Free To Lose - Jews, Whites & Libertarianism

Is civilization being destroyed? It most certainly is, with malice aforethought at that. Who are the perpetrators? Try Jews, not all Jews but a sizable proportion,  the communists, atheist Jews, vicious, Paranoid, Zionist crazies who run the Stolen Land of Palestine. They call it Israel. They defend it by antagonizing all of their neighbours.

From http://www.toqonline.com/blog/free-to-lose/

Editor’s Note:
The essay below, from the Fall 2011 issue of The Occidental Quarterly, is one that every High School and College student should read. It is short, concise, scholarly and has exceptional explanatory value!

Therefore, I invite you to copy the essay below and send it to a student you know. Block copy the text to your word processor, save it and attach it to an email! Or, if you wish, send a link.

The political philosophy of Libertarianism has recently attracted a wave of support in the United States among the mainly White Tea Party movement, and the supporters of Ron and Rand Paul. The catalyst has been the perceived failings of the Obama administration’s response to the global financial crisis and subsequent recession: a response characterized by an ideologically-driven expansion of government ownership, spending, and regulation of the US economy, with a corresponding decline in individual liberty. To espouse free market libertarianism in this context seems a rational corrective to Obama’s neo-Marxist agenda, given the libertarian commitment to the maximization of individual liberty and minimization of the state – at a time when a bloated dysfunctional state seems to lie at the heart of the problems facing White people.

While there is a spectrum of libertarianism that straddles the left-right binary of contemporary politics, in today’s world, libertarianism is primarily associated with the commitment to market liberalism that was the hallmark of the Austrian and Chicago Schools of economics. A watershed moment in the history of post-war libertarianism was the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Economics to the libertarian theorist Friedrich von Hayek in 1974. For the preceding thirty years the economic theories of the British economist John Maynard Keynes held sway throughout the West. Keynesianism, involving state intervention in the economy through deficit spending to stimulate output and employment, is based on the idea that governments can and should act to eliminate the worst vicissitudes of the business cycle. Through manipulation of the federal budget a government can, theoretically, engineer economic outcomes.

Keynesianism emerged as a midway position between free-market libertarianism and socialist state-planning. However, the stagflation crisis that emerged with the OPEC oil crisis of the early seventies threw the post-war Keynesian consensus into turmoil. It set the scene for the re-emergence of political support for free-market libertarianism, and ultimately for the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Regan in the US — and, subsequently, their legions of political imitators throughout the world. At the forefront of this renaissance of libertarian thought, alongside Hayek, was a group of Jewish intellectuals whose ideas and advocacy were key to this achievement, and to libertarianism’s subsequent and enduring appeal. The most prominent and influential of these figures were Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand.

It is one of the seeming paradoxes of political history in the past century that Jews have been prominent as theorists and activists for ostensibly opposing ideological forces: socialist collectivism on the one hand, and free-market libertarianism (and neo-conservatism) on the other. However, this paradox begins to fade when viewed through the lens of Professor Kevin MacDonald's theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. According to this theory, Judaism emerged historically as a strategy to promote the economic welfare and reproductive success of Jews as a genetically distinct population. In The Culture of Critique MacDonald examines a range of twentieth-century intellectual movements that had a decisive Jewish involvement and concludes that they share a common tacit agenda in promoting the group evolutionary interests of Jews — often at the expense of non-Jews. Accordingly, they can be accurately regarded as Jewish intellectual movements that are, in reality, post-Enlightenment manifestations of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. A major focus in Culture of Critique is on the role of Jews in the formulation and advocacy of Marxist and cultural-Marxist ideologies [ see Cultural Marxism ], such as the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School.

My purpose here is not to determine whether libertarianism is, like the Frankfurt School, a Jewish intellectual movement. This requires more extensive treatment than can be given here. Here I will examine, firstly, why free-market libertarian ideas have held a strong attraction to a prominent subset of Jewish intellectuals; and secondly, I will discuss the practical effect of libertarian economic and social policies on European-derived populations.

JEWS AND LIBERTARIANISM
In a speech to the Mont Pelerin Society  in 1972 entitled #Capitalism and the Jews, Milton Friedman,  perhaps the pivotal figure in the history of modern libertarianism after Hayek, explored the seeming paradox that, despite the Jews having thrived under capitalism, they had played a central role in the formulation and advocacy of leftist political ideologies. He observed that, despite the Jews as a people having done very well under capitalist societies,

“for the past century, the Jews have been a stronghold of anti-capitalist sentiment. From Karl Marx through Leon Trotsky to Herbert Marcuse, a sizable fraction of the revolutionary anti-capitalist literature has been authored by Jews. Communist parties in all countries, including the party that achieved revolution in Russia but also present-day Communist parties in Western countries, and especially in the U.S., have been run and manned to a disproportionate extent by Jews—though I hasten to add that only a tiny fraction of Jews have ever been members of the Communist party. Jews have been equally active in the less revolutionary socialist movements in all countries, as intellectuals generating socialist literature, as active participants in leadership, and as members.”

Friedman finds this somewhat difficult to reconcile with the fact that “the Jews owe an enormous debt to capitalism.” It is obvious that, as an intelligent and capable people, the Jews are always likely to thrive in the competitive context of the unfettered market. Accordingly, it seems apparent to Friedman that the real enemy to Jewish interests (and the interests of other able minority groups) are the barriers to entry and anti-competitive practices that, in various historical instances, have restricted their full participation in the economic affairs of a nation. For Friedman, it is axiomatic that

“the feature of capitalism that has benefited the Jews has, of course, been competition. Wherever there is a monopoly, whether it be private or governmental, there is room for the application of arbitrary criteria in the selection of the beneficiaries of the monopoly—whether these criteria be color of skin, religion, national origin or what not. Where there is free competition, only performance counts. The market is color blind. No one who goes to the market to buy bread knows or cares whether the wheat was grown by a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or atheist; by Whites or blacks. Any miller who wishes to express his personal prejudices by buying only from preferred groups is at a competitive disadvantage, since he is keeping himself from buying from the cheapest source. He can express his prejudice, but he will have to do so at his own expense, accepting a lower monetary income than he could otherwise earn.”

Friedman was influenced by Ludwig von Mises, who expressed a similar view in 1944. Identifying why free market capitalism is good for Jews and other minorities he writes:

“In an unhampered market society there is no legal discrimination against anybody. Everyone has the right to obtain the place within the social system in which he can successfully work and make a living. The consumer is free to discriminate, provided that he is ready to pay the cost. A Czech or a Pole may prefer to buy at higher cost in a shop owned by a Slav instead of buying cheaper and better in a shop owned by a German. An anti-Semite may forego being cured of an ugly disease by the employment of the ‘Jewish’ drug Salvarsan and have recourse to a less efficacious remedy. In this arbitrary power consists what economists call consumer’s sovereignty.”

Another celebrated Jewish libertarian, who nevertheless rejected the label, was Ayn Rand (born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum). While Rand and her theory of Objectivism have never been widely respected in academia she has exerted an enormous popular influence through her writings. In her book The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) she also made the link between the extent of free markets and the relative absence of discrimination against minorities in a society. She writes that

“no political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism. A fully free, capitalist system has not yet existed anywhere. But what is enormously significant is the correlation of racism and political controls in the semi-free economies of the 19th century. Racial and/or religious persecutions of minorities stood in inverse ratio to the degree of a country’s freedom. Racism was strongest in the more controlled economies, such as Russia and Germany — and weakest in England, the then freest country of Europe.

