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Michael Lind

Michael Lind Books

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“Page 199: According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Statistics, more than 20 percent of all imports to the United States come from foreign subsidiaries or affiliates of U.S. multinational corporations. … This is why American business is so adamantly opposed to tariffs—not fear of foreign retaliation, but fear of tariffs on products from American-owned industrial plantations.”

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Book:The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution
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“Page 200: This school of thought might be called “free trade plus.” The United States will benefit from global free trade, these liberals argue, as long as the skills and productivity of American workers are upgraded. Higher skills translate into higher productivity, which will in turn translate into higher wages. Here a good theory falls victim to an evil fact: productivity has been going up in America, without resulting wage gains for American workers. The average productivity of American workers increased by more than 30 percent between 1977 and 1992, while the average real wage fell by 13 percent.”

Free Trade
Book:The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution
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“Page 204: In an 1848 address, he (Karl Marx) observed: "Generally speaking, the Protective system in these days is conservative, while the Free Trade system works destructively. It breaks up old nationalities and carries antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie to the uttermost point. In a work, the Free Trade system hastens the Social Revolution. In this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, I am in favor of Free Trade." … the neo-fascist right is more likely than the cosmopolitan left to benefit from erosion of living standards by free-market globalism. Laissez-faire globalism may breed its own nemesis, in the form of the most radical and destructive kinds of ethnic nationalism and economic statism.”

Free Trade
Book:The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution
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“Page 147: Over time, this lack of participation in the military by the white overclass could lead to an increasing divergence between the norms of the civilian and the military elites in the United States, and a declining respect for civilian authority by a heavily middle-class and working-class military. The incidents of insubordination that greeted President Clinton’s attempt to end the ban on homosexual men and women in the military showed the existence of both the cultural gap and the possible consequences.”

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Book:The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution
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“Libertarians are not the brightest lights in the candelabra, a fact that is evident from the alternatives they tend to offer to public prevention of private abuses. For example: if you don’t like working a hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents a day, then find another employer! It is obvious to intelligent people, if not libertarians, that more generous employers will price themselves out of a market whose standards are set by the most rapacious.”

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Author:Michael Lind
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“If you have free universal health care and free education supported by public school taxes, then you have more bargaining power with your bosses, but if everything is privatized, and ordinary Americans have to pay for everything through their wages, then they're at the mercy of their employers. If the workers know they'll be ruined if they lost their jobs, they're not going to be uppity. You want to break their spirit.”

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Author:Michael Lind
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“Civil libertarian activists are found overwhelmingly on the left. Their right-wing brethren have been concerned with issues more important than civil rights, voting rights, abuses by police and the military, and the subordination of politics to religion - issues like the campaign to expand human freedom by turning highways over to toll-extracting private corporations and the crusade to funnel money from Social Security to Wall Street brokerage firms.”

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Author:Michael Lind
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“On the conservative side, today's libertarianism is far more dogmatic and devoid of qualification than the liberalism of Adam Smith or J.S. Mill. Like Marxism, libertarianism is a utopian worldview based on an economic-determinist vision of history. Unlike Marxism, libertarianism is highly specific in its predictions about the transition to the utopian world order, rendering it vulnerable to fact.”

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Author:Michael Lind
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