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Category Archives: Politics
“Democrats” Are Destroying Us ON PURPOSE
Biden’s approval rating is down 24 points from his 63 percent rating one year ago in May 2021.
Only 33 percent of Democrats believe the country is headed in the right direction, down 16 points from his rating in April.
When will people realize that DemComs WANT the things that are happening to the country? We see rising, unsustainable gas prices. They see the end of fossil fuels. It’s what they want. In their fantasy-land, the end of fossil fuels will automatically mean that everyone uses solar and drives electric. That, of course, won’t happen. If those things were economically and technologically feasible, people would already be doing them.
None of that is the point. The point is that the worse things get, the more people become afraid. The more people become afraid, the more they let the government do whatever they want to do to them. Look at what happened with COVID. People behaved precisely as tyrants wanted them to behave, when afraid. Imagine when the fear isn’t only over a virus with a 99.99 percent survival rate, but instead the fear is over hyperinflation, shortages, mass impoverishment and the end of life as we have known it.
You’ve heard the phrase, “divide and conquer.” DemComs are doing that, too. Another phrase is “weaken, destroy and conquer.” People do not act like “Democrats” do unless it’s deliberate. They are destroying our currency, our liberty, our economic prosperity, our morale and our Constitution with wreckless yet surgical precision — and speed. It’s like a 9/11 coming from our own government — not just to a couple of buildings, but to the entire material and spiritual foundations of our society.
That’s why I keep saying we are an occupied country. The people occupying our country are not going to let us vote them away. They are here to stay, and once their destruction reaches a certain point, it will be too late to go back.
It’s too late for a “red wave”, and most Republicans are rotten and corrupt, anyway. We need a revolution. You don’t vote away tyrants. You eradicate them.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Watch “America’s Debt Crisis Explained” on YouTube
Will Midterms be Biden’s Last Hurrah ?
For half a decade now, America’s media elite have been obsessed with former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s conversion to Trumpism.
Press and TV are daily consumed with his actions and prospects and the future of the party he captured in 2016.
Perhaps it is time to consider the prospects of President Joe Biden and the political future of his embattled presidency.
What are the odds that Biden, like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama before him, will run again in 2024, win reelection, serve out a second term and transfer his office to the 47th president on Jan. 20, 2029?
My guess: The odds of that happening are roughly the same as the odds that last-minute entry Rich Strike would win the Kentucky Derby, as he left the starting gate at Churchill Downs at 80-1.
Consider the first hurdle Biden faces on the way to renomination in 2024 — the midterm elections five months off.
Since the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 reached record highs in January, both have seen eight weeks of wipeouts of trillions of dollars in value as we approached bear-market territory by the end of last week.
Stock portfolios, pensions and retirement benefit plans have been gutted. These massive market losses are also a lead indicator pointing to a recession right ahead, just as voters pass judgment on a Democratic Party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress.
But even before we reach recession, Americans have already been living with a Biden inflation of 8% that has lasted for months and affected all the necessities of normal life, such as groceries and gasoline.
And the worst seems yet to come.
The Federal Reserve has reversed course from its easy money days and begun to raise interest rates to squeeze the Biden inflation out of the economy. What lies ahead may remind people who were around then of Jimmy Carter’s “stagflation,” where interest rates hit 21% to kill an inflation that reached 13%.
As for the crisis on the southern border, it is deeper than ever. Some 234,000 migrants were caught illegally entering the U.S. in April alone, with thousands of others evading any contact with U.S. authorities.
This is an invasion rate of some 3 million illegal migrants a year.
Shootings, killings, carjackings, criminal assaults, and smash-and-grab robberies in record numbers are the subject of our nightly news.
And the latest national polls suggest the country is holding Biden responsible. The president’s approval rating is down to 39%, and only 1 in 3 Americans think he is doing a good job handling the economy and that the nation is headed in the right direction.
Now the omicron variant of COVID-19 is making a comeback; infections are again over 100,000 a day.
Biden might find consolation from how his predecessors overcame midterm defeats. Clinton in 1994 lost 54 House seats and won reelection easily in 1996. Obama lost 63 House seats in 2010 to come back and win handily over Mitt Romney in 2012.
Why cannot Biden ride out the anticipated storm in this year’s midterms and come back to win election in 2024, as did Clinton and Obama?
Age has something to do with it. Clinton was 50 in his reelection year 1996. Obama was 51 in his reelection year 2012. And both were at the peak of their political powers.
Biden, on election day 2024, will be two weeks shy of his 82nd birthday. Should he serve out a second term, he would not leave the White House until he had turned 86. Biden has been America’s oldest president since the day he took office.
Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers wrote of “energy in the executive” as being an indispensable attribute of good government.
Does Biden, with his shuffling gait, regular gaffes, and physical and cognitive decline manifest that attribute of which Hamilton wrote?
The likely scenario for Biden?
His party sustains a crushing defeat in November comparable to what Clinton and Obama suffered. But the party does not immediately rally around Biden as present and future leader, as it did with Clinton and Obama. Critics inside the Democratic coalition begin to blame Biden for the loss.
Ambitious Democrats, sensing disaster if Biden tops the ticket in 2024, begin to call for him to stand down and give way to a younger candidate, a new face, in 2024.
One or two progressives declare for president, and the pressure builds on Biden to avoid a personal and political humiliation in the 2024 primaries by standing down, as Harry Truman did in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson did in 1968.
By early 2023, Biden will have adopted the line that dealing with the challenge of China and Russia and, at the same time, coping with recession and inflation require his full attention. And these preclude a national political campaign for reelection.
And then President Joe Biden announces he will not run again.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
From Biden’s Own Mouth: Rising Gas Prices an “Incredible”, Beautiful Thing
Biden offered his take on gas prices during a joint press conference with Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Monday.
