Your Teacher Said What?! Read Free Page B

“window of optimism”: that the best society is the one that gives people the best chance to achieve. They think property rights are in conflict with human rights; we think property rights are human rights. They believe in the tax system as a way of promoting desirable social goals, like reduced inequality; we think taxes are just a method for funding necessary— necessary —government activity.
    What do you call these people? Once upon a time, I would have called them liberals, and most everyone would have understood what that meant. However, one of the consequences of spending some time in the company of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises is being reminded that that the word “liberal” used to mean something very different: an affection for liberty, free markets, and property rights, along with a hostility to economic cronyism.
    Pretty confusing, no?
    I’m a little happier calling them “Progressives.” Partly this is because that’s what they’ve taken to calling themselves, but mostly it’s because the history of progressivism—excuse me, Progressivism—really explains the two sides in this battle a whole lot better.
    People have been calling themselves “progressives” in America since the end of the nineteenth century and mostly started out with a laudable interest in improving the lot of the poor. Progressives built schools and settlement houses, ran charities, fought corruption in government, and recruited the Bull Moose himself, Theodore Roosevelt, who ran for president in 1912 as—you guessed it—the candidate of the Progressive Party. But the soul of Progressivism was a journalist named Herbert Croly, who published a book called The Promise of American Life in 1909.
    If you want to understand modern Progressives—and especially the Progressive wing of the Democratic party—you could do a lot worse than reading Croly. Here are a few of his choicest observations about America:
    â€œAmerican history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation.”
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    America was “saved from the consequences of its distracting individualistic conception of democracy.”
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    â€œThe popular will cannot be taken for granted, it must be created.”
    In order to govern, according to Croly, people must be shown that the “special interests” really run things, that the pursuit of profit by Haves (Croly’s capitalization) is antidemocratic. It’s not that Croly didn’t like elites; he loved them, since the people didn’t really understand their own best interests, and only powerful leaders could “accelerate the desirable process of social reconstruction.”
    However, Progressives, true to their heritage as do-gooders, greatly prefer their elites to be uncorrupted by anything as souldestroying as money. Like, for example, the First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, who told a group of women at a day care center in Zanesville, Ohio, in 2008: “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” 3
    Or the president himself, who said in an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek about plans to curb the bonuses being paid to Haves in the financial services industry, “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. . . . I do think that the compensation packages that we’ve seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always to performance.”
    Well, everyone hates bankers. But hardware stores?
    Bernie Marcus, one of the founders of Home Depot, is a regular guest on Squawk Box , and he sure knows when someone is insulting him. To the Obama