It’s not just that the government SHOULDN’T bail out banks. It CAN’T bail out banks — not truly.
How can the GOVERNMENT guarantee your deposit? If every bank collapsed, then everyone’s money would be worthless. The government could not simply command the banks into profitability, as that ranting, decrepit dementia patient in the White House claims. In the much more probable scenario that SOME banks collapse (two so far), then the government CAN take money from profitable bank accounts (via taxes, or more inflationary debt) and bail out the people with accounts in the failed banks. But this has the effect of rewarding bad investments and keeps both bank owners and deposit holders from making necessary corrections. The market and economy as a whole will suffer, making additional depressions, recessions and additional bank failures more likely.
If you think the government can truly shield you from your own or another’s mistake WITHOUT causing someone else to pay for it, you probably believe in Santa Claus, too.
Nazi Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one and socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship.
My purpose today is to make just two main points: (1) To show why Nazi Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one. And (2) to show why socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship.
The identification of Nazi Germany as a socialist state was one of the many great contributions of Ludwig von Mises.
When one remembers that the word “Nazi” was an abbreviation for “der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei — in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — Mises’s identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with “socialist” in its name to be but socialism?
Nevertheless, apart from Mises and his readers, practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed.
The basis of the claim that Nazi Germany was capitalist was the fact that most industries in Nazi Germany appeared to be left in private hands.
What Mises identified was that private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive. The position of the alleged private owners, Mises showed, was reduced essentially to that of government pensioners.
De facto government ownership of the means of production, as Mises termed it, was logically implied by such fundamental collectivist principles embraced by the Nazis as that the common good comes before the private good and the individual exists as a means to the ends of the State. If the individual is a means to the ends of the State, so too, of course, is his property. Just as he is owned by the State, his property is also owned by the State.
But what specifically established de facto socialism in Nazi Germany was the introduction of price and wage controls in 1936. These were imposed in response to the inflation of the money supply carried out by the regime from the time of its coming to power in early 1933. The Nazi regime inflated the money supply as the means of financing the vast increase in government spending required by its programs of public works, subsidies, and rearmament. The price and wage controls were imposed in response to the rise in prices that began to result from the inflation.
The effect of the combination of inflation and price and wage controls is shortages, that is, a situation in which the quantities of goods people attempt to buy exceed the quantities available for sale.
Shortages, in turn, result in economic chaos. It’s not only that consumers who show up in stores early in the day are in a position to buy up all the stocks of goods and leave customers who arrive later, with nothing — a situation to which governments typically respond by imposing rationing. Shortages result in chaos throughout the economic system. They introduce randomness in the distribution of supplies between geographical areas, in the allocation of a factor of production among its different products, in the allocation of labor and capital among the different branches of the economic system.
In the face of the combination of price controls and shortages, the effect of a decrease in the supply of an item is not, as it would be in a free market, to raise its price and increase its profitability, thereby operating to stop the decrease in supply, or reverse it if it has gone too far. Price control prohibits the rise in price and thus the increase in profitability. At the same time, the shortages caused by price controls prevent increases in supply from reducing price and profitability. When there is a shortage, the effect of an increase in supply is merely a reduction in the severity of the shortage. Only when the shortage is totally eliminated does an increase in supply necessitate a decrease in price and bring about a decrease in profitability.
As a result, the combination of price controls and shortages makes possible random movements of supply without any effect on price and profitability. In this situation, the production of the most trivial and unimportant goods, even pet rocks, can be expanded at the expense of the production of the most urgently needed and important goods, such as life-saving medicines, with no effect on the price or profitability of either good. Price controls would prevent the production of the medicines from becoming more profitable as their supply decreased, while a shortage even of pet rocks prevented their production from becoming less profitable as their supply increased.
As Mises showed, to cope with such unintended effects of its price controls, the government must either abolish the price controls or add further measures, namely, precisely the control over what is produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it is distributed, which I referred to earlier. The combination of price controls with this further set of controls constitutes the de facto socialization of the economic system. For it means that the government then exercises all of the substantive powers of ownership.
