Yuval Noah Harari, professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is not only a best-selling author but also a top advisor to Klaus Schwab, founder and front man of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

In 2018, Harari wrote: “Unfortunately, ‘free will’ isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology.”

And, in a 2019 interview, Harari said:

Humans today are a hackable animal—an animal that can be hacked. . . . Hacking a person means understanding and seeing through them better than they can themselves. . . . The consequences are obvious: Anyone who knows people’s inner feelings can anticipate their actions. And, of course, manipulate their desires. Ultimately, these institutions (companies and states are meant here, TP) will make more and more decisions on our behalf because they understand our inner processes absolutely perfectly.

In a 2019 TV interview, Harari said:

Humans are now hackable animals. You know, the whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will. So, whatever I choose, whether in the election or whether in the supermarket, this is my free will. That’s over—free will.

This article will challenge Harari’s statements that man has no free will, free will is “over,” and that free will can be “hacked.”

I believe this is necessary because Harari wants to discount rational autonomy, Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) important Enlightenment ideal. Moreover, it is important to address that the conceptualization of man that Harari promotes is epistemologically flawed and misanthropic.

Above all, I want to highlight the danger such a pseudoscientific image of man represents; it tempts proponents to degrade man to a creature that can be controlled and steered according to political goals thus encouraging tyrannical fantasies of power. Ideas such as the Great Reset, the New World Order, and transhumanism ultimately stem from such an image of human nature in the social and economic sciences.

Let us dive in.

Harari’s conjecture is based on scientism. Scientism is the basic attitude of applying the scientific method to social and economic science (the science of acting human beings). Scientism applies mechanical analogies to study the individual, and it applies organic analogies to notional collectives such as the state or the society. In doing so, scientism denies the existence of individual human consciousness and free will. The scientific method describes the procedure in science used to obtain knowledge. In the natural sciences, one usually forms hypotheses and examines their validity on the basis of data (observations obtained from laboratory experiments).

Knowledge is found in experience, and experience also serves to assess the veracity of the hypotheses that the natural scientist puts forward. The central assumption is the validity of determinism (that an event or an observation can be causally explained by one or more factors). This in itself is fairly unproblematic. In natural science, all experience we gain from the real world is subject to the action-logical category of causality (a condition of the possibility of objectified experience, Kant would say). And human action is determined insofar as it results from the actor’s personal history (background, talent, experiences, knowledge, etc.). But determinism is usually interpreted materialistically in the sense that observable phenomena are assumed to be determined by material, tangible factors (physical in nature or biological and chemical processes), while mental, explanatory factors are excluded as explanatory variables.

In natural science, the application of materialistic determinism is relatively unproblematic. Here we are dealing with atoms, molecules, and planets (objects of knowledge that do not act, have no goals, and do not choose between alternative courses of action but simply react to a cause because they have no consciousness or free will). But in the realm of human action, the application of materialistic determinism is highly problematic and must be dismissed as wrong because there are no behavioral constants. The field of human action is categorically different from the natural sciences.

Why?

The answer can be found in the phrase, “man acts.” This proposition cannot be denied without logical contradiction and is therefore true for human cognitive faculty; it applies a priori. One cannot say, “man does not act,” without acting and, therefore, contradicting oneself. Whoever denies that man acts already presupposes the validity of the statement. Further truths can be logically derived from acknowledging that man acts. For example, humans have goals. They choose means to achieve their goals. Means are scarce, and acting requires time, etc. If one applies materialistic determinism to human action, as proponents of scientism do, one assumes (consciously or unconsciously) that human action is not unconditional.

The notion that human action is not without presupposition is (as mentioned before) unproblematic in the following case. Human action, will, and volition of the agent are absolutely conditional. They are the results of an individual’s development, becoming in life, and previous history. Seen from this perspective, human action is not completely free, but that is a far cry from the notion that there is no free will.

Suppose one wants to deny the acting person free will. In that case, one must assume that there are factors (biological, physical, and chemical) that legitimately determine human action. How else could it be so? But the proof of this has not yet been provided, and it cannot be provided because man is capable of learning. Knowledge and ideas can change over time. The statement, “man is capable of learning,” cannot be denied without contradiction. It is, as noted earlier, valid a priori. Whoever says, “man is not capable of learning,” wants to convey something to the listener that the listener does not yet know but is obviously capable of learning (Otherwise, the speaker would not make this statement.). This is a performative contradiction.

But if one cannot deny man’s ability to learn, one cannot predict future human action today. After all, the knowledge and the ideas of an acting human, which determine their actions, can change over time. The future state of a person’s knowledge and ideas is unknown today; therefore, from today’s perspective, the agent’s future actions cannot be known either. Epistemologically speaking, ideas are the “ultimate given” if one wants to explain the reasons behind the acting person’s actions. The ideas are no longer accessible to any further explanation or letztbegründung (ultimate justification). A certain person acts because they have chosen a certain idea (concept or theory) and made it their own. If one wanted to deny this, one would have to prove that the emergence and the selection of ideas can be conclusively explained by internal and external factors. But due to the agent’s undeniable (a priori) ability to learn, this is also not possible.

“Unfree will,” as implied by material determinism (and as advocated by Harari), is logically contradictory and thus flawed. This can also be illustrated by the following simple consideration. Person X is a determinist, while person Y is a nondeterminist. Y believes in free will, but X is convinced of the opposite. If X believes that man has no free will, then it is absurd to try to convince Y that determinism is true. The determinist who tries to convince the nondeterminist of their position negates their position. The determinist must assume that the nondeterminist, whom they want to convince of their deterministic view, has free will to choose to adopt the position of the determinist.

We come to the following conclusions. Firstly, one cannot deny (without contradiction) that man acts. Secondly, one cannot argue (without contradiction) that human action is predictable or logically explainable by certain factors (qualitative/quantitative). Free will cannot be discounted or negated at the drop of a hat as Harari does. Rather, one cannot meaningfully deny that the agent (within certain limits) can influence the course of events and can cause a different outcome compared to a situation in which they would not act. In this sense, they do have free will through the choice of their actions.

Consequently, man cannot be thought of as a mindless automaton that always responds to an impulse in a specific manner. Their future actions cannot be predicted and controlled. Man is not, and will not be, “hackable” (by AI) in the sense Harari asserts. To deny man free will is highly problematic because it degrades man to a controllable automaton. Thinkers like Harari do this to promote the possibility and acceptability of managing people according to political and ideological considerations. And that opens the door to tyranny. One is advised to hold tightly to the idea of free will, especially, when the peaceful and productive coexistence of people is the goal.

[This piece is an excerpt from Chapter 13 of The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda, to be released January 10, 2023.]

This chapter derisively refers to the notorious Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) as the Great Leap Backward. But China’s Great Leap Forward is not the ultimate object of my scorn. That scorn is reserved for the contemporary project conducted by people, who, if they knew anything about history, or cared about its results, would never propose this treacherous and potentially world-devastating campaign called the Great Reset—unless their intentions are evil and not merely misguided.

