Anyone who has ever flirted with socialism is suspect. As with religion in old age, they will revert—to socialism, in profound ignorance of the laws of politics and economics, to religion, in profound ignorance of what the universe is.

***

It was because he was ignorant (or indifferent) to the laws of economics that President Roosevelt (FDR) could in good conscience impose the New Deal on the nation. Overriding the Supreme Court, which during the first two years of his first term declared the New Deal completely unconstitutional, Roosevelt literally frightened the Court into submission, reminding it of his 1933 Inaugural address statement that the Constitution is a flexible document that could be bent to mean whatever citizens wanted it to mean. Under socialist pressure of the day the Court buckled.

Adhering to the economics and philosophy of John Maynard Keynes, who declared that, in a national catastrophe, “since we are all dead in the long run,” a nation need not stick to principles, that to end the Great Depression the U.S. government should borrow as much as needed—and give that money to citizens in need: employment, welfare, subsidy. Which Roosevelt did, threatening the Supreme Court that he would pack it with six additional justices if it didn’t approve everything he asked.

In continual correspondence with Benito Mussolini (whom, in the early ‘30s, Roosevelt greatly admired, each endorsing each the other’s books), Roosevelt agreed when Mussolini declared (as did German newspapers at the time^[1]), that “America finally understands fascism,” the notion that the rights of the community precede those of the individual.

Which encouraged Roosevelt to stick to his New Deal—and completely reverse America’s founding principle of maximum individual liberty, maximum individual responsibility, very limited government. Roosevelt did what the rest of the world was doing, nay, the very purpose of the 20th century: give socialism a chance. Communism from the Left, fascism from the Right.

***

Socialism exists because the world is ignorant of how socialism plays out politically, in which politicians win elections by continually expanding government service, knowingly keeping citizens dependent; and ignorant of how the laws of economics play out in a free market, in which value and demand, both subjective, are only revealed when individuals, at a moment in time, pay for something. Possible in a market economy because there is a honest price system, not possible in a socialist economy where the price system is distorted (by an entity that doesn’t belong, government). Socialism is the reason, in the 20th century, that no statesperson anywhere in the world credibly came forward on a platform of reducing the size of government.^[2]

Why, then, do nations still consider socialism? It’s not a new idea. Mussolini, Hitler, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, did not invent it. Karl Marx did, 1848, Das Kapital. Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1850, immediately refuted it, explaining the consequences of redistributing wealth, confiscating the means of production, theft, the consequences of offering wealth to those not even asking for it, nor themselves qualified to create the means of production, a skill in its own right. The consequence is that nations chase away their creative industrialists and entrepreneurs. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.^[3]

Compare East Germany to West Germany, North Korea to South Korea, Havana to Miami. Creative industrialists all left. A product of violent revolution (in that citizens never vote for communism), revolutionaries know (to install a communist economy) that many citizens need to be eliminated: in the Soviet Union, 30 million, China, 30 million, North Korea, five million, Cambodia, two million.^[4]

European socialism? Yes, if citizens prefer security to liberty, yes, if nations don’t mind sending their creative business people to California—where, for the last 50 years The San Jose Mercury News reports that 71 percent of Silicon Valley are foreign born.

***

The New Deal shifted America’s historical self-reliance to unhistorical dependency. Shifted an America influenced by Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Alexis de Tocqueville, to an America influenced by Karl Marx, FDR, John Maynard Keynes, John Dewey and the ideas of British socialist Harold Laski, whose Democracy in Crisis (worshipped by New Dealers) argued that the primary assumptions of self-reliant individualism are now obsolete. Both Howard Williams, organizer of the Farmer-Labor Party, and Democratic President Roosevelt held that individualism was a relic of the “horse-and-buggy age,” and should, therefore, be replaced with a modern, nationally planned economy.^[5]

Which encouraged educator John Dewey to argue that people become individuals only through society—why government must control the economy and social spheres of life. A year after Roosevelt’s inauguration, Dewey declared that liberalism had shifted from its classical form—each person viewed as sovereign, government viewed as the sole protecter of that sovereignty—to a new collectivist form in which government assists in the development of the individual by providing for his needs: cultural, economic, legal, political, science, the arts. By developing his personality, the state, rather than protect America’s foundation, is now the source of an individual’s freedom—and selfhood.^[6]

***

Modelled after Otto von Bismarck’s 1870’s Germany, the New Deal aimed to create the corporate state: taxation and regulation to kill off small business so that only large business (with their lower long run average costs) survives. Protected from competition, monopolies now raise their prices and do the state’s bidding: pay for citizens’ pension, education, health care, employment, cultural access and defense (by a very strong military). In exchange, citizens and business grant the nation’s leader lifetime dictatorship: Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt. The corporate state.

