The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
In a Financial Times op-ed, “Investors in Xi’s China face a rude awakening” (August 30, 2021), George Soros writes that Xi’s “crackdown on private enterprise shows he does not understand the market economy. … Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has collided with economic reality. His crackdown on private enterprise has been a significant drag on the economy.”
Translated out of Orwellian Doublethink, the “crackdown on private enterprise” means cutting back on what the classical economists called rent-seeking and unearned income. As for its supposed “drag on the economy,” Mr. Soros means the economy’s polarization concentrating wealth and income in the hands of the richest One Percent.
Soros lays out his plan for how U.S. retaliation may punish China by withholding U.S. funding of its companies (as if China cannot create its own credit) until China capitulates and imposes the kind of deregulation and de-taxation that Russia did after 1991. He warns that China will suffer depression by saving its economy along socialist lines and resisting U.S.-style privatization and its associated debt deflation.
Mr. Soros does recognize that China’s “most vulnerable sector is real estate, particularly housing. China has enjoyed an extended property boom over the past two decades, but that is now coming to an end. Evergrande, the largest real estate company, is over-indebted and in danger of default. This could cause a crash.” By that, he means a reduction of housing prices. That’s just what is needed in order to deter land becoming a speculative vehicle. I and others have urged a policy of land taxation in order to collect the land’s rising site value, so that it will not be pledged to banks for mortgage credit to further inflate china’s housing prices.
Warning about the economic consequences of China’s falling birth rate, Soros writes: “One of the reasons why middle-class families are unwilling to have more than one child is that they want to make sure that their children will have a bright future.” This is of course true of every advanced nation today. It is most extreme in the neoliberalized countries, e.g., the Baltics and Ukraine – Soros’s poster countries.
Soros gives his game away by stating that “Xi does not understand how markets operate.” What he means is that President Xi rejects rapacious rent-seeking, exploitative free-for-all, and shapes markets to serve overall prosperity for China’s 99 Percent. “As a consequence, the sell-off was allowed to go too far,” Soros continues. What he means is, too far to maintain the dominance of the One Percent. China is seeking to reverse economic polarization, not intensify it.
Soros claims that China’s socialist policies are hurting its objectives in the world. But what he really is complaining about is that it is hurting America’s neoliberal objectives for how it had hoped to make money for itself off China. This leads Soros to remind Western pension fund managers to “allocate their assets in ways that are closely aligned with the benchmarks against which their performance is measured.” But the tragedy of financializing pensions is that fund managers are rated on making money financially – in ways that hurt the industrial economy by promoting financial engineering instead of industrial engineering.
“Almost all of them claim that they factor environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) standards into their investment decisions,” Soros writes. At least, that’s what their public relations advisors advertise. Exxon claims to be cleaning up the environment by expanding offshore oil drilling in Guyana, etc. As for “social standards,” the neoliberal mantra is trickle-down economics: by making our stock prices rise, by stock buybacks and higher dividend payouts, we are helping wage-earners earn a pension, even though we are offshoring and de-industrializing the economy, de-unionizing it and “freeing” the economy from consumer and workplace protection laws.
Soros has a radical solution, which he suggests “should obviously apply to the performance benchmarks selected by pensions and other retirement portfolios: … The US Congress should pass a bipartisan bill explicitly requiring that asset managers invest only in companies where actual governance structures are both transparent and aligned with stakeholders.”
Wow. Such a bill would block Americans from investing in many American companies whose behavior is not at all aligned with stakeholders. What proportion: 50%? 75? More?
“If Congress were to enact these measures,” Soros concludes, “it would give the Securities and Exchange Commission the tools it needs to protect American investors, including those who are unaware of owning Chinese stocks and Chinese shell companies. That would also serve the interests of the US and the wider international community of democracies.” So Mr. Soros wants to block the United States from investing in China. He seems not to see that this is President Xi’s objective also: China doesn’t need U.S. dollars, and is in fact de-dollarizing.
