Ayn Rand and the Lying Liars Who Hate Her

Ayn Rand smoking on left and with Alan Greenspan on right

I happen to be one of those folks who has never read more than a page or two of any fiction by the greatest selling single author in the history of the world, Ayn Rand.  There are a lot of her quotes out there that I like and I pass them on when I come across them, however I have no doubt that if I read Atlas Shrugged my assessment would be similar to those of Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley, Jr.  If I had met her in person, I have no doubt that I would 'like' her as much as Buckley too.  However, that has never spared me the tired, scripted speeches from Stalinist Leftists who have some sort of pathological hate for the woman.

This hate is not a puzzling one, it is one that is easily explained by a core trait of the Leftists in general: Authoritarianism.  You see, if they don't like something then nobody else is supposed to like it either.  Rarely do they bother with a substantive critique, no they launch into a bunch of fashion/taste/emotional issues.

Below is an example of one of those scripts and I have finally found a reason to say something nice about Paul Krugman.  He made an attribution of the slam, which is quite rare for the Rand attackers.  In person, nobody has made any sort of attribution in my presence. It is as if they all spontaneously came up with the same words, in the same order, independently.  Something like the "herd" of independent thinkers that Dinesh D'Souza used to talk about on his book tours.

Here is a great one via Paul Krugman:

September 23, 2010, 3:34 PM
I’m Ellsworth Toohey!

So says one of my commenters (sic). And for my sins, I actually get the reference.

The best line I’ve ever heard about Ayn Rand’s influence:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Funny thing, someone I went to high school with used that quote when responding to a Rand non-fiction quote I posted in 2011.  I asked him where he got it, because I had seen it before, and he said he made it up himself.  Coming from a former editor, communications director, budding novelist, and ardent devotee of Paul Krugman, this level of plagiarism can be easily explained by another trait of the Leftist: Any lie will do when trying to "win" an argument, even if nobody was arguing.

The absurdity only increased on that topic.  He had a fit that Rand based her philosophy on "selfishness."  Which brought a big "so what" from me and she always struck me as being for self interest, which is different.  Another whine of his was that she thought philanthropy was "stupid."  Again, so what?  I don't think that and believing every word any person says as gospel is just stupid.  He later once told me that I need to make a "choice" between Ayn Rand and being a Christian.  Of course, this edict did not come as a question, it came as an order, which resulted in literal laughing-out-loud on my end of the internet.

What brings out these off-the-rails ravings is beyond me.  Seriously, I doubt that Mussolini showed up every time one of his classmates went to Church and challenged God to strike him dead on the steps of the cathedral, followed by a demand that said friend either renounce Samuel Clemons or the Lord.

By that logic in the modern day, I would have to stop enjoying Seinfeld and stop quoting atheist Larry David (MP3), or renounce Christianity.  Video here:

One of the Krugman commentators appears to have the same experience as me, with regard to hearing these things before:

D. Taggert
Portland
I always heard it as "involves Hobbits." Of course, I never read fantasy, as I was too busy building my railroad empire.
Sept. 24, 2010 at 10:08 a.m.

The most often heard Ayn Rand "take-down" I've encountered is the one that goes "the only people I've met who read Atlas Shrugged were teenage girls . . ." and every time I hear it, it is exactly the same, while at the same time it is so vapid  that I can never remember the whole thing until I hear it again.  Rarely am I ever able to find it online, probably because I am not wording it correctly for a search engine to find it.  If anybody reading this knows what I am talking about, please comment or forward.  In a concise impact statement, the speaker tries to make the implication that only maladjusted teenage girls and equally damaged males would appreciate her fiction.  A long-winded version can be found here, but I cannot find the short trite version as I write.  The same author decided to rip-off Winston Churchill's famous quip: Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains. like this:

This is a sign, mind you, of developmental disability. When you’re 19, you are permitted to find the Fountainhead inspiring and brilliant. If you still find it so when you’re 39, instead of seeing it correctly as turgid, overwrought garbage, then you are experiencing some form of mild intellectual retardation.

