Is July 4 a racist holiday?

And now July 4 is racist | Liberty Classroom - Tom Woods:

July 4, 2020 - "Even Independence Day is racist now.... There's a hashtag trending on Twitter today: #FvckTheFourth [there's also #FvcktheForth and #Fvckthe4th - gd]. Classy, as we've come to expect.

"One person asked: why are black people celebrating the day some slaveholders won their independence? Well, I suppose instead we could celebrate the non-Western societies that were spreading the ideas of natural rights and individual liberty that this very person is appealing to today. Perhaps he could name a few to kick it off? We'll wait.

"You'd think people could at least pause to acknowledge that the very principles they claim to appeal to – equality under the law, individual rights, etc. – emerged from the Western civilization they profess to despise....

"Naturally we're encountering even more frequently than usual the old chestnut about the Declaration of Independence having been hypocritical in its claims about equality because those claims applied only to whites. Well, our old friend Kevin Gutzman, celebrated Madison and Jefferson biographer and faculty member at my Liberty Classroom, has a nice reply to that. Enjoy:...

"Of the five men who drafted the Declaration of Independence:

1. Roger Sherman of Connecticut drafted the Connecticut law that abolished slavery in Connecticut;
2. Benjamin Franklin was the president of an abolition society that submitted a petition for the abolition of slavery to the first US Congress;
3. John Adams, as the chief draftsman of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, wrote the section that was read by a Massachusetts court as having abolished slavery in Massachusetts;
4. Thomas Jefferson co-sponsored a 1769 bill to abolish slavery in Virginia, wrote the first draft of the law that banned slavery from the Midwest, called for and signed the law that abolished the international slave trade, wrote the most influential antislavery book in American history, drafted a bill (which failed by one vote in Congress) that would have banned slavery from most of today's Deep South, and wrote the part of the Declaration of Independence that says "all men are created equal"; and
5. Robert Livingston … well, his record I don't know as well, but I do know that several of his political allies in New York and some of his relatives were involved in antislavery, which led to abolition of New York slavery under a 1799 law signed by his friend Governor John Jay.

So why do we say slaves weren't included in 'all men are created equal'?

It seems to me that people are making a lot of uninformed assertions. (In case you want to know more about Jefferson and blacks, I not-so-humbly refer you to the "Colonization" chapter in my latest book, Thomas Jefferson – Revolutionary.) There's also quite a bit of "they're responsible for not having their novel ideas sooner" in criticism of 18th-century American/Western men.

I'll add to this comment that I don't quite understand the psychology driving people to join in this public breast-beating about their supposed (though not actual) moral superiority to the people who made the American Revolution. I'm trying to be charitable, but every potential explanation that occurs to me isn't positive.

"Beautiful. I'd say learning American history from non-crazy people is more urgent than usual these days."

Hollywood hypocrisy shown by The Favourite

Somebody’s Favorite | Liberty Unbound - Jo Anne Skousen:

February 10, 2019 - "In the wake of last year’s militant #MeToo movement, when actresses haughtily proclaimed, 'We will no longer be pressured into trading sex for jobs' (and bullied other actresses into wearing black at the event to show their solidarity), the Academy this year has bizarrely honored The Favourite with ten Oscar nominations, ... confirming once and for all (as if there were any doubt) that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has zero credibility and doesn’t know what the hell it is doing.

"Loosely based on the reign of Queen Anne and her relationships with Sarah Churchill,Duchess of Marlborough, and a servant named Abigail (eventually Lady Masham), the film suggests that the silly and childlike Anne made all of her decisions based on which woman’s tongue pleased her best — and I don’t mean by talking. The film fairly drips with transactional sex....

"Rachel Weisz, who plays Sarah Marlborough, called the film 'a funnier, sex-driven All About Eve.' In that film, an established star (Margo Channing) befriends an aspiring actress (Eve Harrington), only to see her try to usurp her position in the theater. Similarly, in The Favourite, a young social climber, Abigail (Emma Stone), .... worms her way cunningly — or in this case, cunnilingually — into the favor of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) by befriending and then pushing aside the queen’s long-standing confidante and advisor, Lady Churchill (Weisz), simultaneously finagling a financially and socially beneficial marriage to regain her aristocratic status.

"Don’t misunderstand my objection — I enjoy a good bedroom farce, with doors slamming, lovers hiding, comic timing, and double entendres galore. But this is different. The Favourite doesn’t just joke about sex; it celebrates the use of sex to gain political power, and hypocritically undermines everything these same preening, moralizing Hollywood hotshots stood up for just last year.

"It also seems to justify rape, as long as it’s funny.... When Lord Masham enters Abigail’s servant quarters without being invited, she asks him, 'Are you here to seduce me or to rape me?” He responds, “I’m a gentleman.' 'To rape me, then,' she deadpans, and the audience chuckles....

"All I’m asking is that the Academy pick a side and stick with it. Or admit that it really has no backbone or underlying moral principles whatsoever, and quit pretending to have the upper hand on social morality....

"Liberty readers might well enjoy The Favourite.... It’s bizarre in many ways, but it’s also witty, opulent, and well-acted. It presents three powerful women controlling the throne and politics of England in their own womanly way.... All three women use their sex for trade, but they do it willingly and deliberately, from a position of power rather than victimhood. Is it possible — even probable — that women in Hollywood have been doing the same thing for over a century, and only cried 'outrage!' (and somehow managed to blame Republicans) after they were caught?"

