” all under the guise of being in defense of Islam.

What is to cut the tortuous Gordian Knot of endless historical grievances and acts of vengeance that bind Gazans and Israelis in endless cycles of war and misery, with dreadful spillover effects for the rest of us?

The answer is to promote economic growth.

Part II: Hernando de Soto:

Foster Property Rights and Economic Growth via Capitalism to Defeat Terrorism and Make Lives Better

The beauty of economic growth is that people gain much more by building than by taking/faking/breaking, so when given the chance, they choose building over destroying. Capitalism is the only known economy that builds and keeps building new wealth and prosperity.

The past 300+ years of capitalist economic development have seen “explosions” of prosperity spread around the world, the likes of which have never been seen before. In the process, capitalist-generated prosperity creates vast constituencies to fight terrorism and totalitarianism.

But, you might ask, will the “Arab street” listen? Here’s evidence that it can listen and embrace capitalism.

Economist Hernando de Soto, in three Wall Street Journal opinion pieces dating between 2011 and 2014, reported on how Peru’s adoption of free-market economics, starting with allowing legal ownership of property—property rights—led to successfully defeating the Shining Path terrorists in Peru. He extended the lesson to how to defeat terrorists in the Arab world.

In The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism on Peru (WSJ, 10-10-2014), he shows that allowing Peruvians ready means to legally own and use property (uncommon in much of the world) freed up vast amounts of “informal” capital, created an enormous constituency for economic growth via capitalism, robbed the terrorist group Shining Path of ready support, and enabled the Peruvian government to defeat Shining Path (details are discussed below).

Modeling on success in Peru, he reports that “after years of fieldwork and analysis—involving over 120 Egyptian and Peruvian technicians with the participation of 300 local leaders and interviews with thousands of ordinary people” (Egypt's Economic Apartheid, WSJ, Feb. 3, 2011), he found a very strong constituency for doing the same in Egypt:

“The people of the ‘Arab street’ want to find a place in the modern capitalist economy”(The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism).

“According to our estimates, more than 200 million people throughout the Middle East and North Africa depend on income from operating businesses or occupying property in the informal economy—without the protection of the rule of law. [That is, without enforceable legal ownership of property, any investment in a business is so at risk of being taken away by other people that very little will be invested to grow beyond tiny “mom and pop” businesses.] That means the entrepreneurs who want a legal system with property rights like those in the West outnumber al Qaeda membership in the region, often estimated at up to 4,000 core activists, by a ratio of about 50,000 to one.” (The Secret to Reviving the Arab Spring's Promise: Property Rights, WSJ, Feb. 26, 2013).

Of course, Hamas (and Hezbollah) may number more than al Qaeda then did, but the Shining Path was large and deeply entrenched in Peru. So his logic and evidence remain compelling: “Just as Shining Path was beaten in Peru, so can terrorists be defeated by [economic] reforms that create an unstoppable constituency for rising living standards in the Middle East and North Africa.” (The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism, my emphasis added).

All that’s needed, he shows by examples quoted below, is for policy leaders, including Western leaders, to recognize that the “poor” were neither helpless oafs nor fertile ground for demagogues and terrorists. Rather, they were highly motivated small entrepreneurs:

“What changed the debate [in Peru], and ultimately the government’s response, was proof that the poor in Peru weren’t unemployed or underemployed laborers or farmers, as the conventional wisdom held at the time. Instead, most of them were small entrepreneurs, operating off the books in Peru’s “informal” economy. They accounted for 62% of Peru’s population and generated 34% of its gross domestic product—and they had accumulated some $70 billion worth of real-estate assets. This new way of seeing economic reality led to major constitutional and legal reforms….

“We got a lucky break in 1991 when then-U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle, who had been following our efforts, arranged a meeting with President George H.W. Bush at the White House. ‘What you’re telling me,’ the president said, ‘is that these little guys are really on our side.’ He got it. This led to a treaty with the U.S. that encouraged Peru to mount a popular armed defense against Shining Path while also committing the U.S. to support economic reform as an alternative to the terrorist group’s agenda. Peru rapidly fielded a much larger, mixed-class volunteer army—four times the army’s previous size—and won the war in short order” (“The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism”).

Part III: Capitalism vs. Socialist/Marxist Big Government and Fascism

How good it is to see that various peoples around the world hunger for the economic freedom and prosperity that capitalism provides! (I’m thinking also of reports on microlending by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and how people in India seized on opportunities provided by mobile phones to do business that greatly improved their lives.)

Yet governments resist capitalism, partly out of competition for power, partly out of egotism of “elites,” and probably partly out of being horrified with associating with “poor” people.