Again, every time these people find me in person, mentioning that I've never read, nor claimed to have read Atlas will stop the speech that each speaker claims as his own.

It is like those intense Ford vs. Chevy guys on loads of pot.  Most car guys respect each other and their rides.  There are a few of those Ford or Chevy guys who hate each others brands, but they usually shut up when they find out that you are in neither camp, but not always.

I suppose the least frequent Ayn slam, but frequent enough to include, would be the "I've never met anybody who said they read Atlas Shrugged (or Ayn Rand) who has actually read a word of it."  It usually comes from people who speak in absolutes about others, but hold the notion that there are no absolutes.  Somehow they have managed to live over half of a century without meeting a single person who has read the biggest selling author ever, but they have no trouble meeting people willing to lie about it.

That one was tossed at me by the 'editor' mentioned above and by another high school classmate who is now a professor.  When I mentioned to the Professor that Editor had said the same thing, the Professor claimed no knowledge of anybody ever saying that before, it was his own personal observation.  Of course, I was supposed to believe that the identical wording had to be a coincidence that repeated itself at least a dozen times over the years.

It took a while for the professor to "get it" when I said, several times, that I've never read Atlas, nor have I ever claimed to.  As for both of them, I see that not having any contact with them for a couple of decades was no loss, not just because of the Rand thing.  As with most people non scripts, conversing with them is annoying at best and impossible at worst.

A Hard Lesson for Joan Baez

Some history is escaping from the Internet Black Hole

Google archive of this 1979 article.

We seem to be emerging from another period of hidden news and hidden history.  Since the Internet became popular (I will peg that in the 1990s just for discussion's sake) there has been a tendency of people to not believe anything unless they could find it online.  Like most things, there is a good and bad to that approach.  I recall telling people quite often "you need to look that one up in a library" when items like the rift between Joan Baez and the hardcore Left came up.  With Google's newspaper archive, those who wish to find original articles can save a few trips to the library.

In this case, I had heard about Joan Baez catching flack over daring to acknowledge thousands of people were fleeing the newly united Communist Utopia of Vietnam.  You see, Joan Baez was one of the pacifists that the hard Left used for propaganda against anybody not as Left as them.  Once the Communists took control of all of Vietnam, she was supposed to shut up about any injustices that happened under the Ho Chi Minh City regime.  She didn't.

Folk singer Joan Baez

Joan Baez found out in short order that under no circumstances can anybody on the Left complain about any action of a Communist country and get away with it.  For those unfamiliar with the Vietnamese Boat People issue, it was another case where people fled in droves away from socialism.  It is one of those reality rules that Leftists ignore at best, or lie about at their worst: People always flee Socialism, the more hard-core the Socialism the greater the number of refugees.  When Vietnam was divided into North/South, the exodus from the North numbered an estimated one million people.  Some say "they fled both ways," which is technically correct and laughable at the same time.  Yes, over 100,000 Communist operatives "fled" North, on Soviet and Polish ships.  The stampede South overshadowed this just a little.

In 1979, (as recorded in the Toledo Blade on 2 July, 1979), Baez was urging President Carter to use the US Seventh Fleet to rescue the latest wave of refugees.  Of course, the Left view was the refugees were "nothing but assassins and colonels".  Jane Fonda had some angry words for Baez about Baez' Open Letter to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (in full at the end of this post).

Jane Fonda pretending to operate NVA Anti-Aircraft System.

Joan Baez, Jane Fonda duel over Vietnam issue - AP via Milwaukee Sentinel, 3 July 1979

Ms. Fonda responded with a letter to Ms. Baez. questioning the reliability of her sources and her definition of repression.
"I don't know if we can expect the Vietnamese people to turn free those millions of people overnight, people who were involved in a war much more hideous than any repression," Ms. Fonda wrote.
"I hope you will reconsider the assertion of your ad: that the Vietnamese people are 'waiting to die.' Such rhetoric only aligns you with the most narrow and negative elements in our country who continue to believe that Communism is worse than death," she added.

