In the opening pages of his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky gives a description of the key players the reader is to meet in his epic tale of generational sins and familial redemption.  The third and virtuous Karamazov brother Alyosha is commended by the narrator not only for his devout and fervent faith in God, but the methodic patience and due diligence he exhibits in his pursuit of moral truth and wisdom.  In contrast to the rudder-less passion that so many young people of that generation (1860's Russia) had for new and constantly-changing "causes," Alyosha is described as follows:

"The path he chose was a path going in the opposite direction of many his age, but he chose it with the same thirst for swift achievement.  As soon as he reflected seriously on it, he was convinced and convicted of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul, and at once he instinctively said to himself: 'I want to live for immortality with Him and I will accept no compromise.'

In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, but it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism today. It is the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from earth but to set up Heaven on earth."

I couldn’t have said it better had I blogged it myself.

As much as I would love to write an entire column on the subtle genius of Dostoevsky’s analysis of the human condition in Brothers, let me focus like a laser-beam on the profound insight he made some 150 years ago regarding the “question” of socialism.  Socialism, the economic and political theory that advocates for the state to control the means of production and oversee the distribution of resources, was relatively new back in Old Fyodor’s day and the assumption among intellectuals from Moscow to Mexico was that it would inevitably become the way all countries ran their government, society, and economy.

Now, with the winds of a century-and-a-half of unflattering evidence at our back, it ought to be much easier to identify the failings and false assumptions of countries that adopted Leftist (i.e. collectivist, Marxist, and socialist) creeds for the management of their nation.  I say “ought to be easier” because it seems that each new generation in Western nations thinks that it will be the one to find that elusive utopian pot-of-gold at the end of their artificially-created, progressive rainbow.  These dreamers have it set in their minds that the problems with socialist thought are all superficial ones.

If we only had the right leader.  If people just knew the good intentions we have in trying to help them.  If the citizenry could just be educated properly.  If the right piece of legislation were to be passed.  If bothersome things like the traditional family structure and local church were to disappear.

Equally frustrating are the responses (or lack thereof) from Americans who don’t believe in top-down socialism, yet remain unconvinced that those who do believe in it are supporting something that is a potential threat to their way of life.

We’re not going to turn into Cuba tomorrow, so why all the fuss?  Progressive liberals aren’t really advocating socialism.  The American system is too strong to be disrupted by a few rabble-rousers at Harvard and in the media.  The Bible doesn’t say that much about “politics” so I don’t think we should even worry too much about it.  Ever heard of “separation of church and state”, bro?

What the naïve on both sides of the political aisle in this country are missing is this: the problem with socialism is not simply this or that policy, this or that leader, this or that educational improvement.  The problem with socialism (and any ideology using socialism as its proverbial North Star) is an inherent rejection of a Higher Power, mankind’s fallen state, and the immortality of the human soul.

Of course not every liberal, progressive, leftist, or out-right socialist is irreligious, but the ideas that have fueled the ideological Left’s engine for two centuries (about the same amount of time America’s Judeo-Christian, free-market value system has been in place) come from the minds of irreligious men and have almost exclusively produced irreligious results.

This matters, or should matter, to anyone who claims to believe in God.  Almost any recent study puts that number at about 90% of Americans.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, thinkers such as Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Friedrich Engels (pictured right) began to lay the intellectual groundwork for socialism’ move from a fringe idea to the most dominant socio-political force of the 20^th century.  They rejected private property.  They loathed the excesses and exploits of industrialization.  They believed in the supremacy of science and the ability of the enlightened human mind to coordinate the activities of millions of less-enlightened human beings.

Above all else they denied the existence of a personal, rational God and any moral code for living He might have.

This aversion to the divine wasn’t some peripheral, incidental motivation for the founders of modern socialism: it was as foundational to their ethos as “endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights” is to the American one.  Committed socialists have always been either adamantly anti-religious, or at the very least, unrelenting critics of religion.

