Today, free market capitalism is under attack more than any other time in our nation’s history, whether the target is Wall Street, oil companies, or as Annie Leonard would have it, our whole system of wealth creation in general.

Many Americans are still confused about what went wrong on Wall Street during the 08′ financial crisis, and the distinction between free market capitalism and its ugly half sibling, crony capitalism, can be difficult for many to discern.

Enter the Atlas Network’s 2011 Morality of Free Enterprise Initiative, and its latest video explaining this important and often overlooked distinction.

For more information, visit www.AtlasNetwork.org/morality

That story really stayed with me. So here is the first of a new series of FIREWALL videos, called “What We Believe.” In them, I’ll do my very best to explain in as rational and non-antagonistic a method as possible, just what the fundamentals of modern Conservatism — especially Tea Party Conservatism — are all about.

Part one covers the two big items: small government, and free enterprise. In the future we’ll look at elitism, wealth creation, gun ownership, immigration, and more.

I know I don’t speak for everyone on these issues — no one speaks for everyone, not even those in the same camp — but I do hope to capture the core beliefs in a way that people who share these views can use to pass on to those people in their lives who don’t.

More soon…

At first glance, I did not recognize that the book being advertised is one for which, in a sense, I am responsible. It turns out that the “new” book is only an old (portion of a) book, now adorned by a new subtitle and two new introductory paragraphs by the Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson. If I reveal that the book’s author is Joseph A. Schumpeter, many readers will recognize it immediately as Part II of that famous economist’s best-known work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, first published in 1942, with subsequent editions in 1947 and 1950.

The new book’s front cover has a blurb from Fortune that declares Schumpeter to have been “the most influential economist of the twentieth century . . . a major prophet.” The back cover has an embarrassingly superficial blurb by publisher Steve Forbes that, among other things, describes Schumpeter as “the twentieth century’s foremost economist.”

I do not consider Schumpeter entitled to be called the most influential economist of the past century―that distinction unfortunately belongs to John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman surely deserves the second place. As for Schumpeter’s rank as a prophet or as the intellectually foremost economist, I would place him below Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek.

Nevertheless, Schumpeter was unquestionably one of the most important economists of his day, and his work has continued for good reason to attract readers ever since his death in 1950.

His analysis of the historical dynamics of classic capitalism, which makes up Part II of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, though contestable on various grounds, may be, all in all, the best ever written, and it certainly remains among the most thought-provoking. (My own thoughts on Schumpeter’s analysis appear briefly in my book Crisis and Leviathan, pp. 239-44.)

In the mid-1970s, having read Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy repeatedly and having used it to good effect in my teaching, I sent a proposal to Harper & Row, the publisher. I proposed that Part II of the book be published as a separate work with an introduction by me. I asked for a reasonable royalty on sales of this proposed book. Harper & Row declined my offer. The publisher liked the idea of a stand-alone publication of Part II, with my introduction, but did not want to pay me a royalty. Not long afterward, in 1978, I was surprised to find in the bookstores the very volume I had proposed, with an introduction by Robert Lekachman, who evidently had been willing to work for less than I when he was approached by the publisher. Somewhat pushed out of shape by this pilfering of my idea, I wrote a letter to Harper & Row to let their managers know how unprofessional, at best, I considered their action to be. As I recall―although my memory is foggy in this regard―Harper then sent me a nominal “finder’s fee.”

(This episode, by the way, was but one of many that led me to propound Higgs’s Law of Publishing, which states: All publishers strive to maximize losses, but by virtue of sheer stupidity, some of them screw up so royally that they earn enough income to remain in business.)

Returning from the foregoing personal digression, what are we to make of the idea that capitalism might survive, indeed, of the idea that it has survived to date, when in fact it has scarcely ever existed and, even when prevailing economic conditions and institutions verged most closely on the capitalist model, sometime between the 1830s and World War I in the United States, they suffered a variety of government interventions and distortions that made the prevailing economic order, like nearly all such orders in reality, a form of “mixed economy”?