Baez had an excellent counter to Fonda's boilerplate defense-of-Communism-by-any-means-necessary.

"What we're (sic) really saying is that I'm betraying 17 or 18 geriatric Stalinists who are running the government - not the people."

"I've said it for 22 years, till I'm blue in the face . . . I believe in people, not systems. I don't have any ideological yoke around my neck that binds me to human rights violations."

This is a bit of history that I have been trying to document for over a decade.  I had no luck with search engines in the 1990s - 2000s, they are of course limited by what is out there to search.  For some strange reason, every bit of Joan Baez information related to Vietnam was centered on her days supporting the North over the South.  I try to run a fair and balanced blog here, and nothing is more fair than the truth.  In my attempt to find any of the famous video of Baez singing in a North Vietnamese bomb shelter (clips I will add if anybody wants to send me links to them), the best I could find was not even close.  So here is the introduction to her appearance on Firing Line (link is to Amazon DVD of full show), with the great William F. Buckley, Jr. where Baez lays out her non-aggression position (clip lasts 4:46).

In the clip, Baez mentions her Quaker roots.


The Baez open letter, in full:
Open Letter to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

Four years ago, the United States ended its 20-year presence in Vietnam. An anniversary that should be cause for celebration is, instead, a time for grieving.

With tragic irony, the cruelty, violence and oppression practiced by foreign powers in your country for more than a century continue today under the present regime.

Thousands of innocent Vietnamese, many whose only "crimes" are those of conscience, are being arrested, detained and tortured in prisons and re-education camps. Instead of bringing hope and reconciliation to war-torn Vietnam, your government has created a painful nightmare that overshadows significant progress achieved in many areas of Vietnamese society.

Your government slated in February 1977 that some 50,000 people were then incarcerated. Journalists, independent observers and refugees estimate the current number of political prisoners between 150,000 and 200,000.

Whatever the exact figure, the facts form a grim mosaic. Verified reports have appeared in the press around the globe, from Le Monde and The Observer to the Washington Post and Newsweek. We have heard the horror stories from the people of Vietnam from workers and peasants, Catholic nuns and Buddhist priests, from the boat people, the artists and professionals and those who fought alongside the NLF.

The jails are overflowing with thousands upon thousands of "detainees."

People disappear and never return.

People are shipped to re-education centers, fed a starvation diet of stale rice, forced to squat bound wrist to ankle, suffocated in "connex" boxes.

People are used as human mine detectors, clearing live mine fields with their hands and feet.

For many, life is hell and death is prayed for. Many victims are men, women and children who supported and fought for the causes of reunification and self-determination; those who as pacifists, members of religious groups, or on moral and philosophic grounds opposed the authoritarian policies of Thieu and Ky; artists and intellectuals whose commitment to creative expression is anathema to the totalitarian policies of your government. Requests by Amnesty International and others for impartial investigations of prison conditions remain unanswered. Families who inquire about husbands, wives, daughters or sons are ignored.

It was an abiding commitment to fundamental principles of human dignity, freedom and self-determination that motivated so many Americans to oppose the government of South Vietnam and our country's participation in the war. It is that same commitment that compels us to speak out against your brutal disregard of human rights. As in the 60s, we raise our voices now so that your people may live.

We appeal to you to end the imprisonment and torture-to allow an international team of neutral observers to inspect your prisons and re-education centers.

We urge you to follow the tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights which, as a member of the United Nations, your country is pledged to uphold.

We urge you to reaffirm your stated commitment to the basic principles of freedom and human dignity ... to establish real peace in Vietnam.