The foregoing statements, each framed in the language of ethical universalism, clearly disclose the chief attraction of free-market libertarianism to Jews like Friedman, von Mises and Rand. Free markets, they affirm, advance the interests of Jews through imposing an impersonal economic discipline on non-Jews through which their ethnocentricity and anti-Semitic prejudice can be circumvented. That this proposition contains a great deal of truth is confirmed, I would contend, by the historical record: Jews have indeed prospered under the conditions of free market capitalism among often hostile majority European-derived populations.

It may have occurred to the reader, however, that while Friedman, von Mises and Rand opposed the existence of monopolies that provided “room for the application of arbitrary criteria in the selection of the beneficiaries of the monopoly,” the reality is that Jews, even in the freest of markets, are notorious for developing and using ethnic monopolies in precisely this fashion. Indeed this is a major theme of MacDonald's A People That Shall Dwell Alone where he observes that from “the standpoint of the group, it was always more important to maximize the resource flow from the non-Jewish community to the Jewish community, rather than to allow individual Jews to maximize their interests at the expense of the Jewish community.”

The massive extent of Jewish nepotism in their business dealings is so exhaustively documented (very frequently by Jews themselves) as to be beyond dispute. Such is the rarity of instances where Jews use other Jews in a purely instrumental manner that they are cause for great shock and trauma within the Jewish community (witness the Madoff affair). Given this, it seems to me that while, as Friedman, von Mises and Rand assert, the free market may work efficiently to hinder ethnocentric discrimination among Whites (a group that MacDonald characterizes as, owing to their evolutionary history, strongly predisposed to individualism), the hyper-ethnocentrism of the Jews (and the Chinese) predispose them to transcend this “rational” discipline imposed by the free market. MacDonald makes the point that the propensity of these groups to engage in “tribal economics” involving high levels of within-group economic cooperation and patronage confers on these groups “an extraordinarily powerful competitive advantage against individual strategies.”

Accordingly, the free-market libertarian agenda, when promoted in the context of a society that is multi-racial, and where some racial groups exceed Whites in the degree of their ethnocentricity, may not promote the group evolutionary interests of Whites in enhancing their access to resources and reproductive success. The truth of this proposition is confirmed, I would submit, by the tendency of European governments through history to impose laws barring Jews from many industries and professions. That such laws were so widespread, and deemed so necessary, is surely indicative of an awareness, borne of experience, of the tendency of Jews to adopt a racial collectivist strategy in competition to the individualistic strategies of the majority Europeans — and that this would invariably result in Jewish market dominance, and concomitant outbreaks of anti-Semitism. That such restrictions were rendered less effective by their inconsistent application across the political patchwork of European jurisdictions through history was regarded by Friedman as a saving grace for Jewish populations. He noted that

“Throughout the nearly two thousand years of the Diaspora, Jews were repeatedly discriminated against, restricted in the activities they could undertake, on occasion expelled en masse, as in 1492 from Spain, and often the object of the extreme hostility of the peoples among whom they lived. They were able nonetheless to exist because of the absence of a totalitarian state, so that there were always some market elements, some activities open to them to enter. In particular, the fragmented political structure and the numerous separate sovereignties meant that international trade and finance in particular escaped close control, which is why Jews were so prominent in this area.

It is no accident that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the two most totalitarian societies in the past two thousand years (modern China perhaps excepted), also offer the most extreme examples of official and effective anti-Semitism…If we come to more recent time, Jews have flourished most in those countries in which competitive capitalism had the greatest scope: Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Britain and the U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century — a case that is particularly pertinent when that period is compared with the Hitler period.”

Agreeing with the thesis that free markets have been good for Jews, Jerry Muller, in his recently published #Capitalism and the Jews (2010) observes that when Jews have been allowed to compete with Non-Jews on equal terms, they have always done disproportionately well. Nevertheless, this economic success has been cause for both pride and embarrassment to Jews. It has prompted some anti-Semites to (erroneously) condemn capitalism as inherently Jewish. For the left, meanwhile, the reality of differential group achievement under conditions of legal (and assumed biological) equality is an embarrassment and a disgrace. The left have learned to hide their embarrassment under the intellectual fig leaf of “White racism.”

WHITES AND LIBERTARIANISM
It seems evident from the foregoing that, the only time that Whites will be acting in their own evolutionary self-interest in embracing the free-market libertarian agenda will be when they either live in a racially homogeneous society where their group interests are not imperilled by the utility-maximizing behavior of individuals; or in a multi-racial society where competing racial groups do not exceed Whites in their ethnocentrism, or exceed Whites in their ethnocentrism but lack the native endowment of intellect to capitalize on this by effectively employing altruistic group strategies in competition with individualistic Whites.

The consequence of this, I would argue, is that the realization of the free-market libertarian agenda is likely to disadvantage Whites in a society with significant Ashkenazi Jewish and East-Asian populations. Such societies certainly include the contemporary United States and most other Western nations. In contrast, experience has shown that other racial groups, with their relatively lower mean IQs, despite their comparatively higher levels of ethnocentrism, are unlikely to out-compete Whites in the context of a free market economy. These groups, however, present an evolutionary threat to Whites of an entirely different order: with their comparatively high birth rates, crime rates, and levels of welfare-dependency involving the large-scale transfer of resources away from White communities.

If White ethnocentrism could be enhanced sufficiently to prompt Whites to adopt cohesive group strategies on a large scale (i.e., strategies that involve some controls on individual behavior—a form of altruism), then the economic playing field could be leveled sufficiently to allow more effective competition with Jews. However, given that Ashkenazi Jews have significantly higher mean IQs than Whites (particularly with regard to verbal IQ, which is a strong predictor of commercial aptitude); they are probably still likely to generally out-compete Whites in such a hypothetical conflict of racial group altruistic strategies. Nevertheless, the large-scale adoption of altruistic group strategies, even if offering only a partial improvement in the relative economic welfare of Whites compared to other racial groups, would be worthwhile.

However, a major barrier to Whites adopting altruistic group strategies are the ideologies that dominate the climate of opinion (especially in education) in Western nations today, some of which are explored by MacDonald in Culture of Critique, and which are calculated to thwart the emergence of manifestations of White ethnocentrism. MacDonald observes that a century ago the social sciences were effectively divorced from the biological sciences. While a reconciliation of sorts began in the 1970s, the humanities and large sections of anthropology continue to remain virtual intellectual closed shops, estranged from the contradictory findings of the biological sciences. Indeed given the leftist monopolization of these fields, resulting in the doctrinaire rejection of inconvenient scholarship and biology, it is hardly surprising that utopian socialism of the most naive variety routinely emanates from the academy.

It has undoubtedly been one of the chief attractions of leftist collectivism for Jews that free-market libertarianism — through the theoretical removal of the possibility of state coercion of individuals — effectively protects non-Jews in the expression of their anti-Semitism in their personal behaviour. Friedman concedes the point, noting that

“competitive capitalism has permitted Jews to flourish economically and culturally because it has prevented anti-Semites from imposing their values on others, and from discriminating against Jews at other people’s expense. But the other side of that coin is that it protects anti-Semites from having other people’s values imposed on them. It protects them in the expression of their anti-Semitism in their personal behavior so long as they do it at their own expense. Competitive capitalism has therefore not eliminated social anti-Semitism. The free competition of ideas that is the natural companion of competitive capitalism might in time lead to a change in tastes and values that would eliminate social anti-Semitism but there is no assurance that it will. As the New Testament put it, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’”

Implied in the above is that anti-Semitism is essentially irrational, and that Jews, while able to avoid economic manifestations of anti-Semitism through the operation of the free market, will have to wait for non-Jews to become more enlightened for social anti-Semitism to disappear. Likewise, for von Mises: “the truth is that while the Jews are the objects of anti-Semitism, their conduct and qualities did not play a decisive role in inciting and spreading its modern version.” Therefore, consistent with Jewish intellectual movements like Freudian psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School, anti-Semitism is characterized by these leading theorists of free-market libertarianism as being symptomatic of delusion or of the psychopathology of non-Jews, rather than a mostly rational and predictable response to a threat to the group evolutionary interests of non-Jews.

