Today many Americans celebrate the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. I’m not one of them. King was a socialist, and didn’t really believe in the ideas of equality that he voiced in the famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. You don’t have to take my word for it, however. King made the case for socialism and hyper-affirmative action without my help. To accurately dispel his “I Have a Dream” rhetoric, I will provide several examples of his philosophy.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Arguably the most famous line of King’s speech, this line has fueled both liberals and conservatives alike to honor King for what would appear to be a belief of equal rights, without the need for policies like affirmative action. However in his book, Where Do We Go From Here, published in 1968, he makes the case for affirmative action and reparations.
A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.
It wasn’t enough for King to safeguard equal rights for all. He advocates special treatment in order to boost black Americans to a level he believed would be equal with that of whites. Was it not enough that they boost themselves freely using the “content of their character”? He also believed that the redistribution of wealth could aide black Americans.
No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries…Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.
This argument doesn’t hold much water for me. The people that would receive the money wouldn’t be those that were disenfranchised, and the people being forced to give up their money wouldn’t have been the perpetrators.
King had no love for our founding fathers. “Our nation was born in genocide,” he remarked, and regarded the Declaration of Independence and Constitution as irrelevant to black Americans, because some of the Founding Fathers were slave owners. He may not have been aware that many (perhaps even the majority) of the Founding Fathers spoke out against slavery. John Dickinson, Ceasar Rodney, George Washington, George Wythe, William Livingston, and John Randolph were all former slave owners, but released them when we had gained our independence from Great Britain. Others, such as Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, established anti-slavery societies in their home states. John Adams once boasted that he had never owned a slave. Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, referred to slavery as a “great evil.” Another signer, Richard Henry Lee, President of the Continental Congress, expressed similar views. The Founding Fathers as a whole, or even as a majority, did not endorse slavery. Why would Dr. King then make the case that the Declaration and Constitution couldn’t apply to black Americans?
Those of us that fear globalism as a means of tyranny can find no comfort in Dr. King’s words:
Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation. This means we must develop a world perspective.
King also encouraged his followers to “question the capitalistic economy” and “restructure America.” He proposed this question as well, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?” I suppose that if someone wanted to drink salt water, or bacteria-ridden water, he could walk out and gather some. However, if he wanted clean drinking water, someone has to process it and pump it to homes, and that takes money in the form of equipment costs and wages, as well as electricity.
King didn’t believe in natural price fluctuations in the free market. He believed that it was “violence” and it caused blacks to pay “higher consumer prices” than people of other races. "Do you know," he asked, "that a can of beans almost always costs a few cents more in grocery chain stores located in the Negro ghetto than in a store of that same chain located in the upper-middle-class suburbs?" There were probably more robberies in such stores in the ghetto than in the suburbs. This lowers the availability of competition—fewer competitors will want to enter this risky market. Therefore, the few stores in the ghetto that remain can charge whatever they want, with very little concern toward their potential competitors.
King believed that whether or not a family was working, there ought to be a minimum income guaranteed by the government. This would involve a massive, forceful redistribution of wealth by the government. King endorsed what he called “a democratic socialism” and described himself to friends as “an economic Marxist”.
Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech represents ideas that people can easily embrace, whether they belong to the conservative, liberal, or libertarian areas of the political spectrum. I must sadly retort, though, that Dr. King didn’t actually embrace these ideals, but instead embraced the enemies of liberty--statism and socialism. He didn’t believe in free markets and economic freedom. Today, people will be celebrating an undeserved image of Dr. King, largely because they haven’t heard or truly understood what he really believed.
I thank Marcus Epstein for his “Myths of Martin Luther King”, Lew Rockwell for his “The Economics of Martin Luther King, Jr.”, and Thomas Woods for his 33 Questions about American History You Weren’t Supposed to Ask.