George Soros is obviously upset that President Xi is not Boris Yeltsin, and that China is not following the kleptocracy dependency that warped Russia’s economy. Soros thought the ending of the Cold War would simply let him buy up the most lucrative rent-yielding assets, as he has aimed to do in the Baltics and Ukraine. China said “No,” so it is not deemed to be a “market economy,” Soros-style. It has not made its social organization marketable, and has avoided the financial dependency that makes “markets” a vehicle for U.S. control via sanctions and foreign buyouts
When it comes to popular culture, a lot of us ask, “Where have all the heroes gone?” It wasn’t that long ago that you could easily stock your bookshelves with admiring biographies of men like MacArthur and Patton, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, Andrew Jackson and George Washington.
When it came to novels, there was no shortage of heroes either, ranging from Jack Ryan to Philip Marlowe to Rhett Butler, not to mention the almost innumerable heroes of pulp fiction.
But now of course everything is “woke,” and historical heroes are toppled from their pedestals (often literally).
When it comes to fiction—good grief—with a few notable exceptions, it’s a wasteland of politically correct anti-heroes out there.
But here’s a great, fun, patriotic series of novels you might not know about it. It’s the Custer of the West series by military historian H. W. Crocker III. Book two in the series is now available. It’s called Armstrong Rides Again! If you’re looking for some politically incorrect comedy relief from all the bad news out there, you’ve just found it.
The idea behind the series is that George Armstrong Custer has survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn and become an undercover soldier-for-hire and frontier marshal in the Wild West. The first book in the series—titled Armstrong, which is Custer’s nom de guerre—sets up that premise. That book won plaudits from thriller writer Stephen Coonts (Flight of the Intruder), Rob Long (Cheers), and Winston Groom (Forrest Gump), which is good company by any measure.
Armstrong Rides Again! is the sequel—and it’s hilarious. Marshal Armstrong is a hero who is not only larger than life, admirably brave, infinitely resourceful, a dab hand with the ladies (and dogs and horses), but also delightfully funny in his innocent vanity and sometimes blissfully ignorant innocence.
Who would love this book? I think just about anyone. For men, the plot is full of action, adventure, battles, and hair-breadth escapes. For women, there’s a bit of romance too. The books are written as novel-length letters from Custer to his wife, Libbie, to whom Custer is unfailingly loyal even while being surrounded by feminine admirers.
Teenagers should get a kick out of the books as well. The stories read very quickly, and teenagers, as much as anyone, will chuckle at the politically incorrect humor.
Discerning readers of any age will nod in acknowledgment and approval at the important historical, cultural, political, and even religious themes that are expressed throughout the series and behind all the comedy. The books—which I suppose are comic westerns by category—are also definitely conservative in their outlook.
In Armstrong Rides Again! that’s more obviously the case because Custer is involved in the political machinations and civil war of a fictional Latin American country. The book features some real-life characters—like the outlaw Black Bart and the soldier turned satirist Ambrose Bierce—while bringing back some of the best characters from the first book, including the woman who rescued Custer from the Sioux at the Little Bighorn, Armstrong’s multilingual Indian scout, and a former Confederate officer turned federal agent who becomes Armstrong’s indulgently sardonic sidekick.
If you want a book that will keep you smiling at the beach or grinning by the fire, Armstrong Rides Again! will get it done. It’s a fun book, and a worthy book. Can’t wait for the next installment—and the movie!
Joe Biden again struggled to defend the disappointing jobs numbers for August, promoting more taxes as a solution.
The United States economy only created 235,000 jobs in August, a disastrous number as analysts predicted as many as 740,000.
Biden blamed the weak economy on people who refuse to get vaccinated. [Breitbart 9/3/21]
Wow. Next he’ll blame the collapse of our military, the rise of hyperinflation and the death of freedom on the unvaccinated. Sounds like the fascist has found his theme.
With the Federal Reserve’s annual Jackson Hole symposium there’s been much talk about when the central bank might allow interest rates to rise, presumably through the process of “tapering.” Tapering would mean easing monthly bond purchases, which would “effectively increase interest rates.“
Much of the discussion over the Fed’s policies on interest rates tends to focus on how interest rate policy fits within the Fed’s so-called dual mandate. That is, it is assumed that the Fed’s policy on interest rates is guided by concerns over either “stable prices” or “maximizing sustainable employment.”
This naïve view of Fed policy tends to ignore the political realities of interest rates as a key factor in the federal government’s rapidly growing deficit spending.