New Deal America, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, all three profited from an illusion of the nation as an egalitarian community whose members look out for one another’s welfare under the watchful eyes of a strong leader. In which the “community” never questions that life doesn’t work that way, that there are no species in nature where one member tells others what to do. Species know what to do; it’s encoded in their genes.^[7]

Adam Smith said it best: individuals each pursuing their self-interest to survive organize society better than anything that can possibly be done by design. The invisible hand of nature, Wealth of Nations (1776).

In the 20th century, Friedrich A. Hayek explained why: there is too much information in an economy for any individual or committee to absorb. Meaning, only those who need specific data (drawn from an ever-changing pool of billions of bits), at a moment in time, have the incentive to retrieve it—by closely observing price changes in the market.^[8] The Constitution of Liberty (1960).

***

For decades now, economists, Paul Krugman, opinion writer for The New York Times, Nobel economist, included, have agreed that whatever else Franklin Roosevelt accomplished, he didn’t end the Great Depression. To the contrary, Roosevelt lengthened and worsened the Depression. Continually changing polices, he frightened business away from investing in the economy.

Again, it was his ignorance of economics that allowed Roosevelt to create (not cancel) cartels, outlaw price cuts (when incomes were falling), limit farm planting to raise farmers’ incomes (in violation of supply-side economics), forcibly move farmers hit by the Dust Bowl to locations away from the farms and homes they built (even though the soil beneath the surface erosion was still good, even very good), plus weigh business down with enormous taxation and regulation.

Which extended the 1929 to 1932 Depression eight years, and raised unemployment from 15 to 25 percent. In 1932, campaigning on what he would do once in office, so eager to implement his New Deal, Roosevelt didn’t bother to verify that the Depression was over. 1933.^[9]

***

In summary, FDR

· Expanded the power, reach, and expenses of the U.S. government.

· During his first five years, expanded the nation’s money supply and created government jobs—to give the impression the economy was expanding and unemployment was dropping. Which created inflation, and no drop in unemployment.

· Then pulled in the money supply—which lead to deflation and created the 1937 stock market crash (worse that the 1929 crash). Manufacturing collapsed, wages fell 35 percent, unemployment rose by four million.^[10]

· Frightened away private investment. By increasing taxes and regulation of business, vacillating on social, political and economic policies, supporting labor unions with their policy of excluding non-union work on government projects. Which created higher than market wages and higher unemployment for the whole economy. National Labor Retail Act (NLRA).^[11]

· Restricted competition, dictated farm and factory output, set prices for products and services. Rather than protect consumers and labor, New Dealers simply expanded their own power.^[12]

· Instilled in the nation’s mind that government borrowing, the creation of money out of nowhere, was real money—when in fact real money, capital, comes from surplus production. Adam Smith, Karl Marx.

· Instilled in the nation’s mind that inflation from government spending does not represent a cut in wages, thus, a lowered standard of living.^[13]

· Doubled income taxes. Added, for example, an undistributed profits tax on firms not distributing profit as dividends (in favor of reinvesting them in the firm).^[14]

· Created a political dimension to business investment—encouraging investors to withdraw funds, as in socialist countries every time government changes the rules. Capital flight.^[15]

· Believing it was big business that caused the Great Depression, President Roosevelt complained that “bankers, a very selfish lot, had ganged up on him”—why he ordered the FBI to investigate any banker or business person who actively disagreed with him.^[16]

· Did nothing to prevent business from thinking that since there are no checks and balances on Roosevelt (who had the Supreme court in his pocket), there was nothing to stop him from nationalizing industries and making himself dictator. Fascism. Germany, Italy, Japan.

***

A major social ramification of the New Deal is that it weakened America’s underlying culture of rugged individualism. Solving citizens’ personal problems, the New Deal weakened the natural relationship between men and women.

Since the 1930s (with so many out of work), the New Deal encouraged citizens to work together, to think communally. Such thought caused men and women to lose elements of their masculinity and femininity. By the 1970s, with most women working, with men and women living together (married or not), sharing duties, living like roommates, with a standard of living based on two salaries, men lost their desire to be the sole provider, women their desire to be the sole caregiver—and after the man’s hard day at work, to prepare and serve him dinner.

Meaning, if women want to work, because they want or have a career, they must employ household help: a cook, a governess, a chauffeur, people to clean—as did the aristocracy in Tolstoy’s Ana Karenin, who speak exactly as do today’s educated middle class, yet maintain a traditional man-woman relationship.