It would seem that libertarian ideas are particularly hazardous to the collective interests of White people because we are naturally attracted to them. As MacDonald notes, our evolutionary history makes us prone to individualism in the first place. You then get a negative feedback loop where libertarian ideology intensifies this innate individualism to encourage ever greater individualism among Whites, and an ever greater aversion to manifestations of White ethnocentrism. Thus, where the spirit of free market libertarian individualism reigns, Whites willingly maximize their individual self-interest at the expense of the group evolutionary interests of the White community — with disastrous long-term consequences.

MULTICULTURALISM, IMMIGRATION, AND LIBERTARIANISM
It is clear that many of the political stances adopted by White libertarian individualists neatly dovetail with many of the doctrines of the anti-White left — multiculturalism being the prime example. The pro-market individualism of Western nations has, as a by-product, led to the embrace of a profoundly shallow concept of culture. Many Westerners now see cultural differences as if they were merely differences in consumer tastes and preferences. In a consumerist society, diversity is celebrated — as diversity is the basis for consumer choice. The consumer is king, and he demands that his own personal and individual preferences be satisfied.

Multiculturalism is, therefore, the natural anthropology of a consumer-friendly economy. Because our own lives are filled with personalized choices, each made according to our unique tastes, we have come to approach culture in the same spirit. For many Whites, a culture is like an individual choice of a consumer product. Accordingly, the naive White multiculturalist treats differences in human cultures as if they were analogous to a preference for Coca-Cola over Pepsi — that is, mainly a difference in consumer tastes — consumer sovereignty at work. This view, however, is radically different from the view implicit in less tolerant traditions like Judaism and Islam that regard cultures as weapons in the struggle for survival and supremacy of those who carry on those traditions. It is not surprising that, in an intellectual climate of almost limitless White libertarian tolerance for cultural diversity, non-White immigrant communities feel free to openly express disdain for European-derived peoples, disparaging their culture and their central place in the historical development of the world.

A large majority of Jews have historically been strongly in favor of a libertarian immigration policy for the White-majority countries in which they choose to reside. That this attitude is generally not extended to the state of Israel is, naturally enough, a source of consternation and ridicule among White nationalists. MacDonald has examined this phenomenon extensively, regarding it as a foundational tenet of almost all Jewish intellectual movements that have historically emerged from Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. Interestingly, this rampant hypocrisy extends to the likes of Friedman and Rand. For instance Friedman’s position with regard to immigration to the US was that, providing that immigrants (from whatever racial or cultural source) are entering the nation to take up employment, as opposed to state welfare, there is no rational reason to oppose that immigration. With reference to the large scale immigration into the US in the late nineteenth century he opined that:

“You will find that hardly a soul who will say that it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. ‘But what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?’ ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘We couldn’t possibly have free immigration today. Why, that would flood us with immigrants from India, and God knows where. We’d be driven down to a bare subsistence level.’ What’s the difference? How can people be so in- consistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today?

Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There’s a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not? Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promises a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.”

So if there is a job waiting for an individual — regardless of their race — then it would be irrational to exclude that person. However, the apparent attraction of non-discriminatory immigration for Friedman did not extend to the state of Israel. While Friedman frequently railed against the socialist tendencies of various Israeli governments, he was a strong supporter of the ethno-state of Israel, and there is no record of him ever noticing Israel’s racially-restrictive immigration policy — much less decrying it. This surely demonstrates that in such matters the in-group moral criterion of whether it was “good for the Jews” surpassed his universal libertarian commitment to the supposed benefits of a free and open immigration policy.

Ayn Rand demonstrated an even greater capacity for hypocrisy with her attitude toward respective manifestations of White and Jewish ethnocentrism. She declared that “there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement” and espoused the moral superiority of her type of individualism which “regards man — every man — as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.” For Rand, however, “every man” ostensibly did not include the Arabs in their conflict with Israel. Instead she regarded the fight between Israel and the Arabs as fight between civilized men and savages. Appearing on Donahue in 1979 she declared that: “If you mean whose side should you be on — Israel or the Arabs? I would certainly say Israel because it’s the advanced, technological, civilized country amidst a group of almost totally primitive savages who have not changed for years and who are racist and who resent Israel because it’s bringing industry and intelligence and modern technology into their stagnation.”

So to what extent does the libertarian immigration agenda, advocated with such patent inconsistency by the like of Friedman and Rand, serve the interests of Whites in terms of immigration policy? White racial nationalists generally do not have a problem with immigration per se, but rather with non-White immigration that shifts the demographic balance of power away from European-derived populations. Because of their strict individualism, libertarians dismiss the importance of race in human affairs. This is reflected in the fact that many of the most prominent libertarian theorists, endorse a policy of non-discrimination with regard to immigration — although this principal is rarely extended by Jewish libertarians to the state of Israel.

The anthropological reality is, as Frank Salter observes, the precise opposite of the individualist fantasy propagated by libertarianism: that, until recent decades, almost all human societies have sought, like Israel, to prevent permanent mass migration in their own group evolutionary interests. Western societies since about 1965 have been the rare exceptions. Salter observes that:

“Hunter-gatherers and primitive agriculturalists, farmers and herders have all laid claim to a territory and fiercely defended it. Marriage partners have been found almost exclusively within the ethnic group, encompassing the local dialect. The psychological motivations for this are well established in such predispositions as social identity mechanisms, collectivism, assortment by similarity, innate cognition of human kinds, and rational choice. Evolutionary origins of territoriality and ethnocentrism are indicated by their being human universals as well as being found in apes. And from the evolutionary perspective, which acknowledges the limited carrying capacity of all territories and of the world itself, it is maladaptive to allow one’s lineage — family, clan or ethnic group — to be replaced by others.

The vital interest all societies have in controlling a territory also falsified the assertion that national security consists solely of defending individual citizens from attack, for example by vetting immigrants for terrorist connections, as is already the practice with tourists. Unlike tourists, immigrants affect the receiving country’s numbers, identity and cohesion. Societies thus have a corporate interest in retaining national sovereignty, which entails control of a territory. This helps to explain the historical pattern of corporate liberty being put before citizens’ rights. Inviting the world to a country as prosperous as Australia would result in the displacement of the Australian people inside their historical homeland. This is an outcome even more maladaptive than enslavement because it would be permanent.”

The question then arises as to why European-derived people in Western nations would, through accepting large-scale non-White immigration, act in a way that is entirely contrary to their group evolutionary interests. Part of the problem, discussed at length by MacDonald, is that Northern Europeans are, as a product of their evolutionary development, inherently more individualistic and less ethnocentric than other racial groups. This makes them predisposed to the type of individualism that has been at the core of Western market capitalism for centuries — an individualism that originally was a source of strength, and that has only become problematic in the context of the establishment of large non-White communities within formerly homogenous White nations.

While individual Whites may benefit from non-White immigration (such as a business proprietor or a leftist political candidate), in terms of their evolutionary interests as a distinct genetic community, non-White immigration is a huge negative. MacDonald has pointed out that more ethnocentric and less individualistic groups (most prominently Jews) have exploited this tendency of Europeans to lobby for changes to immigration policies to serve their own group interests. I think it is quite clear that the libertarianism of Friedman, von Mises and Rand, whether intentionally or not, has aided and abetted the cultural Marxists in serving Jewish group interests with regard to its influence on immigration policies in Western nations.