Read more: http://www.libertyunbound.com/node/1953

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The Scotsman who discovered spontaneous order

Adam Ferguson and the Spontaneous Order of Society - Foundation for Economic Education - Richard M. Ebeling:

November 26, 2016 - "One of the most cherished misunderstandings, if not delusions, of the social engineer – the individual who would presume to attempt to remake society through conscious and planned design – is the confident belief that he (and those like him) can ever know enough to successfully remold mankind and human institutions. An appreciation of how limited is our individual knowledge and abilities to ... make a 'better world' through government regulation, control and central planning has been slow in fully developing ... [but] was a central hallmark of several of the members of the Scottish Enlightenment.

"A leading figure in this Scottish movement was Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), who for several years held a chair in Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.... Ferguson is best known for his 1767 work, An Essay on the History of Civil Society ... [which] contains some of the clearest analyses of social institutions and their emergence and evolution as the spontaneous development of the interactions of multitudes of people over many generations, the results of which are unpredictable, yet often superior to any attempt to actually guide or direct social processes through time.

"Ferguson believed that the origin and nature of man in society had to be derived from historical investigation.... [M]an may be a willing, volitional and acting individual, but he is born into society in the form of families and clans, which then took on more complex and extended forms of human relationship and association over extended time. The formal institutions of society concerning rights and law emerged out of this more primitive human order precisely to delineate private property ownership and impose restraints on abusive political authority.

"Thus, Ferguson argued, society was not created by design to provide safety and security, but, instead, freedom and rights emerged and evolved out of more primitive forms of tribal and collective association as responses to considered injustices and abusive power....

“Like the winds, that come we know not whence, and blow whithersoever they list, the forms of society are derived from an obscure and distant origin; they arise long before the date of philosophy, from the instincts, not from the speculations of man.... Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what is termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments [institutions], which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design....

"Ferguson was insistent that however much we may now see and appreciate the logic and the benefits that have arisen through the evolution of society’s institutions to protect rights, secure property, enforce justice, and maintain the peace that fosters the environment that makes liberty and prosperity possible, the multitudes of human actions and interactions that brought this about were done by individuals giving no thought to how their specific goal-oriented activities would generate the complex order of modern society....

"Ronald Hamowy, an expert on Adam Ferguson who wrote his dissertation on Ferguson and his conception of spontaneous order under the supervision of F.A. Hayek  ... emphasized that Ferguson’s greatest concerns with commercial society came not from the development of the market order, itself, but from the intruding and intervening hand of government into the competitive system....

'In matters of particular profession, industry, and trade,’ wrote Ferguson, ‘the experienced practitioner is the master . . . When the refined politician would lend an active hand, he only multiples interruptions and grounds of complaint’....

"[T]o try to impose ... centrally engineered designs on society limits its potentials and possibilities to what a handful of finite and limited human minds can anticipate and imagine. Far better for all to have the individual liberty, and to respect the freedom of others, to use their knowledge as they see fit in the pursuit of their own personal happiness, so all may reap the benefits that come from the interactions of multitudes of minds the full outcomes of which that no one can successfully comprehend."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/adam-ferguson-and-the-spontaneous-order-of-society/

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One great idea and two bad ones

Nationalism and Socialism Are Very Bad Ideas - Reason.com - Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Reason:

February 2017 - "Between the Great Lisbon Earthquake [1755] and the revolutionary year of 1848 the European chattering classes had three big ideas. One was very, very good. The other two were very, very bad. We're still paying.

"The good one, flowing from the pens of such members of the clerisy as Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and above all the Blessed Adam Smith, is what Smith described in 1776 as the shocking idea of 'allowing every man [or woman, dear] to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice'....

"The boldness of commoners pursuing their own interests resulted in a Great Enrichment — a rise in Europe and the Anglosphere of real, inflation-corrected incomes per head, from 1800 to the present, by a factor, conservatively measured, of about 30. That is, class, about 3,000 percent.... And now, despite the best efforts of governments and international agencies to bungle the job, liberalism is spreading to the world, from Hong Kong to Botswana....

"The two bad ideas of 1755–1848 were nationalism and socialism.... Nationalism, when first theorized in the early 19th century, was entwined with the Romantic movement, though of course in England it was already hundreds of years old.

"What is bad about nationalism, aside from its intrinsic collective coercion, is that it inspires conflict. The 800 U.S. military bases around the world keep the peace by waging endless war, bombing civilians to protect Americans from non-threats on the other side of the world. In July 2016, we of the Anglosphere 'celebrated,' if that is quite the word, the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, a fruit of nationalism, which by its conclusion three and a half months later had cost the Allies and the Central Powers combined over a million casualties, most of them dismembered by artillery....

"The other bad idea of the era was socialism, which can also be linked to Romanticism, and to a secularized Christianity.... What's bad about socialism, aside from its own intrinsic collective coercion, is that it leads to poverty. Even in its purest forms — within the confines of a sweet family, say — it kills initiative and encourages free riding.... The not-so-sweet forms of socialism, especially those paired with nationalism, are a lot worse. Thus North Korea, Cuba, and other workers' paradises. As the joke goes, 'Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism it's the other way around.'

"What to do? Revive liberalism, as the astonishing successes of China and India have. Take back the word from our friends on the American left. They can keep progressive, if they don't mind being associated with the Progressive movement of the early 20th century, and its eugenic enthusiasms for forced sterilization and for using the minimum wage to drive immigrants, blacks, and women out of the labor force.....

"Read Adam Smith, slowly — not just the prudential Wealth of Nations, but its temperate sister The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And return in spirit to the dawn of 1776, when the radical idea was not nationalism or socialism or national socialism, but 'the obvious and simple system of natural liberty' that allows all men and women to pursue their interests in their own ways."

Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2017/01/26/three-big-ideas
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