You may have heard of Pareto's law. It has to do with statistical distribution: of money, talent, productivity, and just about everything else. It is the 20/80 rule. Nobody knows why it works, but it works in so many areas that it is unwise to ignore it.
A Pareto distribution applies to any political movement. The larger the movement, the more accurately it applies. The law of large numbers sees to it that a Pareto distribution is common. Here is how it works.
Approximately 1% of the members of the movement are leaders. These people are well informed, articulate, have enough leisure to be able to work effectively in the organization, have lots of high-level personal contacts, and provide the brains of the movement.
About 4% of the ones below the top 1% are the drivers of the movement. These are the people who are the organizers, the people with the databases, the people with personal contacts in the business world, the people who are active in one political party. Without them, there would be no leverage for the movement.
Below them are about 15%. These are the people who are thoughtful, understand the basic issues at hand, have some understanding of the movement's history, and who know what it takes to get organized. They provide considerable funding for the movement.
Below them are about 60% of the members. These people have some vague awareness of the issues. They are enthusiastic. They want to be involved. They will attend a meeting once in a while. They may send in a little bit of money occasionally. They provide whatever votes the movement has. Half of them will probably drift into something else when it catches their fancy.
Below them are about 11%. These are people who are completely confused. They know some of the language of the movement, but they have the categories scrambled. They cannot explain why they are committed to the movement. This is good, because nobody in the movement with any knowledge wants these people to be identified as members of the movement. It just is too embarrassing.
Below them are another 4%. These people have the categories backward, not just scrambled. If someone presents a free-market argument to them, they are convinced it is Communism. They have never heard of Keynesianism, but when you explain it to them, they cannot remember it 3 minutes later.
Below them are the bottom 1%. They drool a lot.
LETTERS. I GET LETTERS
With this as background, I want to quote a letter that was sent to me in response to my article, "Obama: A Keynesian, not a Communist."
You need take your own counsel.This man is somewhere in the next 11%. I would not call him a drooler. He has his categories scrambled. He does not distinguish between Keynesianism, Communism, and the Council on Foreign Relations. For him, it is one gigantic stew, and it is all evil.
Saying "he is a Keynesian" and not a Communist is like saying "it's a Cardinal ...not a bird".
Saying he's just a front man for the CFR ignores the fact that the CFR is made up of people who are determined to rule a depopulated planet earth.
Whatever you call them, they are determined to enact the delusional philosophies of Karl Marx, The Mad Prussian.
Whether that makes them Communists, Nazis or simply pathological madmen is just semantics. The goals are the same.
For instance, Nick Rockefeller's question to Arron Russo when Russo expressed concern for "the people"... "Why do you care about them, they're just serfs?"
These are not "just" power mongers.
They are criminals with amounts of power/money that boggles the mind.
As Sun Tzu said, "Know your enemies."
The problem with someone like this is that he has read enough to be dangerous, not in the sense of being intellectually dangerous, but being dangerous to the movement that he claims to represent. Anybody outside the Tea Party movement who deals with somebody like this man perceives rapidly that he knows names, but he does not know what he is talking about. Anyone who has even the vaguest understanding of the issues at hand will know within a few minutes that he is utterly confused. Worse, he is one of those people who will not sit down and shut up. "Let me straighten you out, fellow."
These people never perceive that they are ill-informed and ill-equipped. They are confident that they are masters of the field. They cannot resist showing others how much they know. They send emails to strangers who happen to be specialists in the field. "Let me straighten you out, fellow."
I have been writing on this topic for over 50 years. I wrote a book on Marxism back in 1968: Marx's Religion of Revolution. But what do I know?
This poor soul spends his life in a fog, seeing only an occasional phrase that he grabs onto, as he struggles from phrase to phrase, slogan to slogan, vainly attempting to clarify his mind. He fails.
Every movement has lots of people like this man, and the most that members can hope for is that nobody with any influence ever meets them.
KARL MARX AND THE CFR
Karl Marx believed in violent revolution. That was the heart, mind, and soul of his philosophy. Everything else was academic paraphernalia. He wanted bloody revolution, and he was committed to a philosophy of envy. He wanted destruction.
He did not want socialist reforms. He opposed anybody who called for socialist reforms. He savaged them in print. He hated the reformers more than he hated the capitalists. He spent his whole career attacking obscure German socialists who were not sufficiently revolutionary. He never took on anybody with an IQ above 100 who was committed to capitalism. He never attempted to refute John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, or any of the defenders of the capitalist system, with one exception: Malthus. He spent his entire career beating up on obscure socialists. I say this, not as somebody who has read the Communist Manifesto and nothing else, but as someone who has read volume after volume of his collected works.
For the record, Marx was an opponent of Thomas Malthus and Malthus' prediction of a population crisis. Malthus was the one major capitalist economist who Marx bothered to refute in detail.
To argue that everybody in the Council on Foreign Relations believes in killing off the population is to argue an absurdity. They believe in population control. They are standard humanist intellectuals. But they are not deep ecologists. There is no indication that anybody in the organization, now or before, has ever called for population contraction by anything except voluntary decisions to have no more than one child per family. I certainly agree with this agenda for humanist intellectuals. I encourage it. These people are not Communists. These are also not Chinese Communists, who legislate mandatory abortions for every woman who has one child. To accuse the CFR of such a monstrosity shows that the accuser has not understood Comminism or the CFR.
There is a wide range of belief within the Council on Foreign Relations, just as there is in any movement made up of people with money, influence, degrees from prestigious institutions, the ability to write, to speak, and to take leadership positions. Some of them are no doubt power-seekers. Others just want to have influence. Others want to rub shoulders with people who have power and influence. But at the bottom 1% of the Council on Foreign Relations there are no droolers. These are people with IQs above 110, graduated from some school like Michigan State, and made $10,000,000 selling scrap metal.
The man who wrote the e-mail has no interest in anything intellectual. You can see that from this statement: "Whether that makes them Communists, Nazis or simply pathological madmen is just semantics. The goals are the same." The fact that World War II became a world war when Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union never occurs to this fellow. There are no differences? You mean it makes no difference what isms there are? Yet an entire civilization was torn apart by the conflict among these isms. If the letter-writer is correct, then history makes no sense. It is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Well, it is not a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. It has meaning. Ideas have consequences. This is why we must distinguish among ideas.
The Left has the same problem. The Left's walking wounded yell "fascist" whenever they hear an idea they don't like. Not one of the shouters could summarize the basic ideas of fascism. Not one of them could name an Italian theorist of the fascist movement, other than Mussolini.
CONCLUSION
Why should I beat up some poor soul who does not know up from down? Only as an example. We need to recognize that the Tea Party movement is filled with people who are no better informed than this fellow. I hope there are very few local leaders of the movement who are as poorly equipped intellectually as this man, but there are surely people who will attempt to exercise such leadership, by sending out e-mails, or buttonholing people to tell about the commie, genocidal, CFR, Nazi, socialist, power-mad people who are after us all. Our enemies are a combination of Stalin, Pol Pot, Rockefeller, Hitler, Nehru, and Huey Long.
Whenever I encounter these people, I am reminded of Mitch Jayne's comment, as part of his verbal patter for the Dillards, half a century ago. "Two of him would not make a halfwit."
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