Thus, it is this very libertarian individualist agenda favoring the free global movement of people, in conjunction with the openly anti-White and anti-Western agendas of the cultural Marxists that have facilitated the demographic transformation of Western nations in the past few decades. Because of their denial of the significance of race, libertarians are never going to be allies in the fight to save White populations from demographic and political eclipse. The growth in popularity of libertarian ideas among Whites is as likely to undermine White racial solidarity as effectively as any of the more openly anti-White nostrums of the left. As White racial nationalists and activists we urgently need to convey to patriotic White libertarians that racial collectivism is the only effective means to promote our group interests now and into the future. It is lesson that was learned many centuries ago by those that have worked tirelessly to promote their own group evolutionary interests at our expense — with Judaism being the classic example.

 

 

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  1. The tone of many of these posts illustrates exactly your point: that individualism has advanced the white race in the past but is now destroying it in the face of less individualist ethnic groups.

  2.  
    Kevin Bjornsson said:

    Fascinating. Though libertarianism does not lead to multi-culturalism. Even though politics can be considered apart from culture, inevitably culture and group identity are involved because liberty derives from a philosophical justification.

    Natural rights provides that justification, and while a creation of Greco-Roman fusionism, espouses a universalism both cultural and political that will prevail throughout the world (or the world will sink into a new Dark Age). Because there are competing universalisms.

    Communism has been defeated, but is making a comeback through a Red-Green alliance. Islamism posits a type of universalism, and like communism, opposes western civilization.

    Humanism is cultural universalism that would have defeated Christianity and Islam before they became established, and has already succeeded in transforming Judaism (to a large extent). Western culture came into existence before the printing press was used in Europe. This left the large mass of pagans vulnerable to Christian conversion. Yet Christianity partially assimilated to humanism, while Islam has not.

    Israel tolerates a large Arab population and welcomes skilled immigrants, even non-Jewish. That is because their strong economy needs labor. Jews have a slight advantage with immigration to Israel, but that is necessitated by the extreme dangers they face elsewhere. Europe had a similar strategy, but unlike Israel, attracts the wrong sort through it’s exceptionally generous welfare system.

    European solidarity is a bad strategy, due to it’s subsidy to the wrong sort of whites, and the alienation of the right sort of non-whites. Humanism provides a sufficient cultural base for political libertarianism. Of course this assumes that the west abandons it’s embrace of Athenian democracy, and re-embraces natural law. The synthesis of Jus Gentium (common law) and Stoicism (holistic, both cultural and political) results in Jus Naturale (natural law theory).

     

    “Kevin Bjornsson” here pretends that Whites would benefit from supporting the most intelligent, no matter which people they belong to. His purpose is of course to promote Jews.

    “Israel tolerates a large Arab population and welcomes skilled immigrants, even non-Jewish. That is because their strong economy needs labor. Jews have a slight advantage with immigration to Israel, but that is necessitated by the extreme dangers they face elsewhere. Europe had a similar strategy, but unlike Israel, attracts the wrong sort through it’s exceptionally generous welfare system.

    European solidarity is a bad strategy, due to it’s subsidy to the wrong sort of whites, and the alienation of the right sort of non-whites.”

    Ah, the falsehoods. First, Israel “tolerates” Arabs living within its borders? They are the ORIGINAL people. They were the ones who submitted to the Zionist invasion, armed by the U.S. and Britain, while the other Arabs were driven out and killed in the thousands. To say that Israel “tolerates” them is like saying Jews and their non-White allies in the West “tolerates” Whites living here, and that we should be grateful to them for this.

    Most Israelis would like to get rid of all the Arabs, but even they can’t be completely racialist, or their support among the “goyim” would be weakened. So they keep these Arabs. But treat them as second-class citizens. The Arabs are discriminated against. Their politicians are beaten. The media lie about their politicians. The Arabs are treated in exactly the same way as racialist Whites are treated in the West because of Jew-controlled media.

    Kevin Bjornsson says Jews have a SLIGHT immigration advantage. Another lie. Jews have a COMPLETE advantage – in that Jews from anywhere in the world are allowed to migrate to Israel, because they are of the superior Jewish blood. Palestinians, on the other hand, are not even allowed to move back to the last 22 percent of Palestinian land, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, if they have fled elsewhere.

    And Christians are forbidden to marry Jews in Israel. Something Bjornsson “forgets” to mention. Because that destroys his talk about how the poor, persecuted Jews must have their “slight” advantage. The ban against Christian-Jewish marriage, and the open hatred against Christians in Israel, shows that Israel is not based on escaping “persecution”, but on their wish for racial supremacy.

    When Greek Orthodox priests march down Golgotha carrying a large wooden cross, Jews line up on both sides to shout hateful slurs at them and spit at them. And they especially spit on the cross. This is something the Jew-controlled media never mention. Jews in general hate Whites and Christianity.

    And these are the people Kevin Bjornsson claims it is oh-so-fine to live with in the West? Anyone who has actually read Kevin MacDonald's work, or other work documenting how Jews have pushed mass immigration and race-mixing for Whites, knows that this is false.

    Kevin Bjornsson claims that European solidarity is wrong because it promotes the worst Whites. We should instead allow Jews among us, who are better. But Jews also promote the worst among themselves. And they promote Black and Arab immigration to Europe and America (which Bjornsson pretends he doesn’t know), peoples with a much lower IQ than Jews or Whites, because they aid the Jewish agenda of preventing a White defense against their influence.

    Whites are far better off promoting our whole race, including the worst – because we need all the numbers we can get in this fight. Otherwise we will soon be a minority in all Western nations, with a state of constant murder and rape like in Rhodesia and South Africa (where half of all women have been raped). Hundreds of millions of Blacks, Arabs, Turks and others will be let in, to give their votes to the Jew-approved leftist parties. (At least 80 percent of Jews vote for the Left. Because anti-White collectivism is good for them.)

    Kevin Bjornsson here will of course be on the anti-White side. He will declare other Whites to be “suckers” and “losers”, and he will have many excuses for siding with the “winners”. All in his own self-interest in a crumbling West. He is either a Jew himself or one of the greedy little cowards who like to get a piece of the pie.

     

  3. This is a fantastically accurate piece. The only thing I would add is that Koreans, more so than Chinese, very much demonstrate this sort of behavior. One can see how Korean immigrants in countries more productive than their own (primarily the U.S. and Japan) ironically achieve an average living standard well above the native populations by maximizing resource inflow into the Korean community (patronizing and promoting other Korean businesses whenever possible, banding together to keep non-Koreans out of business fields they are in, etc.) and minimizing outflow.

     

     

     


 

Capitalism and the Jews
NB This comes from Milton Friedman, a Jew and very prominent economist.

 

Capitalism and the Jews

by  Milton D. Friedman
“Capitalism and the Jews” was originally presented as a lecture before the Mont Pelerin Society in 1972. It subsequently was published in England and Canada and appears here without significant revision.

I.       Paradox Exposed

Postwar Collectivism in the West
Immediately after the Second World War, the prospects for freedom looked bleak. The war had produced an unprecedented centralization of economic controls in every belligerent country. The “socialists of all parties,” to whom F. A. Hayek dedicated his brilliant polemic The Road to Serfdom, seemed well on their way to establishing central planning as the standard for peace as for war, pointing triumphantly to the full employment that had been produced by inflationary war finance as decisive evidence for the superiority of central planning over capitalist chaos. And, if that occurred, there seemed little hope of halting the slide toward full-fledged collectivism.