Meanwhile, I’m not the first to think of this appellation in connection with Mao’s Great Leap. That distinction may be held by a Soviet critic of Mao’s quixotic strategies. In an article entitled “The Great Leap Backward,” one A. Khan’kovskiy treated the Great Leap Forward as a major deviation from the “successful” Soviet socialist system that had followed “the Great October Socialist Rev0lution.”1

According to the Soviet writer, Khan’kovskiy, the Soviets had undertaken their glorious revolution under unfavorable conditions. They had established a socialist state against “the united front of the imperialist powers.”2 (Meanwhile, the Soviets were launched and kept afloat by Western—especially U.S.—financing and technology.3) In spite of these difficulties, the Soviets had set the standard and vouchsafed to the Chinese a blueprint and model that it might follow. In the case of China, “[t]he gigantic might of the Soviet state was on its side.” The Chinese benefitted from Soviet support as the Soviets treated the Chinese like a doting parent would its child. They had sent manpower, intelligence, material supplies, and money:

Our country gave China economic and political aid: For many years an entire army of Soviet specialists—over 10,000 people—worked in China. They helped build factories, automotive vehicle, tractor and machine building plants, electric power stations, radio stations, mines, bridges (the famous bridge across the Yangtse) River, highways . . .4

Even American politicians had acknowledged the Soviet Union’s largesse. According to Khan’kovskiy, a joint commission of the U.S. Congress wrote in a two-volume treatise on the Chinese economy: “‘history is unaware of a similar example in which a country [the Soviet Union] would offer on a plate an entire industrial system.’”5

With Soviet assistance and funding, the Chinese began to trudge the road of happy destiny. In the first several years since the establishment of the Chinese People’s Republic, Chinese economic output had increased by several factors. From 1949 to 1957, as noted by the U.S. congressional commission, the index of industrial production of the Chinese People’s Republic rose by over 400 percent. China was on track to become another “successful” socialist state. For China, “[a]ll possibilities existed for a progress toward communism, following the true and tried way laid by the Great October Revolution.”6

Mao’s Early Career

In addition to the Soviet Union’s aid to Communist China, Mao benefitted personally and politically from Western and Eastern European assistance. Mao had been supported in his early communist career by Yale University vis-à-vis Yale-in-China.7 As Jonathan Spence, a professor of Chinese history put it:

In 1919, Mao, aged 26, was in Changsa, having his middle school education. He visited Peking and while there received his . . . serious introduction to communist theory in Li Ta-chao’s Marxist Study Group. Now, if he was to develop a reputation in socialist circles, he had to find a forum to propagate his views . . . At this crucial point the student union of Yale-in-China invited Mao to take over the editorship of their journal.8

The Yale Daily News noted that Mao accepted the offer. With Mao at the helm, the paper would now be refocused to include social criticism of contemporary issues and work toward “thought reorientation.”9

After studying Marxist theory in Peking, Mao moved to Shanghai, where he met Ch’en Tu-hsiu, who later became the Communist Party leader. Ch’en instructed Mao to form an area branch of the party in Peking, but Mao found that he lacked the funds. Yale-in-China intervened again. Spence noted that “Yale-in-China agreed to rent him three rooms, which Mao named his ‘culture bookshop.’” Business boomed as Mao rang up “high sales” with such titles in Chinese as “An Introduction to Marx’s Capital,” “A Study of the New Russia,” and “The Soviet System in China.” Mao established branches of his bookstore and from the profits was able to establish several socialist youth corps and fund the Communist Party. Due to his success, Mao was chosen as one of the delegates to the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party at Shanghai in 1921. “From there it was only a small step to becoming one of the founders of the Communist movement in his country.”10 . . .

Mao’s Leap into Madness

Khan’kovskiy suggested that Mao’s voluntarism11 soon got the better of him. The 8th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held in 1956. The Congress approved the proposals for the second Five-Year Plan for 1958–1962. “There was no question of any adventuristic ‘leaps’ or of ‘communes.’”12 But the Maoists dismissed this original plan as Mao decided to accelerate development radically. “The Maoists simply threw it overboard, replacing a more or less efficient program with high sounding phrases of ‘great leaps’ and ‘red banners.’”13

A second session of the 8th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was convened in May 1958. At this convention, Mao introduced his new revolutionary scheme. “The shrieking slogan which all of Mao’s stooges soon began learning by rote was: ‘By tensing all our forces, by striving forward, let us build socialism on the principle of more, faster, better and more economically!’”14 Mao aimed “to have China reach the production levels reached by the capitalist countries in the course of 100 to 200 years, in 10–20 or even less years.”15

The Great Leap Forward was an attempt to increase crop yields dramatically and to industrialize the countryside—to make local communities self-sustaining while increasing agricultural and industrial yields for the state. To accomplish these feats, the peasants were reorganized into massive communes of thousands and even tens of thousands, where all resources were communally shared, including food. Private ownership of land and free trade were abolished, along with the right to leave the collective.16 To avail women for farming, communal dining halls were established. With women working the communal farms, many men were likewise made available for small-scale “industrial” production. Communes were instructed to produce steel in homemade, backyard furnaces. A massive campaign to collect metal tools to transform everything into steel was conducted. Khan’kovskiy mockingly described this effort:

The Maoists intended to catch up with Britain by creating thousands and thousands of dwarf blast furnaces. It has been described already how everywhere, in cities and villages, on squares, streets and deserts, everywhere ore was to be smelted.17

On the agricultural front, to justify the overseeding of land, “Mao had proclaimed his belief that ‘in company grain grows fast; seeds are happiest when growing together’—attempting to impose class solidarity on nature.”18 Seeds were sown at five to ten times the normal density, with the predictable result that many young plants were choked off and died. The Chinese adopted farming methods from the Soviet “agrobiologist,” Trofim Lysenko, a neo-Lamarckian who rejected Mendelian genetics and instead held to the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. The results were disastrous:

Wheat and maize never grow well together in the same fields, and the replacement of the traditional barley crop with wheat in the high, cold fields of Tibet was simply catastrophic. Other mistakes were made in the nationwide campaign. The extermination of the sparrows that ate the grain resulted in a massive increase in the number of parasites. A large amount of hydraulic equipment that had been hurriedly and carelessly built was found to be useless or even dangerous because of the increased erosion and the risk of flooding at the first high tide. Moreover, the cost of its construction in terms of human life had been enormous: more than 10,000 out of 60,000 workers had died on one site in Henan.19

The peasants exhausted themselves in everything but agriculture, having been drafted into engineering projects and small-scale steel production, the products of which were virtually worthless. As Khan’kovskiy put it, Mao had turned “millions of experienced grain growers into amateur metallurgists.”20 The mismatch of competence and assigned duties represented a devastating loss in productive output.

The Black Book of Communism, reviled by Western Marxists, sardonically described the overall efforts as follows:

In this happy dream that was to bring real Communism within reach, the accumulation of capital and a rapid rise in the standard of living were to go hand in hand. All that had to be done was to achieve the simple objectives set by the Party.21

When the crop yields fell and the death toll rose, the Maoist regime began a campaign of denial, doublespeak, torture, and mass murder. The secretary of the Xinyang district wrote: “The problem is not that food is lacking. There are sufficient quantities of grain, but 90 percent of the inhabitants are suffering from ideological difficulties.”22 Sound familiar?

