Welcome to Keith Knight. Don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute. Here is my latest article at the Libertarian Institute titled In Defense of Humor's Progressive Myths. In a blog post last month, Doctor Tyler Cowen listed a number of books he is currently reading and specifically mentioned a book which I think is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of all time. Here's what Cowen said. Michael Humor, progressive myths.
Michael is a very smart philosopher, but this book seemed like a waste of time to me. Will it persuade anyone? Do we need Michael writing seven page essays rebutting various claims of the BLM movement and the like? I invited Doctor Tyler Cowen onto the Libertarian Institute podcast to discuss his objection to Humor's progressive myths. He politely declined. I'd like to address Doctor Cowen, who has an open invitation onto my podcast to defend himself anytime.
I don't know what metric Cowan uses to differentiate productive books from unproductive books. Let's assume productivity can be categorized as increased efficiency, attempting to pursue a given end, accounting for opportunity costs and benefits. This book cost $12.00 on Amazon, is 245 pages, and is a complete refutation of the progressive ideology on economic, philosophical, empirical, and historical grounds.
Humor provides readers with the very low cost education progressives pretend to offer us. Progressive ideas are widely embraced by both Democrats and Republicans since it allows politicians to increase their power and social status under the guise of helping society while using involuntary investors taxpayers to bear the
cost of their programs. This is why presidents such as Republican Teddy Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson can historically be categorized as progressive, along with George W Bush and Barack Obama. Today, all four presidents drastically increase the size and scope of government under the guise of helping the vulnerable masses. Every basic tenant of progressivism has been fully embraced by both parties for more than a century.
If Republicans or moderate Democrats were not progressive, we'd see the following drastic decreases in government spending year after year. We, of course, see the opposite, regardless of which party is in power. Abolition of numerous regulatory agencies. Abolition of Teddy Roosevelt's antitrust laws. Universal school choice with the plan to fully voluntarize all education. Privatization of food stamp programs. Abolition of Franklin Roosevelt's minimum wage. Abolition of Woodrow Wilson's
income tax. Abolition of Woodrow Wilson's Federal Reserve. Abolition of the Department of Education. No, Doctor Cowan, your time is not being wasted when, for a monetary cost of $12.00 and an opportunity cost of roughly 8 hours 1.5 days of school, you get to see through a century of lies being promoted by the most powerful people on earth. My time is not wasted when decades of Humor's research is summarized for readers like me. Humor's ability to save people time is astounding.
You could spend 1000 hours watching mainstream news and never learn about the important empirical evidence humor brings to light. On page 189, humor addresses a claim few, if any, are familiar with. How could masking possibly increase the spread of disease? Most people also wear the same mask repeatedly for many days, so pathogens may accumulate in the mask. This is a particular problem with cloth masks, which many
people wore during the pandemic. Indeed, one study found that cloth masks caused a nearly sevenfold increase in the risk of influenza like illness compared to wearing no mask. He mentions this after quoting Doctor Anthony Fauci on 60 Minutes in March of 2020. Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks. There's no reason to be walking around with a mask.
Consider Humor's refutation of the entire concept that billionaires are people with bank accounts hoarding billions of stationary dollars. Jeff Bezos, for example, does not have $200 billion sitting in a bank account. Rather, he owns a large stake in Amazon. When you read that Bezos is worth $200 billion, that is based on the current Amazon stock price and the portion of the company that he owns. Having the opportunity to clearly see the world around you at a microscopic cost is not a
waste of time. Ever since I lost my crystal ball, I've been unable to see the future and determine what will persuade who and to what degree.
I can say with a high degree of confidence that the chance of humanity being de bamboozled from the wealth destructing, divisive death cult of progressivism is higher than it otherwise would be. When we have professors with pH DS debunking progressive conspiracy theories regarding the economy, race, American history and gender, The economist should be quick to ask, compared to what? How are people usually persuaded? White papers that are read only by peer reviewers and policy
wonks? Online videos, academic books, blog posts, tweets? What is the right way to persuade people out of 12 years of progressive indoctrination, followed by four years of progressive ideas dominating universities, followed by a life where the entire corporate press defends every welfare policy and regulatory department under the sun? Many people will be persuaded by progressive myths for three reasons. First, social proof or the tendency for humans to do what
others are already doing. The more people who unapologetically hold the anti progressive position, the more people will feel welcome to embrace anti progressive ideas such as free markets or decriminalization of all economic activity between consenting adults. Second. Authority or the human tendency for people to trust those with a high social status.
Having a published, well documented book by a PhD philosopher increases the legitimacy of his thesis in the minds of many that progressivism is primarily a mythical belief system. Third, the documentation is so overwhelming in the economic section alone, it is very likely to drastically increase the amount of insecurity progressives hold in their positions, thus decreasing the confidence they have in silencing critics.