While it is no doubt very neat and tidy to think the Fed makes its policies based primarily on economic science, it’s more likely that what actually concerns the Fed in 2021 is facilitating deficit spending for Congress and the White House.
The politics of the situation—not to be confused with the economics of the situation—dictate that interest rates be kept low, and this suggests that the Fed will work to keep interest rates low even as price inflation rises and even if it looks like the economy is “overheating.” If we seek to understand the Fed’s interest rate policy, it thus may be most fruitful to look at spending policy on Capitol Hill rather than the arcane theories of Fed economists.
Why Politicians Need the Fed to Keep Deficit Spending Going—at Low Rates
If all this spending were just a matter of redistributing funds collected through taxation, that would be one thing. But the reality is more complicated than that. In 2020, the federal government spent $3.3 trillion more than it collected in taxes. That’s nearly double the $1.7 trillion deficit incurred at the height of the Great Recession bailouts. In 2020, the deficit is expected to top $3 trillion again.
In other words, the federal government needs to borrow a whole lot of money at unprecedented levels to fill that gap between tax revenue and what the Treasury actually spends.
Sure, the Congress could just raise taxes and avoid deficits, but politicians don’t like to do that. Raising taxes is sure to meet political opposition, and when government spending is closely tied to taxation, the taxpayers can more clearly see the true cost of government spending programs.
Deficit spending, on the other hand, is often more politically feasible for policymakers, because the true costs are moved into the future, or they are—as we will see below—hidden behind a veil of inflation.
That’s where the Federal Reserve comes in. Washington politicians need the Fed’s help to facilitate ever-greater amounts of deficit spending through the Fed’s purchases of government debt.
Without the Fed, More Debt Pushes up Interest Rates
When the Congress wants to engage in $3 trillion dollars of deficit spending, it must first issue $3 trillion dollars of government bonds.
That sounds easy enough, especially when interest rates are very low. After all, interest rates on government bonds are presently at incredibly low levels. Through most of 2020, for instance, the interest rate for the ten-year bond was under 1 percent, and the ten-year rate has been under 3 percent nearly all the time for the past decade.
But here’s the rub: larger and larger amounts put upward pressure on the interest rate—all else being equal. This is because if the US Treasury needs more and more people to buy up more and more debt, it’s going to have to raise the amount of money it pays out to investors.
Think of it this way: there are lots of places investors can put their money, but they’ll be willing to buy more government debt the more it pays out in yield (i.e., the interest rate). For example, if government debt were paying 10 percent interest, that would be a very good deal and people would flock to buy these bonds. The federal government would have no problem at all finding people to buy up US debt at such rates.
Politicians Must Choose between Interest Payments and Government Spending on “Free” Stuff
But politicians absolutely do not want to pay high interest rates on government debt, because that would require devoting an ever-larger share of federal revenues just to paying interest on the debt.
For example, even at the rock-bottom interest rates during the last year, the Treasury was still having to pay out $345 billion dollars in net interest. That’s more than the combined budgets of the Department of Transportation, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Veterans Affairs combined. It’s a big chunk of the full federal budget.
Now, imagine if the interest rate doubled from today’s rates to around 2.5 percent—still a historically low rate. That would mean the federal government would have to pay out a lot more in interest. It might mean that instead of paying $345 billion per year, it would have to pay around $700 billion or maybe $800 billion. That would be equal to the entire defense budget or a very large portion of the Social Security budget.
So, if interest rates are rising, a growing chunk of the total federal budget must be shifted out of politically popular spending programs like defense, Social Security, Medicaid, education, and highways. That’s a big problem for elected officials, because that money instead must be poured into debt payments, which doesn’t sound nearly as wonderful on the campaign trail when one is a candidate who wants to talk about all the great things he or she is spending federal money on. Spending on old-age pensions and education right now is good for getting votes. Paying interest on loans Congress took out years ago to fund some failed boondoggle like the Afghanistan war? That’s not very politically rewarding.
So, policymakers tend to be very interested in keeping interest rates low. It means they can buy more votes. So, when it comes time for lots of deficit spending, what elected officials really want is to be able to issue lots of new debt but not have to pay higher interest rates. And this is why politicians need the Fed.