Belief in a Higher Power carries with it certain realities for our day-to-day lives, and even for the way we construct a society and government.  For example, it requires humility to acknowledge “there is a God, and I’m not Him.”  Such humility is a precursor for the acceptance that mankind is not inherently good, but actually inherently flawed (and in need of redemption).  If I’m flawed, then we’re all flawed.  If we’re all flawed, then the idea that we can centralize power in the hands of a few and trust their good will and judgment to organize the lives of 300 million people living in the most technologically-advanced, complex civilization in human history becomes untenable (and literally impossible).

Social engineering, an irreplaceable plank in the socialist platform, never works because of the complexities of even the simplest societies and so the socialist committed to science and logic is left floating in the wind with an idea that doesn’t produce the results their theories promised it would.

It is here that the secular collectivist and socialist, realizing that no matter how hard they try they can never fully eradicate man’s primal desire for higher truths and objective standards, begins to invoke language that is soaked in moral, religious connotations.  Words like “justice”, “compassion”, and “fairness” are bandied about on the Left by everyone from Karl Marx to Bill Maher.  To compound the confusing, contradictory positions they take, socialists seek out religious leaders sympathetic to their anti-capitalist, anti-establishment message.

As I wrote about last summer, Barack Obama moved to Chicago 25 years ago for this very reason.  An atheist until his late 20’s, then Barry Obama responded to an ad in The New York Times looking for a young, articulate minority activist to come work in the South-side neighborhoods of the Windy City to help advance the secular-socialist dream of fundamentally changing America as envisioned by the grand puba of community organizing: Saul Alinsky.  The people that recruited Obama were, like Alinsky before them, white secular socialists who thought that their inability to capture the hearts and minds of the black and Latino neighborhoods had to do more with the color of their own skin than their revolutionary message.  What Barack Obama found out from a local pastor named Jeremiah Wright was that to be taken seriously in these predominantly religious communities, young Obama would have to be in church on Sundays.

Dostoevsky had something to say about this wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing tactic the secular-Left constantly employs as well.  During a conversation later in Book One of Brothers Karamazov, a minor character named Peter Miusov recalls the words of a French police inspector put in charge of squashing the 1848 socialist uprising in France.

“We are not particularly afraid of all these socialists, anarchists, atheists, and revolutionists; we keep watch on them and follow all of their doings.  But there are a few peculiar men among them who believe in God and are Christians, but are at the same time socialists.   Those are the people we are most afraid of…The Christian who is a socialist is to be dreaded far more than the socialist who is an atheist.”

This unholy union between church and big-State proponents is as ironic as it is prevalent throughout the history of the last two centuries.  While I can never know the heart or real motivation of someone who claims to believe in both the God of the bible and the tenets of socialism, I can know (and judge) their actions and the results of the things they publicly promote.

I want to be as clear as I possibly can: I hate socialism, in all its various forms and guises.  I hate it like I hate the habitual, willful sins in my life that I struggle with on a daily basis.  I hate it like I hate the thought of someone who has access to clean water refusing to drink it in favor of contaminated pond-water just because they dislike the person offering them the bottle of Aquifina.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the political, economic, or historical aspects of socialism: it all stinks (and to high heavens).

Rejecting socialism and the notion that the centralization of power and redistribution of income are compatible with liberty and prosperity does not mean that one must instantly become a Ronald Reagan-loving capitalist.  It also doesn’t mean that every opponent of socialism has to sign their name to a theologically uniform document, or even be a religious person themselves.

My concern today is two-fold:  First that those of you reading this that do hold Judeo-Christian convictions would at least recognize the fundamental rejection of God that lay at the very heart of socialist (Leftist) thought.  And second, whether you are a believer or not, that you would have had your intellect intrigued enough to set out to find out if I’m accurate in my appraisal (or at least my agreement with Dostoevsky’s appraisal) of socialism.

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” -Winston Churchill

Here is a clip from that speech that I think speaks directly to our modern timidity when it comes to evil in the form of nation-states and radical ideologies around the globe.

If you have time, watch the entire speech here, and tell me where can one hear such clear, bold, unapologetic rhetoric these days?  Where is this generation's "Reagan"?  I agree with those who say we can't rely on invoking the name of The Gipper every election from now until kingdom-come...but where are the new voices of sanity in a political world gone mad?