This was the socialism instituted by the Nazis. And Mises calls it socialism on the German or Nazi pattern, in contrast to the more obvious socialism of the Soviets, which he calls socialism on the Russian or Bolshevik pattern.
Of course, socialism does not end the chaos caused by the destruction of the price system. It perpetuates it. And if it is introduced without the prior existence of price controls, its effect is to inaugurate that very chaos. This is because socialism is not actually a positive economic system. It is merely the negation of capitalism and its price system. As such, the essential nature of socialism is one and the same as the economic chaos resulting from the destruction of the price system by price and wage controls. (I want to point out that Bolshevik-style socialism’s imposition of a system of production quotas, with incentives everywhere to exceed the quotas, is a sure formula for universal shortages, just as exist under all around price and wage controls.)
At most, socialism merely changes the direction of the chaos. The government’s control over production may make possible a greater production of some goods of special importance to itself, but it does so only at the expense of wreaking havoc throughout the rest of the economic system. This is because the government has no way of knowing the effects on the rest of the economic system of its securing the production of the goods to which it attaches special importance.
The requirements of enforcing a system of price and wage controls shed major light on the totalitarian nature of socialism — most obviously, of course, on that of the German or Nazi variant of socialism, but also on that of Soviet-style socialism as well.
We can start with the fact that the financial self-interest of sellers operating under price controls is to evade the price controls and raise their prices. Buyers otherwise unable to obtain goods are willing, indeed, eager to pay these higher prices as the means of securing the goods they want. In these circumstances, what is to stop prices from rising and a massive black market from developing?
The answer is a combination of severe penalties combined with a great likelihood of being caught and then actually suffering those penalties. Mere fines are not likely to provide much of a deterrent. They will be regarded simply as an additional business expense. If the government is serious about its price controls, it is necessary for it to impose penalties comparable to those for a major felony.
But the mere existence of such penalties is not enough. The government has to make it actually dangerous to conduct black-market transactions. It has to make people fear that in conducting such a transaction they might somehow be discovered by the police, and actually end up in jail. In order to create such fear, the government must develop an army of spies and secret informers. For example, the government must make a storekeeper and his customer fearful that if they engage in a black-market transaction, some other customer in the store will report them.
Because of the privacy and secrecy in which many black-market transactions can be conducted, the government must also make anyone contemplating a black-market transaction fearful that the other party might turn out to be a police agent trying to entrap him. The government must make people fearful even of their long-time associates, even of their friends and relatives, lest even they turn out to be informers.
And, finally, in order to obtain convictions, the government must place the decision about innocence or guilt in the case of black-market transactions in the hands of an administrative tribunal or its police agents on the spot. It cannot rely on jury trials, because it is unlikely that many juries can be found willing to bring in guilty verdicts in cases in which a man might have to go to jail for several years for the crime of selling a few pounds of meat or a pair of shoes above the ceiling price.
In sum, therefore, the requirements merely of enforcing price-control regulations is the adoption of essential features of a totalitarian state, namely, the establishment of the category of “economic crimes,” in which the peaceful pursuit of material self-interest is treated as a criminal offense, and the establishment of a totalitarian police apparatus replete with spies and informers and the power of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.
Clearly, the enforcement of price controls requires a government similar to that of Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia, in which practically anyone might turn out to be a police spy and in which a secret police exists and has the power to arrest and imprison people. If the government is unwilling to go to such lengths, then, to that extent, its price controls prove unenforceable and simply break down. The black market then assumes major proportions. (Incidentally, none of this is to suggest that price controls were the cause of the reign of terror instituted by the Nazis. The Nazis began their reign of terror well before the enactment of price controls. As a result, they enacted price controls in an environment ready made for their enforcement.)
Black market activity entails the commission of further crimes. Under de facto socialism, the production and sale of goods in the black market entails the defiance of the government’s regulations concerning production and distribution, as well as the defiance of its price controls. For example, the goods themselves that are sold in the black market are intended by the government to be distributed in accordance with its plan, and not in the black market. The factors of production used to produce those goods are likewise intended by the government to be used in accordance with its plan, and not for the purpose of supplying the black market.