There is much more to this history. Suffice it to say that the Great Leap Forward precipitated the worst famine in recorded history. Deaths attributable to the famine of 1958–1961 numbered between 20 and 43 million, including those children who were murdered, boiled, and turned into fertilizer.23

The Ultimate Great Leap Backward

Before I point to the primary similarity between China’s Great Leap Forward and the Great Reset, some notable differences should be conceded. But even these differences do not weigh in favor of the Great Reset. Whereas the Great Leap Forward was a misguided attempt to increase crop yields dramatically and industrialize the countryside, the Great Reset aims deliberately at deindustrialization and will affect a reduction in agricultural output. The Great Leap Forward established the People’s Commune and enforced collective “ownership” of land and other resources. Great Reset–initiated policies will lead to the consolidation of farmland in the hands of fewer owners, those with sufficient capital to undertake agriculture under stifling regulations and policies to meet Agenda 2030’s sustainable development goals (SDGs).

Whereas during the early phase of the Great Leap Forward, eating meat was celebrated as a revolutionary act,24 under the Great Reset, eating meat is deemed reactionary and unsustainable while eating insects and synthetic meats is promoted and celebrated as environmentally conscious.25 The putative object of the Great Leap Forward was to increase gross domestic product to equal or surpass that of developed nations, particularly Great Britain, and to raise the standard of living of the peasants and the population at large. The Great Reset, on the other hand, represents deliberate de-growth and reduced standards of living of the lower and middle classes in the developed world and the squelching of growth in the developing world. While the Great Leap Forward was implemented to hasten the arrival of full communism, the Great Reset establishes corporate socialism, economic fascism, and neo-feudalism. (See Part I). Despite the technological innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (discussed in Part IV), the Great Reset is a de-civilizational project.

Yet, the Great Leap Forward and the Great Reset share one essential feature: the arbitrary imposition of a collectivist unscientific ideology on all human activity and nature. During the Great Leap Forward, Lysenkoism was adopted from the Soviet Union for ideological reasons, despite its disastrous effects there. During the Great Reset, climate catastrophism has been adopted on equally ideological, unscientific grounds. “The science” we are told to follow is a sham. Against the facts of science and the benefits of technology, we are told that CO2 is pollution, that “sustainability” requires imposing an enormous tax on humanity for the respiration of plants, and that farming methods of the original Green Revolution, which have increased yields by many factors, must be eliminated and replaced with a new environmentalist Green Revolution. We are told that industrial production must be carried on using non-fossil-fuel inputs. These demands are as delusional as anything advocated by Chairman Mao.

Carbon neutrality by 2050 is an insanely impossible demand. Our industrial civilization and the population it supports depend on the advances made in fossil fuel extraction and use. Even Vaclav Smil, a believer in climate change, who is an otherwise credible source, agrees:

For those who ignore the energetic and material imperatives of our world, those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point, the prescription is easy: just decarbonize—switch from burning fossil carbon to converting inexhaustible flows of renewable energies. The real wrench in the works: we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.

Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances.26

In short, we risk returning to the pre-industrial era of drudgery and intermittent starvation if the planners of the Great Reset have their way. They must not have their way.

[This piece is an excerpt from chapter 13 of The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda, to be released January 10, 2023.]

1. A. Khan’kovskiy, “The Great Leap Backward,” Literaturnaya Gazeta, no. 36 (September 6, 1967): 14–15. Pages in the retrieved document do not maintain the original pagination. I will refer to the page numbers of the retrieved document.
2. Ibid,, p. 1.
3. Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Forest Row: Clairview, 2016; Antony C. Sutton, National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union, Dauphin Publications Inc., 2021. 
4. Khan’kovskiy, “The Great Leap Backward,” p. 1.
5. Ibid., p. 2.
6. Ibid.
7.  “Yale Group Spurs Mao’s Emergence,” Yale Daily News, February 29, 1972, p. 1. 
8. Spence qtd. in ibid.
9. Spence qtd. in ibid.
10. Ibid., Spence qtd. in ibid.
11. In Marxist thought, voluntarism refers to an overemphasis on the subjective conditions (will, consciousness) for revolution. It deviates from the orthodox Marxist position, which emphasizes “objective conditions,” which are deemed to be determinative.
12. A. Khan’kovskiy, “The Great Leap Backward,” p. 2.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 3.
15. Ibid.
16. That is, the property rights of the peasantry were completely abrogated, the first instance of which is ownership of oneself.
17. A. Khan’kovskiy, “The Great Leap Backward,” p. 4.
18. Stéphane Courtois and Mark Kramer. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 489.
19. Ibid. 
20. A. Khan’kovskiy, “The Great Leap Backward,” p. 4.
21. Stéphane Courtois and Mark Kramer, The Black Book of Communism, p. 488.
22. Qtd. in ibid., p. 492.
23. Ibid., pp. 492–493.
24. Ibid, p. 488.
25. See for example, Amrou Awaysheh and Christine J. Picard, PhD., “5 Reasons Why Eating Insects Can Reduce Climate Change,” World Economic Forum, February 9, 2022, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/02/how-insects-positively-impact-climate-change/; Kate Whiting, “How Soon Will We Be Eating Lab-Grown Meat?” World Economic Forum, October 16, 2020, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/will-we-eat-lab-grown-meat-world-food-day/.
26. Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going, Viking, 2022, https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Really-Works-Science/dp/0593297067, pp. 5–6.

As we enter the holiday season stock owners have been the big losers of 2022, but jobs are still plentiful and nominal wages are rising rapidly. The Wall Street Journal reports “Stiff Demand Drives Gains in Jobs, Wages” (December 4). Faced with a stagnant stock market, nothing bolsters confidence more than the plethora of job openings, seemingly everywhere, and for all types of jobs.

The number of job openings is a statistic worth paying attention to as a gauge of the overall economy, but certainly not the only one. Here we examine it in relation to economic conditions and other statistics. This reveals some good, some bad, and some ugly insights into the economy, but overall, the signs all point to the business cycle and the turn toward economic crisis.

The Good

Let’s start with the overall unemployment rate, which is now below 4 percent, or about the same as the bubble low of the last business cycle in late 2019 and at the apex of the Tech Bubble of the late 1990s but did not drop that low during the Housing Bubble. The prior expansion was very long, and the recession of 2020 was the shortest on record, with most establishment economists considering it a covid phenomenon, rather than a true macroeconomic bust saved only by massive levels of governmental and Fed tampering interventions.

While politicians and Mainstream economists would like to think this sub–4 percent rate is “full employment” or the “natural rate” of unemployment, Austrian economists tend to view this level as the downward turning point in the boom-bust cycle and a harbinger of possible economic crisis.