The Fed Is Converting Debt into Dollars
Here’s how the mechanism works.
Upward pressure on rates can be reduced if the central bank steps in to mop up the excess and ensure there are enough willing buyers for government debt at very low interest rates. Effectively, when the central bank is buying up trillions in government debt, the amount of debt out in the larger marketplace is reduced. This means interest rates don’t have to rise to attract enough buyers. The politicians remain happy.
And what happens to this debt as the Fed buys it up? It ends up in the Fed’s portfolio, and the Fed mostly pays for it by using newly created dollars. Along with mortgage securities, government debt makes up most of the Fed’s assets, and since 2008, the central bank has increased its total assets from under $1 trillion dollars to over $8 trillion. That’s trillions of new dollars flooding either into the banking system or the larger economy.
For years, of course, the Fed has pretended that it will reverse the trend and begin selling off its assets—and in the process remove these dollars from the economy. But clearly the Fed has been too afraid of what this would do to asset prices and interest rates.
Rather, it is increasingly clear that the Fed’s purchases of these assets are really a monetization of debt. Through this process, the Fed is turning this government debt into dollars, and the result is monetary inflation. That means asset price inflation—which we’ve clearly already seen in real estate and stock prices—and it often means consumer price inflation, which we’re now beginning to see in food prices, gas prices, and elsewhere.
This certainly isn’t a new trick. Just as we must look back to the Second World War to find similarly huge increases in government spending, the Second World War also provides an earlier example of this debt “monetization” scheme.
David Stockman describes the situation in his book The Great Deformation:
[During the war] the Federal Reserve became the financing arm of the warfare state. Making short shrift of any pretense of fed independence, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau simply decreed that interest rates on the federal debt would be “pegged.” …
Obviously the only way to enforce this peg was for the nation’s central bank to purchase any and all treasury paper that did not find a private sector bid at or below the pegged yields. Accordingly, the Fed soon became a huge buyer of Treasury securities, thereby “monetizing” federal debt on a scale never before imagined.
This follows a textbook scheme that central banks have used during many wars and crises.
Under modern conditions, inflationary financing of war involves a government “monetizing” its debt by selling securities, directly or indirectly, to the central bank. The funds thus obtained are then spent on the items necessary to equip and sustain the armed forces of the nation.
But the money need not be spent on armed forces, of course. It can be spent on anything, such as bailouts and “stimulus.” The possibilities are endless, and the scheme can be used for any type of perceived emergency. But the mechanism is the same.
Now, most of the time in the past, this was considered a very radical thing to do, but it’s now standard operating procedure in this alliance between Congress and the Fed. You want huge deficits? Call in the central bank.
The Fed has apparently been more than happy to oblige. As noted by David Wessel at Brookings, the Fed is definitely doing its part.
Between mid-March and late June 2020, the Treasury’s total borrowing rose by about $2.9 trillion, and the Fed’s holdings of U.S. Treasury debt rose by about $1.6 trillion. In 2010, the Fed held about 10% of all Treasury debt outstanding; today it holds more than 20%.
Since the crisis began, neither domestic nor foreign holdings of debt have increased significantly. Instead, the Federal Reserve has sharply increased its ownership of U.S. debt…. In fact, the Federal Reserve has indirectly purchased nearly all new debt issued since the recent crisis began.
Another estimate concluded the Fed “bought 57 percent of all Treasury issuance over the past year.”
Of course, the Fed doesn’t need to buy 100 percent of the new debt that’s issued. There are still many factors that buoy the demand for US debt in addition to the central bank’s purchases. European regimes and China, among others, are all at least as profligate as the United States when it comes to debt and spending, and so US debt by comparison continues to look relatively stable and like a relatively safe bet.
But these other factors clearly aren’t enough to keep the interest rate paid on US debt as low as the politicians need it to be. So the central bank steps in to “help out.”
Hiding the True Cost of Spending
The political benefit to the US government goes beyond just keeping interest rates low. Converting government spending into monetary inflation obscures the true cost of trillions of dollars of new spending.
Rather than raise taxes to fund spending, deficit spending is more politically feasible for policymakers, because the true costs are moved into the future, or they’re hidden behind a veil of price inflation.
