Book Review: "The 5,000 Year Leap" by Cleon Skousen

[_EAllusion]

China is the closest thing we have to pure capitalism? What on earth? There still is heavy government involvement in China's economy. The gradual liberal market reforms introduced over the past two generations are a scaling back of command economy. Somehow that got confused with some sort of lassiez faire fantasy. I thought that review was generally bad, but this assertion bowled me over.

Everybody Wang Chung -

I'm not aware of any person considered a "founding father" who was agnostic, though I'm willing to accept some were if you have some examples. A few like Paine and Ethan Allen were deists. A good measure more were what can be described as theistic rationalists. Then many more were ordinary Christians of one stripe or another. Pretty much all the enlightenment political figures who were theistic rationalists and deists would probably be atheists or "agnostics" today, but you have to appreciate them in their historical context.

Mind you the general thesis you are criticizing so historically ignorant and wrong that it's difficult to know where to begin. But I think you were promoting a myth with that comment.

[Guest]

fgn

[_MrStakhanovite]

Constitution regarding the kind of civilization and society it aimed at generating, and the relationship between the government and the individual, and the individual and individual is, indeed, heavily grounded in Old Testament moral teaching, as well as New Testament concepts of optimum ethical relations

Someone has been neglecting their study of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles.

ETA: Namely, Droopy.

[Guest]

yu

[Guest]

tyjh

[_Droopy]

In a nutshell (emphasis on "nut"), Cleon Skousen asserts that the US Constitution is based on ancient Hebrew political structures, which came to us via the Anglo-Saxons.

I'd have to check that claim, as, given past experience here, your intellectual integrity in these matters has been shown to be a bit questionable. Suffice it to say, however, that this is hardly a controversial claim, save on the Cass Sunstien Left. The moral and ethical background of the Constitution regarding the kind of civilization and society it aimed at generating, and the relationship between the government and the individual, and the individual and individual is, indeed, heavily grounded in Old Testament moral teaching, as well as New Testament concepts of optimum ethical relations. The Founders were seeking an enduring and sustainable social order, for which morality of the Old Testament and New Testament kind were considered foundation. They were not after sixties-like radical personal autonomy, but ordered liberty.

In actuality, the real success of the colony and the state of Virginia began because John Rolfe, Jamestown settler and husband of Pocahontas, started growing tobacco. Glenn Beck conveniently ignores the fact that Virginia was built on land stolen from Native Americans, land farmed by labor stolen from African slaves. The real success was because of free land and free labor.

Clearly, you absorbed your dumbed down public school education quite well, no doubt licking your chops at the prospect of absorbing even more quasi-Frankfurt School propaganda at college. In reality, as anyone with a modicum of actual historical knowledge of this episode understands, Jamestown failed because its original governmental structure imposed a communitarian, socialist economic model on the colony. Incentives to produce were destroyed, market signals did not exist, and the result was dire poverty and starvation.

Indeed, a number of these colonists were indentured servants (the typical resident of a modern socialist country, in other words) who could not own property and had no stake in the success of his own labor.

When a new govoner came on the scene, and brought evil Reaganomics with him, things changed. As historian Matthew Page Andrews related:

“As soon as the settlers were thrown upon their own resources, and each freeman had acquired the right of owning property, the colonists quickly developed what became the distinguishing characteristic of Americans – an aptitude for all kinds of craftsmanship coupled with an innate genius for experimentation and invention.”

John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, said that once private property was instituted, men could engage in “gathering and reaping the fruits of their labors with much joy and comfort.”

Like most leftists, and like most leftists here, you are just very poorly read outside your own ideological cubby hole, but, with a little effort, that could be remedied within a few years, but you'll have to get cracking. Its later than you think.

...and to claim that religion played a major role in what the author calls "The 5000 Year Leap." (Where DID he get that number, anyway? Not 3000? Not 7000?).

If you had actually read the book, instead of, Graham-like, just scanning it for polemical ammunition, you would know that this is a reference to the coming forth of the principles of freedom - classical liberalism and the Constitution - after 5,000 years of civilization in which only baby steps to such a conception were ever taken, and, in most cases, despotism has been the norm.

It is well-documented that many of the founders were either agnostic or at most deists. This book overstates the role of religion in general and Christianity specifically in the writing of the Constitution and the creation of our country.