We can't sit back and think that the Iranian problem (in particular) will take care of itself.  Inaction now will force military action later (or, more likely, in the near future).

Say what you will about him, but Glenn Beck is willing to go deeper with his audience than chalk-boards and heated rhetoric.  Last week, Beck did an entire hour on the impact Road to Serfdom has had on the West since it was first published nearly 70 years ago.  Watch these clips and learn something.

Honestly, after doing an hour on my favorite book, one of the most important books of the past century, Beck could do a week of juggling on a unicycle on his show and I'd still defend him for this.

Previously, on rjmoeller.com….

I began a discussion of “The Left’s Fundamental Flaws” by addressing one of the broader, more existential reasons I so vehemently disagree with progressive liberals in this country: namely, the excessive emphasis that Left-of-Center political (and cultural) leaders put on “change at all costs.”  I traced the Left’s ideological thought back to the largely misguided notion of philosophers like Locke and Helvetius that human beings are born “Tabula Rasa” (“a blank slate”).  Therefore, as Helvetius in particular wrote, all that is needed for “perfect” people is the “perfect” environment – engineered by “elites” (translation: “people who went to Ivy League universities”), via legislation and education.

A good litmus test for whether or not you are on the Left yourself is if you agree with the conclusion that the government’s role is, chiefly, to create better, more perfect people.

This distinction in thought is typically where traditional Judeo-Christian religious beliefs and Leftism justifiably tend to part ways, and why the overwhelming majority of self-described religious Americans tend to be on the Right when it comes to politics.

God makes “new” men and women, not Uncle Sam, Big Brother, or even Mother Earth.

As I stated last time, religious people can be on the Left; but anti-religious people, people who denied their Creator and mankind’s fallen, sinful state, invented the Left.

----

Today, we bring you Part II of “The Left's Fundamental Flaws”:

In my last column, I attacked the Left’s obsession with “change” and “progress” and noted that such words, as broadly appealing as they may indeed be, still imply a specific direction.  This week I want to explain why the direction the Left has consistently picked since (at least) Karl Marx is the wrong one.  I want to continue my treatment of the flaws of the Left with a description and analysis of some of the specific ideas, movements, and people that I believe paved the way for modern American progressive-liberalism.  Once again, I will be drawing from the wealth of wisdom and insight in Dr. Richard Pipes’ A Concise History of the Russian Revolution to take a look at when and where the type of ideological thought and policy-making we see on the Left today first emerged and took root in other nations, at other times.

In his opening chapter and introduction, Dr. Pipes astutely points out that a common denominator in any nation that eventually adopts Leftist, collectivist, or socialist doctrine for the running of their government and society is the existence of a specific class of radicalized professors, thinkers, writers, and social agitators.  The name he gives this group is “Intelligentsia.”  There are Intellectuals, “those who passively contemplate and analyze life,” and then there is the Intelligentsia, “activists who are determined to reshape it.”

“Intelligentsia” describes intellectuals who want power in order to change the world.

But who cares, right?  If a group of busy-bodies on college campuses and in the newsrooms of media outlets want to get involved and promote their progressive agenda, what’s the big deal?

Well, let me finish fleshing out what it is the Left has traditionally believed before you make any judgments on how benign their current attempts to “fundamentally transform” might be.  Change, in and of itself, is not a moral or immoral thing.  It’s what you are changing in to, and how you plan on changing that matters.

According to Pipes, there are two societal conditions that must be met for an Intelligentsia to emerge as a powerful, and ultimately destructive, force in a nation.  The first is a prevalent “materialistic ideology that regards human beings not as unique creatures endowed an immortal soul but as exclusively physical entities shaped wholly by their environment.”  In other words, the pre-conditions necessary for a radical-Left intelligentsia to take influential prominence in a country are that the nation in question either must be becoming increasingly irreligious, or the religious teaching of that nation must be infused with secular, humanistic, Leftist concepts and beliefs.

Or both, in our nation’s current case.