Meaning, a middle class home today that cannot afford an aristocratic lifestyle is living over its means. Couples without time for long meals together, long evenings (or days) alone, because they’re both working, are living over their means. Let that rat race continue, let the state subsidize those couples, and their lives are ruined.

^[1] The main Nazi newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter, reported: “What has transpired in the United States since President Roosevelt’s inauguration is a clear signal of the start of a new era in the United States as well.” May 11, 1933. We, too, as German National Socialists, are looking toward America…Roosevelt is carrying out experiments and they are bold. We, too, fear only the possibility that they might fail.” January 17, 1934. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals, Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939 (2007).

^[2] Why Donald Trump is so important. Not a statesperson, not even qualified for the presidency, he is the transition without which a credible statesperson willing to reduce the size of government cannot come forward. First a wrecking ball, then new construction, then, a statesperson. As Karl Marx proposed: first construct the economy, capitalism, then, communism.

^[3] When offered higher compensation in exchange for not receiving salary until the firm’s product is sold, workers (and their unions) always refuse. They worked; they want to be paid. Turgot, 18th century French political economist. Not an entrepreneurial response.

^[4] In Cuba, just for questioning, thousands of middle class citizens (like you, the reader) were and still are imprisoned for life—deprived of family, career, and friends. Where hundreds of land and factory owners were shot-point blank in the temple, personally, by Che Guevara—for refusing to turn over their life savings, their property.

^[5] Timothy Sandefur, Freedom’s Furies, How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness (2022), p. 118. Roosevelt also used “a relic of the horse-and-buggy age” to describe the U.S. Constitution.

^[6] Ibid, p. 119. Confirmed also by psychologist B.F. Skinner, who believed that individuals, because they are molded by their environment, improve if the environment improves.

^[7] An aristocracy that assigns everyone a profession is a bad idea. Plato’s Republic.

^[8] In 1989, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian economists were asked how they knew what to produce, and how much. Their answer: we copied what you were doing in the West. In other words, no market, no price changes.

^[9] For 200 years before 1933 to 85 years after the Great Depression, no depression in the U.S. ever lasted more than four years.

^[10] Sandefur, pp. 206-207. Economists and politicians were shocked. “We are floundering. We have pulled all the rabbits out of the hat and there are no more rabbits.” Maury Maverick, Congressman. Ibid, p. 217.

^[11] Ibid, p. 208. Enacted in 1935, the NLRA still has not been repealed.

^[12] Increasing power is at the essence of progressivism. The only way to impose liberal legislation on a conservative nation. By force. Rent control, price control, taxes, national debt.

^[13] In the U.S., no one notices a lowered standard of living. Because relative to other nations (with their own New Deals), the U.S. always has the comparative advantage: a higher standard of living, less socialist.

^[14] Op cit, p. 210.

^[15] You can’t solve economic problems through the political process.

^[16] A policy continued by all U.S. presidents ever since.

On each side of the double-door entrance to the Thomas Jefferson-designed domed library at the University of Virginia, there are two three-by-six-foot plaques listing the names of the students from the university who, between 1861 and 1864, died for their country.

What did they die for? Southerners in the Civil War did not willingly die to preserve slavery—a system providing labor for plantation owners. No, those students died to preserve a United States of America that enforced its Constitution, a Constitution that provides for very limited federal government (Article 1, Section 8, the enumerated powers clause), versus unlimited state government.

The Constitution does not mention murder, kidnapping, slavery. It would not have been ratified. It was left to the states to outlaw crime. With one exception:

in violation of an enumerated list of acts (Article 1, Section 10) that compete with the federal government. Granting Letters of Marque and Reprisal, for example—the forceful seizing as pledge or a regaining by recapture. Implied, Congress has the right to prevent states from committing certain crimes. Slavery.

***

The South knew two things: one (still true), that the North was (is) a body of helpful do-gooders minding other people’s business.

Today, those do-gooders are the nation’s university professors, 98.5 percent of whom are progressive.^[1] And by extension, their students, the nation’s future schoolteachers, who in turn unduly influence our nation’s children. Those college, high school, and elementary school teachers, socialists at heart, believe that the rights of the nation (progressives would say “community”) precede those of the individual, and by extension, that the rights of the federal government precede those of the state. Without realizing that is the exact definition of fascism.

The second thing the South knew was that people from an aural culture cannot succeed in an advanced industrialized economy—that freed slaves would not make it on their own.