“Here’s the situation. And when it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over,” Biden said, finding nothing but positivity and future sunshine for Americans as the end point for their current pain.
The national average for a gallon of regular gas stands at $4.56 as of Monday, which is more than $.40 higher than just four weeks ago and builds on a succession of price rises. [Breitbart]
He openly admits it. Biden’s not opening up the free market for gas — which would massively decrease the cost of fuel — because he wants America to go through an “incredible transition.” He’s not hiding it. This is the whole purpose. Biden has always had loose lips; so he’s candid enough to state openly what others (including those he works for) will not admit.
Communists and Nazis did the same thing. Communists were always promising a better and brighter future. When they didn’t get it, they blamed it on their having too little power — and they simply seized more.
America’s revolution toward totalitarian control is underway. From the point-of-view of the totalitarians, it’s going swimmingly. Totalitarians have never had it so easy. Joe Biden has unlimited power — the power to destroy, which he calls (with that part demented, part naturally idiotic grin) — an “incredible transition.”
It’s hard to imagine a more undiluted picture of evil than this: Joe Biden, the least deserving fool (even from an autocrat’s point-of-view) gets to cash in on the buildup of government control that statists/leftists have been accumulating in America for decades.
For generations now, people of the more “libertarian” or limited government mindset have warned against the power of government growth. Sooner or later, we were warned, bigger and bigger government would come back to bite us. Ronald Reagan was our last serious warning, back in the 1980s. Ayn Rand, George Orwell, Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises and Frederic Bastiat warned us decades (even centuries, in Bastiat’s case) before the final disaster. America’s founders saw how it could happen, and now it has. Donald Trump followed in Reagan’s path, in many ways, but it now appears too late. Nobody is coming to rescue us. It’s a sinking ship. Each one of us will have to find a way to rescue ourselves from the disaster taking hold of us.
If you think an election is going to solve it all, then all I can say is: Come up with a Plan B. Now. If you think a regime with no qualms about tripling the cost of living almost overnight while laughing about it, and then smugly calling the disaster an “incredible transition”, is going to submit itself to the accountability of elections, then you probably never expected any of this to be happening.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Let’s Cancel Student Loans – Not Forgive Them, But Cancel the Program
BY GEORGE LEEF | MAY 20, 2022 | EDUCATION
Higher education in the US is bloated and dysfunctional because federal meddling turned it into a mass entitlement. Turn off the federal spigot and it will rapidly improve.
In recent weeks, the tumult in Washington has largely centered on the issue of student loans. Almost every Democrat and left-leaning pundit has come out in favor of some degree of relief for those who have amassed debts to pay for college. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) for example, penned a Washington Post opinion piece with the exhortative title, “President Biden, it’s time to cancel student debt.”
What he wants the President to do is to forgive students of their payment obligations under their federal student loan contracts. It’s highly questionable whether the President has the legal authority to unilaterally forgive student debts, but let’s put aside that problem.
I’m going to argue that Congress should do something it unquestionably has the power to do, namely to repeal a statute. The statute is the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, one of the many laws passed by a giddy Congress at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson had a host of ideas for improving America through federal money and regulation—his “Great Society”—and government meddling in education was at the top of his list. Title IV of the Act created the federal student loan program.
The first question that ought to have been raised is whether the HEA was constitutional. Nothing in the Constitution authorizes Congress to legislate with respect to education. Article I, Section 8 sets forth the powers of Congress and education is not included. Education was among the great number of subjects that the Founders thought belonged to “the States or the people respectively” as the Tenth Amendment reads.
Nor does the Constitution anywhere authorize Congress (or the President) to lend money to college students—or to any other group.
If someone had asked James Madison or Benjamin Franklin or any of the other men who drafted the Constitution if it gave the new government the authority to lend money to people who wanted to go to college, the answer would have been an emphatic “No.”
Unfortunately, constitutional questions about federal programs were not being asked in the 1960s. A long series of Supreme Court decisions dating from the mid-1930s on had made it clear that the Court wouldn’t bother with challenges to federal spending and regulation. The “progressive” Justices had given broad interpretations to the General Welfare Clause and the Commerce Clause so that the intended restrictions of Article I, Section 8 were erased.
That’s too bad, because the federal student aid program has turned out to be one of the greatest blunders in our history, right up there with the income tax, the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and the pro-union National Labor Relations Act. It is responsible for the enormous increase in the cost of higher education, a vast throng of poorly prepared and disengaged students entering college, the consequent decline of academic standards, credential inflation (i.e., the requirement by many employers that applicants have college degrees if they want to be considered), and the statist drift of the country, as more and more of the citizenry has been subjected to the proselytizing of zealous faculty and administrators.
If we could take a time machine back to 1965 and show the legislators and voting public what the HEA would do, I think that it would not have been enacted.
Returning to the student debt “crisis,” it too is an unintended consequence of the HEA. It isn’t really a crisis, since most student debtors are able to handle their payments, but there are some true horror stories—students with six-figure debts who can’t even pay the mounting interest. Nevertheless, the burden of paying for very expensive college credentials that many students didn’t really want and don’t use in their work is a big economic drag.
What is the solution?
It certainly is not to decree a general forgiveness of college loan debts. That would do nothing to alleviate the problem of too many people attending too expensive colleges to obtain degrees of too little utility. It would, however, confer a great windfall on many heavily indebted graduates who have high-paying jobs in law, medicine, and other professions. They can and should pay off their loans.
A better solution that some people have advocated is to once again allow graduates who find themselves drowning in debt to have their student loan debts discharged in bankruptcy. That was permissible until 2005, when Congress decided to revise the bankruptcy law so as to make student loan debts extraordinarily difficult to escape.
Writing in the May 10 Wall Street Journal, Richard Schinder correctly observes,
“Comprehensive student debt forgiveness is bad public policy. A legal regime—the federal bankruptcy system—already exists for those who truly need debt relief, with rules and consequences that are well-established.”