Joan Baez
President, Humanitas/International Human Rights Committee


CO-SIGNERS:

Ansel Adams
Edward Asner
Albert V. Baez
Joan c. Baez
Peter S. Beagle
Hugo Adam Bedau
Barton J. Bernstein
Daniel Berrigan
Robert Bly
Ken Botto
Kay Boyle
John Brodie
Edmund G. "Pat" Brown
Yvonne Braithwaite Burke
Henry B. Burnette, Jr.
Herb Caen
David Carliner
Cesar Chavez
Richard Pierre Claude
Bert Coffey
Norman Cousins
E. L. Doctorow
Benjamin Dreyfus
Ecumenical Peace Institute Staff
MiIni Farina
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Douglas A. Fraser
Dr. Lawrence Zelic Freedman
Joe Fury
Allen Ginsberg
Herbert Gold
David B. Goodstein
Sanford Gottlieb
Richard J. Guggenhime
Denis Goulet, Sr.
Bill Graham
Lee Grant
Peter Grosslight
Thomas J. Gumbleton
Terence Hallinan
Francis Heisler
Nat Hentoff
Rev. T. M. Hesburgh, C.J.C.
John T. Hitchcock
Art Hoppe
Dr. Irving L. Horowitz
Henry S. Kaplan, M.D.
R. Scott Kennedy
Roy C. Kepler
Seymour S. Kety
Peter Klotz-Chamberlin
Jeri Laber
Norman Lear
Philip R. Lee, M.D.
Alice Lynd
Staughton Lynd
Bradford Lyttle
Frank Mankiewicz
Bob T. Martin
James A. Michener
Marc Miller
Edward A. Morris
Mike Nichols
Peter Orlovsky
Michael R. Peevey
Geoffrey Cobb Ryan
Ginetta Sagan
Leonard Sagan, M.D.
Charles M. Schultz
Ernest L. Scott
Jack Sheinkman
Jerome J. Shestack
Gary Snyder
I. F. Stone
Rose Styron
William Styron
Lily Tomlin
Peter H. Voulkos
Grace Kennan Warnecke
Lina Wertmuller
Morris L. West
Dr. Jerome P. Wiesner
Jamie Wyeth
Peter Yarrow
Charles W. Yost

Obama and the Telephone Operators

Rough Rider Obama

Obama's 6 December 2011 Speech, Osawatomie, Kansas

What is this love that president Obama has for a pre-Industrial Revolution society?  He has been on a kick about automation for months.  He is still yammering about ATMs, travel agents, and the Internet.  Now he has added telephone operators?  It goes hand-in-hand for his hate of the Industrial Revolution.  A few months ago, on 17 August, 2011, he was using the bank teller example:

Abolish the Drive-Thru too?

When I go into factories these days, what’s amazing is how clean and how quiet they are, because what used to take 1,000 folks to do now only takes 100 folks to do. And one of the challenges in terms of rebuilding our economy is businesses have gotten so efficient that -- when was the last time somebody went to a bank teller instead of using the ATM, or used a travel agent instead of just going online?

This was on Obama's meandering path to telling his audience that he wanted more public education money.  The sad thing is, the ATM was an invention to make banking more convenient for people.  Over-regulation of the banking industry made the ATM indispensable.

Ernestine the Operator

On December 6th 2011, in Kansas, Obama bleated this:

Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper. Steel mills that needed 100 -- or 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle. And these changes didn’t just affect blue-collar workers. If you were a bank teller or a phone operator or a travel agent, you saw many in your profession replaced by ATMs and the Internet. 

So, let's go back to the days before automatic switching and see how this works out.  Via PBS, we can see that calls per person per year in 1940 was around 250 (PDF).  The US population was 132,164,569, according to the 1940 Census, so that is about 33,041,142,250 telephone calls annually, handled by about 350,000 operators.  Each operator handled about 94,403 calls per year.

In 2000 (the last year in the PBS chart) US population was 281,421,906. At the call rates of 1940, that is 70,355,476,500 calls and a demand for 745,267 operators.  However, by 1997 (last year noted in the PBS chart) Americans made an average of 2,325 calls per year.  If we use the 2000 census, that is 654,305,931,450 calls that would demand 6,930,986 operators for voice calls only.  Forget about text messages, Facebook, chat or the like.  The technology that Obama approves of does not support that.  Also remember, if we kept 1940s technology it is highly unlikely that people would make 2,000-plus calls per year either.