Why, 160 years after slavery, progressives still create programs to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion. In education, spend billions of taxpayer dollars teaching students from aural cultures how to read. Not possible.^[2] Those programs achieve equality because they drop instructional standards to the lowest common denominator, which, according to the U.S. Department of Education, is why for the last 70 years (and still to this day), only 36 percent of the nation is proficient in reading and math.^[3] Why the U.S. Navy lowered the reading level of its entrance exam to fourth grade, the level at which the average American high school senior today graduates. Why, according to the San Jose Mercury News, for the last 50 years, 71 percent of the Silicon Valley workforce has been (and still is) foreign-born. Americans can’t do the work.^[4]

Except, that 98.5 percent no longer win national elections (2026): the remaining 1.5 percent represent the nation’s silent majority—no longer silent.

***

Living in the Northeast, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the 1850s, said:

It wasn’t until the Kansas-Nebraska Act, along with the enforcement of fugitive slave laws that forced citizens to hunt down and return slaves, that Northerners’ thinking changed—forcing them to finally see slavery as aggressive and dangerous.^[6]

Before he became president, Abraham Lincoln thought like Emerson.

Still, in responding to an attack by Horace Greeley in the New York Tribune, Lincoln said:

In defense of Lincoln, having already decided upon emancipation, Lincoln hoped his letter would soften the public’s impact of what he knew would be a controversial proclamation. As Frances Seward complained to her husband, Secretary of State William Seward, “His letter hardly does him justice. . . He gives the impression that the mere keeping together a number of states is more important than human freedom.”^[9]

In his own way, Frederick Douglass added:

Douglass meant:

Don’t come around with your white social workers to try to help. We know what to do; we’ve been living in this country for 250 years. We’re sick and tired of being told what to do.^[11]

“We know what to do” meant get an education! Twenty percent of freed African-Americans ran to school. The same percentage today.^[12]

NAEP 8th Grade Education test scores in Mathematics, 2022, by ethnicity:^[13]

• Asian/Pacific Islander: 306

• White: 285

• Two or more Races: 276

• Hispanic: 261

• American Indian/Alaska Native: 258

• Black: 253

260 is NAEP Basic—with a 26 percent probability of being prepared for college.

300 is NAEP Proficient—with a 58 percent probability of being prepared for college.^[14]

330 is NAEP Advanced—with an 87 percent probability of being prepared for college.

These scores will never change.

***

Yes, the most underlying reality was that the Civil War was about ending slavery—because of the gross immorality of slavery—but it was not the motivating cause.

I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government, whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.^[15] Abraham Lincoln.^[16]

***

The South knew (or at least thought) that it would win quickly and come back to the United States with slavery intact (or come back as the Confederacy with the U.S. Constitution). The South felt its rebel soldiers were six times tougher than any Yankee soldier.^[17]

^[1] According to David Brooks, commentator on PBS Newshour, opinion writer at The Atlantic and The New York Times, only 1.5 percent of college faculties in the U.S. admit they are conservative. Conservative professors have been thoroughly intimidated, politically and physically, into self-censorship. David Brooks, “The Future of Nonconformity,” New York Times, July 24, 2020.

^[2] Eighty percent of children from aural cultures enter kindergarten with a 2,500 to 4,500 word deficit—increasing through 12th grade.

^[3] See NAEP scores in this essay.

^[4] Ethan Baron, “H-1B: Foreign Citizens Make Up Nearly Three Quarters of Silicon Valley Tech Workforce,” San Jose Mercury News, January 17, 2018.

^[5] Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, 2005), 160.

^[6] Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 160.

^[7] Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 470.

^[8] Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 471.

^[9] Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 471.

^[10] Delivered at the closing of the Civil War, 1864—Robert M.S. McDonald, “Frederick Douglass: The Self-Made Man,” Cato Institute, Cato’s Letter 31, no. 3 (Fall 2011).

^[11] McDonald, “Self-Made Man” speech first delivered in 1859, paraphrased by Robert M.S. McDonald.

^[12] Most high school students today graduate, but because they can’t read, it’s still 20 percent.

^[13] NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress), known as the “The Nation’s Report Card,” is a congressionally mandated program within the U.S. Department of Education. It is administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

^[14] Thirty-six percent of the nation is at this level. Everyone else is below.

^[15] Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 356.

^[16] For the record, Thomas Jefferson, a Southerner, was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite president—why Lincoln built the Jefferson Memorial.