Forward looking, the total number of job openings in the economy is more than 10 million for a labor force of 165 million. The recent peak of almost 12 million job openings dwarfs the previous historical peak of nearly 7.5 million in 2019. That was a record going all the way back to the beginning of the data series in 2000 and 50 percent higher than the tech- and housing-bubble peaks. These periods can be labelled “almost too good to be true.” For my part, I was on the lookout for another bust/crash/crisis going into 2020.

The Bad

The labor force participation rate is of great concern to government economists. It reflects the number of eligible adults working or looking for work and that number is now hovering around 62 percent. During the 1990s it hit an historic peak above 67 percent. The “missing” 5 percent of the current workforce represents about eight million people who could be working and paying taxes! The complex reasons for this decline will be explained in a subsequent article.

To illustrate these matters, we can compare our situation to the Great Depression and World War II. The economy was being strangled during the 1930s by New Deal progressivism in the USA and other forms of fascism and communism globally. The war between the isms, known as World War II, resulted in seventy-five million deaths (3 percent of the world population) and untold dislocations, plus the destruction of most of the world’s fixed capital.

Subsequent generations of Americans have forgotten these woes and have been taught instead one of the top ten worst economic lessons of all time: “World War II got us out of the Great Depression.”

If you send millions of men overseas in uniforms, with hundreds of thousands dying, force homemakers into war production, impose wage and price controls and ration most important consumer goods, and produce zillion$ of otherwise worthless tanks, bombs, and bullets, then government statistics of inflation and unemployment rates will look very good!

People in the other belligerent nations were far worse off, but Professor Higgs has calculated that using traditional scientific methods that the geographically lucky Americans were no better off during World War II than during the Great Depression!

So, with the decline in labor participation, particularly among prime adult males, yes, extreme prosperity and wealth can allow us leisure and idleness—a “good thing,” but as Ludwig von Mises warns us about government policies: “War Prosperity is like prosperity that an earthquake or plague brings.” So, we want to know if the decline of work is the result of real prosperity or trumped-up government policies.

The Ugly

This overview of labor statistics is critical for understanding the context of the business cycle. As pundits draw their hard lines in the sand concerning recession—yes, no, and maybe—I see theory sitting in the yes position. A recession is coming.

First and most basic, the reduction in labor force participation seems strongly influenced by policy. For example, policy has been strongly and artificially encouraging idleness because of welfare policies, unemployment insurance, disability benefits, etc. These types of anti-work-dependency policies exploded during the covid lockdowns. Ryan McMaken has pointed out that the decline of marriage among men in lower-wage occupations also has led to the male exodus from the workforce. Thisis an ongoing trend that will not change in the near future.

Policy has also been highly discouraging for workers because of high taxes and regulations. According to Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early, the result was that in the lowest-income 20 percent of American households in 2017, only 36 percent of prime-age adults worked, and on average they only worked half as many hours as those in the top 80 percent. This large decrease in labor force participation thereby undermines the supposed strength indicated by the overall low unemployment rate.

Second and crucially, let’s not forget the Fed and its inflationary policies. Under the cover of covid, the Fed unleased trillions of new credit moneys and the Treasury unleased trillions of new spending giveaways in the critical period of early 2020 when the covid-hysteria lockdown hit an economy that was already collapsing.

As that multitrillion-dollar cauldron of cash started to get spent, price inflation exploded to the highest rates in forty years! The rising Consumer Price Index means that buying gasoline, grocery shopping, and paying bills is much tougher by decreasing the purchasing power of our wages.

Price inflation has significantly exceeded wage rate growth causing “real wages” to decline in 2021–22. Consequently, this is a big part of the explanation of why employers who try to pay higher wages to attract workers are still having difficulties finding dependable employees. Inflation means that rising nominal wages is not the good sign for labor market strength we might have hoped.

When these factors are considered, the outward statistical signs of a strong labor market turn negative. Not surprisingly, three-fourths of Americans think we are already in recession and just about everyone not dependent on selling stocks or real estate, or who works for the Fed, admits fear of recession and this creates real trepidation about our economic future.

Other than government wars, mass unemployment is surely the worst economic situation an economy can face and it’s not a problem right now. It seems that the statistical unwinding of fiscal and monetary stimulus and the drawdown of personal savings can keep the economy afloat for a while. However, don’t be fooled by current statistics either. The record number of job openings has already fallen by more than 10 percent from the peak.

What’s Next?

As job openings have noticeably declined, the decline is relatively larger in the jobs that produce tangible things and less so in paper pushing and service-oriented jobs. This would speak to the direction of expected change. In terms of magnitude, however, job openings would have to fall by almost another three million to get back to the precovid peak and another five million to get back to the post-housing-bubble low.

Total layoffs and discharges in the private sector have remained historically very low since the covid reopening, with September recording a record twenty-year low. That number has not yet turned up this Christmas season as expected, but the layoffs that have been announced have been in the typical bubble industries, such as technology, consumer discretionary, and finance, as well as in the covid-hysteria bubble products such as delivery and streaming services.

Within the context of current economic statistics and Fed policy, the economy is headed in the direction of an economic bust. Even with record low unemployment and record high territory for job openings, the labor market is headed for trouble with structural-dependency problems and possibly years of labor stagnation ahead. Combined with the current high rates of price inflation, one likely result is stagflation, the once unthinkable Keynesian outcome of simultaneous high unemployment and high price inflation.

We think of thieves as conducting their work when no one is looking, such as breaking into a house while the owners are away. But the most successful thieves have done their stealing in plain sight, on a grand scale, while the owners were home and often with their tacit approval, though with sleights of hand that few are able to detect. Such a theft occurred when Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law on December 23, 1913.

A central bank such as the Fed has a remarkable character. According to establishment boilerplate, its purpose is to stabilize the economy and ensure prosperity and “full employment.” The decision makers at the Fed are of necessity selected for their superhuman brilliance and neutrality of judgment, thus qualifying them to adjust the amount of money available to the banks so that they may in turn serve the interests of a public numbering some 330 million people.

If for some reason certain members of the public don’t reap the benefits of this policy—or worse, end up losing their jobs, their savings, their businesses, and their homes—it’s not because the Fed itself is a bad idea. How could it be? Without the Fed as an emergency lender, bankers threw the economy into panics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But there’s another side to the Fed’s character that is somewhat less wholesome than its public image and is best revealed by the way it was founded.

The Bankers’ Dream

Before the Fed’s founding, bankers in general and Wall Street in particular complained about US currency’s lack of “elasticity.” “Elasticity” in this context is one of the great euphemisms of human history. According to lore, this missing feature of “hard” money, such as gold or silver, was responsible for the panics of 1873, 1884, 1893, and 1907. The supply of the coins that were behind the paper banknotes couldn’t be increased when needed. Gold and silver were therefore said to be inelastic. Because of this inelasticity, the legend persisted that banks were having trouble meeting the demand for farm loans at harvest time, as G. Edward Griffin explains in The Creature from Jekyll Island:

To supply those funds, the country banks had to draw down their cash reserves which generally were deposited with the larger city banks. This thinned out the reserves held in the cities, and the whole system became more vulnerable. Actually, that part of the legend is true, but apparently no one is expected to ask questions about the rest of the story.