Under a system of de jure socialism, such as existed in Soviet Russia, in which the legal code of the country openly and explicitly makes the government the owner of the means of production, all black-market activity necessarily entails the misappropriation or theft of state property. For example, the factory workers or managers in Soviet Russia who turned out products that they sold in the black market were considered as stealing the raw materials supplied by the state.
Furthermore, in any type of socialist state, Nazi or Communist, the government’s economic plan is part of the supreme law of the land. We all have a good idea of how chaotic the so-called planning process of socialism is. Its further disruption by workers and managers siphoning off materials and supplies to produce for the black market, is something which a socialist state is logically entitled to regard as an act of sabotage of its national economic plan. And sabotage is how the legal code of a socialist state does regard it. Consistent with this fact, black-market activity in a socialist country often carries the death penalty.
Now I think that a fundamental fact that explains the all-round reign of terror found under socialism is the incredible dilemma in which a socialist state places itself in relation to the masses of its citizens. On the one hand, it assumes full responsibility for the individual’s economic well-being. Russian or Bolshevik-style socialism openly avows this responsibility — this is the main source of its popular appeal. On the other hand, in all of the ways one can imagine, a socialist state makes an unbelievable botch of the job. It makes the individual’s life a nightmare.Every day of his life, the citizen of a socialist state must spend time in endless waiting lines. For him, the problems Americans experienced in the gasoline shortages of the 1970s are normal; only he does not experience them in relation to gasoline — for he does not own a car and has no hope of ever owning one — but in relation to simple items of clothing, to vegetables, even to bread. Even worse he is frequently forced to work at a job that is not of his choice and which he therefore must certainly hate. (For under shortages, the government comes to decide the allocation of labor just as it does the allocation of the material factors of production.) And he lives in a condition of unbelievable overcrowding, with hardly ever a chance for privacy. (In the face of housing shortages, boarders are assigned to homes; families are compelled to share apartments. And a system of internal passports and visas is adopted to limit the severity of housing shortages in the more desirable areas of the country.) To put it mildly, a person forced to live in such conditions must seethe with resentment and hostility.
Now against whom would it be more logical for the citizens of a socialist state to direct their resentment and hostility than against that very socialist state itself? The same socialist state which has proclaimed its responsibility for their life, has promised them a life of bliss, and which in fact is responsible for giving them a life of hell. Indeed, the leaders of a socialist state live in a further dilemma, in that they daily encourage the people to believe that socialism is a perfect system whose bad results can only be the work of evil men. If that were true, who in reason could those evil men be but the rulersthemselves, who have not only made life a hell, but have perverted an allegedly perfect system to do it?
It follows that the rulers of a socialist state must live in terror of the people. By the logic of their actions and their teachings, the boiling, seething resentment of the people should well up and swallow them in an orgy of bloody vengeance. The rulers sense this, even if they do not admit it openly; and thus their major concern is always to keep the lid on the citizenry.
Consequently, it is true but very inadequate merely to say such things as that socialism lacks freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Of course, it lacks these freedoms. If the government owns all the newspapers and publishing houses, if it decides for what purposes newsprint and paper are to be made available, then obviously nothing can be printed which the government does not want printed. If it owns all the meeting halls, no public speech or lecture can be delivered which the government does not want delivered. But socialism goes far beyond the mere lack of freedom of press and speech.
A socialist government totally annihilates these freedoms. It turns the press and every public forum into a vehicle of hysterical propaganda in its own behalf, and it engages in the relentless persecution of everyone who dares to deviate by so much as an inch from its official party line.
The reason for these facts is the socialist rulers’ terror of the people. To protect themselves, they must order the propaganda ministry and the secret police to work ’round the clock. The one, to constantly divert the people’s attention from the responsibility of socialism, and of the rulers of socialism, for the people’s misery. The other, to spirit away and silence anyone who might even remotely suggest the responsibility of socialism or its rulers — to spirit away anyone who begins to show signs of thinking for himself. It is because of the rulers’ terror, and their desperate need to find scapegoats for the failures of socialism, that the press of a socialist country is always full of stories about foreign plots and sabotage, and about corruption and mismanagement on the part of subordinate officials, and why, periodically, it is necessary to unmask large-scale domestic plots and to sacrifice major officials and entire factions in giant purges.