If student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy, the worst horror stories would be addressed. I would favor that, especially if it were coupled with a requirement that if a student discharges his student loan debts in bankruptcy, the college or university that educated him (or at least took his money in exchange for various courses) would have to cover the loss to the taxpayers. That would make schools think long and hard before they admitted academically weak students who can only make it through by taking raft of Mickey Mouse classes.
Those changes would go far toward alleviating the student loan mess, but they wouldn’t solve it. Federal student aid money would continue to prop up needlessly high tuitions and lure many marginal students into college because the financing is easy.
The solution is to eliminate federal student aid funding entirely. (And yes, I would include college assistance for military veterans.) The HEA repeal bill might be written so that five years after the date of enactment, all federal loans and grants would cease, thereby giving students and institutions time to adjust. Alternatives such as Income Share Agreements (where funders provide most or all of the money the student needs for college in exchange for a contractual commitment obligating the student to repay a percentage of his earnings for some years after graduation) would emerge. Colleges would find many ways to shed costs that add little or no educational value, like “diversity” offices.
Higher education in the US is bloated and dysfunctional because of federal meddling.
BY GEORGE LEEF | MAY 20, 2022 | EDUCATION
Higher education in the US is bloated and dysfunctional because federal meddling turned it into a mass entitlement. Turn off the federal spigot and it will rapidly improve.
EVERYTHING BELOW THIS IS REPETITIVE.
I’m going to argue that Congress should do something it unquestionably has the power to do, namely to repeal a statute. The statute is the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, one of the many laws passed by a giddy Congress at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson had a host of ideas for improving America through federal money and regulation—his “Great Society”—and government meddling in education was at the top of his list. Title IV of the Act created the federal student loan program.
The first question that ought to have been raised is whether the HEA was constitutional. Nothing in the Constitution authorizes Congress to legislate with respect to education. Article I, Section 8 sets forth the powers of Congress and education is not included. Education was among the great number of subjects that the Founders thought belonged to “the States or the people respectively” as the Tenth Amendment reads.
Nor does the Constitution anywhere authorize Congress (or the President) to lend money to college students—or to any other group.
If someone had asked James Madison or Benjamin Franklin or any of the other men who drafted the Constitution if it gave the new government the authority to lend money to people who wanted to go to college, the answer would have been an emphatic “No.”
Unfortunately, constitutional questions about federal programs were not being asked in the 1960s. A long series of Supreme Court decisions dating from the mid-1930s on had made it clear that the Court wouldn’t bother with challenges to federal spending and regulation. The “progressive” Justices had given broad interpretations to the General Welfare Clause and the Commerce Clause so that the intended restrictions of Article I, Section 8 were erased.
That’s too bad, because the federal student aid program has turned out to be one of the greatest blunders in our history, right up there with the income tax, the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and the pro-union National Labor Relations Act. It is responsible for the enormous increase in the cost of higher education, a vast throng of poorly prepared and disengaged students entering college, the consequent decline of academic standards, credential inflation (i.e., the requirement by many employers that applicants have college degrees if they want to be considered), and the statist drift of the country, as more and more of the citizenry has been subjected to the proselytizing of zealous faculty and administrators.
If we could take a time machine back to 1965 and show the legislators and voting public what the HEA would do, I think that it would not have been enacted.
Returning to the student debt “crisis,” it too is an unintended consequence of the HEA. It isn’t really a crisis, since most student debtors are able to handle their payments, but there are some true horror stories—students with six-figure debts who can’t even pay the mounting interest. Nevertheless, the burden of paying for very expensive college credentials that many students didn’t really want and don’t use in their work is a big economic drag.
What is the solution?
It certainly is not to decree a general forgiveness of college loan debts. That would do nothing to alleviate the problem of too many people attending too expensive colleges to obtain degrees of too little utility. It would, however, confer a great windfall on many heavily indebted graduates who have high-paying jobs in law, medicine, and other professions. They can and should pay off their loans.
A better solution that some people have advocated is to once again allow graduates who find themselves drowning in debt to have their student loan debts discharged in bankruptcy. That was permissible until 2005, when Congress decided to revise the bankruptcy law so as to make student loan debts extraordinarily difficult to escape.
Writing in the May 10 Wall Street Journal, Richard Schinder correctly observes,
“Comprehensive student debt forgiveness is bad public policy. A legal regime—the federal bankruptcy system—already exists for those who truly need debt relief, with rules and consequences that are well-established.”
If student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy, the worst horror stories would be addressed. I would favor that, especially if it were coupled with a requirement that if a student discharges his student loan debts in bankruptcy, the college or university that educated him (or at least took his money in exchange for various courses) would have to cover the loss to the taxpayers. That would make schools think long and hard before they admitted academically weak students who can only make it through by taking raft of Mickey Mouse classes.
Those changes would go far toward alleviating the student loan mess, but they wouldn’t solve it. Federal student aid money would continue to prop up needlessly high tuitions and lure many marginal students into college because the financing is easy.
The solution is to eliminate federal student aid funding entirely. (And yes, I would include college assistance for military veterans.) The HEA repeal bill might be written so that five years after the date of enactment, all federal loans and grants would cease, thereby giving students and institutions time to adjust. Alternatives such as Income Share Agreements (where funders provide most or all of the money the student needs for college in exchange for a contractual commitment obligating the student to repay a percentage of his earnings for some years after graduation) would emerge. Colleges would find many ways to shed costs that add little or no educational value, like “diversity” offices.
Higher education in the US is bloated and dysfunctional because federal meddling turned it into a mass
Higher education in the US is bloated and dysfunctional because federal meddling turned it into a mass entitlement. Turn off the federal spigot and it will rapidly improve.