Several of them come to mind. Why wasn’t there a panic every Autumn instead of just every eleven years or so? Why didn’t all banks—country or city—maintain adequate reserves to cover their depositor demands? And why didn’t they do this in all seasons of the year? Why would merely saying no to some loan applicants cause hundreds of banks to fail?

The Morgan and Rockefeller bankers on Wall Street dreamed of having a central bank that could supply money when needed, as a “lender of last resort.” A central bank would also control the banks’ inflation rate. If bank reserves could be maintained at a central bank and a common reserve ratio established, then no single bank could expand credit more than its rivals, and therefore there would be no bankruptcies caused by currency’s draining from overly inflationary banks. All banks would inflate in harmony, and there would be tranquility and profits for all.

The bankers who traveled a thousand miles to meet on Jekyll Island in November 1910 understood they needed a cartel to bring their dream to life. And they needed the threat of state violence for the cartel to work.

Thus, included in their secret meeting were two politicians serving as the bankers’ advocates in Washington. The bankers planned to establish their cartel over the Christmas holidays, while the American public was distracted, though for political reasons it was delayed until 1913.

The public would be a hard sell. Americans were profoundly suspicious of Wall Street and cartels. They distrusted anything big in business or government. A central bank operating for the benefit of the big banks had no chance of becoming law, unless it was promoted as shackling Wall Street itself. This could be accomplished, it was widely believed, through a government bureaucracy of overseers.

The Pujo Committee

Frequent speeches by Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollette and Minnesota congressman Charles Lindbergh brought public outrage over the “money trust” to a boil. LaFollette charged that the entire country was under the control of just fifty men; Morgan partner George Baker disputed the allegation, claiming it was no more than eight men. Lindbergh pointed out that bankers had controlled all financial legislation since the Civil War through committee memberships.

Government, acting as the sword of justice, decided to act, with most people oblivious to the fact that the executioner and the accused were one and the same. In response to the accusations, it formed a new subcommittee, which held hearings from May 1912 until January 1913.

The Pujo Committee was headed by Louisiana congressman Arsène Pujo, then roundly considered to be a spokesman for the “oil trust.” The hearings followed the usual pattern, bringing forth immense quantities of statistics and testimonies from bankers themselves. Though the hearings were conducted largely because of the charges brought forth by LaFollette and Lindbergh, neither man was allowed to testify.

Under the direction of Paul Warburg, the principal author of the Jekyll Island plan that in its essentials became the Federal Reserve Act, the banks provided 100 percent financing for something called the National Citizens League, the purpose of which was to create the illusion of grassroots support for Warburg’s brainchild.

University of Chicago economics professor J. Laurence Laughlin was put in charge of the league’s propaganda, ostensibly to bring a measure of objectivity to the discussions. John D. Rockefeller, whose representatives at Jekyll were Senator Nelson Aldrich and bank president Frank Vanderlip, had endowed the university with $50 million.

Woodrow Wilson was an outspoken critic of the money trust in his 1912 presidential campaign, all the while receiving funding from the very trust he was condemning. Wilson said:

I have seen men squeezed by [the money trust]; I have seen men who, as they themselves expressed it, were put “out of business by Wall Street,” because Wall Street found them inconvenient and didn’t want their competition.

Benjamin Strong Runs the Show

When the Fed began operations in late 1914, the man in charge of the system was Morgan banker Benjamin Strong Jr., one of the Jekyll Island attendees. Strong served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from its inception until his death on October 16, 1928. Strong, in the Morgan tradition, was an anglophile who inflated the US money supply from 1925–28 to keep Britain from losing gold to the US. Details of Strong’s reign and the precrash conditions he created can be found in Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression:

The long-run tendency of the free market economy, unhampered by monetary expansion, is a gently falling price level, falling as the productivity and output of goods and services continually increase. The Austrian policy of refraining always from monetary inflation would allow this tendency of the free market its head and thereby remove the disruptions of the business cycle.

The Chicago goal of a constant price level, which can be achieved only by a continual expansion of money and credit, would, as in [Benjamin Strong’s policy of the] 1920s, unwittingly generate the cycle of boom and bust that has proved so destructive for the past two centuries.

During the 1980s, millions of American children pored over the Toys ‘R’ Us catalog, daydreaming about what toys we hoped to receive in a few weeks on Christmas morning. After all, by the mid twentieth century, Christmas—for countless middle-class households with children— had become more or less synonymous with an enormous number of gifts for children in the form of toys and games. Barbie playsets and a myriad of action figures were routinely advertised during Saturday morning cartoons and in Sunday print ads in the weeks before Christmas. We kids of the 80s were sure to tell our parents what toys we “needed.”

We weren’t the first generation with such thoughts, of course. As Jean Shepherd (1921-1999) recounts in the beloved film A Christmas Story—set in 1940—Christmas was the time to strategize on how to receive essential toys—such as a new BB gun—from Santa. The annual bacchanalia of gifts at Christmas meant the holiday had become something “upon which the entire kid year revolved.”

Moreover, the copious number of gifts for children has been just one aspect of how Christmas in many ways has become a holiday focused on children. From Santa Claus to gingerbread houses to countless children’s Christmas movies and picture books, Christmas has become a time for adults to invest enormous amounts of time, money, and energy into amusing and entertaining children as a means of expressing parental affection. 

But, of course, as with so many modern rituals and cultural expressions, the extensive focus at Christmas time on children’s amusement and gifts is a fairly young practice enabled by the wealth and disposable income made possible by modern economies. 

Early Child-Centered Christmas Rituals

Giving toys to children is not new. As noted by Nicholas Orme in his book Medieval Children, baby rattles date at least to Aristotle’s time, and the philosopher himself praised rattles “as a means of allowing children to expend their energy without doing damage.” Orme describes how by the Middle Ages, children had access to a variety of simple toys such as small windmills and spinning tops, which were called by a variety of different names by children with slang such as “prill” and “whirligig.” Girls had dolls—called poppets in those days—which required more imaginative types of play. 

Adults helped children access these toys, and adults produced these toys. Some adults made toys designed to be sold to others at markets. Some may have even been produced via mass production—employing craftsmen (and craftswomen) producing the toys at home for sale by merchants. 

The question remains, however, as to how much emphasis adults of these earlier times put on providing amusements for children, and to what end. 