My friend Sheldon Richman has been on something of a crusade recently against the defense of capitalism by those who favor a free society, which of course includes a free-market economy. He prefers that defenders of freedom avoid the defense of something called capitalism because, first, the term derives in large part from enemies of the free society, such as the Marxists, and, second, because it has always served and continues to serve the enemies of a free society as a perennial object of misplaced responsibility, a (nonexistent) malefactor to be blamed for every economic problem the government’s countless interventions bring about.

Thus, most recently, by undertaking a series of decisive interventions stretching from the Fed‘s mismanagement of monetary policy, to Fannie and Freddie’s subsidies of unqualified home buyers, to the self-serving idiocies of Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and Co., among other ill-fated actions, the government created the complex of interrelated disasters that includes the housing boom and bust, the financial debacle of 2008, and the economic recession since 2007. And who’s to blame? That’s right: capitalism. Which must then be “reformed” by mountains of additional government interventions laid atop the previously existing mountain, leaving, of course, Barney and Chris sitting pretty as the reformers, and the key troublemakers―the Fed, Fannie, and Freddie―smelling like roses, with the Fed being given even more power, and Fannie and Freddie being fed a diet of hundreds of billions of dollars in ongoing taxpayer-funded bailouts to continue doing the damage they do.

Perhaps, if we all frankly admitted that capitalism has been as dead as a dodo since 1914, if not even longer, then such factually absurd, ideologically inspired, politically tactical blame-casting would be precluded. It would make no more sense than blaming our economic troubles on the divine right of absolute monarchs, centuries after that doctrine has been abandoned. Perhaps.

So far, however, I have refrained from coming completely onboard Richman’s crusade ship. For many proponents of the free society, capitalism has always signified the ideal of the free-market society more than it has referred to any of its deeply compromised and distorted instantiations that have occurred historically. These people are understandably reluctant to give up still another cherished shibboleth to their enemies, as they previously surrendered their most positive and important ideological identity as liberals. So, even though I rarely use the term capitalism, and I strive to make as clear as I can the difference between the ideal free society (which I defend) and the realities of any existing or previously existing society (which I only study), for now, I decline to condemn those who continue to defend capitalism. They may be making a rhetorical mistake, as Richman insists, yet their hearts are in the right place. It will be easier to straighten out people’s rhetoric in due course than to bring about the change of heart that so many misguided people must experience, if even a shred of freedom is to be preserved.

Codevilla cuts immediately to the core: the United States today is divided into (a) a ruling class, which dominates the government at every level, the schools and universities, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and a great deal else, and (b) all of the rest of us, a heterogeneous agglomeration that Codevilla dubs the country class. The ruling class holds the lion’s share of the institutional power, but the country class encompasses perhaps two-thirds of the people.

Members of the two classes do not like one another. In particular, the ruling class views the rest of the population as composed of ignoramuses who are vicious, violent, racist, religious, irrational, unscientific, backward, generally ill-behaved, and incapable of living well without constant, detailed direction by our betters; and it views itself as perfectly qualified and entitled to pound us into better shape by the generous application of laws, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and unceasing declarations of its dedication to bringing the country—and indeed the entire world—out of its present darkness and into the light of the Brave New World it is busily engineering.

This class divide has little to do with rich versus poor or Democrat versus Republican. At its core, it has to do with the division between, on the one hand, those whose attitudes are attuned to the views endorsed by the ruling class (especially “political correctness”) and whose fortunes are linked directly or indirectly with government programs and, on the other hand, those whose outlooks and interests derive from and focus on private affairs, especially the traditional family, religion, and genuine private enterprise. Above all, as Codevilla makes plain, “for our ruling class, identity always trumps.” These people know they are superior in every way, and they are not shy about letting us know that they are. Arrogance might as well be their middle name.