In recent weeks, the tumult in Washington has largely centered on the issue of student loans. Almost every Democrat and left-leaning pundit has come out in favor of some degree of relief for those who have amassed debts to pay for college. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) for example, penned a Washington Post opinion piece with the exhortative title, “President Biden, it’s time to cancel student debt.”
What he wants the President to do is to forgive students of their payment obligations under their federal student loan contracts. It’s highly questionable whether the President has the legal authority to unilaterally forgive student debts, but let’s put aside that problem.
I’m going to argue that Congress should do something it unquestionably has the power to do, namely to repeal a statute. The statute is the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, one of the many laws passed by a giddy Congress at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson had a host of ideas for improving America through federal money and regulation—his “Great Society”—and government meddling in education was at the top of his list. Title IV of the Act created the federal student loan program.
The first question that ought to have been raised is whether the HEA was constitutional. Nothing in the Constitution authorizes Congress to legislate with respect to education. Article I, Section 8 sets forth the powers of Congress and education is not included. Education was among the great number of subjects that the Founders thought belonged to “the States or the people respectively” as the Tenth Amendment reads.
Nor does the Constitution anywhere authorize Congress (or the President) to lend money to college students—or to any other group.
If someone had asked James Madison or Benjamin Franklin or any of the other men who drafted the Constitution if it gave the new government the authority to lend money to people who wanted to go to college, the answer would have been an emphatic “No.”
Unfortunately, constitutional questions about federal programs were not being asked in the 1960s. A long series of Supreme Court decisions dating from the mid-1930s on had made it clear that the Court wouldn’t bother with challenges to federal spending and regulation. The “progressive” Justices had given broad interpretations to the General Welfare Clause and the Commerce Clause so that the intended restrictions of Article I, Section 8 were erased.
That’s too bad, because the federal student aid program has turned out to be one of the greatest blunders in our history, right up there with the income tax, the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and the pro-union National Labor Relations Act. It is responsible for the enormous increase in the cost of higher education, a vast throng of poorly prepared and disengaged students entering college, the consequent decline of academic standards, credential inflation (i.e., the requirement by many employers that applicants have college degrees if they want to be considered), and the statist drift of the country, as more and more of the citizenry has been subjected to the proselytizing of zealous faculty and administrators.
If we could take a time machine back to 1965 and show the legislators and voting public what the HEA would do, I think that it would not have been enacted.
Returning to the student debt “crisis,” it too is an unintended consequence of the HEA. It isn’t really a crisis, since most student debtors are able to handle their payments, but there are some true horror stories—students with six-figure debts who can’t even pay the mounting interest. Nevertheless, the burden of paying for very expensive college credentials that many students didn’t really want and don’t use in their work is a big economic drag.
What is the solution?
It certainly is not to decree a general forgiveness of college loan debts. That would do nothing to alleviate the problem of too many people attending too expensive colleges to obtain degrees of too little utility. It would, however, confer a great windfall on many heavily indebted graduates who have high-paying jobs in law, medicine, and other professions. They can and should pay off their loans.
A better solution that some people have advocated is to once again allow graduates who find themselves drowning in debt to have their student loan debts discharged in bankruptcy. That was permissible until 2005, when Congress decided to revise the bankruptcy law so as to make student loan debts extraordinarily difficult to escape.
Writing in the May 10 Wall Street Journal, Richard Schinder correctly observes,
“Comprehensive student debt forgiveness is bad public policy. A legal regime—the federal bankruptcy system—already exists for those who truly need debt relief, with rules and consequences that are well-established.”
If student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy, the worst horror stories would be addressed. I would favor that, especially if it were coupled with a requirement that if a student discharges his student loan debts in bankruptcy, the college or university that educated him (or at least took his money in exchange for various courses) would have to cover the loss to the taxpayers. That would make schools think long and hard before they admitted academically weak students who can only make it through by taking raft of Mickey Mouse classes.
Those changes would go far toward alleviating the student loan mess, but they wouldn’t solve it. Federal student aid money would continue to prop up needlessly high tuitions and lure many marginal students into college because the financing is easy.
The solution is to eliminate federal student aid funding entirely. (And yes, I would include college assistance for military veterans.) The HEA repeal bill might be written so that five years after the date of enactment, all federal loans and grants would cease, thereby giving students and institutions time to adjust. Alternatives such as Income Share Agreements (where funders provide most or all of the money the student needs for college in exchange for a contractual commitment obligating the student to repay a percentage of his earnings for some years after graduation) would emerge. Colleges would find many ways to shed costs that add little or no educational value, like “diversity” offices.
Higher education in the US is bloated and dysfunctional because federal meddling turned it into a mass
Higher education in the US is bloated and dysfunctional because federal meddling turned it into a mass entitlement. Turn off the federal spigot and it will rapidly improve.
Nor does the Constitution anywhere authorize Congress (or the President) to lend money to college students—or to any other group.
If someone had asked James Madison or Benjamin Franklin or any of the other men who drafted the Constitution if it gave the new government the authority to lend money to people who wanted to go to college, the answer would have been an emphatic “No.”
Unfortunately, constitutional questions about federal programs were not being asked in the 1960s. A long series of Supreme Court decisions dating from the mid-1930s on had made it clear that the Court wouldn’t bother with challenges to federal spending and regulation. The “progressive” Justices had given broad interpretations to the General Welfare Clause and the Commerce Clause so that the intended restrictions of Article I, Section 8 were erased.
That’s too bad, because the federal student aid program has turned out to be one of the greatest blunders in our history, right up there with the income tax, the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and the pro-union National Labor Relations Act. It is responsible for the enormous increase in the cost of higher education, a vast throng of poorly prepared and disengaged students entering college, the consequent decline of academic standards, credential inflation (i.e., the requirement by many employers that applicants have college degrees if they want to be considered), and the statist drift of the country, as more and more of the citizenry has been subjected to the proselytizing of zealous faculty and administrators.