It is because of their terror, and their desperate need to crush every breath even of potential opposition, that the rulers of socialism do not dare to allow even purely cultural activities that are not under the control of the state. For if people so much as assemble for an art show or poetry reading that is not controlled by the state, the rulers must fear the dissemination of dangerous ideas. Any unauthorized ideas are dangerous ideas, because they can lead people to begin thinking for themselves and thus to begin thinking about the nature of socialism and its rulers. The rulers must fear the spontaneous assembly of a handful of people in a room, and use the secret police and its apparatus of spies, informers, and terror either to stop such meetings or to make sure that their content is entirely innocuous from the point of view of the state.
Socialism cannot be ruled for very long except by terror. As soon as the terror is relaxed, resentment and hostility logically begin to well up against the rulers. The stage is thus set for a revolution or civil war. In fact, in the absence of terror, or, more correctly, a sufficient degree of terror, socialism would be characterized by an endless series of revolutions and civil wars, as each new group of rulers proved as incapable of making socialism function successfully as its predecessors before it. The inescapable inference to be drawn is that the terror actually experienced in the socialist countries was not simply the work of evil men, such as Stalin, but springs from the nature of the socialist system. Stalin could come to the fore because his unusual willingness and cunning in the use of terror were the specific characteristics most required by a ruler of socialism in order to remain in power. He rose to the top by a process of socialist natural selection: the selection of the worst.
I need to anticipate a possible misunderstanding concerning my thesis that socialism is totalitarian by its nature. This concerns the allegedly socialist countries run by Social Democrats, such as Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, which are clearly not totalitarian dictatorships.In such cases, it is necessary to realize that along with these countries not being totalitarian, they are also not socialist. Their governing parties may espouse socialism as their philosophy and their ultimate goal, but socialism is not what they have implemented as their economic system. Their actual economic system is that of a hampered market economy, as Mises termed it. While more hampered than our own in important respects, their economic system is essentially similar to our own, in that the characteristic driving force of production and economic activity is not government decree but the initiative of private owners motivated by the prospect of private profit.
The reason that Social Democrats do not establish socialism when they come to power, is that they are unwilling to do what would be required. The establishment of socialism as an economic system requires a massive act of theft — the means of production must be seized from their owners and turned over to the state. Such seizure is virtually certain to provoke substantial resistance on the part of the owners, resistance which can be overcome only by the use of massive force.
The Communists were and are willing to apply such force, as evidenced in Soviet Russia. Their character is that of armed robbers prepared to commit murder if that is what is necessary to carry out their robbery. The character of the Social Democrats in contrast is more like that of pickpockets, who may talk of pulling the big job someday, but who in fact are unwilling to do the killing that would be required, and so give up at the slightest sign of serious resistance.
As for the Nazis, they generally did not have to kill in order to seize the property of Germans other than Jews. This was because, as we have seen, they established socialism by stealth, through price controls, which served to maintain the outward guise and appearance of private ownership. The private owners were thus deprived of their property without knowing it and thus felt no need to defend it by force.
I think I have shown that socialism — actual socialism — is totalitarian by its very nature.
In the United States at the present time, we do not have socialism in any form. And we do not have a dictatorship, let alone a totalitarian dictatorship.We also do not yet have Fascism, though we are moving towards it. Among the essential elements that are still lacking are one-party rule and censorship. We still have freedom of speech and press and free elections, though both have been undermined and their continued existence cannot be guaranteed.
What we have is a hampered market economy that is growing ever more hampered by ever more government intervention, and that is characterized by a growing loss of individual freedom. The growth of the government’s economic intervention is synonymous with a loss of individual freedom because it means increasingly initiating the use of physical force to make people do what they do not voluntarily choose to do or prevent them from doing what they do voluntarily choose to do.
Since the individual is the best judge of his own interests, and at least as a rule seeks to do what it is in his interest to do and to avoid doing what harms his interest, it follows that the greater the extent of government intervention, the greater the extent to which individuals are prevented from doing what benefits them and are instead compelled to do what causes them loss.