^[17] As the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon, 5th century BC (fighting the Persians), and North Vietnamese and North Koreans in the 20th century (fighting the Americans) defending their homeland, felt they were six times stronger. As in the 21st century, defending their homeland, the Iranians.

Locked up for 120 days in Independence Hall, Philadelphia (1787), 55 brilliant statesmen mulled over every important political document from 5th century Athens, 1st century Rome, 17th and 18th century Age of Enlightenment to derive a formula for creating a government that would not fail. It’s unlikely such a convention will ever happen again.

To that end, they created the world’s greatest guide for forming a government: the US Constitution. Government so small you almost couldn’t see it, with three branches to check on each other (to prevent one individual or branch from becoming too powerful), the whole document, one page. (A government so small that in 1814, when the British invaded Washington and burned it down, they were shocked to find almost no government buildings. The few workers grabbed the few documents, Betsy’s flag, and ran. Compare the Eurpean Constitution, the Maastricht Treaty, 254 pages that no one reads or understands, much like the UN Chater, 74 pages that speak nebulously of human rights rather than clearly of civil rights.)

That some of those revolutionaries were white racist misogynist slave owners is irrelevant. Frederick Douglass in the 19th century and Clarence Page in the 20th century (essayist on PBS NewsHour), both Black, made essentially the same point: do not go there. They rose to the occasion. They knew their limitations, knew slavery was wrong.

Knew that if all states were to ratify the Constitution, there had to be a compromise: no mention of slavery; Black Americans would count as three-fifths of a person. That was the deal.

But knew, long run, the Constitution was the ticket out of slavery. Just not then. Exhausted from the Revolutionary War, the framers concentrated on approval of the Constitution—asking the nation to read the reasoning behind every Article—The Federalist Papers.

***

From their research at Independence Hall, the Constitution’s drafters were clearly inspired by the “Funeral Oration of Pericles” in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, where Pericles states that Athenians are an open and free society, occupied in myriad pursuits, not worried that our enemies are walking among us. We’ll fight them if we have to—our generals and soldiers, motivated to preserve what we have created, see our enemies simply as marauders. Why, with a smaller but better-trained army, we usually defeat them, the Persians, for example, on the Plain of Marathon. [1]

Before today’s “woke” anti-Americanism, the “Funeral Oration of Pericles” was required reading in the nation’s schools—as was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. They made students proud to be American.

Versus the New York Times Magazine-promoted 1619 Project, or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which leave students hating America—why France’s education minister proclaimed on national television: “Do not look at woke America! In France, we teach students the history and culture of France. It bonds French citizens with love of their country. Plus, French institutions, by law, are forbidden to ask students, citizens, or job applicants any question with respect to ethnicity, race, sexual preference, or religion. Laïcité.”

US schools should do the same. Teach the history and culture of British and American democracy—the democracy that created the freedom and opportunity that fostered a population of five million in 1790 to grow to 330 million, today, the world’s third-largest nation. An extraordinary singularity: most Americans aren’t born here; they come here. Like the Athenians, grateful to live in a free society, unlike the “woke,” they are willing to defend their country. [2]

It is why American schools should not celebrate the history and culture of other nations. Americans fled those nations! [3]

And it is why American schools shouldn’t be used as an instrument of political activism. [4] They were not designed for that. American schools were designed to teach reading, mathematics, and history so that students, as future citizens, will instantly recognize threats to democracy, the very reason Thomas Jefferson inaugurated the world’s first public schools. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which causes anything connected to that concept to fail, were not on Jefferson’s mind. In business, DEI is a distraction that causes firms to take their eyes off of their sole purpose: making a profit. Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic Bank. In education, DEI is the distraction that causes teachers to take their eyes off their sole purpose: teaching basic subject matter—why, for the last 50 years (since the War on Poverty), according to the US Department of Education, only 36 percent of the nation’s students are proficient in reading, math, history, and science. [5] Why the US Navy, unable to obtain new recruits, reduced the reading level of its entrance exam to fourth grade, the level at which the average American high school senior today graduates. [6]

***

Greek city-states did a great thing: they left each other alone. (Until the Peloponnesian War.) 100 years, though, Greek direct democracy failed, as Athens grew too large for the whole city to vote on every issue, and the Greek language, so nuanced, allowed clever demagogues to twist it to convince an unsuspecting majority to follow them—into oligarchy.

Rome solved that problem by creating a republic, a government of elected representatives. And, by following the advice of one of the world’s wisest statesmen, Cicero, who said that a government must have two legislative houses: a large house for the people (House of Commons, House of Representatives) and a smaller house for big business, large landowners (House of Lords, Senate), or the government will fail. It is why the US has a bicameral legislature and an Electoral College: to give extra weight to smaller states or smaller groups of citizens, the rich, for example.