Fortunately, those fears have not been realized over the intervening years. On the contrary, government inefficiency together with the clear conflict between central planning and individual freedom served to check the trend towards collectivism. In Britain, in France, in the U.S., war-time controls were dismantled and market mechanisms were given greater play. In West Germany, the courageous action of Ludwig Erhard in ending controls in the summer of 1948 triggered the so-called German economic miracle. Even behind the Iron Curtain, Yugoslavia broke with its Soviet masters, rejected detailed control of the economy, and treated us to the surprising vision of creeping capitalism in an avowedly communist society.

Unfortunately, these checks to collectivism did not check the growth of government. Rather, they diverted that growth from central direction of the economy to central control of the distribution of the product, to the wholesale transfer of income from some members of the community to others.

The Collectivist Trend in Ideas
Much more important and much more a time, there was an intellectual reaction against governmental intervention. Some of us optimistically envisioned a resurgence of liberal values, the emergence of a new trend of opinion favorable to a free society. But any such resurgence was spotty and short-lived. Intellectual opinion in the West has again started moving in a collectivist direction. Many of the slogans are individualist—participatory democracy, down with the establishment, “do your own thing,” “power to the people.” But the slogans are accompanied by attacks on private property and free enterprise—the only institutions capable of achieving the individualistic objectives. They are accompanied by a demand for centralized political power—but with “good” people instead of “bad” people exercising the power.

West Germany is perhaps the most striking example of the paradoxical developments in the world of affairs and the world of ideas. Who could ask for a better comparison of two sets of institutions than East and West Germany have provided in the past two decades? Here are people of the same blood, the same civilization, the same level of technical skill and knowledge, torn asunder by the accidents of warfare. The one adopts central direction; the other adopts a social market economy. Which has to build a wall to keep its citizens from leaving? On which side of the wall is there tyranny and misery; on which side, freedom and affluence? Yet despite this dramatic demonstration, despite the Nazi experience—which alone might be expected to immunize a society for a century against collectivism—the intellectual climate in Germany, I am told, is overwhelmingly collectivist—in the schools, the universities, the mass media alike.

This paradox is a major challenge to those of us who believe in freedom. Why have we been so unsuccessful in persuading intellectuals everywhere of our views? Our opponents would give the obvious answer: because we are wrong and they are right. Until we can answer them and ourselves in some other way, we cannot reject their answer, we cannot be sure we are right. And until we find a satisfactory answer, we are not likely to succeed in changing the climate of opinion.

The Jews as an Example of the Paradox
The Jews owe an enormous debt to free enterprise and competitive capitalism.

My aim here is not to give a ready answer—for I have none. My aim is rather to examine a particular case of paradox–the attitude of Jews toward capitalism. Two propositions can be readily demonstrated: first, the Jews owe an enormous debt to free enterprise and competitive capitalism; second, for at least the past century the Jews have been consistently opposed to capitalism and have done much on an ideological level to undermine it. How can these propositions be reconciled?

I was led to examine this paradox partly for obvious personal reasons. Some of us are accustomed to being members of an intellectual minority, to being accused by fellow intellectuals of being reactionaries or apologists or just plain nuts. But those of us who are also Jewish are even more embattled, being regarded not only as intellectual deviants but also as traitors to a supposed cultural and national tradition.

This personal interest was reinforced by the hope that study of this special case might offer a clue to the general paradox—typified by West Germany where Jews play a minor role. Unfortunately, that hope has not been fulfilled. I believe that I can explain to a very large extent the anti-capitalist tendency among Jews, but the most important elements of the explanation are peculiar to the special case and cannot readily be generalized. I trust that others will be more successful.

II. The Benefit Jews Have Derived from Capitalism

An Anecdote and Some History
Let me start by briefly documenting the first proposition: that the Jews owe an enormous debt to capitalism. The feature of capitalism that has benefited the Jews has, of course, been competition.[1] Wherever there is a monopoly, whether it be private or governmental, there is room for the application of arbitrary criteria in the selection of the beneficiaries of the monopoly—whether these criteria be color of skin, religion, national origin or what not. Where there is free competition, only performance counts. The market is color blind.

No one who goes to the market to buy bread knows or cares whether the wheat was grown by a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or atheist; by whites or blacks. Any miller who wishes to express his personal prejudices by buying only from preferred groups is at a competitive disadvantage, since he is keeping himself from buying from the cheapest source. He can express his prejudice, but he will have to do so at his own expense, accepting a lower monetary income than he could otherwise earn.

A recent personal experience illuminates sharply the importance of competition. Some years ago, I attended an International Monetary Conference held in Montreal. The persons there consisted, on the one hand, of members of the Conference, who include the two top executives of the major commercial banks throughout the world; on the other, of persons like myself invited as speakers or participants in panel discussions. A conversation with an American banker present who recounted a tale of anti-Semitism in American banking led me to estimate roughly the fraction of the two groups who were Jewish. Of the first group—the bankers proper—I estimated that about 1 per cent were Jewish. Of the much smaller second group, the invited participants in the program, roughly 25 per cent were Jewish.

Why the difference? Because banking today is everywhere monopolistic in the sense that there is no free entry. Government permission or a franchise is required. On the other hand, intellectual activity of the kind that would recommend persons for the program is a highly competitive industry with almost completely free entry.

This example is particularly striking because banking is hardly a field, like, say, iron and steel, in which Jews have never played an important role. On the contrary, for centuries Jews were a major if not dominant element in banking and particularly in international banking. But when that was true, banking was an industry with rather free entry. Jews prospered in it for that reason and also because they had a comparative advantage arising from the Church’s views on usury, the dispersion of Jews throughout the world, and their usefulness to ruling monarchs precisely because of the isolation of the Jews from the rest of the community.[2]

This anecdote illuminates much history. Throughout the nearly two thousand years of the Diaspora, Jews were repeatedly discriminated against, restricted in the activities they could undertake, on occasion expelled en masse, as in 1492 from Spain, and often the object of the extreme hostility of the peoples among whom they lived. They were able nonetheless to exist because of the absence of a totalitarian state, so that there were always some market elements, some activities open to them to enter.

In particular, the fragmented political structure and the numerous separate sovereignties meant that international trade and finance in particular escaped close control, which is why Jews were so prominent in this area. It is no accident that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the two most totalitarian societies in the past two thousand years (modern China perhaps excepted), also offer the most extreme examples of official and effective anti-Semitism.

If we come to more recent time, Jews have flourished most in those countries in which competitive capitalism had the greatest scope: Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Britain and the U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—a case that is particularly pertinent when that period is compared with the Hitler period.[3]

Freedom of Entry and Jewish Representation
Moreover, within those countries, Jews have flourished most in the sectors that have the freest entry and are in that sense most competitive. Compare the experience of the Jews in banking, that I have referred to, with their experience in retail trade, which has been almost a prototype of the textbook image of perfect competition and free entry. Or compare their minor role in large industry with their prominence in the professions such as law, medicine, accountancy and the like.[4]

Though there are barriers to entry in the professions, too, once past the initial barriers, there is a large measure of free competition for custom. Even the differences within the professions illustrate my theme. In the U.S., for which I know the details, there was for a long time a major difference between medicine and law in the extent to which state licensure was an effective bar to entry. For reasons that are not relevant here, there was significant restriction of entry in medicine, relatively little in law. And Jews were proportionately much more numerous in law than in medicine.

The movie industry in the U.S. was a new industry and for that reason open to all. Jews became a major factor and this carried over to radio and television when they came on the scene. But now that government control and regulation has become more and more important, I am under the impression that the Jewish role in radio and T.V. is declining.

Capitalism and Israel
A rather different example of the benefits Jews have derived from competitive capitalism is provided by Israel, and this in a dual sense.