Today, in the United States, government spending, federal, state, and local, amounts to almost half of the monetary incomes of the portion of the citizenry that does not work for the government. Fifteen federal cabinet departments, and a much larger number of federal regulatory agencies, together, in most instances with counterparts at the state and local level, routinely intrude into virtually every area of the individual citizen’s life. In countless ways, he is taxed, compelled, and prohibited.
The effect of such massive government interference is unemployment, rising prices, falling real wages, a need to work longer and harder, and growing economic insecurity. The further effect is growing anger and resentment.
Though the government’s policy of interventionism is their logical target, the anger and resentment people feel are typically directed at businessmen and the rich instead. This is a mistake which is fueled for the most part by an ignorant and envious intellectual establishment and media.
And in conformity with this attitude, since the collapse of the stock market bubble, which was in fact created by the Federal Reserve’s policy of credit expansion and then pricked by its temporary abandonment of that policy, government prosecutors have adopted what appears to be a particularly vengeful policy toward executives guilty of financial dishonesty, as though their actions were responsible for the widespread losses resulting from the collapse of the bubble. Thus the former head of a major telecommunications company was recently given a twenty-five-year prison sentence. Other top executives have suffered similarly.
Even more ominously, the government’s power to obtain mere criminal indictments has become equivalent to the power to destroy a firm, as occurred in the case of Arthur Andersen, the major accounting firm. The threatened use of this power was then sufficient to force major insurance brokerage firms in the United States to change their managements to the satisfaction of New York State’s Attorney General. There is no way to describe such developments other than as conviction and punishment without trial and as extortion by the government. These are major steps along a very dangerous path.
Fortunately, there is still sufficient freedom in the United States to undo all the damage that has been done. There is first of all the freedom to publicly name it and denounce it.
More fundamentally, there is the freedom to analyze and refute the ideas that underlie the destructive policies that have been adopted or that may be adopted. And that is what is critical. For the fundamental factor underlying interventionism and, of course, socialism as well, whether Nazi or Communist, is nothing but wrong ideas, above all, wrong ideas about economics and philosophy.
There is now an extensive and growing body of literature that presents sound ideas in these two vital fields. In my judgment, the two most important authors of this literature are Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. An extensive knowledge of their writings is an indispensable prerequisite for success in the defense of individual freedom and the free market.
“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”
— Edward Abbey
Remember: The American republic and its Bill of Rights were created because of oppressive, tyrannical governments.
The whole point of our Constitution is to protect us from bad governments — including our own government, if it goes outside the boundaries of the Constitution itself.
Permanent emergency orders in many states; lawless FBI raids for the sole purpose of intimidating critics of the government and potential political threats; not-so-secret partnerships between huge social media companies and government agencies to outright censor inconvenient facts or other speech the government doesn’t want to be stated; ruination of the currency through insane government spending; unlimited taxation … these certainly qualify as going outside the boundaries of the Constitution itself! Today’s regime — Democrats and RINOs alike — are unflinchingly extra-Constitutional, and they don’t seem to care as they never show any concern about losing power.
To leave things as they are — to do absolutely nothing, beyond symbolic and token gestures taking place in the House of Representatives right now, gestures which will do absolutely nothing — means to allow our present form of government (already worse than the British monarchy that inspired the creation of the Constitution) to morph into one of the worst dictatorships in all of human history. My prediction: It will be the worst, and it will be global.
On our present course, that’s where we’re headed. And sooner than you think. Solutions exist, but they will not come in the form of elections and other charades completely orchestrated by the very tyranny we’re trying to overcome.
Put simply: Tyrants and dictators have never allowed themselves to be voted out of office. They’re not going to start now. Puppet Biden will be replaced by Puppet Buttigieg, Puppet Harris or some other puppet. Whether that happens in 2024 or 2028 matters little to our freedom, our prosperity and our sanity.
So get your heads out of denial, conservatives/libertarians/Republicans/conscientious Independents, and start facing facts. We need solutions: not charades.
This photo was back in the day — in 2019. I grew up in the Washington DC area and lived in the city as an adult in the 1980s, loving it. In 2019 I had the honor of an invitation via Rob Arlett to a private tour of the White House (including the Oval Office) and an exclusive invitation to a gathering with then-President Trump and the Australian Prime Minister. It was a glorious couple of days, but I do remember thinking at the time that I might look back on it precisely as I do now: Darkness could lie ahead. I never dreamed how true that would be, given the subsequent events of just a few months later, starting in the spring of 2020.
