Category Archives: Politics

How Will We Talk About 2020 Election Fraud as More Evidence Emerges?

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If we get hard evidence that the 2020 election was rigged, as appears increasingly likely with data emerging from Arizona, Georgia and elsewhere, how will Communist social media companies respond? Will they not let us discuss it? And how will the Biden regime and Congress respond? Will there be arrests simply for talking about it? We will soon learn how much of a dictatorship we are already living under. Kudos to President Trump for not letting this issue go. Right now, election integrity is the ONLY issue that matters.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Ayn Rand on Poverty

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If concern for human poverty and suffering were one’s primary motive, one would seek to discover their cause. One would not fail to ask: Why did some nations develop, while others did not? Why have some nations achieved material abundance, while others have remained stagnant in subhuman misery? History and, specifically, the unprecedented prosperity-explosion of the nineteenth century, would give an immediate answer: capitalism is the only system that enables men to produce abundance—and the key to capitalism is individual freedom.

Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others—misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement—failure is not a mortgage on success—suffering is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence—man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone’s altar nor for anyone’s cause—life is not one huge hospital.

The Inversion is Complete: America’s Government Now Threatens the Citizens

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BIDEN: “Those who say the blood of Patriots, you know, and all the stuff about how we’re gonna have to move against the government… If you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

Emperor Joe Biden, providing all the proof you need that he and his party are the biggest threat to the rights of individuals since Nazism and Communism.

In 1962, freedom-loving Americans feared being nuked by Russia. In 2021, freedom-loving Americans fear the threat of their own government.

In other news …

The U.S. military is now teaching critical race theory, the idea that America is a bad place with a shameful history, and that individual plus economic freedom is an evil and hateful thing. George Washington executed known traitors in the early American army. Today, the heirs to George Washington are teaching soldiers how to BE traitors.

And then there’s the question of election integrity …

Communist Democrat approach to elections:

If a Republican wins, it’s automatically invalid; the Democrat is the real winner, and only a conspiracy (e.g., Russia) could explain it.

If a Democrat wins, it’s automatically the “will of the people”, it must stand and it may not be questioned. Questioning the victory of any Democrat will get you condemned, censored and (perhaps) ultimately convicted of a felony.

That’s it.

DIVIDE, INDUCE UNEARNED GUILT & CONQUER.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

This is how the left turned America totalitarian.

Democratic Determination to Eliminate Filibuster is Highly Revealing

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If you really believed you’d ever be out of power again, you would not support getting rid of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Clearly, the Democratic Communists intend to hold power forever once they get rid of the filibuster. Otherwise, they would not risk being the minority in future sessions of Congress without it. Right now, the filibuster is the only thing standing in the way of: stacking the Supreme Court; completely nationalizing and rigging elections in favor of one party; confiscating all guns; imposing all-out censorship; redistributing wealth; imposing a racist dictatorship; and all the rest. It takes a dictator to want to get rid of the filibuster. Just look at the legislation they’re trying to pass without it. We already know.

Republicans and lovers of liberty should not take too much comfort in that election bill losing. All it means is that we keep the status quo. The status quo means that President Trump wasn’t allowed to win reelection, regardless of what the votes said; and two Georgia Senate seats were going to the Democrats regardless of the voting outcome. We know there was fraud, and our entire government, right up to the Supreme Court, is too corrupt even to consider investigating the evidence we already have. THAT’S our biggest problem. We can’t go on like this, even if the Democrats fail to pass one piece of legislation. This isn’t your daddy’s republic. It’s not even a republic anymore. Get real, Republicans. We need to divorce from these totalitarians, once and for all. There is no working with them — not now, and not ever again.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Censorship Makes Us Stupid

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Censorship FEEDS irrationality and conspiracy theories. When selective facts are not permitted to be considered, and certain conclusions may not be drawn, or certain hypotheses may not be uttered … you shut down the capacity of the mind to do its job: to THINK. Many correct and brilliant conclusions are littered with half-baked or contradictory ideas along the way. This is how the process of thinking operates. The efforts of Facebook, Twitter, Google, the Bidenistas and others to outright shut down and even legally prosecute human thinking (as with the Arizona recount) are not only grotesquely unjust. They are stupid. And they are policies that will make us stupid. What else could be their intention?

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Our Public Pensions are Crumbling

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A few years ago, my father passed away…

He was a brilliant physician… but unlike most surgeons, he didn’t have a lucrative private practice to support him in retirement. He was a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill… a state employee.

And his wife, my stepmother – whom I’ve known and loved for more than 30 years – depends on the survivorship benefits from his pension. The problem was, that pension was hanging by a thread.

I’ve seen headlines for years about a “pension crisis” (as I’m sure you have too) and read occasional notes about small towns going bankrupt. I figured the pension problems were just fearmongering… or something that a little bailout from the federal government could fix.

I was wrong.

When I dug into the numbers, I discovered that at the time, North Carolina’s state-sponsored pension funds were only 51.3% funded, right on the edge of the crisis point. It made me furious.

