If you want to change the world, then stop tolerating the intolerable.
Resist, complain, detach, scream, fight, withdraw — or simply refuse to participate.
Put bad people on the defensive and demand THEY explain why THEY are such terrible people.
Doing all this may or may not change the world. But it will definitely change YOUR world.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
“It makes me sad that I’m now avoiding San Francisco, a city I used to love. Last time my wife and I went in 2020, a drugged up person ran up to my wife’s face and started screaming some of the most obscene things I’ve ever heard. She was terrified. During a previous trip, my rental car was broken into and everything was stolen out of our trunk. When calling the police to report the theft, they let us know this happens hundreds of times per day in the city and said it was our own fault for parking in the street,” according to the CEO of a company fleeing San Francisco.
Blue states, blue cities are sick, insane places.
Reader comments on the above:
“It was once so beautiful. I took my Mother and Daughter years ago before the filth and crime. Could not imagine a family visiting now.”
“I’ve been to San Francisco dozens of times over the years and I absolutely loved it, but you couldn’t pay me to go back again and that makes me very sad!”
“Wonder what his voting record was…”
“You want to be terrorized in your city with violence, disease, theft, and worse? You want all that? Vote Democrat… because that’s exactly what you’ll get… and quite frankly, that’s exactly what you’ll deserve.
Friends don’t let friends vote Democrat.
Well… at least they don’t stay friends.”
“Folks, it’s not enough to just complain a bit on social media. And it’s (apparently) not enough to just quietly go to the polls and vote against those who are wrecking everything (but please, please do at least that).
It’s time to start holding your own friends, acquaintances, and even family members accountable for their role in all this.
How is it even remotely acceptable to vote for any Lefty anywhere these days?
I’m not saying the Republicans are (necessarily) the solution to all these problems, but Democrats are positively the cause of all these problems.”
Dr. Hurd’s reply: “I agree. And I do hold people responsible for their destructive views. I don’t wish to associate or (when possible) live near people who wish for their own and my destruction. I frankly don’t care what happens to them. But I will not pretend to be their friends.”
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
A reader sent me a comment about one of my columns where I suggested that the biggest mistake people make is to try to change others. She agrees that the choice of what to think and do will always be that of the individual. But then she makes an interesting point: Can people can be changed or otherwise affected by factors beyond their control, like advertising, education and other outside influences? Can these factors lead people to a particular belief and perhaps direct their actions?
Our subconscious mind responds to ideas, language and physical cues before we form a fully conscious concept. Countless books have been written about how to generate sales, manage employees, sway voters, improve teamwork, etc. All of these fall under “influence” as defined above, and can indeed change behaviors – under certain conditions that vary with the individual.
For example, one person will respond to an ad for an expensive automobile by thinking, “Wow, that car looks nice!” He might even buy it. Did the ad make him do it? Of course not. The ad merely tapped into a value he already held. The fact that he likes nice cars was already present in his subconscious. The ad came along and reminded him of what he subconsciously values. This is neither control, deception, nor undue influence.
A different person will see the ad and not care. He’s content with his average car. Another man might react to the ad with anger. “I can’t believe people spend that kind of money on cars! That money should be given to poor people for health care.” Another might experience envy. “I hate people who can afford those cars. They don’t deserve them.”
The commercial generated an array of emotions based on the values and beliefs of each viewer. When the subconscious responds to ideas, it’s actually responding to stored values that were previously perceived and then internalized by the conscious mind. The ad brought that subconsciously stored value to the surface where we may, or may not, act on it.
Of course, different tactics will generate varying degrees of influence, depending on the person. Some people respond primarily to reason and are disgusted by intimidation or shouting. Others may respond only to the threat of force. Most of these types use force and intimidation themselves, with no concern for reason.
The famous cognitive psychotherapist Albert Ellis correctly pointed out that emotions have three parts. He dubbed them “A-B-C.” First, there is “A,” the activating event (the car ad, for example). Second, there is “B,” the belief the person holds (this could also be called the premise). Third, “C,” is the emotional consequence (did he like the ad?).
People do what they do because of the beliefs and values they hold, and there can be a multitude of emotional responses to the same influence. Some beliefs can be erroneous, some correct, some irrational or half-truths, and some might be a matter of debate.
This is why you can’t control other people. Their minds already control them. They can be influenced though education and logic, but they will only change if they believe that it’s worthwhile to do so.
Try telling an Islamic terrorist that he should listen to reason. You won’t get anywhere, because he’s firmly convinced that faith supersedes reason — in fact, it’s immoral to even listen to reason from an “infidel.” The same thing applies to cults. Some members will figuratively (or literally) drink the Kool-Aid, while others will eventually leave. Again: Some people hold viewpoints that forbid questioning, while others retain the willingness to question and think – even in the face of undue influence.