In his influential book Centuries of Childhood (1960), Philippe Ariès contends that a change to how adults viewed childhood amusements in the late Middle Ages and in the early modern period. Ariès described how by the sixteenth century, Western Europeans had begun to leave behind the large communal festivals of earlier centuries at which children had a role, but were certainly not the focus of attention. This led to a shift in how children were integrated into holiday festivals as well. Evidence provided by Ariès includes the painting “The Feast of Saint Nicholas” produced by Dutch artist Jan Steen in the 1660s. In the scene chosen by Steen,

the grown-ups have organized the occasion to entertain the children: it is the feast of St Nicholas, the ancestor of “Santa Claus.” Steen catches the moment when the parents are helping the children to find the toys which they have hidden all over the house for them. Some of the children have already found their toys. Some little girls are holding dolls. Others are carrying buckets full of toys. There are some shoes lying about: perhaps it was already customary to hide toys in shoes, those shoes which children of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in some countries, put in front of the fire on Christmas Eve? This is no longer a great collective festival, but a quiet family celebration; and consequently this concentration on the family is continued by a concentration of the family around the children. Family feasts became children’s feasts. [emphasis added]

It is significant that this image was created by a Dutch painter. Such scenes were more common in the Dutch Republic where a merchant-focused, bourgeois political economy had transformed the Dutch population into one of the world’s most prosperous. Ariès suggests this painting reflects the “same modern feeling for childhood and the family” that is today reflected in child-centered holiday rituals. Yet, this focus on delighting in children’s play was not universally well received. Many moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cautioned repeatedly against “coddling” children. One etiquette guide cautioned against becoming the sort of supposedly tiresome person “who never talk[s] of anything but their wives, their little children, and their nannies.” St. Jean-Baptists de La Salle (1651-1719) condemned parents for treating their children “in an idolatrous manner” with the attitude of “what the children want, [the parents] want too.” 

As Orme shows, parents in every age felt affection toward their children and generally wished for their safety and happiness. This can manifest itself differently in different times and places, however. In some periods, both ordinary parents and elites regarded facilitating children’s play as not only good for the child, but as delightful for the parents witnessing it. In other times and places, molders of public opinion have viewed such attitudes as prone to excess resulting in “spoiling the child.” 

To modern eyes, of course, the “problem” of spoiling children in the sixteenth century will appear as much ado about nothing. Thanks to centuries of slow capital accumulation, the textile trade, merchant shipping, and other forms of economic progress, England, northern France, and the Low Countries had enjoyed just enough prosperity to give their children “buckets full of toys.” By modern standards, however, the standard of living in even the wealthiest parts of Europe remained far below what would come in the nineteenth century and afterward. In southern and eastern Europe, of course, the standard of living tended to be even lower.

In this period, child labor was also widespread out of necessity. Families often could not produce a comfortable income on just the labors of the mother and father. Farming and artisan families required help from children, and older children often became servants in other households. So, while small children were enjoying the fruits of economic progress, childhood remained much shorter than it is today thanks to the need for children to produce some form of income in the marketplace.

The Victorians Seek to “Preserve Childlike Innocence.” 

Trends toward focusing on children accelerate in the nineteenth century. In her book on children’s literature, Kimberley Reynolds writes that the role of the Victorians in “inventing childhood” has been much exaggerated. Yet, it is also true that during the Victorian period, “the middle and upper classes evolved a more self-conscious and sustained myth of childhood than any that had gone before.” 

Maaike Lauweart adds: 

the 19th century saw a dramatic change in the image of and thinking about the child and childhood. The Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais has famously immortalized the new-formed ideas about children and the child’s culture in his 1886 Pears soap advertisement. The child depicted in the advertisement is a kind of cherub, a beautiful, innocent, vulnerable dreamer that had to be taken care of, washed, dressed, fed and cured. The Innocent Child was very much situated within the pastoral tradition – with its longing for and wish to preserve childlike innocence. The 19th century has been notably phrased the ‘Age of the Child’ by Swedish pedagogue Ellen Key because of its focus on the child and his/her well being, education and health. 

It is remarkable that the nineteenth century might be known as the Age of Child because it is in this same period that we often hear of how countless children were forced to work in the factories—i.e., the “satanic mills.” This, we are told, was brought about by the second wave of industrialization that had begun in the eighteenth century and become far more intense by Victorian times. 

How could anyone call this period a time marked by new concerns for children when so many allegedly were being worked to death in factories? 

The answer lies in the fact that the age of child labor was actually moving quickly toward its own demise by the late nineteenth century. This trend was brought about by the factories themselves. As Ralph Raico notes in his work on the industrial revolution, contrary to the Marxian myth of the working classes being impoverished by industrialization, the truth was that ordinary people were actually enjoying higher incomes and more access to goods and services as the second half of the nineteenth century advanced. This meant that child labor was becoming less necessary to secure a subsistence living, and as the economic lot of households improved, children worked less, at least less hazardous jobs. Many Victorians welcomed the trend. 

This also meant that the falling cost of producing goods and services also made a wide variety of products more affordable.  Markets were responding to Victorian ideals of childhood, and this “helped ensure that children’s goods would expand along with other markets.” In turn, the availability of so many books and toys then reinforced Victorian views of childhood, and these ideas spread as “childhood innocence” became feasible for more and more people. 

Thus, it is no coincidence that the boom in mass-produced goods made specifically for children, as historian Jennifer Sattaur puts it, “coincided closely with the rise of the middle-classes, industry, and capitalism.” 

The Modern-Child Centered Christmas Arrives

For many, this new Victorian, middle-class emphasis on children affected the way they viewed popular holidays as well. The initial impulses reflected in Steen’s “The Feast of St. Nicholas” were ultimately made more common, attainable, and opulent by growing economies in the nineteenth century.  This was all finally translated into its modern form for American audiences by Clement Moore in his 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” also known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” In it, “St. Nicholas” appears with “a sleigh full of toys” with which to fill the children’s stockings. The poem was enormously popular and promoted a “homey, child-centered version of Christmas” that was embraced by many Americans who were themselves enjoying a rapid rise of living standards.

This trend only continued to accelerate into the twentieth century, and it is this image of Christmas that is the source of so much excitement and enjoyment for children and their parents today. Yet the child-focused abundance and leisure we now associate with Christmas was made possible by industrialization, capital, and the hard work of so many generations that came before us.

In his 1922 book on socialism, Die Gemeinwirtschaft, Ludwig von Mises attributes socialism’s attractiveness to the claim that Marx’s doctrine would be both ethical and scientific. In truth, however, Marxism represents a metaphysical dogma that promises an earthly paradise yet threatens civilization itself.

Thesis of the Inevitability of Socialism

Marxism explains that immoral capitalist economies will necessarily be replaced by socialist systems that meet higher moral standards. Socialism promises to do away with the irrational private economic order and install a rational, planned economy. Socialists proclaim that hierarchical capitalist production will give way to a cooperative order without subordination:

Socialism appears as a goal towards which we have to strive because it is moral and because it is reasonable. It is a question of overcoming the resistance that ignorance and the ill will oppose to its coming.

Along with this treacherous combination of ethics and science comes the assertion that socialism is inevitable. Marx declares that communism’s arrival represents the end of history and the reward for all historical strife. Socialists believe that “a dark power, which we cannot escape, is gradually leading mankind to higher forms of social and moral existence. History is a progressive process of purification, at the end of which stands socialism as perfection.”

Karl Marx called his approach the “materialistic conception of history.” His theory asserts that socialism is the inescapable result of natural forces. Marx’s historical materialism entails several meaningful components. First, it refers to a specific methodology of historical-sociological research that aims at determining the overall social structure of historical epochs. Second, as a sociological doctrine, historical materialism includes the thesis that class struggle is the determining historical force. Finally, the Marxist historical perspective is a theory of progress that encompasses the purpose and goal of human life.