Ludwig von Mises long ago noted the political importance of inflation as a means of allowing the regime to “free itself” from having to ask the taxpayers for another tax increase.
Or, as Robert Higgs puts it in Crisis and Leviathan,
Obviously, citizens will not react to the costs they bear if they are unaware of them. The possibility of driving a wedge between the actual and the publicly perceived costs creates a strong temptation for governments pursuing high-cost policies during national emergencies.
The Myth of Fed Independence
As Stockman notes, when this sort of monetization takes place, it is all the more clear that alleged “Fed independence” is a fantasy. The Fed is today a critical partner is enabling the federal government’s spending plans, and in manufacturing a politically motivated low–interest rate environment.
Economists and Fed watchers may pore over Fed documents and Fed commentary to try to figure out how the Fed views the economics of low–interest rate policy. And that surely is a factor. But the political realities are something else, and remain very much at the center of it all.
This article is adapted from a talk at the Colorado Springs Mises Meetup on August 21, 2021. See the video.Author:
Ryan McMaken is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power&Market, but read article guidelines first.
So let me get this straight. You are sovereign over your own body. Therefore, if you are pregnant, you are allowed to terminate your pregnancy. Body sovereignty trumps the fetus. Similarly, you’re allowed to put marijuana into your body, and you’re allowed to do with your genitals whatever you wish — with other consenting adults. Once again, your sovereignty over your body trumps any other consideration, or the views of others.
Yet when it comes to a vaccine, YOU MAY NOT EXERCISE THIS OPTION. You may not even challenge the idea of this vaccine on social media. It’s an unspeakable crime and, on our present course, will soon be a literal criminal offense. No body sovereignty when it comes to vaccinations. Unlimited body sovereignty when it comes to abortion, sex and pot smoking.
The letter of resignation below represents today the feelings of about just the entire US military according to our sources. Our heroic soldiers have
had just about as much as they can take from our woke government and their imposition of woke perversions on the military as sodomy, abortion,
critical race theory and transgenderism. We saw the likes of this in the similarly rotten and corrupt Weimar Republic though the German military was
largely unaffected where Prussianism prevailed. I always thought that 1933 Germany required the Versailles Treaty, the hyperinflation of 1920-1923,
and a 1929-1933 depression culminating in 50% German unemployment to create the National Socialist Revolution but this may not be the case aswe watch the US morally implode into an Aldous Huxley medical dictatorship under an Orwellian Animal Farm under the most degraded values inhistory. Here mass abortion has killed in the US alone 60 million souls not to speak of our US influence on the 1.5 billion abortion murders worldwidenot including the after morning pill.
The following quote was taken from an RT article by Chris Hedges that appeared today that complements my points. As my above articles just above points out that Brzezinski lured the Russians into Afghanistan and here was the cost:
Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, along with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, oversaw the arming of the most radical Islamic mujahideen groups fighting the Soviet occupation forces, leading to the extinguishing of the secular, democratic Afghan opposition. Brzezinski detailed the strategy – designed, he said, to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam – taken by the Carter administration following the 1979 Soviet invasion to prop up the Marxist regime of Hafizullah Amin in Kabul:
Next Hedges writes about the Afghanistan heroin war that was justified by 9-11 that no one in Afghanistan was involved in. The CIA brought us in there for only one purpose which was to restart the heroin. As my heroin war pieces point out, no member of Islam was involved in 9-11 but we invaded Afghanistan for the only purpose which was to restart the heroin production shut down by Mullah Omar which was a righteous act. Here is the cost of the Afghanistan War Two.
Here Chris Hedges:
Things are already dire. There are some 14 million Afghans – one in three – who lack sufficient food. There are two million Afghan children who are malnourished. There are 3.5 million people in Afghanistan who have been displaced from their homes. The war has wrecked infrastructure. A drought destroyed 40 percent of the nation’s crops last year. The assault on the Afghan economy is already seeing food prices skyrocket. The sanctions and severance of aid will force civil servants to go without salaries, and the health service, already chronically short of medicine and equipment, will collapse. The suffering orchestrated by the empire will be of biblical proportions. And this is what the empire wants.