I haven’t set foot in D.C. since fall 2019 and don’t expect ever to return. What a beautiful place it was in the 1980s and in the decades beyond that it got even better, perhaps peaking in 2019, during the Trump years; then starting in 2020 it all went to hell. And now it’s occupied by a gang of thugs and a leering, decrepit puppet jeering and dancing on the philosophical graves of the great patriots who came before them.
I will freeze frame this experience for good, in hopes that some way, somehow, better days for our once glorious nation lie ahead!
After Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired Capitol surveillance footage this week exposing yet more falsehood from the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 and leaving Democrats and their media allies irate, the committee chair on Wednesday said the panel never actually analyzed the crucial footage.
On Monday’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News aired the footage of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, undermining the select committee’s narrative of a “deadly insurrection.” Given access to the video by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Carlson’s team reviewed over 40,000 hours of footage, which offered proof the committee manipulated audio and video to dramatize the riot for its made-for-TV hearings in an election year.
But in a Wednesday night statement to CNN, select committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., claimed the panel never analyzed the blockbuster footage Fox News aired this week.
“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”
Hiring investigators who “kind of went through the video” doesn’t sound like a very thorough investigation.
However, Thompson’s admission that his committee lacked due diligence makes no sense. Since when do lawmakers have no access to the same material as their own staffers? Did none of the nine panel members view the footage that was played for the cameras? Does Thompson not know who had access to the tapes? Was it just the former television executives they hired to produce their show trials? Either Thompson is lying and knows exactly who had access, or he handed the key to Vice Chair Liz Cheney and had nothing to do with it while the committee leaked exclusives to CNN.
Thompson’s office did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s inquiries.
The committee clearly had access to the footage Carlson aired this week that contradicted the panel’s key narratives. After all, members of the committee endlessly bragged about how many documents, more than 35,000, investigators reviewed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who used the committee to dodge responsibility for her own failure to secure the Capitol, just refused to make the tapes public — and after Carlson’s revelations, it’s clear why.
Carlson’s program showed that the man who became the face of the “insurrection,” known as the “QAnon Shaman,” was given VIP treatment by police. The tapes showed since-deceased Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick walking around “vigorously” after altercations with protesters who had allegedly murdered him. The footage also showed that mysterious rioter Ray Epps lied to congressional investigators about his whereabouts the day of the riot, yet the committee protected the “insurrectionist.”
On Monday, Carlson announced his team discovered proof that Democrats on Pelosi’s probe came across the same footage Fox made public.
“We can be sure because the footage contains an electronic bookmark that is still archived in the Capitol’s computer system,” said Carlson. “That means that investigators working for the Democratic Party saw this tape. They saw it, but they refused to release the tape to the public.”
Committee staffers even used some of the footage to show Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., allegedly fleeing the Capitol. All Carlson did was extend the footage a few seconds longer than what was televised in the committee’s show-trial hearings, and it became clear Hawley departed the Capitol along with other members of Congress. The clip published by the committee was always demonstrably dishonest.
A Cornell University study asks, “Why do teens do stupid things?” My response: “Well, not so fast.” Not all teens do stupid things. There’s nothing about being young that makes stupidity inevitable. It’s true that teens don’t have the knowledge they will possess later in life, but this doesn’t mean they’re stupid. The study is offensive to teenagers who are rational and whose only weakness is a lack of worldly experience.
So let’s take a look at the findings according to Science Daily: “‘Teens smoke, take drugs, have unprotected sex and ride with drunk drivers, not because they think they are invulnerable or haven’t thought about the risks…. In fact, they are more likely to ponder the risks [of] engaging in high-risk behavior than adults [do]…. It’s just that they often decide [that] the benefits — the immediate gratification or peer acceptance — outweigh the risks,’ says Valerie F. Reyna, professor of human development at Cornell.”