There is a lot of mythology around the telephone operator profession in America that built over the years that the Bell System as a government protected monopoly.  "Ma Bell" was generally hated by everybody in the USA.  Since they were a monopoly, by edict of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the customer service experience Americans had with them was not much better that the worst department of motor vehicles office in America today.

Sexism and "unfairness" emerged as epithets against the Bell System and that got mixed in with 1970s hate for the phone company.  The sexism narrative was that Alexander Graham Bell himself hired only women as operators because they were cheaper.  Of course, as most socialist narratives, this was false.

It is well documented that boys were originally hired as telephone operators, just as they had been hired as telegraph operators.  A few choice mentions:
In One Man's Life: A Telephone Set About 1889-90

Holmes had presently dis- missed his staff of boys as being noisy and unruly, replacing them with girls

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
by Bruce Sterling

Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the telephone company did not employ women for the sake of advancing female liberation. AT&T did this for sound commercial reasons. The first telephone operators of the Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys. They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up around the phone office, dunned customers for bills, and made phone connections on the switchboard, all on the cheap. 

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described them as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission. And worst of all they played clever tricks with the switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and so forth.

Nobody tell Obama.  Next thing you know, he will want us to go back to the pre-telephone days of the telegraph, or earlier.

Maybe mentioning jobs that people are used to being filled by women ties into the Obama nostalgia for the days when a budding Progressive National Socialist movement was all the rage?

Now, for this, Roosevelt was called a radical. He was called a socialist -- (laughter) -- even a communist. But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight-hour work day and a minimum wage for women -- (applause) -- insurance for the unemployed and for the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform and a progressive income tax. (Applause.) 

(for more bizarre politicians invoking Teddy Roosevelt, see this)

Obama is steeped in mythology in many areas.  From the earlier quoted part of his Kansas speech, Factories where people thought they would retire suddenly picked up and went overseas, where workers were cheaper. Not exactly.  Overregulation of many forms deove American factories overseas where the total cost of production was lower.  Steel mills that needed 100 -- or 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle.  In the past, Obama has invoked the images of South Side Chicago steel mills "leaving".  Now he says American steel mills are more efficient, so now that is a problem to him.  In reality, overbearing environmental regulations ran the steel mills out of the country.  Mini-mills, like those from Nucor Steel, operate today reprocessing scrap steel.  It is no mistake that they generally operate in right-to-work States.

David Bernstein wrote about the myth of early 20th century Progressives and minimum wage for women in response to Obama's speech:

Oddly enough, Obama also praises Roosevelt for supporting a minimum wage for women. Chapter 4 of Rehabilitating Lochner describes the impetus for such laws, and much of the relevant the information in that chapter can be found in this paper published in Law and Contemporary Problems. The history is too rich to give an adequate summary here. Let’s just say that the history of such laws is not pretty. The laws’ primary supporters included male-only labor unions that wanted to keep women out of the workplace–women-only minimum wage laws almost never passed without strong from unions that typically opposed minimum wage laws for men; eugenicists who wanted women to stay home and take care of their children; bigots who thought that only the lower order of men (including Eastern European immigrants) would allow their women to work for wages; moralists who believed that low-wage women were susceptible to vice and should therefore stay out of the workforce; and economists who believed that, as Felix Frankfurter summarized in his brief in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, women who wanted to work but could not command a government-imposed minimum wage were “semi-employable” or “unemployable” workers who should “accept the status of a defective to be segregated for special treatment as a dependent.”

You really cannot trust anything that comes from the mouth of a Socialist.

Now for a lesson in doing your own research, something that Obama's people might want to try.  As soon as I heard Obama say "operators" I was reminded of this interesting statistic from William F. Buckley, Jr. that he voices at a 1991 Young Americans for Freedom forum (unembedable video at the link):  

10:40 - If we had frozen our technology at the level of nineteen-hundred-and-forty, and the same number of telephone calls were made today, per capita, as were made then, every woman between the age of twenty and sixty-six would have to serve as a telephone operator to make possible these transactions.