By asserting the scientific inescapability of a coming socialist system, the practical effectiveness of historical materialism unfolds. If socialism is the positive outcome of human civilization, all real and imagined critics of socialism are reactionaries. Therefore, the fight against the adversaries of socialism is an ethical fight. Socialism’s critics must be branded reactionaries because they block the path to paradise. In the eyes of Marx and his followers, fighting against socialism is particularly evil because of its superfluous nature. Socialism will win regardless; therefore, any opposition to the final victory would only prolong the deprivation of the working class under capitalism and delay the advent of the socialist paradise.

As Mises explains, few assertions have promoted the spread of socialist ideas more than the belief in the inevitability of socialism. Even socialism’s opponents have fallen under the spell of this doctrine. They often feel paralyzed by the perceived uselessness of resistance. The “educated,” particularly, tend to fear being perceived as old-fashioned when they do not champion the social and political progress socialism claims to represent. Mises observed this in his time, and little has changed since then. Public opinion increasingly labels classic liberals (those favoring private property and individual freedom) as reactionaries and assumes that more socialism means more progress.

Expectation of Salvation

Although the idea that certain historical developments are inevitable is clearly metaphysical, it fascinates people to this day. Few can escape the spell of chiliasm with its religious promise of salvation. Yet cut from its religious roots, the Marxist promise of peace and prosperity under socialism becomes an incitement to political revolution. With this political turn, Marx reinterprets the Jewish-Christian eschatological expectation of salvation. In tune with eighteenth-century rationalists and nineteenth-century materialists, Marxism secularizes the event of salvation as a global sociopolitical revolution. In Marxism,the philosophical, anthropocentric metaphysics of historical development is essentially the same as the religious one. The strange mixture of ecstatically extravagant imagination and everyday sobriety, as well as the grossly materialistic content of its proclamation of salvation, has it in common with the oldest messianic prophecies.

As long as socialism is viewed as both scientific and metaphysical, its chiliastic claim to salvation will remain immune to rational critique. Therefore, it is pointless to deal with Marxism rationally or scientifically. Socialism’s critics unsuccessfully attempt to fight against socialism’s mystical beliefs: “One cannot teach fanatics,” writes Mises.

Socialism as Failed Utopia

Marxist political propaganda concerns the creeds that socialism is more productive, morally superior, and inevitable. As such, Marxism goes beyond chiliasm and justifies its teachings as a “science.” Marxism is opposed to free trade and private property. The socialists claim that the market economy is individualistic and thereby antisocial; although, nothing could be further from the truth. Marxism falsely claims that capitalism atomizes the social body. As Mises points out, the opposite is true because markets are inherently social phenomena:

It is only the division of labor that creates social ties, it is the ultimate social thing. Those who stand up for national and state economies seek to subvert the universal society. Anyone who seeks to destroy the social division of labor amongst the people through class struggle is antisocial.

Marxism claims to be a social philosophy, yet it opposes insights into the cooperative nature of liberal capitalism. On the contrary, Marxism is antisocial. Mises warns us “the demise of the liberal society based on the free-market division of labor would represent a world catastrophe that cannot even be remotely compared to anything in known history. No nation would be spared from this.” Despite the absurdity of reducing history to class struggle, Marxism has had a tremendous impact on politics that continues to this day.

Mises published Die Gemeinwirtschaft more than a hundred years ago, and the failures of socialism are even more evident today. The Soviet Union’s breakdown has already shown that communism delivers the opposite of what it promises. While early socialists believed that there would be higher productivity in a classless society than in a society based on private property, the Soviet revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin, had to admit shortly after the establishment of Soviet Russia that the dictatorship of the proletariat had brought greater suffering than had ever been known in history; and that the task ahead would be the just distribution of misery.

Socialism has failed in its promises. This doctrine has been refuted both in practice and in theory. Had the socialists heeded Mises’s arguments, they would have also been spared the consequences of agricultural collectivization. The Holodomor or Great Famine of the early 1930s, with its millions of deaths, was the consequence of this socialist error. They believed they could increase productivity while abolishing property rights and collectivizing agriculture. They were terribly wrong.

Despite the horrendous legacy of socialism, anticapitalist movements show up time and again. Thus, Mises warns, the highly productive division of labor, which has experienced its greatest achievement in capitalism, will always remain endangered. Anticultural tendencies grow within capitalist society itself. One must be aware that every civilization risks succumbing to the spirit of decomposition that descends on societies where socialist movements succeed.

While Christians the world over look to the celebration as a way to remember the incarnation of Christ, some dismiss it as a Christianized version of the ancient Rome’s Saturnalia. Whatever one’s view happens to be, I humbly suggest that it ought to be used by Christians and non-Christians alike as a reflection upon a collision of two kingdoms and two forms of rule. One that makes the way for life, and the other for misery, suffering, and death.

If the celebration of Christmas is an acknowledgement of the Almighty’s offering of peace and goodwill to people everywhere, then it behooves all people to remember who it is that offers universal war and ill-will. No other earthly institution has so consistently offered the latter than the state. The advent story itself reminds us in the second chapter of Matthew that it was a state actor, Herod, who aimed to snuff out the Prince of Peace in his infancy. Truly, the state hates anyone who stands to challenge to their claims of omniscience and omnipotence.

In the West, it is safe to say that most Christmas gatherings don’t include an intentional acknowledgement of the birth of Jesus. Nonetheless, these too might serve at least as reminders of the non-necessity of the state. Our networks of family, friends, and co-workers who offer words and actions of generosity, kindness, and hospitality are rightful reminders that our voluntary associations are at the center of good living. These interactions are indeed anarchic, stateless, and free from threats of violence (unless your uncle Harold has one too many).

Whatever a secularized version of a Christmas celebration might look like, the simple acts of exchanging gifts, the sharing of food and drink, and of a sense of kinship may produce – at the very least – a reflection of the goodness of productive activity that allows such enjoyment. This sentiment is abundantly shared on Ayn Rand’s comments on the American celebration of Thanksgiving as a “celebration of successful production.” It is that voluntary act of productive enterprise that offers us the opportunity to take joy in experiencing the bounties of productive activity, even in spite of the state’s efforts to squash it, or at the least to intervene to favor some at the expense of others.

As for me and my house, we’ve taken Christmas celebrations to be an intentional pause to reflect on the various meanings of Christ’s advent. Certainly, we think through the themes of mercy, grace, and love that are lavished upon God’s creatures through the Word made flesh. Yet, as with every account of the words and actions surrounding the life of Christ, there are multiple lessons for people of goodwill to walk away with. It is our traditions and practices that may serve to draw out those lessons.

With this in mind, it is a sad state of affairs to recognize that most Christians fail to recognize the profoundly anti-state sentiments that are put forward in the nativity. Whether it is a failure to recognize the profound contrast between Christ’s kingdom and the kingdoms of men, or whether it is a vague sense of sentimentality that overtakes the minds of believers, I know not. It is my contention that habits of mind can, however, be forged through the habits of action. In acknowledgement of this, we have cultivated several regular practices that acknowledge the anti-state nature of true Christian worship.