Partly too, socialists easily smear capitalism by associating it with negative human conditions that coexist independently of capitalism. These negative conditions include anarchy, greed, panic, theft, cruelty, war, and big-government economic disasters that keep getting blamed on capitalism.

For example, in the U.S., big government became entrenched in the 1930s. This is well expressed by the widespread saying “Franklin Roosevelt saved America from capitalism, and saved capitalism from itself.” That belief is reinforced by characterizing FDR’s predecessor Herbert Hoover (President during the start of the Great Depression in 1929) as a capitalist guy, when actually he was a big-government practitioner.

Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize in Economics for showing that the Great Depression was started in the U.S. when the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank deliberately raised interest rates enough to crash a stock market it didn’t like. Then, Hoover, FDR, and Congress took many big-government actions that greatly deepened and prolonged the Great Depression, according to the work of many other economists. The imposition of foreign trade restrictions when the U.S. was a net trade exporter, instituted by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, is perhaps the most noted example.

Today we have come full circle back to the 1930s as capitalism is widely denigrated in “leading”—big-government, academic, major media, non-profit, and religious—circles, but realistic hope remains.

For example, capitalism was denigrated by socialists in Europe after World War II. However, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenaur’s economic minister, Ludwig Erhard, went against the big-government, socialist crowd and decided to go with capitalist free markets. The result: West Germany’s famed post-WWII economic boom, the “Wirtschaftswunder,” aka “economic miracle.” However, after Erhard left government (he was Chancellor from 1963 to 1966), socialists and big-government “conservatives” regained power.

Both sides of the struggle can also be seen in Hernando de Soto’s experience in Egypt. At the request of Egypt’s new President, el-Sisi, de Soto made a study of the Egyptian economy (The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism). After he made recommendations to the Egyptian government, “[his report] was championed by Minister of Finance Muhammad Medhat Hassanein, and the cabinet approved its policy recommendations. Egypt's major newspaper, Al Ahram, declared that the reforms ‘would open the doors of history for Egypt.’ Then, as a result of a cabinet shakeup, Mr. Hassanein was ousted. Hidden forces of the status quo blocked crucial elements of the reforms.” (Egypt's Economic Apartheid).

Significantly, in the latter half of 2020 into 2021, the Trump administration midwifed the Abraham Accords in which Israel normalized relations with four Arab/North African nations: United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, with talk of Saudi Arabia (and other Arab nations) eventually joining them. The widely cited reason motivating the nations was prospects for greater economic growth and prosperity.

Now, apparently, those agreements may have been scuttled, at least for the near future. That scuttling, and exciting rioters to weaken Western nations and peace-desiring Arab nations, are obviously major goals of Hamas’s attack on Israel, which was heavily backed and supported by Iran (“Iran Helped Plot Attack,” Wall Street Journal, October 8, 2023, and “Hamas Fighters Trained in Iran,” October 25, 2023 ). Threats remain of major escalations by Iran-funded-and-armed Arab terrorists in the “West Bank” (Palestinian Authority/Fatah), in Lebanon (Hezbollah], and beyond, as pro-Hamas mobs “demonstrate” and riot in Arab and Western nations.

Teaching Capitalism to Win and Prosper

As the above show, although enlightened leadership can be effective in fostering capitalism and expanding prosperity globally, capitalism must get broad, strong backing and continued support from many sources to produce enduring prosperity.

Therefore, capitalism needs to be taught in plain language and full-throated advocacy to be understood by a large part of the population—taught as the very well thought-out, prosperity-creating economic system that it is.

And capitalism needs to be taught to each successive generation because everyone comes into the world knowing nothing but then thirstily drinks in whatever he or she experiences and is taught. If capitalism isn’t taught, socialism—some kind of big government—always lurks in the wings to fill the vacuum.

It’s no longer enough to “preach to the choir” or assume incorrectly that everyone sees the good sense of capitalism.

Marxist tenets have been taught in U.S. colleges and universities for at least 40 years (e.g., Howard Zinn’s text, 1980). These tenets are inherently anti-American, for America was the foremost model of prosperity arising from capitalist freedoms. Graduates from teaching colleges have been teaching Marxist tenets to U.S. public school students for almost as long. Those students now fill many positions in media, government, corporate, and nonprofit bureaucracies. Too many Americans now “buy” it, albeit in disguised forms, sometimes called “cultural Marxism,” such as in victimology, group rights instead of individual rights, government imposition of one-size-fits-all mandatory medical treatments, and that catch-all “social justice,” which is not individual justice at all—i.e., merit is discarded; things start failing; life gets worse.