Materialism in this sense is not the obsession with owning things, also sometimes called “consumerism,” but is the belief that the material world (i.e. matter) is all that there is.  This ideology, whether in its purest, atheistic form, or even when diluted to appease religious liberals, makes it possible to argue that “a rational re-ordering of man’s environment can produce a new breed of perfectly virtuous creatures.  This belief elevates members of the Intelligentsia to the status of social engineers and justifies their political ambitions.”

To paraphrase my favorite writer G.K. Chesterton: “When a nation abandons belief in the Creator, people do not begin to believe in nothing.  They begin to believe in anything.”

The second societal condition to be met for the Intelligentsia to dominate political and economic thought in a country is “economic opportunities to secure independence.”  Basically, the peddlers of radical ideology on the Left need to be financially able to spend their time writing papers, going to conferences, appearing on television and radio shows, and schmoozing with Hollyweird elites instead of having to churn their own butter or start their own business to make ends meet.  Without the worry of having to find sustenance, and with the protections that freedom of speech and assembly offer, the Intelligentsia is enabled to “secure a hold on public opinion, its principal means of political leverage.”

I’ve personally often pondered why it is that people on the secular Left, who believe that they themselves are nothing more than randomly gathered and mutated protoplasm, would work so hard at gaining the fleeting socio-political power and influence they so intently seek.  So frequently did secular-Left thinkers in Europe and Russia such as Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky use what could only be qualified as “religious” rhetoric in detailing their God-less, atheistic visions for utopian life on earth that one is led to believe deep down those men either knew they were rejecting a Higher Power (and purpose) that is real, or they at least understood that the terminology of religious teachings has a powerful and positive effect on most humans throughout history.

Here is Trotsky, one of the key leaders of one of the most significant (and evil) revolutions in human history, describing the ultimate goal of the Bolshevik’s takeover of Russia in 1917:

Man will, at last, begin to harmonize himself in earnest…He will want to master first the semi-conscious and then the unconscious process of his own organism: breathing, the circulation of blog, digestion, reproduction, and, within the necessary limits, subordinate them to the control of reason and will…Man will make it his goal to master his own emotions, to elevate his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent…to create a higher socio-biological type, a superman…Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, subtler.  His body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more melodious.  The forms of life will acquire a dynamic theatricality.  The average human type will rise to the heights of Aristotle, Goethe, Marx.  And beyond this ridge, other peaks will emerge.

Trotsky’s devotion to his secular ideology and worldview sounds “religious”, wouldn’t you say?

But I thought only Sarah Palin and the saps in Red-State, fly-over country talked in such dramatic tones about their faith and convictions regarding mankind’s destiny?

As Pipes puts it, “The (Leftists) in Russia aimed at nothing less than reenacting the sixth day of creation in order to perfect its flawed product: man’s mission was nothing less than remaking himself.”

He continues:

The Russian Intelligentsia constituted a closed caste system, admission to which required commitment to materialism, socialism, and utilitarianism (the belief that the morality of human actions is determined by the extent of pain and pleasure they produce, and that the test of good government is its ability to assure the greatest happiness of the greatest number).  No one who believed in God and the immortality of the soul, in the limits to human reason and the advantages of principled compromise, in the value of traditions and love of one’s country, no matter how otherwise enlightened, could aspire to membership in the Intelligentsia or gain access to its publications.

The Leftist Intelligentsia in Russia during the early part of the 20^th century believed that political and social change came as a result of fundamental changes in the economic relations between the “working class” and the “wealthy.”  Economics has been at the heart of everything the Left, since Marx, wants to do for (and to) a civilization.  In Russia, they wanted the re-distribution of wealth from the arbitrarily-defined “rich” to the loosely-defined “poor.”  They believed that the raw materials needed for industrial production ought to belong entirely to the State, thereby annexing private enterprise under the State’s control.  They believed that the entire concept of “property rights” (the ability to own something to the exclusivity of others) was evil, and the root cause for much of society’s ills and class warfare.  They believed that the government could take back any land they deemed integrally important to the “collective.”

