Featured

Hippienomics

The spirit of free love — and free stuff — has hit the United States, and let’s all wallow in the glory of an economy where that’s the only thing one can afford to do is love. The spiritual masturbation of sitting around in a circle smoking a peace pipe and slapping tambourines, imagining everyone’s needs get magically met by wealthy “others,” represents the nadir of a civilization that had given it a good run, but was ultimately defeated — by hippies.

The Dionysian orgy of intersubjective social stuff that was the 1960s led to a lot of great music, fed by mind-altering drugs that made anything seem possible. Growing a ponytail could cure world hunger and sitting around naked in the mud smoking pot and discussing Khalil Gibran could open up an interdimensional rift sucking out all the negativity in the world. The possibilities were as endless as the stream of government handouts that would make them possible.

As the great political philosopher Steve Miller put it:

Feed the babies, Who don’t have enough to eat, Shoe the children, With no shoes on their feet, House the people, Livin’ in the street, Oh, oh, there’s a solution.

Who would do this? Always the government — the “man” whom the radicals purported to be fighting, and the “power” whom the left purported to be speaking “truth” to. From Rebels without a Cause to “Causists” without a Rebellion — how did these drug-addled hippies go from job-duckers to goose-steppers?

The intolerance of tolerance ultimately led the left into a non-conformist conformity that made the hippies easily manipulable by the state. The politically correct notion is that if one is for living one’s own life and being left alone by the government, then one isn’t interested in the left’s social justice program of liberating minorities from not having more money. Opposing the left automatically makes one a latent racist or sexist or homophobe.

In other words, being for freedom and individuality automatically makes one dialectically opposed to the left’s collectivist viewpoint of “helping” racial, ethnic and gender minorities. Where the money to help these minorities is assumed to come from is through taxation of the “racist” folks who are opposed to them. Since capitalism is held out by the hippies to be structurally bigoted, since de facto people are equal and should have equality of means, that means “the white man” (not just particular individuals, mind you) systematically oppressed minorities to get into this position of “cultural hegemony.”

The state is meanwhile wrongly dismissed by these beatnik finger-snappers as its own interest, since we supposedly live in a “democracy.” This means that any majority the left can cobble together would automatically have “right” on its side — an obvious fallacy. Meanwhile, the morals of the nation are undermined through relativism, and the floodgates to illegal immigration are opened, while the introduction of foreign ideals and lifestyles (which are unerringly statist and collectivist) is lubricated by “cultural diversity.” The point is that the state-sanctioned looting of the capitalist system until its collapse is supposedly justified by opposing the racist, bigoted, sexist economy and the nation’s seemingly corresponding history — which was purportedly altered only by the radicals and progressives who championed the little guy (by building state power over his life).

Now, the history of the United States has been one of the systematic and predictable liberation of minorities, according to the internal logic of the founding documents. The original Declaration of Independence condemned slavery and this was supported by the great majority of colonies. The Constitution’s “three-fifths” clause actually undermined the southern states’ representation in the Congress. Not to mention that slavery is completely un-capitalist, because it is fundamentally opposed to property rights, individual rights, and economic freedom. One owns one’s own labor and can dispose of it as one sees fit; but this does not mean that one can enslave others to one’s own wants and needs through the government.

But because of the state income tax and progressive taxation, passed by the virulently racist Woodrow Wilson, the government not only has the license to control all the money in the economy, but can penalize producers and reward non-producers. Because of the central bank, the systematic destruction of the economy can be forestalled to some unseen, unknown date in the future, and the fingerprints for the predictable demise framed to be those of the rational opposition who try to halt the madness just prior to the inevitable collapse.

The reaction of the radical libertarians, whom Ayn Rand called the “hippies of the right,” has been to oppose state power to the utmost — seemingly for its own sake. Often unstated is the moral case for capitalism and the sanction for state power used for ethical purposes, such as to defend private property and make the case for individual rights.

The key to our nation’s implosion is the destruction of reason. As the great polemicist P.J. O’Rourke wrote of hippies:

Everything. You name it and I believed it. I believed love was all you need. I believed you should be here now. I believed drugs could make everyone a better person. I believed I could hitchhike to California with thirty-five cents in my pocket and people would be glad to feed me. I believed Mao was cute. I believed private property was wrong. I believed my girlfriend was a witch. I believed my parents were Nazi space monsters. I believed the university was putting saltpeter in the cafeteria food. I believed the NLF were the good guys in Vietnam. I believed Lyndon Johnson was plotting to murder all the Negroes. I believed Yoko Ono was an artist. I believed I would live forever or until twenty-one, whichever came first. I believed the world was about to end. I believed the Age of Aquarius was about to happen. I believed the I-Ching said to cut classes and take over the dean’s office. I believed wearing my hair long would end poverty and injustice. I believed there was a great throbbing web of psychic mucus and we were all apart of it somehow. I managed to believe in Ghandi and H. Rap Brown at the same time. With the exception of everything my mom and dad said, I believed everything.

This explains the view of the left-wingers today, who don’t feel compelled to pass something as trifling as a budget, stare unblinking at unending trillions in deficits and shrug, and believe that mankind itself is a toxic scourge that must be environmentally controlled by a necessarily totalitarian state.

The starkest contrast was provided of late between the fledgling tea party and Occupy Wall Street movement, and the cultural elites chose to demonize the former (apparently for their corny tee shirts and habit of leaving public spaces cleaner than when they found them) and lionize the drug-using, syphilis-spreading, criminal syndicate of smelly tramps and trust-fund free-loaders agitating for an omnipotent state. In other words, former hippies endorsed their own and ridiculed their targets. No surprise there.

But at some point, the enablers turn their backs on the parasites — Atlas has to shrug. Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping

Support Conservative Daily News with a small donation via Paypal or credit card that will go towards supporting the news and commentary you've come to appreciate.

Related Articles

One Comment

Back to top button