To explain capitalism to a literate but broad-based general audience, I wrote Capitalism Makes Life Better. Big-Government Socialisms Make Life Worse, July 3, 2022. It is a thoroughgoing eyeopener. For example, you can read of two naturally occurring, self-controlled economic “experiments” in which Marxist, and Marxist-like, agricultural collectives (no private land ownership) produced starvation; but when private ownership of land was introduced, “it made all hands very industrious” and people ate plentifully (Communist China under Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s after Mao; quotation from William Bradford’s history of the Plymouth Plantation, 1620 to 1623 being the relevant years). 

Modern Marxist versions of agricultural collectives are social distinctions that treat people collectively, such as “equity,” “social justice,” group rights and preferences, and an “oppressed vs. oppressor” mentality, as if success in life is automatically oppressive and to be punished. All produce outcomes as bad as agricultural collectives, because:

In keeping with Marx’s “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” everyone is presumed to work to his/her ability and everyone gets comparable outcomes, but it doesn’t work out well that way: Some people see no point in working if they will get paid anyway, and those who do work don’t see the point in working hard or intelligently because they won’t gain from it, so less gets done and more things fail to work—as William Bradford eloquently described.

In keeping with Marx’s “no private property:” The World Economic Forum proclaims “You will own nothing and you will be happy.” The WEF is a self-organized, self-interested collection/coterie/cabal/cartel—take your pick—of the world’s rich and powerful, be they political, economical, or cultural.

Already in motion: no gas stoves, no gasoline-powered automobiles, EVs that can be remotely controlled by Fearless Leaders and Mr. Big’s, no parental rights (much less parental power) over how their children are educated (indoctrinated), no rights to make medical decisions for ourselves and our children (the in-the-works UN/World Health Organization—WHO—treaty, to be enforced in the U.S. without Senate approval), central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) that will make your money instantly programmable by the government, with potential blocking use of your funds, expiration dates for your money, or outright confiscation of it.

In the wings: BLM founders posted that they wanted children to be taken away from their parents at two years of age. Nazi and communist governments took children away at later ages. In Castro’s Cuba, children reportedly were taken by the government at age eleven, as was revealed in the aftermath of the tragedy and political power play involving Elián González and his mother.

Meanwhile very rich people (Bill Gates keeps getting mentioned) are buying up large tracts of farmland and single-family homes, putting food and shelter in the hands of a cartel, and putting us at their mercies.

The list is endless and endlessly destructive.

I followed Capitalism Makes Life Better with Big-Government Socialisms, NOT Capitalism, Caused Economic Disasters in the 1930s, 2000-2002, 2008, and the 2020s (August 25, 2022). It dives deeper into economic and business events but is vitally important for any policymaker.

For example, in the second half of 2007, U.S. regulators forced the whole U.S. economy (and much of the world) into practicing “Enron accounting” (actually, improper regulatory imposition of mark-to-market (M2M) accounting on bank loans, mortgages, and other assets). This was very pro-cyclical, driving prices unreasonably high when they are rising, driving prices unreasonably low when they are falling. This drove banks and stock markets down, down, and down in a self-feeding collapse until regulatory M2M was lifted—by Democrat Barney Frank (reported by Ray Hoffman of BusinessWeek on WCBS Radio at 3:25 PM, March 9, 2009), at which exact point the stock market bottomed (S&P) closed at 676.53) and began to rally all the way up to now.

(FYI, here is a graph (6-15-2010) from economist Brian Wesbury of First Trust Advisors L.P. showing the market’s fall and reversal. He and Steve Forbes were the only consistent voices I found warning about M2M. Here is his 10-minute video blog explaining the Fed's Mistakes of 2008 about M2M, and citing Barney Frank’s action on March 9, 2009.)

Fascism, Not Capitalism

Regarding such concepts as “crony capitalism,” “state capitalism,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “regulatory capture,” and many other invocations of “capitalism,” be aware: They are not capitalism at all, for capitalism requires private enterprise operating in free markets with strong but limited governance to protect life, limb, and property rights; it’s the only way creativity can be both rewarded and selected via purchases by individual people for what they choose to make their own lives better.

By contrast, when big businesses partner with big government, they monopolize or otherwise suppress or limit free markets and free speech. In doing so, they cause great harm, because the political imperatives of government (taking from many, giving to a few, with a generous cut for government bureaucracies) eventually destroy far more than whatever new value the private companies created. That’s fascism, not capitalism.

Most big companies in the world are in fact heavily involved with big government, whether through “regulation,” or big-government spending, or outright threats.

With big businesses so dominant, the U.S. economy—buying and selling of goods and services—is substantially fascist now, but some economic kinds of Marxism are mixed in too, such as where government spending replaces even big companies, as in the case of student loans. Brian Wesbury of First Trust agrees “Government Is Too Darn Big”(11-6-23). And he concludes “we no longer operate in a free-market capitalist system.”