The ruling class, not surprisingly, is also the statist party:

[O]ur ruling class’s standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government – meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc.

Despite the rulers’ chronic complaints about people’s exercising “discrimination” of one kind or another, they have no intention of treating everybody equally. Hence, “[l]aws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally.” As the recent health-care and financial-reform statutes illustrate perfectly, however, much of the inequality is achieved not directly, but by the statutes’ delegation of authority to countless regulatory and administrative bodies, which will use their ample discretion to do the desired dirty work.

Codevilla’s description of the ruling class and its modus operandi is longer and more detailed than his account of the country class, which is probably inevitable in view of the latter’s extreme heterogeneity. And the force of his argument wanes a bit toward the end of the essay, when he muses about how a country party might turn the tide against the domination and contempt it presently suffers at the hands of its officious rulers. Nevertheless, I heartily recommend this magnificent essay, which is one of the most intelligent, forthright discussions of America’s current socio-political condition I have ever read. If we serfs are ever to escape the grip of our overbearing, self-appointed nobility, the first requirements will be to recognize correctly our current condition, to denounce openly its injustice and idiocy, and to deride every claim of legitimacy or entitlement our rulers have the temerity to make or presume.

Congressional approval ratings are at historic lows at around 14% (an acquaintance joked that during the American Revolution, the British Crown had double that approval rating, with roughly a third of colonists supporting the Crown and Parliament). Rasmussen recently reported that only 21% of Americans believe our government has the consent of the governed, and CNN reports that 56% of Americans believe that our government poses an immediate threat to American citizens’ rights and freedoms . . . well you get the idea.

The American people are making it clear where they stand, and in an unmistakable manner. Next week, on April 15th, more than one million people will be at more than 1,000 Tea Party protests across the country as more and more Americans come out to protest where elected officials are taking this country.

These events, though, are more than simply about venting and having their voices heard. They serve to connect people and communities and grassroots organizations. They also allow us to celebrate and remind the rest of our fellow citizens about our Nation’s founding principles: free men, free markets, and the rule of law, which so many in Washington and in state capitols seem to have forgotten.

But we must not allow all of our efforts and energy on April 15th to dissipate on the 16th. If our voices are truly to be heard, we need to build on our protests and begin implementing. A return to our founding principles as a way of life will only occur if those in the Tea Party and 9-12 movement dig into their local communities, hard-wire their electoral precincts, identify and get people trained to run for state and local office, build muscular grassroots coalitions to keep their elected officials accountable, and create greater transparency in local government. Only thenwill we begin to see real change.

That’s why American Majority, Smart Girl Politics, the John Hancock Committee for the States and RedState.com are joining together to conduct the Post-Party Summits: Organizing for a Free America. The time for the Tea Partiers and 9.12ers to organize in a concerted fashion has come.

The Post-Party Summits will not be about firing people up with motivational speakers, though we’ve got some great talent coming in to do just that. It will not be about whipping up emotions and telling people, “We need to fight. We need to have our voices heard,” and then sending those people home with no mission or goals or tools to achieve them. No, the Summits are about empowering people. They are about giving people the useful tools for making the necessary and great changes needed to turn this country around. Each Summit will have 15 workshops with topics ranging from how to hardwire your precincts, to running for office at the state and local level, to conducting voter registration drives, to learning how to become an investigative journalist. The Summits are about organizing, networking, and more importantly, about winning. After all, the people who get to create policy are those who make it across the finish line on Election Day.

Let me explain why they are called Post-Party Summits. It mostly has to do with the fact that they are in the weeks following April 15th. However, it is also about the idea that freedom-loving conservatives must take it upon themselves and move past a reliance on traditional political parties. The country will not be saved by political parties. A party for party’s sake isn’t going to get us very far.Do we really think that simply electing Republicans in the fall solves our problems? We’ve been there, done that. We do need a change of leadership in Washington and elsewhere, but America will only be truly saved by those Americans who take it upon themselves to do the hard work necessary to turn this country around.