This is where your deep immersion politically correct leftist mythopoeic alternative history and innocence of the serious study of history takes flight and also, because of this, the easiest to debunk. The majority of the Founders were practicing or nominal members of established Christian denominations. 24 of the 54 who signed the Declaration were heads of seminaries. And of the debaters and signers of the Constitution, virtually all, save perhaps Franklin (and even this is highly questionable, given statements in his autobiography) were either denominational Christians or Christian deists. Throwing the term "deist" around just won't get you where you need to be, as this deism, as with Jefferson, Washington and others among the core Founders, was Christian deism, and not the vague, hazy deism of modern secularist idolotarians. They were not, for the most part, the modern secular deists who believe in the hand that winds the clock and move on, and makes no claims of absolute moral or metaphysical realities. Jefferson, usually held up by ideologically interested leftists as a deist with vague views of religion and its place in society, believed in life after death and reward or punishment for acts committed here.

The idea that most of them were agnostic is a lie, pure and simple.

I'm quite sure some of those that founded the nation did indeed think that they had been given this continent by God.

Some probably didn't, but the Book of Mormon answers that question decisively, in any case.

That's why they had so little problem moving, killing and removing the "savages", promoting slavery and restricting voting rights to only white men.

1. Do you think some entity "gave" this continent to Amerindians?

2. The Indians had been killing, driving, torturing, eating, sacrificing, and committing genocide upon each other for many centuries prior to the coming of Europeans. There was a tragic clash of civilizations that took place, with deep fault on both sides, nuance completely washed out by your intellectually castrated politically correct version of American history.

3. Slavery was a part of the ancient regime; an economic practice that was as old as human civilization and as well known among Amerindians and Africans as among historic European peoples. The Founders became overwhelming against slavery as the principles of the new nations gelled and were given solid form, but the resistance of the South imposed the need of a trade-off (the basis of practical politics in a civilized society, really) so that the nation as a United States of American could be inaugurated. As the core features of both the Declaration and Constitution negate slavery, it was only a matter of time before it had to be abandoned. But five or six thousand year old traditions die hard.

Skousen quotes various eighteenth-century patriots on the evils of what Samuel Adams, in 1768, called "the Utopian schemes of leveling," which Skousen equates with redistribution of wealth, but he does not mention many of the Founders' endorsement of taxing the rich to support the general welfare. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote approvingly in 1811 of having federal taxes (then limited to tariffs) fall solely on the wealthy, which meant that "the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings”.

And beyond this one Father as your proof text, who? And what, pray tell, do you think those taxes would have entailed (their source, rate, and structure)?

Skousen also challenges the separation of church and state, asserting that "the Founders were not indulging in any idle gesture when they adopted the motto In God We Trust." In reality, the motto that came out of the Constitutional Convention was 'E Pluribus Unum': out of many, one. "In God We Trust" came much later and its use on coins was first permitted in 1864. Only in 1955, during the Cold War, did Congress mandate that it appear on all currency.

Which careful hides the fact that the concept of "separation of church and state" appears nowhere in the Constitution, but in a piece of correspondence between Jefferson and another of the Founders. In any case, anyone with a decent grasp of the Federalist Papers, and other writings of the Founders, would understand the clear meaning of the first amendment in this regard, which was that Congress shall make no law regarding it. That's not a separation of church and state in the modern, leftist/secularist sense, but between the state and private life. The only point of tit was to prevent the imposition of a state church, or state support of a particular denomination.

Nothing more.

In addition to everything else, Skousen does not seem to understand that the Declaration of Independence is not part of the Constitution and did not establish the structure of our government.

The Declaration is a political philosophical manifesto, delineating the first principles of good government upon which the Constitution was, indeed based. The Constitution is a legal "fleshing out" of the first principles expressed in the Declaration.

This is not history, it is fantasy. This country was created on the ideals of the European Enlightenment, with a secular government and bountiful civil liberties.

Deeply grounded in a background of Old Testament and New Testament moral law and ethical teaching, without which such a civil order could not be sustained and the overriding importance of religion in private and public life. Left-wing myth no. 666 is that the Founders established a "secular" government. No, they patently didn't. They established a government utterly neutral toward religion, a very salient difference.

The enlightenment rationalism and secularism you mention here, and of which you and the Left are actually intellectual heirs, have a pedigree in another revolution -the French Revolution, which took another direction entirely from the American.

