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August
29
2022

Americans Are Brainwashed into Ignorance
Paul Craig Roberts

White liberals have succeeded in brainwashing Americans into ignorance. White liberals have been so successful that schools are dedicated to erasing history instead of teaching it. For example, South Orange New Jersey has ridded itself of association with Thomas Jefferson by renaming Jefferson Elementary school Delia Bolden Elementary School in honor of the first black woman from that area to graduate from high school. According to the school, both the students and faculty led the fight to disassociate from Thomas Jefferson. School board member Qawi Telesford said the reason is that Jefferson owned slaves.

Jefferson owned slaves because slaves comprised the agricultural labor force of his time. Slavery was an inherited institution. It was established in territory that later became the United States long before Jefferson was born and long before the United States existed or was even a thought in someone’s mind.

There was nothing Thomas Jefferson or anyone else could have done about it. Turn them loose, you say. Examine what you are saying. 18th century slave owners, such as Jefferson, were not responsible for slavery. It was the existing labor institution into which they were born. Economists will tell you that the price of a slave was the present value of his lifetime wages. Having paid these wages in the slave’s price, how were agricultural producers to pay it a second time by freeing slaves and then hiring them back as workers?

If the US then had the high revenues or money creating capability of today, the government could have compensated owners for the value of the slaves, thus providing a bucket of money for wages with which to reemploy the slaves. Without compensation, the plantations would be confiscated of a work force and without a work force would have to close down. The freed slaves would have no means of subsistence. It is likely that the cost of what is called incorrectly a “civil war” greatly exceeded the cost of compensating slave owners. But, of course, the war was not about slavery. It was about forcing the South to pay the tariff on which the development of Northern industry depended. As President Lincoln said, the South can have slavery forever if they consent to staying in the Union and paying the tariff.

As a result of the takeover of education by ideologues, the level of ignorance in the US is so high that people actually believe that slave owners enslaved the blacks. That is not the case. The blacks arrived in what later became the US already enslaved. They were enslaved by the black king of Dahomey, whose successful slave wars fed captured blacks into the slave trade.

White people did not enslave blacks. They purchased blacks already enslaved by other blacks. They purchased blacks, because that was the available labor force, not because white people were racist. There were just as many white slaves, if not more, held by Muslims at the time.

In American universities and public schools ignorant hatred has displaced objective learning. The only facts are the invented ones that support the false narratives. Truth has been kicked out of American education which today consists of little but anti-white rants.

And so Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence and who was born in the era of slavery has been cast aside in favor of the first black female graduate of a New Jersey high school. Why the first black female graduate? Why not the first white female graduate? Feminists would say the later is just as much a feat. Why not the first handicapped graduate? Why not the first . . .

During the slavery era not only did blacks in Africa own black slaves, but also free blacks in America owned black slaves. So did the Cherokee Indians who took their black slaves with them on the Trail of Tears when the federal government uprooted the Cherokees from their homelands in Georgia and forced them to march to relocation in what became Oklahoma.

It is a paradox that it is considered restitution to remove white names from schools, streets, and parks and to replace them with black names, but it is offensive to place Indian names on sports teams, rivers, counties.

The way things are going, Indian names are being erased along with the names of the white people who created the United States. Soon we will have a country whose history has been recreated after the fact.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

 

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