The more I dug, the more I realized how much danger was facing my stepmother and millions of other retirees…

Nothing beats a government pension. If you (or a loved one) work for the government, you expect pension benefits to support you for the rest of your life.

If you’re already retired, your check has shown up without fail, month after month. Your health care benefits are far better than most. And your money is practically inflation-proof, thanks to your cost-of-living adjustments.

Anyone would love to be promised those benefits in retirement. But what if that promise isn’t kept? What if you work for decades… only to have a big part of your promised compensation taken away from you?

This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s happening. And it’s going to happen to more folks soon.

Public pensions nationwide are crumbling. Legal loopholes are widening. If you don’t take action to protect yourself and your loved ones, you could be left with nothing.

If you’re currently retired, the coming American pension crisis could mean the elimination of cost-of-living adjustments, higher health care premiums, or even cuts to your base pension check. If things are bad enough, you may suffer a ravaging “clawback” – where the government repossesses a huge lump sum of your cash – and still cuts your monthly check.

Again, this is not a hypothetical.

In 2001, the vast majority of pensions were fully funded. Generally speaking, “well-funded” means above 80%. But 50% funding or less is considered the “crisis point.” It’s extremely difficult to come back from 50% or less.

According to The Pew Charitable Trusts – an independent research organization – pensions in Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, and New Jersey are less than 50% funded. In fact, New Jersey sits at the bottom of the list… Its pension is only 38% funded.

Only seven states are 90% funded.

If you’re one of the tens of millions of affected Americans, you should know… you have zero control over what happens.

You can’t increase or decrease the amount that’s being invested. Also, companies hire managers who oversee where the pension money goes… And the fees they charge dilute returns.

Plus, if you die right after you retire, your dependents might get nothing.

But there is a solution…

You can move money from your pension into a self-directed individual retirement account (“IRA”).

This gives you total control of your money. You get to grow your money tax-free, just like a pension… but there’s no limit on how much you can make.

A self-directed IRA is exactly what it sounds like… It puts you in charge of your investments.

In addition to the conventional investments you can make in a typical IRA – like stocks and bonds – a fully self-directed IRA allows you to invest in many other assets, including real estate, private stocks, businesses, options, and even precious metals.

You can invest in just about anything, as long as it’s not employed for your personal benefit. This simply means you must avoid any conflicts of interest. You can’t, for example, invest in companies you have a 50% interest in. But you can buy the house next door through your IRA and then rent it to a neighbor. You can also invest in a local small business (again, as long as it’s not your own).

If you do all your trading inside a retirement account, you don’t have to report any trades to the IRS. The goal is simply to maximize your total returns as quickly and as easily as you can… and get better returns than a pension could offer.

There are two ways to move your pension to an IRA…

One is to “roll over” the pension directly into an IRA. The broker or custodian you’re opening an IRA with should have all the necessary forms for you to fill out.

You can also take a lump-sum payment on your pension and then move the funds into an IRA. If you do transfer the funds within 60 days of taking the lump sum, you’ll avoid being taxed on the money and the 10% early withdrawal penalty. (If you can, though, just roll over the pension directly – you don’t want to risk incurring taxes and penalties at all.)

And make sure that you check with your employer’s pension-plan rules for any fine print.

However you do it, don’t wait. Why leave your pension – the money you’re counting on for retirement – in someone else’s hands?

Here’s to our health, wealth, and a great retirement,

— Dr. David Eifrig

White Liberals Need Sensitivity Training

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Who needs sensitivity training? The answer is white liberals and their black dupes. Not all blacks. Just the white liberals’ dupes.

White liberals and their black dupes are the most racist people on earth. They teach hatred of white people, teaching that leads to verbal and physical abuse. See, for example, these expressions of hatred for white people: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/06/11/expressions-of-anti-white-hatred-in-high-places-aruna-khilanani-at-yale/

White Americans are not taught to hate black Americans. But black Americans are taught by white liberals to hate white Americans. Yet despite the taught, orchestrated hate, blacks are never guilty of hate speech or hate crime. But whites are guilty even if they are silent and actionless. It is called “systemic racism.” By virtue of skin color, white liberals have declared all whites to be racist. Clearly, it is the white liberals teaching racial hatred who require racial sensitivity training. Yet, it is their victims who receive it.

Skin color is now the arbiter of good and evil. Black is good. White is evil.

As whites overall are more successful than blacks overall despite the reverse discrimination that favors blacks, white liberals conclude that the American system is rigged for the triumph of evil over good. Meritocracy does the rigging. The white liberal solution is to get rid of merit-based school admissions, hiring, promotion, and job performance evaluation. Instead, these decisions must be based on skin color (and in some instances by gender declaration and sexual preference).

The consequence is the destruction of educational standards and of educational institutions themselves. For example, in Northern Virginia a famous STEM high school was branded racist because it had a 70% Asian and 30% white student body. (Because of their success relative to blacks, Asians also get the racist treatment.) The remedy was “equity,” which means admission by skin color. Those who effected the change admit that the school now accepts students who are not qualified to be there. For them to graduate, standards are reduced. In other words, an elite school has been destroyed. Having been “reformed,” it now produces the same morons as the rest of US schools.