The Founding Fathers were, for the most part, intelligent secularists who tried desperately to keep the majority of the type of people that would enjoy reading “The 5,000 Year Leap” out of government.

Gaseous revisionist nonsense. The Founders were, overwhelmingly, either practicing Christians, Christian deists with core metaphysical ideas grounded in what they understood as biblical truth claims, or, in a handful of cases, deists with a more vague conception of metaphysical verities, but who were still deeply grounded in the moral requirements of a sustainable social order based in a republican structure and the core place of Christianity in that overall matrix.

If the Founding Fathers wanted religious whack-jobs they would have gone back to Europe.

Or, they just would have become revolutionary socialists or environmentalists, which, at present, are virtually synonymous.

Our founding fathers were very explicit about separation of church and state and wisely so, look at the religiously run countries of today and what they do to their citizens.

No, they weren't. They were very explicit about the complete neutrality of the state in matters both religious and political as to speech, practice, and expression of ideas. Secularist fundamentalists such as yourself are turning the Constitution on its head in your own fervid witch hunt to ideologically cleans American culture of religion, but many of us have your number, Wang, and always have.

I guarantee that if the religious right got power in America they would be every bit as vicious as their fundamentalist analogs in other countries.

More leftist gas, and long debunked. It is only when religion and state unite that problems arise in any degree. The greatest mass murder and warfare in all human history has occurred in the 20th century under socialism and its sibling sects; secular fundamentalist religions who's core ideology is both relentlessly atheistic and vehemently secular.

Cleon Skousen encourages us to revert back to 1776, yet conveniently forgets the oppression of women, the enslavement of Africans, and the persecution of Native Americans, etc. Cleon Skousen has distorted some facts, and cherry-picked others, to reinforce his beliefs, not the truth.

PC blah blah, and he does no such thing. Your intellectual credibility and integrity have just gone to the bargain basement, Wang.

Welcome to the Trailerpark.


Ya'll come back now, here?

[_Droopy]

Someone has been neglecting their study of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles.

I'm not really sure if people like you are even worth my time debating any longer, in all frankness. I can nary suffer under the oppressive, suffocating shroud of this kind of dense ignorance and intellectual obscurantism.

Its becoming quite literally nauseous.

[_Droopy]

1) all of American progress is due to capitalism and freedom to do what you want. False, Thomas Jefferson said "If men were angels, we wouldn't need government." We need a big government to have enough power to control giant corporations. That should be obvious now, as we are about to fail & fall into another depression because of the greedy SOB's who screwed us all, and stole money right and left, because Bush destroyed most of the oversight and watchdogs who were trying to keep unbridled greed from running rampant! Capitalism without morality and a stronger structure to keep oversight is the same as totalitarianism, as it will inevitably lead to one successful corporation destroying another until there is only one left.

As an example, look at the excesses of Microsoft when it was in its heyday. There were dozens of excellent computer programs written/invented in the late 1980's and early to mid-1990's which were brought about by small businesses, and which their survival depended on selling. In most cases like this, and I am aware of close to 10 personally I was interested in, Microsoft announced they were going to add that feature either to their operating system, or to Internet Explorer in the next year. In every case I know of like this, the sales of these small start-up companies (the kind that create the 5000 year leap) dropped so drastically, that the companies went bankrupt and died out. In the vast majority of these cases, Microsoft never did bring out the feature they had said they would. It is not clear to me if they were just plain evil, or if they were intending to produce something like the products they killed off, but in either case, no one else would dare step in and try to produce it, after seeing how the originators of the idea were crushed by the larger corporation, Microsoft. 2) Perhaps this man's ideals could be met by a modified form of capitalism wherein there was some society or government defined limit to how big a company could be allowed to grow. It should be obvious to everyone today that when some companies grow too big they suffer from the dictator at the top.

(In case you never thought about it, the government that everyone seems to like to vilify and hate, is elected by us, but the CEO of your company is the dictator that can fire you any time he wants, and thus he has life and death control over whether or not you can pay for your house and feed your family.) The corporate CEO does not answer to you, and you cannot vote for or against him unless you own stock, and in a large corporation that means very little, because the amount of stock you can afford is a paltry percentage of the total amount unless you are a billionaire. One of the major problems in the world now is the growth to humongous size of corporations, so that they are able to control governments. A few examples: a) look at the horror and devastation that Shell Oil has brought on several small South American nations, where they are so powerful that they can afford to give millions of dollars (or hundreds of millions) to support corrupt politicians, and they are (or at the very minimum were up until a few years ago) polluting the environment to the point they should have senior executives being tried for mass murder! (Watch some of the environmentally oriented documentaries on educational or science channels for more details) There are multiple whole villages where massive increases in cancer are seen from all the organic toxins just being dumped on the ground, or where oil pipelines are leaking, but it's cheaper to let them leak, then to repair them. This is great for the efficiency of capitalism, but morally reprehensible to the average human. Similarly, towns in Nigeria are now uninhabitable due to oil company callousness (I think this may also be from Shell Oil actually).