If we could take a time machine back to 1965 and show the legislators and voting public what the HEA would do, I think that it would not have been enacted.
Returning to the student debt “crisis,” it too is an unintended consequence of the HEA. It isn’t really a crisis, since most student debtors are able to handle their payments, but there are some true horror stories—students with six-figure debts who can’t even pay the mounting interest. Nevertheless, the burden of paying for very expensive college credentials that many students didn’t really want and don’t use in their work is a big economic drag.
What is the solution?
It certainly is not to decree a general forgiveness of college loan debts. That would do nothing to alleviate the problem of too many people attending too expensive colleges to obtain degrees of too little utility. It would, however, confer a great windfall on many heavily indebted graduates who have high-paying jobs in law, medicine, and other professions. They can and should pay off their loans.
A better solution that some people have advocated is to once again allow graduates who find themselves drowning in debt to have their student loan debts discharged in bankruptcy. That was permissible until 2005, when Congress decided to revise the bankruptcy law so as to make student loan debts extraordinarily difficult to escape.
Writing in the May 10 Wall Street Journal, Richard Schinder correctly observes,
“Comprehensive student debt forgiveness is bad public policy. A legal regime—the federal bankruptcy system—already exists for those who truly need debt relief, with rules and consequences that are well-established.”
If student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy, the worst horror stories would be addressed. I would favor that, especially if it were coupled with a requirement that if a student discharges his student loan debts in bankruptcy, the college or university that educated him (or at least took his money in exchange for various courses) would have to cover the loss to the taxpayers. That would make schools think long and hard before they admitted academically weak students who can only make it through by taking raft of Mickey Mouse classes.
Those changes would go far toward alleviating the student loan mess, but they wouldn’t solve it. Federal student aid money would continue to prop up needlessly high tuitions and lure many marginal students into college because the financing is easy.
The solution is to eliminate federal student aid funding entirely. (And yes, I would include college assistance for military veterans.) The HEA repeal bill might be written so that five years after the date of enactment, all federal loans and grants would cease, thereby giving students and institutions time to adjust. Alternatives such as Income Share Agreements (where funders provide most or all of the money the student needs for college in exchange for a contractual commitment obligating the student to repay a percentage of his earnings for some years after graduation) would emerge. Colleges would find many ways to shed costs that add little or no educational value, like “diversity” offices.
Higher education in the US is bloated and dysfunctional because federal meddling turned it into a mass entitlement. Turn off the federal spigot and it will rapidly improve.
In recent weeks, the tumult in Washington has largely centered on the issue of student loans. Almost every Democrat and left-leaning pundit has come out in favor of some degree of relief for those who have amassed debts to pay for college. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) for example, penned a Washington Post opinion piece with the exhortative title, “President Biden, it’s time to cancel student debt.”
What he wants the President to do is to forgive students of their payment obligations under their federal student loan contracts. It’s highly questionable whether the President has the legal authority to unilaterally forgive student debts, but let’s put aside that problem.
I’m going to argue that Congress should do something it unquestionably has the power to do, namely to repeal a statute. The statute is the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, one of the many laws passed by a giddy Congress at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson had a host of ideas for improving America through federal money and regulation—his “Great Society”—and government meddling in education was at the top of his list. Title IV of the Act created the federal student loan program.
The first question that ought to have been raised is whether the HEA was constitutional. Nothing in the Constitution authorizes Congress to legislate with respect to education. Article I, Section 8 sets forth the powers of Congress and education is not included. Education was among the great number of subjects that the Founders thought belonged to “the States or the people respectively” as the Tenth Amendment reads.
Nor does the Constitution anywhere authorize Congress (or the President) to lend money to college students—or to any other group.
If someone had asked James Madison or Benjamin Franklin or any of the other men who drafted the Constitution if it gave the new government the authority to lend money to people who wanted to go to college, the answer would have been an emphatic “No.”
Unfortunately, constitutional questions about federal programs were not being asked in the 1960s. A long series of Supreme Court decisions dating from the mid-1930s on had made it clear that the Court wouldn’t bother with challenges to federal spending and regulation. The “progressive” Justices had given broad interpretations to the General Welfare Clause and the Commerce Clause so that the intended restrictions of Article I, Section 8 were erased.
That’s too bad, because the federal student aid program has turned out to be one of the greatest blunders in our history, right up there with the income tax, the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and the pro-union National Labor Relations Act. It is responsible for the enormous increase in the cost of higher education, a vast throng of poorly prepared and disengaged students entering college, the consequent decline of academic standards, credential inflation (i.e., the requirement by many employers that applicants have college degrees if they want to be considered), and the statist drift of the country, as more and more of the citizenry has been subjected to the proselytizing of zealous faculty and administrators.
If we could take a time machine back to 1965 and show the legislators and voting public what the HEA would do, I think that it would not have been enacted.
Returning to the student debt “crisis,” it too is an unintended consequence of the HEA. It isn’t really a crisis, since most student debtors are able to handle their payments, but there are some true horror stories—students with six-figure debts who can’t even pay the mounting interest. Nevertheless, the burden of paying for very expensive college credentials that many students didn’t really want and don’t use in their work is a big economic drag.
What is the solution?
It certainly is not to decree a general forgiveness of college loan debts. That would do nothing to alleviate the problem of too many people attending too expensive colleges to obtain degrees of too little utility. It would, however, confer a great windfall on many heavily indebted graduates who have high-paying jobs in law, medicine, and other professions. They can and should pay off their loans.
A better solution that some people have advocated is to once again allow graduates who find themselves drowning in debt to have their student loan debts discharged in bankruptcy. That was permissible until 2005, when Congress decided to revise the bankruptcy law so as to make student loan debts extraordinarily difficult to escape.