That the Greek city-states did not interfere with each other is definitely the vision of the Founding Fathers: expansive state and local government, very limited national government. In the Civil War, the South thought it was fighting for states’ rights, except what the South didn’t understand is that the US is a constitutional democracy, not simply a democracy in which the majority always gets its way. Constitutional means legal, means a state cannot just vote 99 to 1 to murder or enslave people it doesn’t like.

In 1933, our nation’s founding principle of limited federal government was reversed. President Franklin Roosevelt grafted his unprincipled New Deal onto the Constitution—which the Supreme Court immediately declared illegal. The court would not allow such a leap into socialist dictatorship. [7] In 1861, the nation fought a civil war because it believed a nation half-free, half-slave, could not survive. [8] In 2061, a nation half-free, half-progressive may fight another civil war? [9]

Notes

1. What 5^th century Greece created was Western civilization: the notion that all social, political, and economic activity should focus on the individual, not the community. The community (the state) does not provide freedom; it protects freedom. The community does not tell citizens what to do—why Western civilization is an evolutionary step forward for mankind, not simply one alternative.

2. Only 9–15 percent of young Americans (ages 16–24) indicate a willingness to serve in the US military. Katherine L. Kuzminski and Taren Sylvester, “Short Supply: Identifying and Addressing the Root Causes of Declining Propensity for Military Service,” December 11, 2025, Center for a New American Security (CNAS)—a Democratic Party-funded think tank—cites Department of Defense surveys.

3. Asian students take classes after school and on Saturday to learn their language and culture. That should be the model for all ethnic studies: after, not during, school.

4. “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Vladimir Lenin.

5. 2024 national average scale score for reading, fourth grade: 215. Proficient is 300. National Center for Education Statistics, NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress).

6. “US Navy Lowers Bar for Recruitment by Removing Education Requirements,” The Maritime Executive, January 29, 2024. Note: 77 percent of young adults 16–24 are also disqualified from military service due to obesity, physical fitness issues, drug use, or criminal records (Kuzminski, Sylvester). If schools can’t teach students to read, they should at least give them courses in physical education.

7. In his 1933 inaugural address, Roosevelt declared (in no uncertain terms) that the Constitution is so flexible it can be made to mean whatever we want it to mean. Why in 1935, under enormous pressure from Roosevelt (who threatened to add six justices to the Supreme Court who would approve anything he asked), the court buckled. Checks and balances: out the window.

8. A nation half-free can survive if its citizens prefer security to liberty. Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, New Deal America, China. Cuba and North Korea are perfect examples of an entrepreneurial people sacrificed to a communal society. Were Cuba not communist, Havana, rather than Miami, would be the financial capital of Latin America. With China, however, a nation with no history of democracy, where citizens care only about family and money, a nation half-free, half communist can perhaps survive.

9. Was January 6 battle number one, and Minnesota 2026 battle number two, where, to crush a progressive stronghold, President Trump sent in the US Army?

I parked my car in front of a restaurant with a long waiting line. Walking that line, not one person acknowledged my presence. Millennials; completely absorbed in their own world. At the end of the line an older couple looked up. I asked them the question I was dying to ask: “Is the line so long because the food is so good?”

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Over the past six thousand years, man has perfected the art of road making. San Francisco, a city of hills and fine road-making machinery, knows that art.

Why, then, has it allowed its planners to place dangerous speed bumps — skateboarder moguls — on its streets, causing vehicles to swerve? One hundred thousand automobiles swerving twenty times a day equals two million swerves in a single day. Someone is going to get hurt. There are 994,000 vehicles registered in San Francisco.

It would have been cheaper to dig potholes — damage to front-end wheel alignment is the same.

What about pedestrians who cross in the middle of the block, who believe motorists are slowing down for them when, in fact, they’re slowing to avoid the bumps? Those unseen pedestrians are going to get hit.

This writer drives right over those bumps. Risk of losing control of the car is less than from swerving.

Read “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” where author Jane Jacobs explains that cities evolved naturally, without planning. San Francisco: stop planning. Remove those bumps.

Showing symptoms of an infection, I was rushed to a Sutter Health Hospital (June 2025). The staff drained the infection, sent a sample to the laboratory, determined the correct antibiotic. And kept me six days. On each of those days, five nurses and five doctors analyzed my charts, the MRI, and the CT scan. The big question: Was the infection due to leakage from a previous hernia operation? If so, should it be redone? They never considered whether the bulge at my stomach, exactly where they were draining, had anything to do with it. Both after my initial hernia operation (when the bulge emerged) and again during those six days at Sutter Health, NO ONE thought to connect the protrusion with the infection, a leaking abscess.

