Truth vs. lies

"What is truth?" asked Pontius Pilate, who then went away to wash his hands. Why didn't he stick around for the answer? Nineteen centuries later, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Herbert Agar wrote, "The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear." Christ calls Satan a liar and a murderer from the beginning. Every tyranny since the dawn of civilization has been based on lies and a very simple technique always has been employed to sustain it. The European socialists in the past century excelled in that technique, finding talented disciples in the American progressive movement.

"A lie told often enough becomes truth," said Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the socialist coup d'état in Russia. "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it," said German National Socialist Adolf Hitler as he rediscovered the key to the mint. His Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels knew that "The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie." And so he counseled, "It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

American leftists know that for their ideology to survive, they need to disassociate it from its compromised European versions. Our domestic progressives claim that their utopia contains no totalitarian elements but their propagandist technique follows the old fundamental principle to "confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."

The Nanny State uses public education to undermine capitalism, spreading the lie that free enterprise multiplies injustice by hurting the poor, that markets are invented by the rich and powerful to exploit the masses. The mortal enemy of modern paternalism is a simple historical truth: The poor and oppressed owe more gratitude to the "spirit of capitalism" than they do to FDR, LBJ, the UN, and U2. (See "The Age of Milton Friedman" by Andrei Shleifer.)