Jews have seldom benefited from governmental intervention on their behalf.

First, Israel would hardly have been viable without the massive contributions that it received from world Jewry, primarily from the U.S., secondarily from Britain and other Western capitalist countries. Suppose these countries had been socialist. The hypothetical socialist countries might conceivably have contributed, but if so they would have done so for very different reasons and with very different conditions attached. Compare Soviet aid to Egypt or official U.S. aid to Israel with private contributions. In a capitalist system, any group, however small a minority, can use its own resources as it wishes, without seeking or getting the permission of the majority.

Second, within Israel, despite all the talk of central control, the reality is that rapid development has been primarily the product of private initiative. After my first extended visit to Israel two decades ago, I concluded that two traditions were at work in Israel: an ancient one, going back nearly two thousand years, of finding ways around governmental restrictions; a modern one, going back a century, of belief in “democratic socialism” and “central planning.” Fortunately for Israel, the first tradition has proved far more potent than the second.

To summarize: Except for the sporadic protection of individual monarchs to whom they were useful, Jews have seldom benefited from governmental intervention on their behalf. They have flourished when and only when there has been a widespread acceptance by the public at large of the general doctrine of non-intervention, so that a large measure of competitive capitalism and of tolerance for all groups has prevailed. They have flourished then despite continued widespread anti-Semitic prejudice because the general belief in non-intervention was more powerful than the specific urge to discriminate against the Jews.

III. The Anti-capitalist Mentality of the Jews
Despite this record, for the past century, the Jews have been a stronghold of anti-capitalist sentiment. From Karl Marx through Leon Trotsky to Herbert Marcuse, a sizable fraction of the revolutionary anti-capitalist literature has been authored by Jews. Communist parties in all countries, including the patty that achieved revolution in Russia but also present-day Communist parties in Western countries, and especially in the U.S.,[5] have been run and manned to a disproportionate extent by Jews—though I hasten to add that only a tiny fraction of Jews have ever been members of the Communist party. Jews have been equally active in the less- revolutionary socialist movements in all countries, as intellectuals generating socialist literature, as active participants in leadership, and as members.

Coming still closer to the center, in Britain the Jewish vote and participation is predominantly in the Labor party, in the U.S., in the left wing of the Democratic party. The party programs of the so-called right-wing parties in Israel would be regarded as “liberal,” in the modern sense, almost everywhere else. These phenomena are so well known that they require little elaboration or documentation.[6]

IV. Why the Anti-capitalist Mentality?
How can we reconcile my two propositions? Why is it that despite the historical record of the benefits of competitive capitalism to the Jews, despite the intellectual explanation of this phenomenon that is implicit or explicit in all liberal literature from at least Adam Smith on, the Jews have been disproportionately anti-cap- italist?

We may start by considering some simple yet inadequate answers. Lawrence Fuchs, in a highly superficial analysis of The Political Behavior of American Jews, argues that the anticapitalism of the Jews is a direct reflection of values derived from the Jewish religion and culture. He goes so far as to say, “if the communist movement is in a sense a Christian heresy, it is also Jewish orthodoxy—not the totalitarian or revolutionary aspects of world communism, but the quest for social justice through social action.”[7]

Needless to say—a point I shall return to later in a different connection—Fuchs himself is a liberal in the American sense. He regards the political liberalism of the Jews in this sense as a virtue, and hence is quick to regard such liberalism as a legitimate offspring of the Jewish values of learning, charity, and concern with the pleasures of this world. He never even recognizes, let alone discusses, the key question whether the ethical end of “social justice through social action” is consistent with the political means of centralized government.

Werner Sombart
This explanation can be dismissed out-of-hand. Jewish religion and culture date back over two millennia; the Jewish opposition to capitalism and attachment to socialism, at the most, less than two centuries. Only after the Enlightenment, and then primarily among the Jews who were breaking away from the Jewish religion, did this political stance emerge. Werner Sombart, in his important and controversial book, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, first published in 1911, makes a far stronger case that Jewish religion and culture implied a capitalist outlook than Fuchs does that it implied a socialist outlook.

Wrote Sombart, “throughout the centuries, the Jews championed the cause of individual liberty in economic activity against the dominating view of the time. The individual was not to be hampered by regulations of any sort. I think that the Jewish religion has the same leading ideas as capitalism . . . . The whole religious system is in reality nothing but a contract between Jehovah and his chosen people . . . . God promises something and gives something, and the righteous must give Him something in return. Indeed, there was no community of interest between God and man which could not be expressed in these terms—that man performs some duty enjoined by the Torah and receives from God a quid pro quo.”[8]

Sombart goes on to discuss the attitude toward riches and poverty in the Old and the New Testament. “You will find,” he writes, “a few passages [in the Old Testament and the Talmud] wherein poverty is lauded as something nobler and higher than riches. But on the other hand you will come across hundreds of passages in which riches are called the blessing of the Lord, and only their misuse or their dangers warned against.”

By contrast, Sombart refers to the famous passage in the New Testament that “it is easier for a Camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God” and remarks, “as often as riches are lauded in the Old Testament, they are damned in the New.... The religion of the Christians stands in the way of their economic activities.... The Jews were never faced with this hindrance.” He concludes, “Free trade and industrial freedom were in accordance with Jewish law, and therefore in accordance with God’s will.”[9]

Sombart’s book, I may say, has in general had a highly unfavorable reception among both economic historians in general and Jewish intellectuals in particular, and indeed, something of an aura of anti-Semitism has come to be attributed to it. Much of the criticism seems valid but there is nothing in the book itself to justify any charge of anti-Semitism though there certainly is in Sombart’s behavior and writings several decades later, indeed, if anything I interpret the book as philo-Semitic. I regard the violence of the reaction of Jewish intellectuals to the book as itself a manifestation of the Jewish anti-capitalist mentality. I shall return to this point later.

A more balanced judgment than either Fuchs’ or Sombart’s with which I am in full accord is rendered by Nathan Glazer, who writes, “It is hard to see direct links with Jewish tradition in these attitudes;... One thing is sure: it is an enormous oversimplification to say Jews in Eastern Europe became socialists and anarchists because the Hebrew prophets had denounced injustice twenty-five hundred years ago.... The Jewish religious tradition probably does dispose Jews, in some subtle way, toward liberalism and radicalism, but it is not easy to see in present-day Jewish social attitudes the heritage of the Jewish religion.”[10]

Jews, Intellectualism, and Anti-Capitalism
A second simple explanation is that the Jewish anti-capitalist mentality simply reflects the general tendency for intellectuals to be anti-capitalist plus the disproportionate representation of Jews among intellectuals. For example, Nathan Glazer writes, “The general explanations for this phenomenon [the attachment of the major part of the intelligentsia to the Left] are well known. Freed from the restraints of conservative and traditional thinking, the intelligentsia finds it easier to accept revolutionary thinking, which attacks the established order of things in politics, religion, culture, and society.... Whatever it is that affected intellectuals, also affected Jews.”[11]

Glazer goes on, however, to qualify greatly this interpretation by citing some factors that affected Jews differently from other intellectuals. This explanation undoubtedly has more validity than Fuchs’ simple-minded identification of anti-capitalism with Jewish religion and culture. As the West German example quoted earlier suggests, non-Jewish intellectuals are capable of becoming dominantly collectivist. And there is no doubt that the intellectual forces Glazer refers to affected Jewish intellectuals along with non-Jewish.

However, the explanation seems highly incomplete in two respects. First, my impression is that a far larger percentage of Jewish intellectuals than of non-Jewish have been collectivist. Second, and more important, this explanation does not account for the different attitudes of the great mass of Jews and non-Jews who are not intellectual. To explain this difference we must dig deeper.