***

Including my first day and night in a bed in the hallway (surrounded by drug overdose patients) because no rooms were available, total cost for six days: $170,463.72.

Why so expensive? Because hospitals charge whatever they can get away with. The cost of a procedure has nothing to do with the actual procedure. Cost is calculated as a percentage of a hospital’s total yearly expenses spread across all patients and all hospitals under a hospital’s parent company. The bill from Sutter Health Hospital CPMC Van Ness Campus in San Francisco had nothing to do with cost—which the hospital will not reveal. $20,000?

***

At a market rate of $5 a square foot, 100,000 square feet times eleven floors totals 1,100,000 square feet, that Sutter hospital may pay $5.5 million a month rent (or, if Sutter owns the building, $5.5 million toward a mortgage). Annualized, that’s $66 million a year. If 50 percent of a hospital’s revenue goes toward rent, the remaining 50 percent covers operating expenses. Thus, annual expenses are $66 million + $66 million: $132 million.

Here’s another way to look at the cost of my hospital stay:

$132 million divided by 274 acute care rooms, $481,751 per room, divided by 365 days equals $1,319 per day per room, times six days: $7,914.

A nurse’s salary of $150,000 a year, divided by 261 eight-hour workdays a year, $574 a day, $71 an hour, times two hours per patient per day: $142. Times six days: $852. Times five nurses: $4,260. Double for five doctors: $8,520.

The lab may have cost $12 million. Divided by 365 days, $32,876 a day, divided by 24 hours, $1370 an hour, times two hours a day, times six days: $16,440. Two technicians, each at $71 an hour (a nurse’s salary), times two hours, $142, times two: $284. Times six days: $1,704. $16,440 + $1,704: $18,144.

The MRI, at $500,000, divided by 365, $1,369 a day, or $57 an hour, times two hours: $114. Plus two technicians, $284. $1,369 + $284: $1,653. Same for the CT scanner: $1,653. Each machine was used once.

Additional administration and operating expenses, such as high insurance premiums, might add another 10 percent to total expense. $132 million x 10 percent is $13.2 million, divided by 365, $36,164 a day, divided by 24, $1,506 an hour, times two hours, $3,012, times six days: $18,072.

My six days might have cost:

Room

$7,914

Nurses

4,260

Doctors

8,520

Labs

18,144

MRI

1,653

CT Scan

1,653

Administration

18,072

TOTAL

$60,216

$10,036 per day.

***

Sutter Health Hospital, 1101 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, Block 0690, Lot 016, takes up two whole city blocks: 275 feet x 384.75 feet, 105,806 square feet.

Those six days may have cost $60,216, but they did not cost $170,463. A perfect example of health care in the US costing three times what it would if left to the market.

If left to the market, patients and doctors would bargain price. Would never let insurance companies just pay for everything, thus leaving hospitals free to focus solely on ways to increase profit; in my case, for example, look no further than what the patient came in for.

Such distortion will attract doctors and nurses who also only look to their job as a revenue source. Guaranteed not to attract empathetic and creative problem solvers.

Working on a Sunday, for example, for higher pay, one of my doctors dropped by my room and said: “Put that book down and turn on the television! Alcaraz is in the finals.” Both of us, tennis players, enjoyed an uninterrupted half hour of Wimbledon tennis. Afterward, he glanced at my charts: “You’re fine.”

Is Sutter Health a factory? Absolutely. That Van Ness Campus, brand new, to which one donor, Williams-Sonoma, a high-end kitchen supply company for home chefs, provided a restaurant-grade kitchen and pizza oven. No sooner had the donor died than the hospital, in a cost-cutting move, closed that kitchen and began ordering mass-prepared food delivered from outside. The food was so awful I couldn’t eat it. On the third day, the hospital nutritionist came to my room: “Mr. Parker, you haven’t eaten a thing!” I replied: “My wife prepares food at home and brings it.”

***

I submitted this essay to AI for feedback. Not a mechanism to uncover humor, still, AI had constructive comments:

Back-of-the-napkin analysis [they got that right!] won’t do. Use real data.

Categorical statements such as ‘American health care costs twice that of Europe, three times that of Asia’ won’t do. Back that claim with data.

Missing from AI, however, is that to make a point it isn’t necessary to prove the point. Everyone knows they can fly to Mexico for the same procedure at one-third the cost. Medical tourism.

