CROSSVILLE — What has capitalism contributed to civilization? It made it. Capitalism alone has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness, and early death. Yet a recent Rasmussen poll showed that only 53 percent of American voters think that capitalism is a better system than socialism. Why has America suddenly signed on to the myth that capitalism is evil and that the change we need is a socialist in the white House? Nearly a year ago in Stumptalk I laid the blame squarely on parents who generation after generation have submitted their most precious gift, their children, to a propaganda mill that filled their head with myths about the glories of government and the evils of capitalism.

The charge was serious so I felt encumbered to back it up. I sought a copy of the textbook used to teach Crossville high school students about American history. I’m forever grateful to the official that provided me with a copy of this Sears catalog-size book. The text is filled with historical distortions and omissions, but my attention was drawn first to Chapter 17 (pg 510), The Progressive Era. Of course I don’t know what was actually taught in the classroom, I only have the textbook to go on. So I welcome any comments from teachers and students to stumptalk@charter.net.

Though great upheavals indeed marked the late 1890s, the text neglected to teach students that the 19th century was one of transformation from an agricultural to industrial society, a period of great industrial growth providing greater prosperity and freedoms. Instead, the text taught the students about the ills in American society and the goals of the progressive movement.

Their goals (pg 513): 1. Protect social welfare: help the poor through community centers. 2. Create economic reform. 3. Foster efficiency in society and the workplace: progressives put their faith in “experts.” 4. Promote moral improvement: pass the Eighteenth Amendment to ban alcohol beverages.

The reforms seemingly were noble causes. But in fact the sterile description taught to Crossville students was a deceitful distortion of the truth about Progressivism. In particular the text exaggerated item 2, the efforts of socialist organizer Eugene V. Debs, when in fact four-time presidential candidate Debs hardly made a dent. And of course item 4 was repealed 14 years later whereby free-choice won.

The text says (pg 518), “The Seventeenth Amendment — the Direct Election of Senators — removed the power of party bosses.” Hogwash! Is there a more insidious exhibition of party boss power than the recent passage of Obama health care against the will of the people?

A primer in political science is in order. The contemporary argument is that politics is a battle of left against right. But in fact the “left verses right” idea was eloquently debunked in 1969 by MIT political science graduate David Nolan. Since then, however, there have been dramatic changes in the political landscape.

Many citizens still worship the carcass of the two-party system, but the truth is that it is dead; it’s evolved into a single warfare/welfare party which was hijacked by the fringes of the far-left and the far-right. The left v. right debate is irrelevant.

The real political struggle today is between the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the Statists. The Founders were strong advocates of both personal and economic freedoms. After all, they codified personal freedoms in their Constitution (Bill of Rights). On economics, it is no accident that Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, a declaration of economic independence against the intervention of an all-powerful state, was published the year of the American Revolution. But it wasn’t until the rebirth of the Austrian Economic Model by Lugwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek during the Nazi era that it was clearly understood how personal and economic freedoms dovetail.

It is the Statists’ hostility to individual liberty that threatens America. Many Statists like to refer to themselves as “progressives,” as did Hillary Clinton during a 2008 debate because of its more palatal sound: “I like to refer to myself as a progressive in the modern American sense.” Nonsense, Hillary has always been a statist. Quit calling them Progressives Glenn Beck, call them what they are — Statist.

The statist camp is a diverse bunch, socialist, Marxist, Maoists, Stalinist, Mussolini Fascist and other forms of despotism, who historically have despised each other but who have one thing in common: they are strong advocates of a centralized, ever growing government. Despite the fact that the American private-sector economy is six times larger than even a bloated government, President Obama said “the only entity big enough to fix the financial crisis is government” — spoken like a true statist.

People are still trying to pen a label on Obama, socialist, Marxist or what? It doesn’t matter. He is a mixture of all Statist brands. He boasted that in college he surrounded himself with radicals, socialist, Marxist, etc. Just a college quirk? Hardly, look at his administration, filled with admitted radicals and reactionaries. His commandeering of the auto industry came right out of Mussolini playbook and his healthcare reform comes from the pages of Marx and Engels.

Here is the challenge America: Shall we citizens restore the land of the free or shall we be content to be the land of the sheep?