Writing in the May 10 Wall Street Journal, Richard Schinder correctly observes,
“Comprehensive student debt forgiveness is bad public policy. A legal regime—the federal bankruptcy system—already exists for those who truly need debt relief, with rules and consequences that are well-established.”
If student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy, the worst horror stories would be addressed. I would favor that, especially if it were coupled with a requirement that if a student discharges his student loan debts in bankruptcy, the college or university that educated him (or at least took his money in exchange for various courses) would have to cover the loss to the taxpayers. That would make schools think long and hard before they admitted academically weak students who can only make it through by taking raft of Mickey Mouse classes.
Those changes would go far toward alleviating the student loan mess, but they wouldn’t solve it. Federal student aid money would continue to prop up needlessly high tuitions and lure many marginal students into college because the financing is easy.
The solution is to eliminate federal student aid funding entirely. (And yes, I would include college assistance for military veterans.) The HEA repeal bill might be written so that five years after the date of enactment, all federal loans and grants would cease, thereby giving students and institutions time to adjust. Alternatives such as Income Share Agreements (where funders provide most or all of the money the student needs for college in exchange for a contractual commitment obligating the student to repay a percentage of his earnings for some years after graduation) would emerge. Colleges would find many ways to shed costs that add little or no educational value, like “diversity” offices.
Higher education in the US is bloated and dysfunctional because federal meddling turned it into a mass
BY GEORGE LEEF | MAY 20, 2022 | EDUCATION
Higher education in the US is bloated and dysfunctional because federal meddling turned it into a mass entitlement. Turn off the federal spigot and it will rapidly improve.
In recent weeks, the tumult in Washington has largely centered on the issue of student loans. Almost every Democrat and left-leaning pundit has come out in favor of some degree of relief for those who have amassed debts to pay for college. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) for example, penned a Washington Post opinion piece with the exhortative title, “President Biden, it’s time to cancel student debt.”
What he wants the President to do is to forgive students of their payment obligations under their federal student loan contracts. It’s highly questionable whether the President has the legal authority to unilaterally forgive student debts, but let’s put aside that problem.
I’m going to argue that Congress should do something it unquestionably has the power to do, namely to repeal a statute. The statute is the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, one of the many laws passed by a giddy Congress at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson had a host of ideas for improving America through federal money and regulation—his “Great Society”—and government meddling in education was at the top of his list. Title IV of the Act created the federal student loan program.
The first question that ought to have been raised is whether the HEA was constitutional. Nothing in the Constitution authorizes Congress to legislate with respect to education. Article I, Section 8 sets forth the powers of Congress and education is not included. Education was among the great number of subjects that the Founders thought belonged to “the States or the people respectively” as the Tenth Amendment reads.
Nor does the Constitution anywhere authorize Congress (or the President) to lend money to college students—or to any other group.
If someone had asked James Madison or Benjamin Franklin or any of the other men who drafted the Constitution if it gave the new government the authority to lend money to people who wanted to go to college, the answer would have been an emphatic “No.”
Unfortunately, constitutional questions about federal programs were not being asked in the 1960s. A long series of Supreme Court decisions dating from the mid-1930s on had made it clear that the Court wouldn’t bother with challenges to federal spending and regulation. The “progressive” Justices had given broad interpretations to the General Welfare Clause and the Commerce Clause so that the intended restrictions of Article I, Section 8 were erased.
That’s too bad, because the federal student aid program has turned out to be one of the greatest blunders in our history, right up there with the income tax, the establishment of the Federal Reserve, and the pro-union National Labor Relations Act. It is responsible for the enormous increase in the cost of higher education, a vast throng of poorly prepared and disengaged students entering college, the consequent decline of academic standards, credential inflation (i.e., the requirement by many employers that applicants have college degrees if they want to be considered), and the statist drift of the country, as more and more of the citizenry has been subjected to the proselytizing of zealous faculty and administrators.
If we could take a time machine back to 1965 and show the legislators and voting public what the HEA would do, I think that it would not have been enacted.
Returning to the student debt “crisis,” it too is an unintended consequence of the HEA. It isn’t really a crisis, since most student debtors are able to handle their payments, but there are some true horror stories—students with six-figure debts who can’t even pay the mounting interest. Nevertheless, the burden of paying for very expensive college credentials that many students didn’t really want and don’t use in their work is a big economic drag.
What is the solution?
It certainly is not to decree a general forgiveness of college loan debts. That would do nothing to alleviate the problem of too many people attending too expensive colleges to obtain degrees of too little utility. It would, however, confer a great windfall on many heavily indebted graduates who have high-paying jobs in law, medicine, and other professions. They can and should pay off their loans.
A better solution that some people have advocated is to once again allow graduates who find themselves drowning in debt to have their student loan debts discharged in bankruptcy. That was permissible until 2005, when Congress decided to revise the bankruptcy law so as to make student loan debts extraordinarily difficult to escape.
Writing in the May 10 Wall Street Journal, Richard Schinder correctly observes,
“Comprehensive student debt forgiveness is bad public policy. A legal regime—the federal bankruptcy system—already exists for those who truly need debt relief, with rules and consequences that are well-established.”
If student loans could be discharged in bankruptcy, the worst horror stories would be addressed. I would favor that, especially if it were coupled with a requirement that if a student discharges his student loan debts in bankruptcy, the college or university that educated him (or at least took his money in exchange for various courses) would have to cover the loss to the taxpayers. That would make schools think long and hard before they admitted academically weak students who can only make it through by taking raft of Mickey Mouse classes.
Those changes would go far toward alleviating the student loan mess, but they wouldn’t solve it. Federal student aid money would continue to prop up needlessly high tuitions and lure many marginal students into college because the financing is easy.