This way of thinking only makes sense if man is not born with certain inalienable rights.  If we are all here on this rock by accident and random chance, then our “rights” are illusionary and open for the interpretation of whichever political party or movement happens to be in charge at any given time.  If mankind has no divine purpose, if history is not headed anywhere, if we are not fallen creatures, if the only (social) justice in the universe is whatever we can grab for ourselves (by taking from others), then the Left’s plan for social engineering through legislation and education is not only correct, it is ingenious.

But, however, if, like our Founders believed, mankind is endowed by its Creator with rights that are then freely lent to representatives in a well-defined, but limited governmental setting, then the Left is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong.  If each individual has the image of that Creator in them, then everything from eugenics to abortion to euthanasia is not only wrong, it is wickedly wrong.  If mankind is born morally broken and flawed, then the notion that education and legislation can “fix” (or even “perfect”) us is not only wrong, it is inherently wrong.

My disagreement with, and refutation of, Leftist ideology goes deeper than simple political partisanship.  As I said last week, my devotion is to my God, the truth, and to conservative ideals, ideals, and values – not the GOP or the people who represent it.  Leftist thought originated with men like Marx, but even today in a lesser form, in the rhetoric and policy initiatives of men like Barack Obama, and women like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, I hear many of the same troublesome themes and intellectual undercurrents.  I cannot reconcile my faith and understanding of the world with the secular, humanist, materialist rationale that guided those who pioneered what we now call today “the Left” (including liberalism, socialism, collectivism, and communism).

For all his good intentions, President Obama not only uses the language of a Leftist, but has worked tirelessly to enact pieces of legislation which typify a Leftist interpretation of the world.  Despite the acknowledged nuances that exist in our political and cultural debates today, either my interpretation of things is right, or his is.

The reason I don’t mind using labels such as Right and Left is precisely because they are directional in nature.  They correctly identify that on any path, to any destination, one must choose a direction to aim at.

You certainly can be closer to the middle of two points, but you can’t face both ways at the same time.

Liberalism has been degraded into liberality.  Men have turned ‘revolutionize’ from a transitive to an intransitive verb…The new liberal rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything.  He has no real loyalty; therefore he can never really be a revolutionist…As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is a waste of time.  A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself.

The man of this school of thought goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that poor people and native tribesmen in Africa are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts.  In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines.  In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men.

Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt.  By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything. –G.K. Chesterton

“Overcriminalization” describes the trend in America – and particularly in Congress – to use the criminal law to “solve” every problem, punish every mistake (instead of making proper use of civil penalties), and coerce Americans into conforming their behavior to satisfy social engineering objectives. Criminal law is supposed to be used to redress only that conduct which society thinks deserving of the greatest punishment and moral sanction.

But as a result of rampant overcriminalization, trivial conduct is now often punished as a crime.  Many criminal laws make it possible for the government to convict a person even if he acted without criminal intent (i.e., mens rea). Sentences have skyrocketed, particularly at the federal level.

My friend Scott Burton wrote a great review of the fifth chapter, "Criminalizing Kids", in One Nation, Under Arrest.  He shares the story of one particular 12 year old student in Georgia who had his life turned upside-down for no other reason than he brought his Boy Scouts pocket-knife with him to school one day last year.

Unfortunately, cases like these have become increasingly common. In an effort to solve specific problems, lawmakers and public officials are eager to pass laws and implement policies that criminalize behavior regardless of the offender’s intent. Miles’s case is a perfect example. After showing some of his friends the two-inch pocket knife, one of them informed the teacher. None of the students who saw the knife said they felt threatened, nor did they think Miles might harm someone. There was no evidence that Miles had any intention of doing anything wrongful with the knife. While a school has every right to impose reasonable and appropriate discipline upon a student if his behavior violates school policy or poses a risk to others, the school board’s actions in this case were downright ludicrous. As if the humiliation of being treated like a common criminal in his own school and in front of his peers was not enough, that is only half of Miles’s story.