Another example of a company grown too large, too big in the ego of the CEO, and creating disaster for others, including almost ALL of its employees is Enron. Enron purposely re-designed the way its accounting practices were carried out so it could deceive the investors and its own employees. It is a perfect example of what happens when capitalism is allowed to run free with no laws, morals or oversight from a more powerful government that has enough power to control it. It was not controlled in the end, it simply imploded, and maybe less than a dozen of the exploiters who screwed grandmothers in California out of their life savings (making them pay higher electric bills due to purposely staging brownout when there was plenty of power available), as opposed to hundreds or thousands of immoral SOB's who should have gone to jail for the equivalent of economic war crimes against the American public.

3) American giant corporations are NOT American. Look at Haliburton, who screwed the American taxpayer out of billions of dollars by having no bid contracts in Iraq, thanks to having Vice President Cheney as a friend in the White House. They have now moved their corporate headquarters to Dubai, an Arab country! All these SOB's care about is earning more money, and damn whomever gets in their way.

4) There are good things that have been done by large corporations, but that does not mean we should roll over as this author seems to think, and just let everyone have at it, doing whatever they want to, to try and invent or build whatever they can get away with.

5) Look at China today, that's the closest thing we have to pure capitalism on the planet today. The government lets them run wild, only pulling them in when they threaten to destroy their trade advantages by causing bad headlines such as those with the poisoning of our dogs, or the lead based paint on children's toys sent to America. (Then they finally did what maybe we should do with some of our evil CEO's, they executed some of them.) That serves as a good reminder to the next guy that maybe he should not just do what he can get away with all the time.)

6) One of the most obvious Errors in this book is possibly closest to me. As a physician, with real knowledge of how drugs are tested, OK'ed by the FDA, and recalled, I am aware of the huge influence that multibillion dollar companies have on drug regulation. The FDA in the last 10 to 20 years has started allowing many more drugs to be put on the market, based on studies funded by the drug industry! (Has anyone here heard of conflict of interest?) Obviously, if your University or you as a professor of Medicine obtain a multi-million dollar grant to research a drug for a company that is paying you the millions of dollars, you are going to be influenced (even if it's subconsciously) to not want to "bite the hand that feeds you." A specific example is the drug Vioxx, an anti-inflammatory drug. Soon after it was released onto the market, there began to be reports that there were a significant number of people having kidney failure (correction, death from heart attacks) due to use of this drug. It was still not pulled off the market for almost 2 more years, as the FDA (which is highly compromised) kept putting off pulling it, based on arguments from the drug company, and listening to arguments like: "What will those people using it do, there's no good substitute for it?" [Yeah, well, there's no good substitute for having your own functioning kidneys either!)

I think you guys get the point. Capitalism unbridled is a horror of manipulation and domination by the most efficient company, which does not mean the most compassionate and caring company. Corporate bottom lines are based on profit, not on not killing people or polluting the environment, and basically, we should not let capitalism run rampant without large powerful government oversight, or we will eventually be in a dictatorship run by one company with executives that we do not get to vote in or out of office. Thanks for reading.

It would probably be impossible, and I mean literally and unambiguous impossible, to present, in one bloviating rant, the sheer density of economic illiteracy, historical ignorance, spin control, fast and loose playing with the truth, and outright mendacity as this post.

There is virtually no point in responding, as it would take an intellectual high pressure fire hose to clean out the stables here of the manure Kevin has accumulated in just one lengthy anti-liberty, anti-property rights, anti-liberal, statist/populist Marxist spleen venting.

Classic.

[_Tarski]

you are just very poorly read outside your own ideological cubby hole

Oh the irony. Stunning.

[_Droopy]

you are just very poorly read outside your own ideological cubby hole

Oh the irony. Stunning.

See my post to Stak above.