In finding ways to practically remember the anti-state meaning surrounding Christ’s birth, our household has taken up the tradition of recounting the facts surrounding the Christmas Truce of 1914. Some years have included viewing the 2005 film, Joyeux Noel. On other occasions, we’ve recalled the exchange of gifts between soldiers on the western front by passing around a precious family memento, a brass gift box from Princess Mary to the soldiers of the British empire. Still another form of remembrance has been to recite a brief passage or two from Stanley Weintraub’s Silent Night as we meditate on common men’s unwillingness to murder one another (at least for a day) in the name of the state.

The point of each of these practices has been to probe our minds and hearts in order to identify our ultimate allegiance. In raising this question, it is my intention to remind my family that it is our duty as worshippers of the King of Kings to defy the tyrants of the earth, just as the wise men of Matthew 2 directly defied an order from Herod when they understood his evil intent. Their actions are certainly an apt illustration of the words of the Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer, “To resist tyranny is to honor God.”

Surely, the past several years have presented ample opportunity for Christians in the west to defy tyrants and their arbitrary edicts. While some have failed to uphold their Christian duty, others have faithfully defied the various forms of Covid-ocracy, raise our voices in condemnation of war-making and the military-industrial complex, or of the rampant cronyism that characterizes so-called modern capitalism, ultimately all of these forms of resistance and protest are an affront to the state, and an as such, are an honor to Christ. May these efforts boldly proceed.

It is because of this mixed record of Christian cowardice and courage that I suggest looking at Christmas afresh. In this season, it isn’t sufficient to think merely of how the individual Christian might look to God’s kindness in Christ to reform oneself or for the non-believer to demonstrate a vague sense of generosity and kindness. May it always include a call to all for courage, being reminded that the lowliest of people’s resistance to the power of the state is a precious offering to the King of Kings and brings a better chance for human flourishing. Further, may it serve as a reminder that the rulers of the state genuinely hate and seek to destroy all that comes from the Prince of Peace.

In this adopting this approach, both Christians and non-believers can take solace in knowing that their own voluntary associations (religious or otherwise), productive work, restful celebrations, and everyday acts of charity serve as foundational institutions that oppose the evil predations of the state. May such practices will grow ever stronger, and may the mere utterance of the phrase, “Merry Christmas” serve to remind the worshippers of the state that their gods and their traditions are truly antithetical to all human life, and as such are completely unnecessary.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has frequently bragged that Florida is in high demand among people looking to relocate. In a new report released this week from the Census Bureau, it seems that he’s been correct. According to the Bureau’s report: 

After decades of rapid population increase, Florida now is the nation’s fastest-growing state for the first time since 1957, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Vintage 2022 population estimates released today.

Florida’s population increased by 1.9% to 22,244,823 between 2021 and 2022, surpassing Idaho, the previous year’s fastest-growing state. 

In raw numbers, that amounts to an increase of about 416,000 people, which is the size of a medium-sized American city. This quickly leads to the question of why so many people are moving to Florida. Much of this narrative—at least among Florida boosters—has centered around the idea that Florida became a place to go to obtain freedom from lockdowns, mask mandates, business closures, and other covid-panic measures imposed by state governments. 

Migration Since Covid Lockdowns in 2020

Events like migration are always complex events, of course, but when we look at the Census Bureau’s new migration data on changes from 2020 to 2022, it sure looks like the data backs up the idea that a great many people are moving from restrictionist covid states to states where daily life is a little less regimented. It is likely that these trends also reflect larger trends in which Americans are moving from high-tax, highly regulated, expensive states to more affordable regions. 

To get a better view of the post-covid trend, let’s broaden our scope to population trends from 2020 to 2022. (The data reflects a July estimate for each year, so we’re talking about changes from July 2020 to July 2022.)

In this case, we find that Florida is in the top three of states with big population changes since 2020. But it’s behind both Montana and Idaho. Idaho’s population has grown 4.9 percent since 2020, while Montana and Florida have growth of 3.3 percent and 3 percent, respectively. The story coming out of Idaho has been that a very large number of Californians relocated there during Covid lockdowns, and also as a means of escaping California’s increasingly interventionist state.  Florida, on the other hand, apparently tends to get migrants from the northeastern United States. 

The Census data at least supports the thesis that people are indeed leaving both California and New York in large numbers. As far as taxes and covid policies go, Illinois could be lumped in with California and New York as well. Indeed, looking at population change since 2020, California, Illinois, and New York are all in the top five for falling population. Since 2020, New York has lost more than 2 percent of its population while California has lost 1.2 percent of its population. Illinois is the second worst, losing 1.6 percent of its population. (The bottom five is filled out by the low-income states of West Virginia and Louisiana.) 

Source: Census Bureau, State Population and Components of Change, 2020-2022.

When we look at raw numbers, we find that Texas tops the list. In fact, both Florida and Texas added more than half-a-million people from 2020 to 2022. Texas added more than 700,000 and Florida added more than 600,000. For context, we could note that the city of Memphis has 630,000 people. Milwaukee has 575,000 people. 

Meanwhile, during this period, both New York and California lost more than 400,000 people each. Illinois lost more than 204,000. No other states come even close in terms of total number of people who moved away. 

Source: Census Bureau, State Population and Components of Change, 2020-2022.

In fact, eight of the top-ten states for population growth from 2020 to 2022 are arguably so-called “red states,” with blue Delaware and purple Arizona filling out the top ten. The bottom ten are either blue states or red states with stagnant economies.

These numbers reflect longer-term trends away from high-tax, expensive, Democrat-controlled states toward the south and West. For example, from 2010 to 2020, eight of the top ten states for population growth were arguably “red states.” Utah and Arizona topped the list with 18.4 percent growth and 17.3 percent growth, respectively. Meanwhile, California’s growth rate was one-third that of Utah, at a rate of 6.1 percent. New York grew 4.2 percent during the period. 

Source: Census Bureau, Historical Population Change Data.

Indeed, the relative growth rates seen here were reflected in the new Congressional apportionment process in which Texas and Florida both gained seats in Congress while New York and California both lost seats. 

The “Experts” Say New York Is One of the “Best” States

Interestingly, these numbers repeatedly contradict what the “expert class” repeatedly tells us about how the “best” states in the Union are places like California, Massachusetts, and New York. For example, in September, Federal Reserve economists Elena Falcettoni and Vegard Nygaard published a new study purporting to provide an objective measure of “living standards across the United States” according to metrics like consumption, education, leisure, and inequality. The researches concluded that eight of the top ten “best” states were New England states, plus New York and New Jersey. North Dakota and South Dakota filled out the list. California and Illinois came in at 16th and 15th, respectively.

Many hundreds of thousands of American state-to-state migrants do not appear to have received this memo. Instead, of the top-ten “best states” in this list, North Dakota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York all lost population from 2020 to 2022. Meanwhile, the states that gained the most population during this period were all ranked within the bottom half of the “best” states according to Falcettoni and Nygaard. 

Apparently, New York isn’t quite as attractive to many Americans as Federal Reserve economists think it should be.