Thinking trumps influence. You can try to influence all you want, but in the end, it’s ideas and the willingness to think that determine the actions a person will ultimately take.
Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach
Happy Birthday Samuel.
Great quote. I love the whole thing
“Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say “what should be the reward of such sacrifices?” Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom — go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!“
The Federal Reserve (“the Fed”) began operations in 1914. Thus, many find it difficult to fathom an America without it. Yet as it conducts its own major framework review, everyone, including the Federal Reserve itself, knows that the Fed is unnecessary. Congress could abolish the institution and restore monetary matters to the free market.
But should we end the Fed? In a word, yes. What would replace it? You! And me. And every other person, negotiating through markets, just like the Founders wanted.
The United States got along quite well without a central bank from 1837 until 1914. Before that, two old-style central banks, both called the Bank of the United States (BUS, often differentiated by calling them the First BUS [1791-1811] and Second BUS [1816-1836]), primarily served as the federal government’s bank. Both were privately owned in the sense that they were joint-stock corporations with shares that traded in securities markets, much like Switzerland’s central bank, the Swiss National Bank, today.
Strictly speaking, no central bank at all was needed until 1933 because before then the U.S. operated under a retail specie standard. In other words, the government defined the value of a U.S. dollar in terms of gold and/or silver. Americans held and traded specie freely, domestically and internationally. Legal entities (individuals, partnerships, corporations, governments) could hold physical silver and/or gold and/or non-legal tender claims (notes and deposits) on physical silver and gold issued by banks.
When in operation, the BUS could, and at times did, exert some minimal influence on the money supply through the speed by which it redeemed the non-legal tender notes of commercial banks for specie or for its own non-legal tender notes. For the most part, however, market forces – that is, people negotiating with each other through markets rather than central bankers – determined America’s domestic money supply and the level of interest rates. When increases in the domestic money supply increased domestic prices and lowered interest rates, gold and silver could “fetch” more abroad, leading to its export and hence a reduction in the domestic money supply. That decreased domestic prices and raised domestic interest rates, which eventually automatically reversed the money outflow. As foreign goods became more expensive relative to domestic ones, and as foreign interest rates became relatively less attractive, imports dropped while exports increased, leading to gold and silver inflows.
During wars and other periods of financial stress when banks stopped redeeming notes and deposits for specie, domestic prices could unmoor a bit more, but widespread expectations about returning to specie convertibility, combined with the freedom to quote prices based on the precise medium of exchange offered, tethered prices to specie. Despite several major wars and financial panics, the domestic price level reverted to the mean several times over the nineteenth century, leading to no net change in the price level over the century.
That is not to say that the pre-Fed system was perfect. There were booms and busts and some seasonal disturbances. The latter were more due to Civil War banking regulations than to market mechanisms, however, and private lenders of last resort minimized the costs of the former.
Before the Fed, the BUS, a sort of regional private central bank called the Suffolk system, bank clearinghouses, the Treasury, and even individual investors served as lenders of last resort during America’s financial panics. Generally, emergency lenders followed a rule established by Alexander Hamilton now called Bagehot’s Rule. They lent freely, at a penalty rate, to all who could provide sufficient collateral.
The Hamilton-Bagehot rule was superior to the modern Fed practice of flooding the markets with cheap money because it allowed insolvent firms to go bankrupt while supplying emergency loans to troubled but solvent companies. It thus stopped panic and financial contagion and also limited the reward-seeking, moral hazard behavior that occurs when individuals and organizations know that someone else will bear the downside risk of their gambles. The inducement for private parties is to earn a penalty rate on a loan likely to go bad only in a state of the world so ugly the loss will not matter, as Warren Buffett did during the 2008-9 crisis.
A specie standard works best when all or most major economies adopt it, which they may do once they realize that lenders of last resort can be private entities and that giving central bankers monetary policy discretion is too close to central planning to be relied upon for long-term price stability. The United States was essentially the last country to abandon the last vestige of the gold standard when President Nixon stopped converting dollars into gold for foreign central banks in the early 1970s, a move vociferously opposed by a financial journalist named Wilma Soss but by too few other Americans at the time. Due to its still dominant economic position, though, America remains the nation best positioned to lead the world back to a saner and safer monetary system.
In short, America could and should end the Fed and be no worse off for it and, instead, a lot better off.
Robert E. Wright is a Senior Faculty Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research and the (co)author of 24 books, including Fearless: Wilma Soss and America’s Forgotten Investor Movement (All Seasons Press, 2022).
An Italian right-winger has won the race for prime minister in Italy; and in America, people hold out hope that a mostly RINO-driven Republican Party will somehow overcome Big Tech manipulation, indirect government censorship and massive election fraud in order to generate a “Red Wave.”
Here’s the problem. The answer does not reside in politics. It resides in people.