After being taken to a detention facility, Miles was brought to juvenile court where Henry County officials added additional restraints. The presiding judge, who coincidentally also served as the attorney for the school board, decided that Miles should remain in the detention center. Only after Miles had spent 48 hours away locked up were his parents able to pick him up on conditional release. Following his stint in juvenile detention, the school held a disciplinary hearing, where he freely admitted to bringing the knife to school. The frightened 12-year-old was subsequently expelled for the remainder of the year. The Rankin family appealed the punishment, but the Henry County school board simply reviewed the transcript without conducting an independent inquiry of its own before affirming the school’s decision. Compounding the hardship Miles faced, the juvenile court deemed Miles “in a state of delinquency” and ordered him to serve thirty days under house arrest, imposed a curfew on him, and placed him on 180 days of probation.

Everyone is afraid of a lawsuit and thus we live in a country of cowards and reactionaries.

Miles Rankin’s legal troubles stemmed from the zero-tolerance policy in his school. Zero-tolerance policies result in part from the propensity of many parents to challenge and even sue school officials for almost any exercise of professional judgment and discretion. Many school boards and administrators try to protect themselves by adopting zero-tolerance policies that allow for no exercise of judgment at all. Zero-tolerance policies do nothing, however, to engender respect for the law or for the officials who tie their hands with them.

Of course, protecting students is a top priority, but in the process of ensuring safety, lawmakers and public officials must not abandon common sense and professional judgment. Miles Rankin and his family’s life have been scarred by an indiscriminate group of administrators who found it easier to hide behind a zero-tolerance policy than to exercise sound judgment. They were so caught up in their own policy that they could not appreciate the real-life consequences of such an irresponsible application of law.

I don't know what the solutions to this problem are, but I intend on finding out when I read One Nation, Under Arrest this summer.  You should do the same.

Read Mr. Burton's full column right here (and send it to 10 people today).

The American public feels it is drowning in red ink. It is dismayed and even outraged at the burgeoning national deficits, unbalanced state and local budgets, and accounting that often masks the extent of indebtedness. There is a mounting sense that taxpayers are being taken for an expensive ride by public sector unions. The extraordinary benefits the unions have secured for their members are going to be harder and harder to pay.

Mort Zuckerman is the Editor-in-Chief of US News & World Report, and was an initial supporter of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2009. But lately, Mr. Zuckerman has changed his tune as he (and America) has watched the president, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid throw economic caution and fiscal responsibility to the wind.

In his latest column, Zuckerman makes the critically important point that there is rampant and nefarious collusion between the public employee unions and the politicians they work tirelessly to elect.

The business community and a growing portion of the public now understand the dynamics that discriminate against the private sector. The public sector unions organize voting campaigns for politicians who, on election, repay their benefactors by approving salaries and benefits for the public sector, irrespective of whether they are sustainable. And what is happening with California is happening in slower motion in the rest of the country. It must be one of the reasons the Pew Research Center this year reported that support for labor unions generally has plummeted "amid growing public skepticism about unions' power and purpose."

There has been a transformation in the nature of our employment. Labor is no longer dominated by private sector industrial workers who were in large part culturally conservative and economically pro-growth. Over recent decades public sector employment has exploded and public workers have come to dominate the labor movement. These public sector employees have a unique and powerful advantage in contract negotiations. Quite simply it is their capacity to deliver political endorsements and votes for the very people who are theoretically on the other side of the negotiating table. Candidates who want to appear tough on crime will look to cops, sheriffs' deputies, prison guards, and highway patrol officers for their endorsement.

The point here isn't to pile blame on every union and every member of those unions. But to deny that there is a conflict of interest for the politician who marries his or her campaign to the same union workers that are being paid (exorbitantly) with the tax dollars that this same politician will have some control over.

City government was developed to serve its citizens. Today the citizenry is working in large part to serve the government. It is always hard to shrink government spending. It is particularly difficult when public sector unions have such a unique lever of pressure.

We have to escape this cycle or it will crush us. One way is to take labor negotiations out of the hands of vulnerable legislators and assign them to independent commissions. They would have a better shot at achieving a fair balance between appropriate salary increases and the revenues and services of local municipalities. The electorate won't swallow any more red ink.

