On January 31 the China Reform Monitor stated: “China has lost faith in the U.S. dollar and is looking to broaden the exchange rate to more flexible and stable currencies….” On Feb. 7 a Pravda headline proclaimed, “Russia to oust U.S. dollar from Nation’s financial policy.” Last month the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development issued a joint report titled “World Economic Situation and Prospects 2005.” According to the report: “the possibility of an abrupt and globally damaging correction persists, since the depreciation of the dollar alone seems unlikely to be sufficient to reduce the global imbalances to sustainable levels in an orderly fashion.” The U.N. report further stated: “The global imbalance is between consumption and debt in the United States and ballooning surpluses in many U.S. trading partners.” Recalling what financial historian Niall Ferguson wrote in Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire: “Since 1982 the [United States] has run a current account deficit totaling nearly $3 trillion,” And now the situation is getting worse.

According to the U.N. report, the global economy grew at a rate of 4 percent in 2004. It will slow to 3.25 percent in 2005. “Monetary policy is being slowly tightened worldwide,” the report explained. The United States merchandise trade deficit increased from $550 billion in 2003 to more than $650 billion in 2004. This deficit is expected to widen further in 2005. From these and other facts, Moscow and Beijing (among others) anticipate a major market correction. Perhaps they hope to encourage a crisis. This would be logical for longtime Marxists who momentarily pretend to favor the free market. (All current leaders of CIS countries and China were taught Marxist doctrines in school. Their most fundamental ideas predispose them to expect a crash of the capitalist system.)

Taking this into account, and viewing the matter from the standpoint of American national security, it is undesirable that Marxists should ever be confirmed in anything. If a damaging global correction occurs, the people of the world will not only blame capitalism. They will blame America. Historically, the political creed that blames America is Marxism, and miscreants addicted to this ideology should never be encouraged, especially when Marxist social experiments have proven so disastrous time and time again. Despite these failures, despite the “death of communism,” there is no end to the Marxists or their misbegotten idealism. Using a theory of under-consumption to predict the final economic breakdown of the capitalist economy, Marxists believe that only socialism can rescue mankind from poverty and war. This is absurd, of course, since the ups and downs of capitalism cannot be compared to the absolute misery of socialism.

Despite socialism’s failures, a radical socialist movement is growing in the West. It sympathizes with Islamic terrorists because the terrorists are said to be victims of American capitalism. The new socialists claim that America is a terrorist state engaged in a genocidal war. In his book Unholy Alliance, David Horowitz traces the rise of neo-communism through the anti-war movement. In a chapter titled “Islamic Revolution,” Horowitz tells how Marxist ideas have been grafted onto Islam. It was the Ayatollah Khomeini who adopted the Marxist concept of “a world divided into oppressors and oppressed.” It was Khomeini who first described America as “the Great Satan” and thereby won the sympathy of the international Left. The goal of radical jihad now includes “social justice.” According to Horowitz, “By portraying his movement as a revolution of the oppressed, the cleric Khomeini was able to rally the support of the political Left in Iran and abroad. Consequently, at its inception the Islamo-fascist regime was supported by both the Iranian Communist Party and the international ‘progressive’ Left.”

The Marxists and neo-communists advance, arm in arm, with radical feminists and radical environmentalists. They aim to destroy the free market. Marxist lies have percolated into the culture, leaving millions of citizens ripe for the propaganda of hostile foreign powers and terrorists. Our vaunted conservatives long ago congratulated themselves over the “death” of communism. Now they must sheepishly admit that communism is alive. Not only alive, but teaching our children.

Consider the egregious University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who compared the victims of 9/11 to Nazis. Some imagine that firing Churchill would violate his First Amendment rights. But the First Amendment was not written to prevent the removal of subversive malcontents from the country’s colleges. The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.” It does not prohibit schools and businesses from firing subversive employees. The Amendment merely prohibits Congress from making speech illegal. Nobody alleges that Ward Churchill’s statements were illegal. But nowhere does the law require the state of Colorado – or any other state – to maintain subversives in tenured professorships. If we cannot combat subversion in our own country, how will the fledgling democracy in Iraq survive?

Before long there is going to be an economic bump in the road and the enemies of America are going to come crawling out of the woodwork – at home and abroad. Russia and China are not friendly countries. The socialist Left is their ready-made Fifth Column, whether we admit it or not. Therefore, the question of the day is not merely to do with the survival of Iraqi democracy, but the survival of American democracy. Consider the arguments offered in a recent book by Ben Stein and Phil DeMuth, titled Can America Survive? The authors give the following assessment of the Left’s destructive power: “If this country becomes so divided and rent by internal criticism, rage, and self-loathing, to the point that we can no longer resist the physical attacks and moral challenges leveled against us by Islamic terrorists, we could find ourselves … facing a mortal enemy who will stop at nothing to destroy as much of this country as he can….”

There is no danger, of course, while America remains economically strong. But rising debts and the growing trade deficit open the way to future trouble. Economic imbalances could propel the politically unbalanced into power. We saw what happened during the Great Depression. The politically unbalanced took power in Germany and unleashed a war that claimed over 55 million victims. If there is one reason to oppose the anti-war movement, this is it. However imperfect the United States may be, and however mistaken George W. Bush’s policies may be, America’s imperfections and mistakes are nothing to compare with the malevolence of the anti-capitalist mentality that animates – as alcohol animates the drunkard – the politically unbalanced malcontents of our day. Ludwig von Mises wrote a book titled The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, in which he wrote of democracy’s limitations as follows: “[B]oth socialism and interventionism were utterly discredited in the eyes of those conversant with economic theory. But the ideas of the revolutionaries and reformers found approval with the immense majority of ignorant people exclusively driven by the most powerful human passions of envy and hatred.”