Humor takes the poor get poorer concept and simply verifies if the evidence proves or disproves this. From page 146 of Progressive Myths 2007 Treasury Department report tracked individuals from 1996 to 2005. It found that 58% of people who started out in the bottom quintile of income earners in 1996 had moved up to a higher quintile by 2005. In two sentences, humor debunks the generational wealth conspiracy theory that almost
every progressive believes. Consider his debunking of the Rich Don't Pay taxes myth from page 155. In case you're wondering about the notorious top 1% of income earners, despite comprising only 1% of the population, they shoulder 1/3 of the entire net tax burden. Yes, the book is persuasive and likely to persuade people who already see progressive mascots like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez as complete sellouts. Allen asks whether or not we need narratives like the Black
Lives Matter movement. Refuted Need. It's not a matter of needing X, it's a matter of is X true, and will more people understanding X to be true be beneficial to readers and the general population? The Black Lives Matter movement rioted, looted and assaulted for months in the summer of 2020, victimizing innocent and powerless people when they were mad at the US government police
force. Conservatives on the other hand, when they were mad at the government, flew to Washington DC and stormed the Capitol building, taking on the most powerful people in society responsible for so many ills. Now do you see why the American establishment pushes the BLM narrative happily while calling January 6th the worst thing since the crimes of the Mongolian Empire? Imagine raising a male child and saying to the child five times a day you are discriminated against as a male.
You are 50% of the population, yet 95.5% of those killed by police, 90% of workplace deaths, and the only gender that must register for military, slavery, conscription and selective service. You must fight the white male, Asian woman pay gap with every fiber of your being since Asian men make more than white women. You must riot and loot every time a male is killed by the police.
Don't try to improve your skills, don't get on the job training, don't show up on time or be a good person in general. The problem has nothing to do with your behavior. The problem is the system. No sane parent would raise their son this way, yet it is how progressives wish for women and non whites to view the world around them.
Thankfully, Japanese Americans didn't take the advice of progressives, according to Thomas Soul in Civil Rights Rhetoric or Reality. Japanese immigrants to the United States also encountered persistent and escalating discrimination, culminating in their mass internment during World War 2. But by 1959 they had about equal the income of whites, and by 1969 Japanese American families were earning nearly one third higher incomes than the average
American family. Apparently, Indian Americans and Nigerian Americans have been able to dodge the white supremacy of America by having income significantly higher than whites on average. If you had to guess how many people in general know the following quote from Progressive Myths, pages 58 to 59, the police killed far more whites than blacks. Here are some more unarmed people who were killed by police recently.
Timothy Randall, Tyler Woodburn, Matthew Mitchell, John Ballmer, Richard Powell and Joseph Nagel. Jeffrey Glover, Klassen Crawford, Nicholas Roden. Those are all just from the year 2022. How many people saw the Dallas police murder Tony Temple by suffocating him to death on camera? How many of your students? Doctor Cowan can explain the disparity in the response by the corporate press between Tony Tempa and George Floyd.
Do they even know Kelly Thomas was beaten to death on camera by police officers who were then acquitted? Consider that unarmed white woman Ashley Babbitt was murdered by a black officer on camera and there was not even a trial, let alone wall to wall media coverage and months of
riots. Had they even heard the name Justine Damond, the unarmed white woman who was fatally shot by 31 year old Somali American Minneapolis Police Department officer Muhammad Noor after she had called 911 to report the possible assault of a woman in an alley behind her house? Humor ends with a heroic defense of America in general, giving Americans of both genders and all races a narrative to unify
us in divisive times. Quoting from page 241 of Progressive Myths, Why does America have so much power? The answer is that America makes the most of human talents. The society does not guarantee you success, but it lets you compete for success. Granted, not everyone has a perfectly equal opportunity, but the poor have much more opportunity in the US then in the vast majority of other societies today and throughout history.
For those of us unwilling or unable to spend $100,000 and four years of our life at university only to be turned into a race baiting, economically illiterate Bolshevik Michael Humor gives us the economic and philosophical education I wish I would have had in school. Yes, Doctor Cowan, we need this book.
I'm not sure why, in the face of a government which spends $6.27 trillion a year, regulates all commercial interaction, taxes the income of productive people to subsidize parasitic behavior while provoking a third World War, Cowan would insult Humor's heroic project of delegitimating the progressive worldview which
got us here. 1 theory is that humor did not take the boring, predictable establishment approach of Straussianing the public into his thesis by shrewdly communicating in such a way that nudges the layman while dog whistling truths only academics can detect. Humor self published on Amazon, the company that has done more to improve the living standards of poor people than any progressive government program
could have ever conceived. By not going through traditional roots, Humor was able to tell the truth, unapologetically debunking conspiracies about racism, sexism, and the idea that the rich are out to get us. I'm eternally grateful for academics like Jason Brennan, Tom Woods, Brian Kaplan, Scott Horton, and Michael Humor who speak to the public in unapologetic terms they can understand on the most important
issues facing the human race. Thanks to everyone for watching Keith Knight, Don't Tread on Anyone, and the Libertarian Institute.