The solution is to eliminate federal student aid funding entirely. (And yes, I would include college assistance for military veterans.) The HEA repeal bill might be written so that five years after the date of enactment, all federal loans and grants would cease, thereby giving students and institutions time to adjust. Alternatives such as Income Share Agreements (where funders provide most or all of the money the student needs for college in exchange for a contractual commitment obligating the student to repay a percentage of his earnings for some years after graduation) would emerge. Colleges would find many ways to shed costs that add little or no educational value, like “diversity” offices.
Higher education in the US is bloated and dysfunctional because of federal meddling.
George Leef
Watch “Who Central Bankers Really Are” on YouTube
The Philosophical Foundations of Capitalism
The greatest era of capitalist development—the last two centuries—has taken place under the ongoing cultural influence of the philosophy of the Enlightenment.
An excerpt from Chapter 1 of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, Volume I.
This book shows that the laws and social institutions necessary to the successful functioning, indeed, to the very existence, of the division of labor are those of capitalism. Capitalism is a social system based on private ownership of the means of production. It is characterized by the pursuit of material self-interest under freedom and it rests on a foundation of the cultural influence of reason. Based on its foundations and essential nature, capitalism is further characterized by saving and capital accumulation, exchange and money, financial self-interest and the profit motive, the freedoms of economic competition and economic inequality, the price system, economic progress, and a harmony of the material self-interests of all the individuals who participate in it.
As succeeding chapters of this book will demonstrate, almost every essential feature of capitalism underlies the division of labor and several of them are profoundly influenced by it in their own operation. When the connections between capitalism and the division of labor have been understood, it will be clear that economics, as the science which studies the production of wealth under a system of division of labor, is actually the science which studies the production of wealth under capitalism. Economics’ study of the consequences of government intervention and of socialism will be shown to be merely study of the impairment or outright destruction of capitalism and the division of labor.
1. The Philosophical Foundations of Capitalism and Economic Activity
Economic activity and the development of economic institutions do not take place in a vacuum. They are profoundly influenced by the fundamental philosophical convictions people hold.15 Specifically, the development of capitalist institutions and the elevation of the level of production to the standard it has reached over the last two centuries presuppose the acceptance of a this-worldly, pro reason philosophy. Indeed, in their essential development, the institutions of capitalism and the economic progress that results represent the implementation of man’s right to life, as that right has been described by Ayn Rand—namely, as the right “to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.”16 Capitalism is the economic system that develops insofar as people are free to exercise their right to life and choose to exercise it. As will be shown, its institutions represent, in effect, a self-expanded power of human reason to serve human life.17 The growing abundance of goods that results is the material means by which people further, fulfill, and enjoy their lives. The philosophical requirements of capitalism are identical with the philosophical requirements of the recognition and implementation of man’s right to life.
It was no accident that the gradual development of capitalist institutions in Western Europe that began in the late Middle Ages paralleled the growing influence of pro-secular, pro reason trends in philosophy and religion, which had been set in motion by the reintroduction into the Western world of the writings of Aristotle. It is no accident that the greatest era of capitalist development—the last two centuries—has taken place under the ongoing cultural influence of the philosophy of the Enlightenment.
Philosophical convictions pertaining to the reality and primacy of the material world of sensory experience determine the extent to which people are concerned with this world and with improving their lives in it. When, for example, people’s lives were dominated by the idea that the material world is superseded by another, higher world, for which their life in this world is merely a test and a preparation, and in which they will spend eternity, they had little motive to devote much thought and energy to material improvement. It was only when the philosophical conviction grew that the senses are valid and that sensory perception is the only legitimate basis of knowledge, that they could turn their full thought and attention to this world. This change was an indispensable precondition of the development of the pursuit of material self-interest as a leading force in people’s lives.
The cultural acceptance of the closely related philosophical conviction that the world operates according to definite and knowable principles of cause and effect is equally important to economic development. This conviction, largely absent in the Dark Ages, is the indispensable foundation of science and technology. It tells scientists and inventors that answers exist and can be found, if only they will keep on looking for them. Without this conviction, science and technology could not be pursued. There could be no quest for answers if people were not first convinced that answers can be found.
In addition to the emphasis on this-worldly concerns and the grasp of the principle of cause and effect, the influence of reason shows up in the development of the individual’s conceptual ability to give a sense of present reality to his life in decades to come, and in his identification of himself as a self-responsible causal agent with the power to improve his life. This combination of ideas is what produced in people such attitudes as the realization that hard work pays and that they must accept responsibility for their future by means of saving. The same combination of ideas helped to provide the intellectual foundation for the establishment and extension of private property rights as incentives to production and saving. Private property rights rest on the recognition of the principle of causality in the form that those who are to implement the causes must be motivated by being able to benefit from the effects they create. They also rest on a foundation of secularism—of the recognition of the rightness of being concerned with material improvement.
Thus, insofar as production depends on people’s desire to improve their material conditions, and on science, technology, hard work, saving, and private property, it fundamentally depends on the influence of a this-worldly, pro reason philosophy.
And to the extent that production depends on peace and tranquility, on respect for individual rights, on limited government, economic and political freedom, and even on personal self-esteem, it again fundamentally depends on the influence of a this-worldly, pro reason philosophy.
From the dawn of the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century, the growing conviction that reason is a reliable tool of knowledge and means of solving problems led to a decline in violence and the frequency of warfare in Western society, as people and governments became increasingly willing to settle disputes by discussion and persuasion, based on logic and facts. This was a necessary precondition of the development of the incentive and the means for the stepped-up capital accumulation required by a modern economic system. For if people are confronted with the chronic threat of losing what they save, and again and again do lose it—whether to local robbers or to marauding invaders—they cannot have either the incentive or the means to accumulate capital.