As soon as I began checking the numbers, I realized that the notion was flawed.  It sounds good, a nation of nearly 300 million people would make a lot of telephone calls, even at the 250 per capita rate of 1940.  However, the female population 20 - 24 of 1991 could easily handle the load with millions of women left to do other things.

Which Way Did Those Refugees Go?

In a classically hilarious Firing Line episode from 1969, Noam Chomsky has the laughable position that more refugees fled South Vietnam to the north than fled in the other direction.

One exchange begins at the 15:30 mark.  In that exchange about Vietnam, Chomsky blames Vietcong atrocities on American intervention in Vietnam.

At the exchange beginning on the 27:00 mark, Chomsky spins the fiction that the first Communist insurrection in Greece (the one prior to the WWII German invasion) was really an organic, internal "uprising" and not Soviet sponsored at all.

Back to Vietnam, at 37:29 Chomsky states that "there is more evidence that South Vietnam tried to colonize North Vietnam than conversely". Buckley asks if the "infiltrators" from South Vietnam going into the North bumped into the refugees coming south. This is where Chomsky begins his big whopper of a tale, saying that refugees traveled in both directions. At 38:30 Buckley asks about the people going "north to south" and Chomsky is 'baffled'.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), by no means a Western mouthpiece even after the fall of the Soviet Union, here is the breakdown of Vietnamese refugee migration from 1954-1956:

The State of The World's Refugees 2000: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action, Chapter 4: Flight from Indochina, War and exodus from Viet Nam -

With the founding of a communist government in the north, more than a million people moved south in the years 1954–56. Their numbers included nearly 800,000 Roman Catholics, an estimated two-thirds of the total Roman Catholic population in the north. There was a smaller movement in the opposite direction, The State of the World’s Refugees as some 130,000 supporters of the communist Viet Minh movement were transported north by Polish and Soviet ships.2

2 L.A.Wiesner, Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and OtherWar Victims in Viet-Nam, 1954–1975,Westport Press, New York, 1988; A.R. Zolberg et al., Escape from Violence: Conflictand the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989, pp. 160–70.

That is greater than a 7 to 1 ratio of people fleeing Communism vs. people fleeing 'oppressive' Western influence.  The number of Catholics alone fleeing North Vietnam vs. those fleeing North is 6 to 1.  Since folks towing the Communist line in the West had a direct line to Soviet propaganda, there is little doubt that Chomsky had the 130,000 number etched in his head.

Years later, after the North Vietnamese took over (with the help of the United States Congress), there was another mass exodus  of Vietnamese.  This time they fled by sea from every port in the country, to any port that would take them.

Socialism, especially the International variety, kills more people than any other ideology on earth and everybody outside of the faculty lounge knows it.

The Left Never Questions A Kennedy

"How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin." - Ronald Reagan, September 25, 1987 -- remarks in Arlington, Virginia

Oh those Kennedys.  Our republic is in a sad state of affairs when so-called Conservatives invoke any Kennedy on a regular basis, including JFK, for almost anything good.  Examples are numerous, worthy of a long book, but I will stick to just a few.  The first example is of a Senator Edward Kennedy absurdity is near the end of a tediously long speech, given in New York city on 12 AUG 1980 with respect to a progressive income tax:

The vast majority of Americans cannot afford this panacea from a Republican nominee who has denounced the progressive income tax as the invention of Karl Marx. I am afraid he has confused Karl Marx with Theodore Roosevelt--that obscure Republican president who sought and fought for a tax system based on ability to pay. Theodore Roosevelt was not Karl Marx, and the Republican tax scheme is not tax reform.