In the U.S., big government, visibly and/or beneath the surface, dominates market activity in medical practice, transportation, energy sources, energy uses (including the automobile industry), banking, insurance, telecommunications, news media, social media (through back-door censorship such as was revealed by “the Twitter Files”), food production via the FDA and USDA, property use (zoning, environment, DEI, ESG), and, of course, taxes and law—and selective enforcements thereof. Also, besides running public schools, government heavily influences colleges and universities via social regulations, “Dear colleague” letters, student-loan money, and other grants, such as for research.

Further, we see “street” forms of fascism when police are told to let some rioters cause great damage and/or terrorize people, while other rioters or just out-of-favor-but-peaceful assemblies of people are denounced or treated very harshly by media and government “law” enforcers.

I first noticed this street fascism when, in the summer of 2016, “mainstream” radio news reported that then-Republican Party candidate for President, Donald Trump, was forced to call off a campaign rally in Chicago because of “the threat of violence”—as if Trump’s supporters were the ones threatening violence, when facts later emerged that the police “couldn’t” protect his supporters from violence by unspecified “protesters.” Whether you hate Trump, love him, or think he is a mixture of plusses and minuses, that was already street fascism in action on a national level. Now it’s gotten much worse. People who cheer or cheered it against Trump and Republicans are at risk of becoming victims themselves.

Revolutions that “take”(“equity,” reparations, “welfare,” favoring illegal immigrants over American citizens and military veterans, etc.) leave less to take next time, so the circle of gainers narrows while the circle of victims widens and keeps widening. That’s one of the reasons for the saying “revolutions eat their own” eventually.

The forces that create such street fascism are now being worked to their advantage by pro-Hamas rioters. Their powers to terrorize and harm people are force-multiplied by Marxists’ weakening of protections for innocent people, such as “defund the police,” “no-bail” laws that let violent offenders be released immediately after being arrested, “empty-the-prison” practices, limiting law-abiding citizens ability to carry guns for self protection, and Soros-backed prosecutors who do not prosecute “minor” offenses, such as “largely peaceful” violent rioting, or shoplifting, even if shoplifting forces stores to abandon neighborhoods and cities (San Francisco most visibly), but prosecute people who fight to defend themselves, which is especially hard on poor neighborhoods. The result is that in many cities, usually Democrat-Party dominated, pro-Hamas rioters are allowed unchecked to terrorize or else are arrested and released the same day, free to terrorize again.

Now add several million people, perhaps as high as 8 million, who have entered/will enter the U.S. illegally, most of whom are unvetted men of fighting age, enough of whom are so unknowable as to pose very serious risks to everyone’s security from diseases they carry (such as tuberculosis), terrorism (big violent attacks, local personal attacks, fear-driven discrimination), narcoterrorist/drug cartels, and Chinese Communist police and military infiltrators; all of which have been documented or reported.

Part IV: Organize, Lead with Capitalism, Win

Fortunately, the unvetted flood of illegal immigrants, the excesses of “woke” cultural Marxism, Marxist and fascist policies, and Nazi-cultivated hatreds and actions have alienated more and more people, with real potential for much more constructive political alignments.

While fascism mixed with Marxism does predominate (bureaucracies can prosper in any combination thereof) even in the U.S., strong capitalist roots still survive. They are embodied in owners, employees, and families who are connected to tens of millions of “small” businesses and home owners. The U.S. Small Business Administration SBA.gov reports: “Most businesses are small— 99.9% of American businesses. There are 33,185,550 small businesses in the United States. Small businesses employ 61.7 million Americans.” Add to that all the family members supported by that work.

Capital markets still exist to send money where and to whom it may be most productive, albeit distorted and redirected by the Federal Reserve Bank and myriad regulations.

Some states and governors are pushing back against the worst of “woke” and big-government actions.

People and businesses are still free to relocate to states with better business climates.

The U.S. still has intellectual and institutional reserves of private-enterprise/free-market/limited-government thought and scholarship. I just wish they had the courage of their convictions and adequate ability to speak persuasively, loudly, and persistently. Why, for a small example, do they use such words as “administrative state” and “virtue signaling” when “bossy bureaucrats” or “dictocrats” or “police state,” and “virtue posturing” or “virtue impostering,” are more accurate, more understandable, and harder hitting.

The U.S. (and many other countries) can be turned around with the right leadership, one that provides good pro-capitalist economic-growth policies, that “raises consciousness” on how capitalism works and its many benefits and virtues, and that teaches them to each successive generation.