Several things are implied. First, it’s not how long you ponder a decision as it is the consideration you give to the underlying premises. If a teenager operates on the premise that immediate gratification matters most, then he can reason all he wants, but his premise is still flawed. This is a fundamental error in thinking that needs to be checked.
The study also addresses the subject of parents. Most people assume, with some justification, that if a teenager makes poor decisions it must be, at least partially, the parents’ fault. Perhaps, but what exactly has the parent done wrong? In my experience, some of the parents of teenagers who made poor decisions turned out to be poor decision makers themselves. And what about the wayward teens who had rational and bright parents? Again, my experience suggests that the parents failed to instill in their kids the confidence to trust their own reasoning and logic.
Frustrated over their teenagers’ bad decision, parents will say things like, “He knows better. I taught him differently.” Well, maybe, but what good does it do to lecture a young child on “not taking drugs” or “not having sex too soon” without emphasizing the more basic concept of living a happy life? Living a happy life includes sound decision-making and occasional delayed gratification to get something better. School speeches and ridiculous government directives can never provide the thinking tools that can guide kids into confident adulthood.
Not everyone will interpret this study the way I did. Science Daily continues: “…interventions [about sex or smoking, for example] should help young people develop ‘gist-based’ thinking in which dangerous risks are categorically avoided rather than weighed in a rational, deliberative way.” In other words, kids should somehow divine the “essence” of right or wrong, rather than weighing the individual pros and cons. Researchers at Temple University found that adults intuitively grasp the risks vs. benefits while adolescents mull them over. On the surface, this might imply that teens make bad decisions because they overanalyze, while adults make better decisions because they go on vague intuition.
So let me get this straight: Teens think too much, and this is the cause of their immature actions. If they didn’t think so much, and thought more about the “gist” of a situation, they’d experience better outcomes. Preposterous. To suggest that deliberative thinking is the cause of irresponsible behavior is itself irresponsible. Thinking isn’t the problem; it’s the ideas that underlie the thinking that are to blame.
For example, a woman in her 30s might recognize that just because a man shows interest in her sexually does not automatically mean that they will make good long-term partners. When she was 16, she probably wasn’t quite so wise and might have spent more time weighing the pros and cons of having sex with anyone who showed interest. In other words, at 30, her premises are more developed, so her conclusions are better.
Thinking isn’t the problem. But it’s always the solution. Thinking teens and adults have to make sure their underlying assumptions are firmly grounded in reality.
People don’t understand: The psychiatric profession is an industry. There’s absolutely nothing morally wrong with being an industry. Industry refers to free enterprise. Enterprise is a trade — value for value. But what happens when the thing being sold is a bunch of baloney? Hot air? Or even toxic?
This video goes a long way toward naming the fundamental problems with the very nature of psychiatry as we know it:
Diagnosis isn’t based on anything objective; it’s just a feeling (at best) of the diagnosing professional.
Mental disorders aren’t determined, for the most part, by evidence or research; they’re determined by vote. Votes which, in turn, are determined by politics — the internal politics of the American Psychiatric Association, the wider culture, or both.
Psychiatric drugs are not held to the same accountability as other drugs. People are desperate for some kind of help or relief, and they want to believe drugs will help them — even though in most cases, they don’t; and in some cases, they make things worse.
So many, many things in our society, our culture, our government-run schools and elsewhere are completely, horrifically insane — is it any wonder that people “act out” with alleged mental disorders as they do? Is it any wonder they feel depressed or anxious, given the brainwashing stupidity to which they’re exposed every single moment of their lives, in the media and elsewhere?
A brilliant analogy (apparently true) is offered in this video, of the slave in 19th century America trying to flee. Apologists for slavery came up with a label for a mental disorder applied to slaves who wished to escape to freedom.
The lesson there? “Mental disorder” is usually in the eye of the beholder. Reality and facts are objective, but the people developing and using the mental health labels … well, not so much.
The human mind and human individuals surely might need professional help at times. But NOT this kind. Not established “psychiatric help” as we know it.
It brings up a point you might have been asking yourself for quite some time: why aren’t they leaving? Why haven’t the authoritarians of the fascist far left packed their bags and set off for greener collectivist fields, leaving the rest of us alone?