UNICEF estimates that 500,000 children were killed as a direct result of sanctions on Iraq. Expect child deaths in Afghanistan to soar above that horrifying figure. And expect the same imperial heartlessness Madeleine Albright, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, exhibited when she told ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent Lesley Stahl that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children because of the sanctions were “worth it.” Or the heartlessness of Hillary Clinton, who joked, “We came, we saw, he died” when informed of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s brutal death. Or the demand by Democratic Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, who after the attacks of 9/11 declared: “I say, bomb the hell out of them. If there’s collateral damage, so be it.” No matter that the empire has since turned Libya, along with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, into cauldrons of violence, chaos, and misery. The power to destroy is an intoxicating drug that is its own justification.
Murdering innocent civilians in war did not start in Afghanistan or Vietnam, or Korea but in World War Two. It was not US policy in World War One for its soldiers to kill women and children as we did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki which were not military targets. Secretary of State James Byrnes persuaded Truman to nuclear bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki to deter Stalin from overrunning Europe as our forces could not hold back the Russian Army which had faced 80% of the German Army finest divisions whereas the US faced at Normandy and in Europe largely the rump of the German Army except at the Battle of the Bulge where we suffered an attack by crack German Panzer divisions brought from the Eastern Front. Hitler rolled the dice in an attempt to cut off the bulk of the Anglo-Saxon Army that required capturing allied fuel depots. Germany largely lost the war based on lack of oil. It was a close call anyway as they came near to some major oil depots. Allied forces suffered over 75,000 casualties.
The US Air Force General Jimmy Doolittle vehemently opposed bombing women and children unlike General Curtis Lemay who supervised the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There are approximately 1.2 unfilled job openings for every unemployed American..
Should unemployment welfare pay more than your typical job? Those familiar with the basic economics of how incentives work would say no. So would anyone with moral objections to taking wealth from others to finance others’ idleness. But with the federal supplement to unemployment benefits set to finally end on Sept. 6, some progressives are raising the alarm.
For context, the program in question is a federal expansion of pre-existing state-level unemployment benefits. The expansion was originally passed at the height of the pandemic, in March of 2020. The expansion extended unemployment benefits to millions of new workers, such as gig economy workers and the unemployed. It also added a $600/week supplement—later reduced to $300/week—on top of what state-level benefits already paid. (Existing benefits vary state to state, typically from $200/week to $600/week). This expansion meant that many workers could earn more on welfare than they could from their regular jobs. Indeed, one study found that in dozens of states the average unemployed household could earn the equivalent of $25/hour on weekly benefits.
This creates a clear work disincentive.
It’s no coincidence that 9 of the top 10 states with the lowest unemployment rates have ended the benefits. And according to polls, more than 1.8 million unemployed Americans are not going back to work because of the benefits. If anything, that’s likely a significant underestimate, as people are likely biased against admitting to such lazy behavior.
As a result of the unemployment bonuses and other pandemic-related factors, small businesses are reporting massive labor shortages. The problem isn’t a lack of jobs. Right now there are approximately 1.2 unfilled job openings for every unemployed American!
But even given these realities, many progressives do not want the ultra-generous welfare scheme to expire. The New York Times’ ominous headline reads: “Federal Jobless Aid, a Lifeline to Millions, Reaches an End.” (Ah, yes, by returning welfare to normal levels that don’t pay more than work, we are “ripping away a lifeline,” or something. Can you tell how hard I’m rolling my eyes?)
“Losing a job is something that we know from research is one of the most damaging things to your financial and personal well-being over the long run,” Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the progressive think tank the Century Foundation, told the Times. “We’ve avoided those kinds of long-term impacts to a large part during the pandemic because we’ve been aggressive with our forms of support. Now we’re pulling it back, we’re putting people at risk.”
Progressive commentators have been similarly critical. MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan, for example, called the lapse in benefits “madness,” and, because President Biden isn’t fighting for a renewal, “another self-destructive move from the Democrats.”
And left-wing lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar have pushed behind the scenes in Congress for an 11th-hour extension of the benefits. (Although, thankfully, such an extension seems unlikely to occur.)
These proponents of making the “temporary” program stretch even longer toward permanency are wrong. Allowing the supplemented benefits to lapse does not pull the rug out from every unemployed person in America—it just returns benefits to normal levels and eligibility. The lapsed supplement simply reverses the woefully bad incentives and encourages the unemployed to return to work, where their return is in high demand because of the labor shortage.