Free markets aren't perfect, but state-controlled economies, the kind we're seeing implode in Greece, always lead to societal collapse.

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
-Alexis de Tocqueville

The Irving Kristol Award was given to General David Petraeus and he gave a fascinating 30-minute speech on the intellectual underpinnings of what became known as "The Surge", the counter-insurgency strategy that helped turned Iraq completely around in 2007. Past winners of this award include Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell, Charles Krauthammer, and Justice Clarence Thomas.

It was an incredible event, and I had more fun than a blogger should be allowed to.  I met Newt Gingrich, Jonah Goldberg, and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Here's some footage of the General's presentation.  It's more than worth you time to check it out.

And here are the opening remarks of AEI's president (and all-around brilliant man), Dr. Arthur Brooks:

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the 2010 Annual Irving Kristol Award and Lecture of the American Enterprise Institute. I'm Arthur Brooks, President of AEI.

As most of you already know, this is the first year we will present the Irving Kristol Award without the man for whom the honor was named. Irving Kristol passed away last September after a brief illness.  We recall the loss with deep regret but fond memories of Irving's life and career.

Irving was an AEI senior fellow--described by the Daily Telegraph as "perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the twentieth century."

But he was much more than that.  Irving was an inspiration and a mentor to scores of us.  His life truly shaped the thinking of generations of intellectuals.  Irving also gave shape to the ideas of thousands of young people over his long career--some of whom went on to intellectual careers of their own--and others who did not, but who nonetheless benefitted from his culture, intelligence, and common sense.

In this first year after his passing, we could think of no better way to commemorate Irving's extraordinary legacy than to dedicate the support for this dinner to AEI's new Young Leaders in Scholarship Fund.  We thank so many of you for backing this new initiative.  It is an investment in America's next generation of researchers, thinkers, and policy leaders. The dividends for our nation will be huge, and fitting in memory of Irving Kristol's name.

To speak on Irving's behalf, I would like to turn the microphone over for a few minutes to his son Bill.  Bill is the founder and editor of The Weekly Standard and a great friend of the American Enterprise Institute.  We are honored to have him with us this evening as we take a moment to remember his father.

***

It is now time to present the Kristol Award, and enjoy the winner's lecture. In the past, our practice has been to have James Q. Wilson announce the award as the Chairman of AEI's Council of Academic Advisors. Unfortunately, Jim is not with us tonight due to health reasons, but he is recovering and we look forward to seeing him again soon at AEI.

About 16 months ago when I was first taking over the presidency of AEI, I was on a flight from Washington, DC, to Syracuse, NY. I happened to sit next to a soldier on his way to Fort Drum in Upstate New York. We got to talking and I asked him where he had been posted. He told me that he had been sent to Iraq in 2007 at the beginning of The Surge.

He told me that when he arrived in Iraq, it was a lost cause--the assumption was not whether America would leave in defeat, but when. Back in the U.S., many political leaders were saying that defeat was inevitable, that the Surge was an exercise in futility, and that nothing could forestall our ultimate fate.

But, he told me, after a year, everything had changed. He said that because of the Surge, what seemed like certain defeat now looked like possible victory--victory for free Iraqis and American patriots. He also said that the strategy saved literally thousands of American and Iraqi lives.

Whose vision was behind the Surge? We are proud at AEI of the part our own scholars played in this strategy. But we recognize that no amount of radical scholarship can affect policy without visionary leadership.

That leadership was--and is--personified in the recipient of this year's Irving Kristol Award. He is soldier and a leader. He is a scholar himself, and a man of innovative and brilliant strategic thinking.

He is one of this era's great generals because he understands that victory matters, and that it matters because everyone deserves freedom. Because of his vision, the sacrifice of our men and women in Iraq was not in vain, and that country today is on a path to freedom.

Tonight, my AEI colleagues and I are proud to honor a great general, a great thinker and a great American patriot--General David Petraeus.

Here's Part 1, but do yourself a huge favor and check out all 5.

If you've yet to read Steyn's tour-de-force, America Alone, throw away whatever book is setting on your nightstand and buy this thing.

Please.