Why are they still here when they could move to perfect examples of the Utopia (that means “no place“) that they want to impose on us that already exist around the world? They pine for the “worker’s paradise” perfection that was national socialist Germany, the USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, and communist China, yet they are still here, complaining that we’re not properly suffering as they are in those nations.
Perhaps if they don’t know their feelings for the country, we can help them with our second point. Maybe they’re under the false impression that they are being “patriotic” and fostering “progress.” They are entirely incorrect in this impression. Destroying a country has never been considered to be “patriotic.” We’ll lay out a partial case to illustrate the point.
It’ll be a partial case because we don’t have the space to detail all of what Team Wrecking Ball has done to the country. They started out destroying our energy independence, inflated the currency to screw the middle class, threw open the border to an illegal invasion, actively worked to weaken the nation, and divided it by race and other immutable characteristics.
Perhaps if they don’t know their feelings for the country, we can help them with our second point. Maybe they’re under the false impression that they are being “patriotic” and fostering “progress.” They are entirely incorrect in this impression. Destroying a country has never been considered to be “patriotic.” We’ll lay out a partial case to illustrate the point.
It’ll be a partial case because we don’t have the space to detail all of what Team Wrecking Ball has done to the country. They started out destroying our energy independence, inflated the currency to screw the middle class, threw open the border to an illegal invasion, actively worked to weaken the nation, and divided it by race and other immutable characteristics.
Then we have foreign policy debacles, epitomized by the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. They fascistically have the government collude with Big Tech to suppress free speech and freedom of the press, while they obsess day and night over new ways of confiscating guns and depriving the people of their commonsense civil rights.
This doesn’t even begin talking about how they lie with language to make normal weather events seem more severe or crime the fault of inanimate objects. Or how they are actively working to weaken the country by depleting our Strategic Petroleum Reserve and sending unending piles of cash overseas, unaccountable to anyone. Who knows what else they have in store for us?
Every roll of the dice is against our best interest, against our people, and against our commonsense civil rights. Even blind luck would have something come out in our favor once in a while, but nothing ever does. It’s not that we’re questioning their patriotism, because they would need to show patriotism before it could be questioned.
This doesn’t even begin talking about how they lie with language to make normal weather events seem more severe or crime the fault of inanimate objects. Or how they are actively working to weaken the country by depleting our Strategic Petroleum Reserve and sending unending piles of cash overseas, unaccountable to anyone. Who knows what else they have in store for us?
Every roll of the dice is against our best interest, against our people, and against our commonsense civil rights. Even blind luck would have something come out in our favor once in a while, but nothing ever does. It’s not that we’re questioning their patriotism, because they would need to show patriotism before it could be questioned.null
All of this is just touching the surface. It raises the question: what would they be doing differently if they wanted a different outcome? How is all of this supposed to magically transform the country into something better?
Can anyone figure out how having the country overrun with an illegal invasion, overdosed on fentanyl, weakened by energy dependence on unreliable energy sources, divided so we are fighting with one another, having our basic civil liberties destroyed, and beset by a myriad of other self-inflicted wounds supposed to foster “Progress”? We don’t see it, so where is their “patriotism”?
[W]henever the legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience.
The main point is that we are talking about a small political minority that has to constantly use deception to gain any traction, hence we call them “the tyrannical ten percent.” We’re talking about a small but very vocal political minority in the country. Yes, they love to pretend they are the “majority,” but seriously, how many people are fully on board with all of what we just detailed?
We’re supposed to somehow fall for the fiction from the nation’s socialist media that all of this is either a “conspiracy theory” or happenstance. We’re also supposed to forget that everything else they told us was a “conspiracy theory” or happenstance.
The tyrannical ten percent, the ruling aristocrats (cultural guerrilla warfare means we don’t refer to them as “elite”), have an outsized influence, and after two long years, it is clear: they are doing all they can to destroy the country they must hate with a passion. So why aren’t they leaving?
Why are they trying to transform the nation into a socialist scum hole that no one else wants?
D Parker is an engineer, inventor, wordsmith, and student of history, the director of communications for a civil rights organization, and a longtime contributor to conservative websites. Find him on Substack.
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THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 