During the same period of time, as part of the same process, a growing confidence in the reliability and power of human reason led to the elevation of people’s view of man, as the being distinguished by the possession of reason. Because he was held to possess incomparably the highest and best means of knowledge, man came to be regarded, on philosophical grounds, as incomparably the highest and best creature in the natural order, capable of action on a grand and magnificent scale, with unlimited potential for improvement. In conjunction with the further philosophical conviction that what actually exist are always individual concretes, not abstractions as such, and thus not collectives or groups of any kind, the elevated view of man meant an elevated view of the individual human
and his individual potential.
In their logically consistent form, these ideas led to a view of the individual as both supremely valuable—as an end in himself—and as fully competent to run his own life. The application, in turn, of this view of the individual to society and politics was the doctrine of inalienable individual rights, and of government as existing for no other purpose than to secure those rights, in order to leave the individual free to pursue his own happiness. This, of course, was the foundation of the freedom of capitalism. The same view of man and the human individual, when accepted as a personal standard to be lived up to, was the inspiration for individuals to undertake large-scale accomplishments and to persevere against hardship and failure in order to succeed. It inspired them when they set out to explore the world, discover laws of nature, establish a proper form of government, invent new products and methods of production, and build vast new businesses and brand new industries. It was the inspiration for the pioneering spirit and sense of self-reliance and self-responsibility which once pervaded American society at all levels of ability, and a leading manifestation of which is the spirit of great entrepreneurship.
Finally, the ability of economic science itself to influence people’s thinking so that they will favor capitalism and sound economic policy is also totally dependent on the influence of a pro reason philosophy. Economics is a science that seeks to explain the complexities of economic life through a process of abstraction and simplification. The method of economics is the construction of deliberately simplified cases, which highlight specific economic phenomena and make possible a conceptual analysis of their effects. For example, in analyzing the effects of improvements in machinery, an economist imagines a hypothetical case in which no change of any kind takes place in the world except the introduction of an improved machine. The truths established deductively in the analysis of such cases are then applied as principles to the real economic world. Consequently, the ability of economics to affect people’s attitudes depends on their willingness to follow and feel bound by the results of abstract reasoning. If economics is to have cultural influence, it is indispensable that people have full confidence in logic and reason as tools of cognition.
* * *
Not only are economic activity and economics as a science dependent on a pro reason philosophy in all the ways I have described, but also it should be realized that economics itself is a highly philosophical subject, potentially capable of exerting an extremely important pro reason influence on philosophy. As the subject that studies the production of wealth under a system of division of labor, economics deals both with essential aspects of man’s relationship to the physical world and with essential aspects of his relationship to other men. Indeed, the subject matter of economics can be understood as nothing less than the fundamental nature of human society and the ability of human beings living in society progressively to enlarge the benefits they derive from the physical world. For this is what one understands when one grasps the nature and ramifications of the division of labor and its effects on the ability to produce. In this capacity, economics overturns such irrationalist philosophical doctrines as the notion that one man’s gain is another man’s loss, and the consequent belief in the existence of an inherent conflict of interests among human beings. In their place, it sets the doctrine of continuous economic progress and the harmony of the rational self-interests of all human beings under capitalism, which doctrine it conclusively proves on the basis of economic law.
Excerpted from Chapter 1 of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, Volume I. Copyright 2020 George Reisman. All rights reserved. The encyclopedic Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is a required reference for every Capitalist’s library. Reisman’s treatise is now available in two volumes: Volume I (focuses on microeconomic issues) and Volume II (focuses on macroeconomic issues).
The Social Credit System is the Elite’s Means of Control
Duff Cooper, Viscount Norwich, was the only British minister who resigned over the Munich Agreement of 1938. His autobiography was titled Old Men Forget.
I expect they do, but I remember.
I remember when business, even large business, operated on handshakes without contracts. Business could operate this way because people in those days had good character and integrity. A person who welched on a handshake was finished in business.
I grew up when America was still America. We were taught that you had to be able to look yourself in the mirror every morning. That required that you were truthful and honorable in your relations with others.
Today you can’t look yourself in the mirror unless you have ripped off, to your financial benefit, others. Just read any of the books by Wall Street whistleblowers or government officials about how the system really operates.
Today, lawyers tell me, even iron-clad contracts cannot protect a deal.
Governments confronted with self-serving behavior other than their own are frustrated by the difficulty of organizing people behind the government’s, or its controlling agents’, agendas. China is consolidating control over its population by creating a “Social Credit System.” The Chinese population is monitored in its behavior. A Chinese citizen who disagrees with the government, drinks while driving, or demonstrates any politically or socially undesirable traits and behaviors gets a very low rating that prevents the citizen from traveling abroad, from attending university, from using public transport, or whatever restriction and punishment the government decides to inflict.
This Social Credit System is in the process of being established throughout the Western World It is the hallmark of the Davos World Economic Forum and America’s Department of Homeland Security. Most of America’s global corporations are its champions.
The Social Credit system requires “citizens” to be subservient to government. Such governments are still called “democracies,” but the citizens have no voice. All voices different from the narrative are cancelled.
I do not think the United States as a country can escape this. States with a semi-aware government, such as Florida with Governor DeSantis, have a chance, but past efforts of states to defend their constitutional authority against an invasive federal government have failed.
Notice that the tyrannical Social Credit system is trying to recreate the reliable, predictable old character system, with the difference being that a citizen’s loyalty is not to his character but to the Government’s agenda.
The first step in establishing a Social Credit system is to gain control over the media. This was accomplished during the Clinton regime when six mega-companies were allowed to buy up and concentrate in a few hands 90% of what was an independent media.
The next step is to use fear–9/11, Covid, Russia–to get a fearful and gullible population to agree to the loss of their constitutional protections in order “to be safe.”
Once this is accomplished, there are no constraints on those who wield power. The Constitution becomes a document without authority.
This is precisely the point at which we stand at this moment.
Paul Craig Roberts
Watch “What’s the Right Minimum Wage?” on YouTube