First, he scolds Ronald Reagan (the Republican nominee) for missing a possible Adam Smith answer from 1776, which really does not address progressive income taxation at all, but revenue taxation:

The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

Progressive taxation was first recorded on paper during the French Revolution in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789:

A common contribution is essential for the maintenance of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This should be equitably distributed among all the citizens in proportion to their means.^[16]

However, The Gipper was substantially correct, in the works of Marx and Engles, The Communist Manifesto of 1848, progressive taxation comes up right after abolishing private ownership of land:

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 

In Senator Kennedy's zeal to misdirect his audience from Marx and to try to make candidate Reagan look foolish, he directed everybody to . . . Theodore Roosevelt.  Trust Buster and Progressive "Bull Moose" Party founder Teddy Roosevelt.  Yes, he was a Republican for a little while, but they were just not progressive enough for him.  He was at war with anybody who was too successful, just like his cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt was when he began his National Socialist reign.  Senator Kennedy's remarks become even more comical when you read his brother John F. Kennedy's remarks in Madison Square Garden almost 20 years earlier, on 21 OCT 1960:

This issue which divides Mr. Nixon and myself, which divides the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, has divided us through many years of our history. It divided the country in l932, and the American people choose progress. It divided the country in 1912, and the American people chose the New Freedom and Woodrow Wilson.

(Emphasis mine)

The 1932 reference is to FDR, who prolonged a depression into the Great Depression.  New Freedom must be newspeak for the totalitarian regime that Wilson enacted in America.  Since JFK's speech was given to an audience of the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, newspeak is a safe bet.

Full disclosure, I got the idea from this William F. Buckley, Jr. lecture.

Update:  Tracking down the Reagan quote in the Ted Kennedy speech proved difficult. For one thing, I made the stupid assumption that Kennedy's speech writer was referencing something from in or around the 1980 campaign.  Not even close.  I found an old James J. Kilpatrick article that reveals Kennedy was attacking Reagan for a then sixteen year old statement.
It would be great to find the 1964 version of the Reagan speech that Kilpatrick wrote about, but even with our advanced research tools the closest references I could find are these and no transcript or video -

1961: Dec. 11 "The Danger of Losing Our Freedom by Installments," Annwl Dinner of the Huntington Memorial Hospital's Medical Staff, Huntington Sheraton Hotel, Pasadena, Calif.

1962: Feb. 21 "Losing Freedom By Installments," Uvalde Chamber of Commerce Banquet, Southwest Texas Junior College, Uvalde, Texas. 

Kilpatrick also notes some of what I noticed in his critique of the Kennedy speech.

Christopher Hitchens On The Hypocrisy Of The Left And More Buckley

A few choice video clips.
Christopher Hitchens on the hypocrisy of the Left with respect to the Iraq war:

William F. Buckley and Christopher Hitchens discuss the counter culture and the counter counter culture Hitchens & Buckley: The New Left Out (3/5):

Hitchens & Buckley: Joint Agreement (4/5)

Hitchens tackles a typical West hating Marxist

Firing Line: A Distinction Between Left And Liberal By Malcolm Muggeridge, Plus Other Buckley Videos

William F. Buckley, Jr. talks with Malcolm Muggeridge about the distinction between Left and Liberal. Bonus, how Mrs. Roosevelt did more damage than Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler, i.e, how Liberalism is bad. Strikes me as similar to how Libertarians view things.

Here (sorry, no embed), Buckley talks about Getting it Right just after its release in 2003.  His introduction to the book is great, covering "the conservative scene" of the 1950s.  During question time, an audience member from AP informs him that Daniel Patrick Moynihan has died and asks Buckley for a few words.

Added bonus. William F. Buckley objects to being called a "crypto-Nazi" by Gore Vidal and threatens to hit him so hard that he will "stay plastered." Over the years Buckley's phrasing has been twisted into "stay stoned."

Gore Vidal: As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of pro-crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.

William F. Buckley: Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in your god damn face and you'll stay plastered.

Only included because I have been looking for this clip for years and finally found it.

Still looking for a speech Buckley gave about how "the Left has won" in our society.

Coming soon to a gun show near you!