Competitive capitalism has permitted Jews to flourish economically and culturally because it has prevented anti-Semites from imposing their values on others, and from discriminating against Jews at other people’s expense.

A third simple explanation that doubtless has some validity is the natural tendency for all of us to take the good things that happen to us for granted but to attribute any bad things to evil men or an evil system. Competitive capitalism has permitted Jews to flourish economically and culturally because it has prevented anti-Semites from imposing their values on others, and from discriminating against Jews at other people’s expense.

But the other side of that coin is that it protects anti- Semites from having other people’s values imposed on them. It protects them in the expression of their anti- Semitism in their personal behavior so long as they do it at their own expense. Competitive capitalism has therefore not eliminated social anti-Semitism. The free competition of ideas that is the natural companion of competitive capitalism might in time lead to a change in tastes and values that would eliminate social anti- Semitism but there is no assurance that it will. As the New Testament put it, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.”

No doubt, Jews have reacted in part by attributing the residual discrimination to “the System.” But that hardly explains why the part of the “system” to which the discrimination has been attributed is “capitalism.” Why not, in nineteenth-century Britain, to the established church and the aristocracy; in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, to the bureaucracy; and in twentieth-century U.S., to the social rather than economic establishment. After all, Jewish history surely offers more than ample evidence that anti-Semitism has no special connection with a market economy. So this explanation, too, is unsatisfactory.

I come now to two explanations that seem to me much more fundamental.

Judaism and Secularism
The first explanation, which has to do with the particular circumstances in Europe in the nineteenth century, I owe to the extremely perceptive analysis of Werner Cohn in his unpublished Ph.D. dissertation on the “Sources of American Jewish Liberalism.” Cohn points out that: 

Beginning with the era of the French revolution, the European political spectrum became divided into a “Left” and a “Right” along an axis that involved the issue of secularism. The Right (conservative, Monarchical, “clerical”) maintained that there must be a place for the church in the public order; the Left (Democratic, Liberal, Radical) held that there can be no (public) Church at all . . . .

The axis separating left from right also formed a natural boundary for the pale of Jewish political participation. It was the Left, with its new secular concept of citizenship, that had accomplished the Emancipation, and it was only the Left that could see a place for the Jews in public life. No Conservative party in Europe—from the bitterly hostile Monarchists in Russia through the strongly Christian “noines” in France to the amiable Tories in England—could reconcile itself to full Jewish political equality. Jews supported the Left, then, not only because they had become unshakeable partisans of the Emancipation, but also because they had no choice; as far as the internal life of the Right was concerned, the Emancipation had never taken place, and the Christian religion remained a prerequisite for political participation.

Note in this connection that the only major leaders of Conservative parties of Jewish origin—Benjamin Disraeli in England, Friedrich Julius Stahl in Germany—were both professing Christians (Disraeli’s father was convened, Stahl was baptized at age 19).

Cohn goes on to distinguish between two strands of Leftism: “rational” or “intellectual” and “radical.” He remarks that “Radical leftism... was the only political movement since the days of the Roman empire in which Jews could become the intellectual brethren of non-Jews... while intellectual Leftism was Christian at least in the sense of recognizing the distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘secular,’ radical Leftism—eschatological socialism in particular—began to constitute itself as a new religious faith in which no separation between the sacred and the profane was tolerated . . . [Intellectual-Leftism] offered [the Jews] a wholly rational and superficial admission to the larger society, [radical Leftism], a measure of real spiritual community.”

I share Glazer’s comment on these passages: “I do not think anyone has come closer to the heart of the matter than has the author of these paragraphs.”

Cohn’s argument goes far to explain the important role that Jewish intellectuals played in the Marxist and socialist movement, the almost universal acceptance of “democratic socialism” by the European Jews in the Zionist movement, particularly those who emigrated to Palestine, and the socialist sentiment among the German Jewish immigrants to the United States of the mid-nineteenth century and the much larger flood of East European Jews at the turn of the century.

Yet by itself it is hard to accept Cohn’s point as the whole explanation for the anti-capitalist mentality of the Jews. In the United States, from the very beginning, the separation of church and state was accepted constitutional doctrine. True, the initial upper class was Christian and Protestant, but that was true of the population as a whole. Indeed, the elite Puritan element was, if anything, pro-Semitic.

As Sombart points out in reconciling his thesis about the role of Jews in capitalist development with Max Weber’s about the role of the Protestant Ethic in capitalist development, the Protestants, and the Puritans especially, went back to the Old Testament for their religious inspiration and patterned themselves on the ancient Hebrews. Sombart asserts: “Puritanism is Judaism.”[12] Cohn too emphasizes this phenomenon, pointing to Puritan tolerance toward Jews in the colonial era, despite their general intolerance toward other religious sects.[13]

To come down to more recent times in the United States, Theodore Roosevelt was highly popular among the Jews partly because of his willingness to object publicly to Russian pogroms. Outside of the closely knit socialist community in New York most Jews probably were Republicans rather than Democrats until the 1920s, when first Al Smith and then Franklin Delano Roosevelt produced a massive shift to the Democrats from both the Right and the Left. The shift from the Left betokened a weakening of the European influence, rather than being a manifestation of it. Yet despite that weakening influence, the American Jewish community, which now consists largely of second and third and later generation Americans, retains its dominant leftish cast.

The final explanation that suggests itself is complementary to Cohn’s yet not at all identical with it. To justify itself by more than the reference to the alleged role of the Jews in Christ’s crucifixion, anti-Semitism produced a stereotype of a Jew as primarily interested in money, as a merchant or moneylender who put commercial interests ahead of human values, who was money-grasping, cunning, selfish and greedy, who would “jew” you down and insist on his pound of flesh.

Jews could have reacted to this stereotype in two ways: first, by accepting the description but rejecting the values that regarded these traits as blameworthy; secondly, by accepting the values but rejecting the description. Had they adopted the first way, they could have stressed the benefits rendered by the merchant and by the moneylender—recalling perhaps Bentham’s comment that “the business of a money-lender... has no where nor at any time been a popular one. Those who have the resolution to sacrifice the present to the future, are natural objects of envy to those who have sacrificed the future to the present. The children who have eat their cake are the natural enemies of the children who have theirs. While the money is hoped for, and for a short time after it has been received, he who lends it is a friend and benefactor: by the time the money is spent, and the evil hour of reckoning is come, the benefactor is found to have changed his nature, and to have put on the tyrant and the oppressor. It is oppression for a man to reclaim his own money; it is none to keep it from him.”[14]

Similarly, Jews could have noted that one man’s selfishness is another man’s self reliance; one man’s cunning, another’s wisdom; one man’s greed, another’s prudence.

But this reaction was hardly to be expected. None of us can escape the intellectual air we breathe, can fail to be influenced by the values of the community in which we live. As Jews left their closed ghettoes and shtetls and came into contact with the rest of the world, they inevitably came to accept and share the values of that world, the values that looked down on the “merely” commercial, that regarded money-lenders with contempt. They were led to say to themselves: if Jews are like that, the anti-Semites are right.

The other possible reaction is to deny that Jews are like the stereotype, to set out to persuade oneself, and incidentally the anti-Semites, that far from being money-grabbing, selfish and heartless, Jews are really public spirited, generous, and concerned with ideals rather than material goods. How better to do so than to attack the market with its reliance on monetary values and impersonal transactions and to glorify the political process, to take as an ideal a state run by well-meaning people for the benefit of their fellow men?

Israel as a Diasporal Reaction
I was first led to this explanation of the anti-capitalist mentality of the Jews by my experience in Israel. After several months there, I came to the conclusion that the quickest way to reach a generalization in any area about values in Israel was to ask what was true of the Jews in the Diaspora and reverse it.