There is no compelling economic case for subsidizing idleness at a rate exceeding work. Nor is there any moral case for forcing others to pay for the idle to enjoy relatively lavish incomes.
But the takeaway here is broader than just progressives being wrong about one welfare policy. This whole affair—the program being expanded again, again, and meeting tremendous backlash when finally allowed to lapse—is proof positive of the difficulty inherent in rolling back any expansion of the welfare state once implemented. As economist Ludwig von Mises once put it, “It is indeed one of the principal drawbacks of every kind of interventionism that it is so difficult to reverse the process.”
Simply put, once expanded, the welfare state is quite difficult to scale back. This is true even when the program in question is facially and obviously absurd, like paying people more money not to work than work. Don’t ever forget the tremendous difficulty, delay, and backlash that ending this unemployment welfare increase entailed. Remember it the next time progressive politicians propose a “temporary” expansion of the welfare state.
Veteran journalist and Middle East analyst Ehud Yaari recently came out with the disturbing statement that just across the northern border, the Iranian military is becoming firmly entrenched in the Syrian Golan. Yaari noted that for the past two months, these combined forces besieged the city of Daraa, occasionally shelling the city. Inside the city are rebel groups who refuse to surrender. The Syrian army intends to exile the rebels to the Turkish-controlled region to the north. Russian attempts at mediation have failed.
Daraa holds particular significance as it was the scene of the first protests against the Assad regime in 2011.
The tense situation threatens to explode at any moment. Another Syrian army bombardment of Daraa on Sunday killed six rebels. The Syrian army declined to comment on the reports but said in a statement it was losing patience with what it called “armed groups and terrorists” in the neighborhood.
Syria loomed as a belligerent threat to Israel until its civil war began a decade ago. But Yaari claims that even in its weakened state, it is still a threat Israel would be reluctant to aggravate. concern.
Though Jordan has expressed a willingness to renew ties with Syria, a powerful Iranian-Hezbollah threat on its border is unappealing to King Abdullah according to Yaari. He claimed that the Syrian army’s 4th and 7th divisions are now essentially controlled by Iran and Hezbollah, further amplifying the threat to Jordan.
Yaari notes that the situation has become even more complex as Israel cannot depend on US support under the Biden administration. The prospect of a dominant Iranian military presence in the Golan is, of course, unacceptable to Israel but with Russia firmly entrenched with the Khmeimim Air Base in Latakia, the IDF is limited in its ability to act against the Iranian presence.
“Israeli efforts to disrupt, prevent or delay the deployment of Iran and Hezbollah in the Syrian Golan region has not been completely successful,” Yaari said.“They’ve inserted themselves into the Syrian army’s nervous system – its chain of command – and into the everyday lives of the local population.”
Israel is caught in a delicate balancing act, caught between Russia, Syria, Hezbollah, and Iran. Yaari warned that a Hezbollah rocket attack targeting Israeli cities could be the match that sparks a major inferno in the region.
“Iran knows that once it erects a military outpost in the area, the IDF will not hesitate to strike,” he explained.“If Israel does not act soon, Iran and Hezbollah will establish a significant military presence in the Golan,” he concluded.
“The result will be that due to tacit approval of the other powers, through cunning and sophistication, Iran will continue to turn the Syrian Golan and the Houran in southern Syria into a branch of the Lebanese front line,” Yaari wrote. “Hezbollah and its patrons will be deployed from the Yarmouk River to the Mediterranean. Putin, despite his promises, is not thwarting this plan and Assad will certainly not stand up to those who saved him from an uprising that began a decade ago and has yet to subside.”
Yaari’s analysis was supported by a recent report published by a Turkish think tank that claimed that Iran has doubled its presence in southern Syria’s Golan Heights, while building military infrastructure in the region, specifically for a future conflict with Israel.
I have given you the best available Covid information in my many postings to this website. Here is the latest roundup. As you can see, none of us has the slightest justification for placing any trust whatsoever in the American Medical Establishment.