Our summit is all about reinvigorating American Exceptionalism: the ideal that it is the individual – not the government – who is capable of rising to the great tasks and accomplishing great things. I challenge people when I speak that they should not assume that the person standing to their right or left will do anything to save this great country; they, themselves, must act. For too long we’ve assumed that the right things would be done by our elected officials; as a result we as a country are in something of a political depression, lost in those wrong assumptions.

No more.

We have awakened and we know the tasks before us: we must have new political leadership that puts into policy the great ideals of our Founding: limited government, free enterprise and individual freedom. We must have new leadership that reflects the values and interests of the American people, not the interests of the political class or those I call the patronage system cronies. We must have responsive government that respects the American people. We must have the American people engaged and demanding greater accountability and transparency from its government and leaders, and that accountability must be ongoing, irrespective of who is elected to office. The time for that change is now.

A good model in American history is what the Progressives were able to achieve between 1912-1920. In those eight years, they fundamentally changed American government and the culture. Their “reform” included the 16th Amendment and the income tax, which led to the formation of the Internal Revenue System. The Progressives founded the Federal Reserve, the Food and Drug Administration, and a myriad of other regulatory agencies that have now become overbearing and intrusive into Americans’ lives. Their so-called “progressive” reforms have led to less freedom and liberty for the American people, and an explosion in the growth of government and its spending (the U.S. government’s entire spending was 2.5% of GDP in 1900. That percentage alone would not cover Medicare’s costs in 2010).

But what the Progressives, or as I call them, the Regressives, did a hundred years ago, liberty-minded people can do now: we can bring about the greatest change in American history over the last century. We can stop this slouch towards statism, this growth of government into every nook and cranny of our lives, and return this country once again to the classical liberalism of our Founders.

However, these changes will not come easily: do you really think the Left is going to roll over, or the political class is going to willingly relinquish power? The only way we bring about the changes needed is if we organize in meaningful ways and become the long-term political force that I believe the Tea Party and 9-12 movement can, and must, become. And those of us involved with the Summits are certain that the Post-Party Summits can be important contributors to furthering what our fellow citizens have started.

If you’re interested in organizing for a truly free America, come join us at a Summit.

Come join the new American Revolution.

That the legislation would negatively affect the earnings of these corporations and potentially hamper their ability to provide healthcare is for Rep. Waxman “a matter of concern,” as the “new law is designed to expand coverage and bring down costs.”

But I wonder, for whom are the negative effects of this legislation really a concern?  For Rep. Waxman and his fellow Democrats who already forced the egregious bill on the public?  For the private enterprises pummeled seemingly on a daily basis by these same politicians?  Perhaps for the American people faced with all kinds of economy-crippling unintended consequences as a result of the legislation, on top of the higher costs and worse healthcare they will ultimately receive?

Is it in response to the criticism of the bill or out of the selfless devotion to public service of Rep. Waxman (he who never read his own cap-and-tax bill) that he has the gall to call individuals critical of the healthcare albatross to personally testify in front of members of his House Committee?  It sure seems like the former when he is challenging the executives simply because their prognoses happen to differ from those of the almighty independent CBO.

Even more shocking is the fact that companies are being asked to provide records such as proprietary analyses on projected health care costs and “any documents including email messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by senior company officials related to the projected impact of health care reform,” for the hearing. As York asserts, “The executives will undoubtedly view such documents as confidential, but if they fail to give Waxman everything he wants, they run the risk of subpoenas and threats from the chairman.  And all as punishment for making a business decision in light of a new tax situation.”  That Waxman is requesting internal emails related to the financial decisions of these companies should send a chill down our collective spine.