Jews in the Diaspora were urban dwellers engaged in commercial pursuits and almost never in agriculture; in Israel, agriculture has much higher prestige than commerce.

Jews in the Diaspora shunned every aspect of military service; Israelis value the military highly and have demonstrated extraordinary competence.

These two reversals are readily explained as the children of necessity, but let me continue.

Yiddish or Ladino was the language of the Jews in the Diaspora; both are looked down on in Israel, where Hebrew is the language.

Jews in the Diaspora stressed intellectual pursuits and rather looked down on athletics. There is tremendous emphasis on athletics in Israel.

And for what may seem like an irrelevant clincher: Jews in the Diaspora were reputed to be excellent cooks; cooking in Israel is generally terrible, in homes, hotels, and restaurants.

Can this record not be interpreted as an attempt, no doubt wholly subconscious, to demonstrate to the world that the commonly accepted stereotype of the Jews is false?

I interpret in the same way the evidence assembled by James Wilson and Edward Banfield that Jews (and “Yankees”) tend to adopt a “community-serving conception” of the public interest, and to vote against their own immediate self-interest, in larger proportions than most other groups.[15]

I interpret also in this way the attempt by Fuchs to trace Jewish “liberalism” to Jewish values and the negative reaction of Jewish critics to Sombart’s book. If, like me, you regard competitive capitalism as the economic system that is most favorable to individual freedom, to creative accomplishments in technology and the arts, and to the widest possible opportunities for the ordinary man, then you will regard Sombart’s assignment to the Jews of a key role in the development of capitalism as high praise.

You will, as I do, regard his book as philo-Semitic. On the other hand, if you are trying your level best to demonstrate that Jews are dedicated to selfless public service in a socialist state, that commerce and money-lending were activities forced on them by their unfortunate circumstances and were wholly foreign to their natural bent, then you will regard Sombart as an anti-Semite simply reinforcing the stereotype against which you are battling. In this vein, the Universal Jewish Encyclopaedia says in its article on Sombart: “He accused the Jews of having created capitalism” (my italics).

The complementary character of the final two explanations is, I trust, clear. Whence comes the value structure that puts service to the general public above concern for oneself and one’s close• family; government employment above private business; political activity above commercial activity; love of mankind in general above concern for men in particular; social responsibility above individual responsibility? Very largely from the collectivist trend of thought to which Jews contributed so much for the reasons advanced by Cohn.

Consider, for a moment, the reaction to the anti-Semitic stereotype by a nineteenth-century English Philosophical radical steeped in Benthamite utilitarianism—by a David Ricardo, James Mill, even Thomas Malthus. Could one of them ever have termed the allegation that Jews created capitalism an accusation? They would have termed it high praise. They would have regarded widespread emphasis on rational profit calculation as just what was needed to promote “the greatest good of the greatest number,” emphasis on the individual rather than the society as a corollary of belief in freedom, and so on.

I conclude then that the chief explanations for the anti-capitalist mentality of the Jews are the special circumstances of nineteenth-century Europe which linked pro-market parties with established religions and so drove Jews to the Left, and the subconscious attempts by Jews to demonstrate to themselves and the world the fallacy of the anti-Semitic stereotype.

No doubt these two main forces were reinforced, and the view of the Jews altered in detail, by their historical and cultural heritage, which made them specially sensitive to injustice and specially committed to charity. They were reinforced also by whatever the forces are that predispose intellectuals towards the Left.

Whether or not this explanation is a satisfactory resolution of the paradox which was my starting point, it remains true that the ideology of the Jews has been and still is opposed to their self-interest. Except behind the iron Curtain, this conflict has been mostly potential rather than real. In the West, so long as a large measure of laissez-faire capitalism prevailed, the economic drive of the Jews to improve their lot, to move upward in the economic and social scale, was in no way hindered by the preaching of socialism as an ideal. They could enjoy the luxury of reacting against the anti-Semitic stereotype, yet benefit from the characteristics that that stereotype caricatured. On a much more subtle and sophisticated level, they were in the position of the rich parlor socialists—of all ethnic and religious backgrounds—who bask in self-righteous virtue by condemning capitalism while enjoying the luxuries paid for by their capitalist inheritance.

As the scope of government has grown, as the collectivist ideas have achieved acceptance and affected the structure of society, the conflict has become very real. I have already stressed the conflict in Israel that has led to giving a far greater role to market forces than the ideology of the early leaders envisioned. I have been struck in the United States with the emergence of the conflict in reaction to some of the proposals by Senator George McGovern. His early proposal, later rescinded, to set a top limit on inheritances produced an immediate reaction from some of those who might have been expected to be and were his strongest sup-porters. It came home to them that his measures—completely consistent with their professed ideology—would greatly hamper the upward social and economic mobility of which they had been the beneficiaries.

Perhaps the reality of the conflict will end or at least weaken the paradox that has been the subject of my talk. If so, it will be a minor silver lining in the dark cloud of encroaching collectivism. 


1.   The only other writer I have come across who explicitly stresses the benefits Jews have derived from capitalism is Ellis Rivkin, The Shaping of Jewish History (New York: Scribner’s, 1971). Unfortunately, Rivkin’s interesting analysis is marred by misconceptions about the nature and operation of capitalism. He takes the accumulation of capital rather than free entry as its distinguishing feature.

2.   See for example Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951), on “court Jews,” also Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (London: T.Fisher Unwin, 1913) [translated from 1911 German original].

3.   Sombart argues that the relation is the reverse: that capitalism flourished where it did because Jews were given a considerable measure of freedom. But he would not have denied that the relation is reciprocal. And his version has been seriously questioned by economic historians. See Introduction by Bert F. Hoselitz to the American edition of Sombart’s book, Jewish Contributions to Civilization, 1919, chapter viia, pp. 247-267.

4.   See Nathaniel Weyl, The Creative Elite in America (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press 1966), particularly the tables in Appendix III giving results for different “elite resters.”

5.   For the U.S., see Nathan Glazer, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1961), pp. 85, 130, 132.

6.   For the American record, see Werner Cohn, Sources of American Jewish Liberation—A Study of the Political Alignments of American Jews, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, New School for Social Research, June 1956; Lawrence Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956); Nathan Glazer, American Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2nd ed. 1970).

7.   Op. cit., p. 197.

8.   Op. cit., pp. 153,205, 209.

9.   Ibid., pp. 216, 221,222, 248.

10.   Nathan Glazer, American Judaism, pp, 135, 136, 139.

11.   The Social Basis of American Communism. pp. 166-167.

12.   Op. cit., g. 249.

13.   However, according to Abba Eban, “Jews were refused admittance into Massachusetts and Connecticut by the Puritans whose idea of religious liberty was linked to their own brand of faith. However, in liberal Maryland and in Rhode Island, where freedom of conscience was an unshakable principle, they found acceptance.” My People (New York: Behrman House, Inc., 1968).

14.   Jeremy Bentham, In Defense of Usury (1787).

15.   James Q. Wilson and Edward C, Banfield, “Public-Regar-dingness as a Value Premise in Voting Behavior,” American Political Science Review, LVIII, 4 (Dec., 1964), pp. 876-887; “Political Ethos Revisited,” American Political Science Review, LXV, 4 (Dec., 1971), pp. 1048-1062. The similarity between the Jews and the Yankees in some of the characteristics examined by Wilson and Banfield is some evidence, if rather weak evidence, for the influence of religion and culture in view of the connection between Puritanism and Judaism.

Milton D. Friedman
Milton Friedman (1912-2006), recipient of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.