Oxford University Clinical Research Group Discovers Fully Vaccinated Healthcare Workers Are a Health Threat to Patients
Study: Fully Vaccinated Healthcare Workers Carry 251 Times Viral Load, Pose Threat to Unvaccinated Patients, Co-Workers
A preprint paper by the prestigious Oxford University Clinical Research Group, published Aug. 10 in The Lancet, found vaccinated individuals carry 251 times the load of COVID-19 viruses in their nostrils compared to the unvaccinated
Is Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla so insouciant that he doesn’t know that vaccine-resistant strains have already appeared and are the consequence of his “vaccine”?
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on Tuesday that, at some point in the future, a strain of COVID-19 that is resistant to vaccines is likely to emerge.
The corrupt medical establishment is trying to claim that variants are natural mutations, not created by the vaccine. In other words, the medical establishment is trying to cover up the fact that Antibody Dependent Enhancement is caused by the mRNA vaccine.
Corrupt Presstitutes Begin Their Crawl Back Down the Limb
For 20 months the scum presstitutes have hyped blind fear to drive Massive numbers of people into dangerous vaccination that spreads the virus, all the while censoring and demonizing the real scientists warning of the vaccine’s consequences. Now that the dire consequences of the dangerous vaccine are both obvious and documented, the presstitutes are doing an about face and breaking from the narrative by asking questions two years too late.
But the dumbshit US Dept of Homeland Security Is So Far Behind the Facts that the Fools have declared Covid vaccination-resistant Americans to be a National Security Threat
And the dumbshits in charge of Eatonville High School in Washington state are forcing students to wear tracking devices in order to contact-trace Covid cases
Democrats/Communists are the party of non-accountability. Look at Joe Biden. No accountability, despite the considerable blood on his hands. Nothing is going to happen to him, to his Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense or the other corrupt people who allowed this to happen.
In law, there’s something called criminal negligence. You or I could be convicted and jailed for hitting and killing a pedestrian, by accident. The law would acknowledge we didn’t mean it; but we’d still be held criminally responsible, in certain cases. So even if you don’t believe (as I do) that what happened in Afghanistan was too spectacular in its stupidity to be an accident, you have to believe that Biden, and all who work with him, are criminally negligent in their actions. Yet we all know they will never, ever be held accountable for anything — not legally, not morally, not in the media. Zero. Even if Biden got impeached for this (how, with a Democratic Congress and no election integrity in most states?), the next fool in power would be worse still.
The deeper issue is that this whole leftist, woke movement is about non-accountability. Biden is supported by millions of people who don’t want to be held accountable for their actions, either. They quietly (or not so quietly) cheer him on. They cheer him on not because he’s a rock star (he’s clearly a demented, sociopathic goofball); they cheer him on because the fact that HE gets away with it all means THEY get away with it all, too.
Biden’s constituents are the violent criminals his party lets out of jail under the excuse of a pandemic. Biden’s constituents are the terrorists let go by Obama who now torture, rape and behead innocent people in Afghanistan, thanks to Biden’s negligence. Biden’s constituents are the people still drawing “unemployment” at $30K a year or more, at least through 2022 and well beyond that if the unaccountable party in power has its way. Biden’s constituents are the people getting the free health care, the free college, the free everything — not because they worked for it and deserve it, but precisely because they did NOT work for it, and do NOT deserve it.
The Democrats — America’s Marxists, Nazis and fascists, all rolled up into one — are the unaccountable party. They count on something, however. They count on the silence, the complicity and the willingness of the rest of us — the good guys — to think rationally (so we can make the money they will steal from us), to take responsibility, to sacrifice for THEIR sake, and to keep working despite the abuse we encounter daily from the parasites of the world.
How long can it all go on?
Everything we know about human nature and all of human history shows this is not sustainable. Their day of reckoning will come. We know that, not by some futuristic prediction, but through the nature of reality. Before long, the good guys will stop taking it.
Afghanistan, and the enormously angry and justified rage being expressed over the whole morbid fiasco, has brought it all to the surface.
I look forward to the days of accountability that will inevitably come for these twisted, nasty, horrific and unaccountable sociopaths holding power as they do today. I don’t know how it will all play out. I won’t deny that these bad guys will continue to inflict a lot of suffering. But when the rest of us have had enough — watch out..
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 