In many essential features, the United States has moved along into the Nineteen Eighty-Four pattern of intellectual life. But there is one important and depressing difference. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mr. Orwell shows that historians in that regime have to be hired by the government and forced to falsify facts. In this country today, and it is also true of most other nations, many professional historians gladly falsify history quite voluntarily. Read more at mises.org

In today’s Washington Times, Richard Berman understandably laments that “Unfortunately, some of our $300 billion in annual donations [to private non-profit organizations] goes to frauds and swindlers instead of aiding legitimate charity work.”

Berman is right to condemn such shysters.  But let’s keep matters in perspective: Uncle Sam now annually confiscates 12 times the amount that Americans give voluntarily to non-profits.  And not just some, but every one, of those confiscated dollars “goes to frauds and swindlers.” Moreover, once a private non-profit is exposed as being a nest of con artists, people can choose to stop funding it.  In contrast, Congress routinely displays itself publicly as being a covey of clowns whose irresponsibility would embarrass any town drunk and whose legerdemain is legendary.  Yet persons who see the true nature of the frauds and swindlers on Capitol Hill are imprisoned if they choose to stop funding Congress’s operation. Read more at cafehayek.com

Are people innately fair-minded or is it learned behavior? A fascinating new study, “Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment,” that is a big step toward resolving this question is being published today in the journal Science

The researchers find strong evidence that market institutions cause people to treat each other, especially, strangers more fairly.

This is exactly the sort of argument that libertarian thinker and economics Nobelist Friedrich Hayek made, especially in his last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. Successful societies are those that adopt market norms and they tend over time to outcompete societies organized in more primitive top-down ways. The upshot is that efforts to extract people from markets (e.g., communism, socialism, fascism) encourage them to revert to the innate savagery of dealing fairly only with kin and fellow tribespeople. Read more at reason.com

The late French sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) is not exactly a household name. Yet this iconoclastic academic and veteran of the French Resistance predicted the current “cult of the expert” and its use as a means of directing public policy and silencing dissent.

In The Technological Society, Ellul discusses at length what he calls “technique” — i.e., the social, political, and economic uses to which science and technology are put.

“Technique” aims to find “the one best means” of performing whatever the task at hand may be.

This thinking is reflected in the cult of the expert, perhaps best exemplified by Woodrow Wilson’s exaltation of abstract academic theories over common sense and experience.

Democracy was so inconvenient. Why should the elite have to bother explaining themselves

Anyway, Ellul sees such “experts” as political “technicians,” and he warns about the subversion of the democratic process (and of democracy itself) that accompanies their gradual rise to power. Read more at www.americanthinker.com

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Instead of killing off cancer cells with toxic drugs, scientists have discovered a molecular pathway that forces them to grow old and die, they said on Wednesday.

“What we discovered is if you damage cells, the cells have a built-in mechanism to put themselves out of business,” Pandolfi said. “They are stopped irreversibly from growing.”

In some of these, they inactivated the Skp2 gene. When the mice reached six months of age, they found those with an inactive Skp2 gene did not develop tumors, while the other mice did.

See more at www.foxnews.com

The real Tea Party story is quite simple and an eloquent tribute to democracy: a genuine movement of ordinary people rising to the demands of their all-American principles. It represents a fundamental difference between those who seek to provide for themselves and those who see government as provider of all material goods. The Tea Party movement is a valiant resistance to decades of profligate entitlement spending, which has had the real effect of worsening every problem it was intended to fix, landing the country, at last, in a sea of impossible debt. Tea Partiers, like the Liberty Boys of 1776, stand steadfast on the principle of equality in the rule of law, not government-ordered equality in material-world goods.

Basically, the resistance boils down to a contest between community builders and community organizers.

How Alinsky Counterfeited Community-Building AssociationsRead more at www.americanthinker.com