If the majority of people do not deserve, comprehend or appreciate freedom — they will not end up with freedom. In America, at best, a slight plurality is rational enough to appreciate some measure of freedom (perhaps 51 percent, nationally). That’s not enough. Add to that the fact the entire culture is rotten — rotten to the core, meaning: intellectually dishonest; totally disrespectful of individual rights; brazenly racist (anti-white, as badly as Jim Crow laws were brazenly anti-black); the list is endless. What I mean by “the culture”: The schools, most of the state and local governments, the entire federal bureaucracy, most of the courts (conservatives included) are either outright Communist/fascist/”woke” — or, worse yet, too cowardly to stand up to them. This is what I mean by a rotten culture — rotten to the core.
You can’t have a rotten-to-the-core culture and a plurality of people mostly uncomprehending of freedom (and therefore undeserving of it) and expect even the greatest candidate on earth (Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson) to save them.
You cannot save bad, stupid or ignorant people from themselves. Only people can save themselves. And you can’t expect most people to save themselves in a culture where the schools, the media and the corporate elite are as rotten as they have become.
Does this mean it’s hopeless? Of course not. Man has free will. A sizable number of Americans ARE rational, freedom-loving, freedom-deserving and some of them more than ever before. That’s most of what informs the Trump/MAGA movement (which will go beyond Trump), not the nonexistant racism and fascism our rotten-to-the-core cultural leftists project onto that movement. Remember that most cultural transformations and revolutions happen at the behest of a minority — whether we’re talking about bad examples (the Nazis, the Communists, the Maoists) or the occasional great example (the American revolution).
It’s not hopeless. But it’s more daunting than I think most Trumpsters, conservatives, libertarians and other nonleftists recognize. Perhaps once they grasp how bad the situation is, we’ll see the greatest reawakening for rationality and liberty mankind has ever seen.
Here’s hoping.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
“My Son Hunter” star Laurence Fox slammed the Biden family in a recent interview on Steve Bannon’s popular “War Room” podcast, saying officials have so far failed to hold the first family accountable over Hunter Biden’s foreign influence peddling, which includes deals involving the Chinese Communist Party. [reported at Breitbart]
Well, of course. If you sympathize and agree with Communism, then — to you — it’s not a problem to make deals with the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, it makes you virtuous.
Communists in the 21st Century — American/European as well as Chinese — have figured out how to have it both ways.
By advocating Communism, they get to be in favor of the alleged supremacy of selflessless over individualism. We’re told — by literally everyone — that self-interest is automatically and always bad, while selflessness is automatically and always good.
They get to impose this creed of selflessness by imposing poverty and the death of liberty on 99 percent of their fellow citizens — while doing so in the name of virtue! And they get to live like billionaires in the process, because they are billionaires. Politically connected ones, at that.
In the past, this meant that Communists had to live in squalor, as they did in Soviet Russia and still do in places like Cuba and Venezuela. While the elites under Communism always lived better than the other 99 percent, these elites did not live like Zuckerberg, Gates, the Bidens, the Pelosis, or the elites of today’s Communist Party live. They were not billionaires.
Today’s Communists have really got quite a show going for themselves. They get to live really, really well — just like the elites of any totalitarian regime (from royalty on down) have always lived. But they get to claim the mantle of “moral superiority.” They do so not only through their advocacy of the redistribution of wealth, but through the supposed moral superiority of the Green movement.
They literally have it both ways. They get to live off the splendors that only capitalism could provide, while morally condemning capitalism — and condemning the other 99 percent to impoverishment.
The middle class is still vibrant in America, so it’s hard to see if you’re ignorant and torpid, as so many are. But the middle class is diminishing. The more left-wing the region of the country — California, New York, the big cities like Chicago/Seattle — the more you can see this. Because American Communists impose their will nationally, and aim to cement that totalitarian authority by hunting down and prosecuting all political opposition (e.g. Mar-a-Lago raid, Trump’s forthcoming criminal prosecution, the forthcoming criminalization of middle class Americans via 87,000 new armed IRS agents) … well, it’s easy to see how it all plays out. And how it all ends.
This does not end well, regardless. If millions of middle class Americans continue to roll over for what the 1 percent Communist elites — Zuckerberg, Gates, Soros, Biden, Pelosi, all the rest — are doing to them, then it’s obvious where it ends. The middle class dies out and everyone is either super-rich/super-connected … or disconnected and living a far less enjoyable, safe, healthy and prosperous life than most middle class Americans DID enjoy from the 1950s forward.
OR: People rise up and fight back. Yet with a weaponized and politicized DOJ, FBI, IRS, FCC, FEC, EPA, DEA and all the other agencies now firmly in position to act as America’s own KGB or Gestapo (or worse), well … it may not be too late to fight, but the war for freedom is pretty well along in its later stages, don’t you think?
Prove me wrong, America. So far, I’m not seeing a whimper of opposition — not real opposition — and it’s frankly disgraceful how easy it has been for these tryants, Biden crime family and all.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 