The market solution: chartered jets on standby at San Francisco International Airport waiting for enough passengers to fly to Mexico City ($300 roundtrip) or Singapore ($1,000 roundtrip) for surgery by an American-trained doctor at a hospital operating with American standards.

In Singapore, hospitals guarantee patients will never contract a staph infection.[1]

The market solution: health savings accounts. Contribute $400 a month ($4,800 a year), accept an insurance policy with a $5,000 deductible (covered by the contribution if needed but which otherwise increases every year), bargain price for every procedure (because you’re paying cash out of pocket), and your policy will drop to $400 a month, $50 a month for a young person. Shop the Internet

[1] Staph infection is the risk from a leaking abscess. How could Sutter Health not have figured that out immediately?

Putin’s story is that the days of Western neo-imperialism (NATO) are over, that the US and Europe are on the wrong side of history. Why Russia pumps out four times the number of weapons as Ukraine and its allies, and why Russian citizens support the effort to defeat and humiliate the enemy, torturing senior citizens, blowing up schools with children present. Putin’s story is that of a virile Russian nation protecting its very existence—why it forced Finland in the Winter War of 1939–1940 to cede land (and lose 26,000 soldiers). Russia needs buffer zones against the West.

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If this sparked a thought, I would love to hear it. Your comments, likes, and shares help guide what I write next.

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Rome 476: David Parker Essays

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In this episode of A San Francisco Conservative, Tom Martin and David Parker take a deep dive into the complex realities of economic globalization and its far-reaching impact on American workers. From shifting trade policies and offshoring to the rise of global competition, they examine how decades of economic integration have transformed local communities, eroded manufacturing bases, and suppressed wage growth in key sectors.

David offers a conservative critique of past bipartisan trade deals and argues for a new policy approach that balances free market principles with strategic protection of national interests. The conversation explores how conservative policies can support domestic job creation, incentivize innovation, and rebuild economic resilience—without resorting to heavy-handed regulation.

Listeners will come away with a better understanding of how global economic forces shape their daily lives and why a reimagined conservative framework is vital for protecting American workers, restoring dignity to labor, and preserving long-term competitiveness in an interconnected world.

Learn More from My Current My books:

Rome 476: David Parker Essays

A San Francisco Conservative: Essays

Income and Wealth: David Parker Essays

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In this episode of A San Francisco Conservative, Tom Martin and David Parker examine the evolving landscape of global geopolitics and what it means for local communities—especially in San Francisco and the broader Bay Area. They delve into shifting geopolitical alliances, U.S. foreign policy strategies, and emerging global threats. Listening closely to how national and international decisions reverberate at the neighborhood level, they highlight the interplay between global trends and local consequences.

David offers a conservative worldview grounded in constitutional principles and community-focused perspectives. Throughout the discussion, they emphasize why foreign policy isn’t just Washington’s domain—it impacts trade, immigration, security, and livelihoods right at home. This episode provides essential context for understanding how international decisions affect American daily life and the conservative approach to global leadership.

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Rome 476: David Parker Essays

A San Francisco Conservative: Essays

Income and Wealth: David Parker Essays

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Their wide-ranging conversation draws on Parker’s unique personal journey—from the classroom to jazz clubs to economic commentary—to shed light on the conservative philosophy shaping his worldview. They explore how historical patterns and economic principles inform David’s understanding of civic life in San Francisco and beyond.

Listeners will gain insight into Parker’s intellectual roots, his motivation behind launching the show, and the key concepts—history, liberty, economy—that underpin his critique of modern policy. Through this foundational episode, Tom and David establish the philosophical framework that will guide their future conversations.

Learn More from My Current My books:

Rome 476: David Parker Essays

A San Francisco Conservative: Essays

Income and Wealth: David Parker Essays

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The conversation revisits the fall of ancient democracies like Athens and highlights the foresight of America’s Founding Fathers in crafting a system rooted in checks, balances, and individual liberty. David makes a compelling case for why today’s leaders—and everyday citizens—must reengage with classical wisdom, naming Pericles’ Funeral Oration as essential reading for modern legislators.

From the role of corporations in civil society to the responsibilities we each carry in a free nation, this episode offers a thought-provoking journey through time, reminding listeners that preserving democracy requires more than good intentions—it demands accountability, education, and an understanding of history’s hard lessons.

Learn More from My Current My books:

Rome 476: David Parker Essays

A San Francisco Conservative: Essays

Income and Wealth: David Parker Essays

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