The threat to free speech and private enterprise represented by this hearing fits in well with the increasingly authoritarian atmosphere emanating from Washington, replete with the abrogation of contracts, bailout of businesses, levy of arbitrary taxes on bonuses, takeover of large swaths of private industry and the populist attack on commerce in general.  Rep. Max Baucus articulated clearly the mentality of this government when he argued that “the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy,” with the goal of healthcare reform to correct the so-called “mal-distribution of income in America.”

This philosophy and its political manifestation bring to mind that of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt.  Both Presidents accelerated our break from laissez-faire, the misguided ideologue Hoover (opposed by the “leave-it-alone liquidationist” to whom my pseudonym stands in tribute, Andrew Mellon), as a technocratic central planner who felt that the “cooperation” through cartelization of industry to keep men employed, maintain high wages and encourage consumption was the key to ending recession; and FDR in his tyrannical New Deal in which he outright attacked businesses on principle, saying of entrepreneurs that “A mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, an organizer of more corporations, is as likely to be a danger as a help,” noting of Wall Street that “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men…The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit,” and taunting his “economic royalist” and “organized money” critics in gloating:

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today.  They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred.  I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.  I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

The Obama administration and much of our Congress combines the worst elements of these two leaders: the socialist ideology and elitism of Hoover and the ruthless lust for power and related hatred of private enterprise of Roosevelt.

Henry Waxman’s call for justifiably critical business leaders to take the stand in his show trial typifies this mindset.  In threatening executives with Congressional Hearings, he is following in the footsteps of National Recovery Administration enforcer Hugh Johnson, who vowed that those who would not abide by Roosevelt’s policies would “get a sock in the nose.”  After witnessing Waxman’s best Hugh Johnson impression, does anyone think that the ratings agencies would ever dare downgrade our national debt, or that indeed any business would do anything to challenge this set of leaders?  Quelling dissent and putting business in its place was the goal during the original Depression as it is in today’s depression.

As we know, the capricious and heavy-handed policy and politics of the 1930s not only made the first Depression “Great” as a result of its immediate economic effects, but also its psychological ones, which themselves had a secondary economic impact.  This second blow was that of the uncertainty created by Hoover and FDR with regard to the rights to liberty and property, an uncertainty that led to a capital strike.  The loss of confidence in our markets and thus the fleeing of capital is illustrated in the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average did not again reach its 1929 high until 1954.  Consider today’s parallel economic struggles (to which we can add that we are now the world’s largest debtor) along with the Nazism in the Islamic world, and history appears to be eerily repeating itself, but we shall leave this discussion for another day.

In closing, there are very real consequences to the threats to our First Amendment and our free enterprise system.  What kind of country is my generation going to inherit, and in what kind of country are we going to raise our children?  Where will man turn when the last best hope of man on Earth repudiates its fundamental tenets?  How will the tragic tale of the tyranny of statism in America end?

He’s also the new Republican governor of Virginia and is taking aim at the commonwealth’s oppressive and inefficient state-owned liquor monopoly. More than a dozen states still completely control the sales and distribution of all distilled spirits.

The result? Higher payrolls for state governments (state-workers are public-sector employees after all) and rotten selection and service for customers (state-sanctioned monopolies tend to diminish the shopping experience).

Despite a reputation as a social conservative, McDonnell thinks that state-run liquor stores are a bad idea from both pragmatic and philosophical perspectives. Given budget crises, says McDonnell, “we can’t just do things the same old way…. Certainly there’s nothing I gleaned from the [Virginia] constitution that would have me think it’s better or required to have the government controlling distilled spirits.”

States such as West Virginia and Iowa have gained millions of dollars in new tax and license revenues by privatizing liquor sales, says Reason Foundation policy analyst Len Gilroy. And they’ve also cut government expenditures by millions of dollars as well.

Will Virginia join them? McDonnell invited Reason.tv to come back in a year and check in with him. Sure thing, Mr. Governor. We’ll bring the questions. You can bring the white zinfandel.

Approximately 4.30 minutes. Written and produced by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie, who also hosts. Additional footage: Dan Hayes.