The emphasis on “equity” instead of merit is now widely spread in US educational systems. In California public schools, mathematics has been deemphasized. White liberals decided that math is racist, because it is harder for blacks to do. The deemphasis on math is described by white liberals as reducing “whiteness” in education. Reconstructing history, taking down monuments, banning books, and substituting indoctrination for learning are other ways “whiteness” is being removed.

What does this mean for white students? They are not only denied education and the ability to reason, they are denied self-respect and any knowledge of positive contributions by their white forebears to their country. They can be neither proud of themselves nor proud of their country.

How then can they fight for their country? What becomes of the military? Indeed, how do you have a police force? https://www.rt.com/usa/526905-portland-officers-resign-charges/

The same is happening in the criminal justice system as in education. Just as it is racist for blacks to fail in school, it is racist for them to fail in society. The criminal justice system is just another racist way whites hold down blacks. In order to get rid of the injustice, black crimes are being defined away. For example, Oxfam, a British charity organization, trains its staff that it is racism for white women to report rape by black men. To discourage Scandinavian women from reporting rape by black men, there is an effort underway to equate such a report with a hate crime, which is punishable. In other words, if white women report that they have been raped, the raped woman, not the rapist, has committed a crime.

White liberals might think they are leading a revolution. If so, they will be its first victims. There is nothing in the doctrine of systemic racism and in critical race theory that excludes white liberals. In The Camp of the Saints the white liberals who paved the way for the black immigrant-invaders were the first to be killed.

White liberals are too stupid to understand that when a society is deconstructed, the result is violence and chaos.

Minimum Wage Laws

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Minimum-wage laws are again in the news, as Joe Biden and his political allies in Congress seek to push the national minimum from its current level of $7.25 per hour up to $15 per hour. Some politicians, Sen. Bernie Sanders for one, declare that people can barely survive even on $15 per hour. If the law takes the minimum up to $15, we can expect pressure to raise it still further in the future.Minimum-wage laws are not well intentioned. They are evil in their methods (coercion) and evil in their goals (to make people believe they’re dependent on government.)
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After all, why shouldn’t the government be compassionate and improve the lives of millions of low-wage workers? Many Americans think that’s one of the reasons for democracy — so that the government can respond to people’s needs.

There is a great deal wrong with minimum-wage laws and I’d like to set forth my case against them. I’m not just against the current move to raise the wage, but against the very concept of laws dictating the terms of contracts between people.

Whenever two people agree on a contract for goods or services, they have peacefully consented to the deal because both expect to be better off as a result. Peter might agree to pay Paul $50 to clean the leaves out of his gutters; Jennifer might agree to pay Jane $8 per hour for cleaning up her restaurant. All four are satisfied. They would probably prefer to receive more or pay less, but they are content with their contracts.

No other person has any right to interfere with them. If Joe were to threaten violence against Peter unless he pays Paul $60, or if Nancy were to threaten violence against Jennifer unless she pays Jane $9 per hour, they would be guilty of a violation of the criminal law.

But if the threat comes not from meddlesome citizens like Joe and Nancy, but from the government, that is supposed to make threats of force all right. When governments enact minimum-wage laws, or increase existing minimum wages, that’s what they are doing — threatening to use force against peaceful individuals for not paying what government officials have decreed to be enough. Unfortunately, few Americans think there is anything wrong in doing that.

There is something wrong, though. The responsibility of government is to protect the rights of its citizens, not to threaten them with punishment for peacefully going about their lives. However passionately you might believe that Paul, Jane, and all other workers need or deserve more, you should agree that it’s morally wrong to accomplish that through coercion. There are noncoercive means of assisting people in need. Peaceful action is better than using force.

What else is wrong with minimum-wage laws?

The most common objection is that they cause unemployment among workers with low skill levels. If Peter can’t afford more than $50, he won’t hire Paul and instead do the work himself. If Jennifer can’t afford to pay Jane $9 per hour, she might invest in automated cleaning equipment. For some workers, therefore, the mandated minimum will not mean more income, but less, as they find it hard to contract (legally, anyway) with someone who values their work at the government’s new minimum level.

When you point out to minimum-wage advocates that some people are certain to lose their current jobs and others who haven’t yet entered the labor market will be unable to find any job at all, they are nonplussed. They will tell you that some studies by economics professors show that unemployment due to the minimum wage isn’t “too severe” and say that the gains to workers who get jobs at the higher wage outweigh the losses.

That’s elitism for you. How can anyone claim to know how much harm is done to a person who cannot find legal employment? How can you measure the losses to a young person or an unskilled immigrant who never finds an honest job because of the minimum wage? Even if it’s true that some workers benefit from higher pay, their gains can’t be compared with the long-term suffering of those who are rendered unemployable.

Furthermore, that utilitarian “gains versus losses” calculus is bogus because many of the apparent winners would have earned raises to or above the minimum wage anyway. With the experience they acquire from entry-level jobs at the minimum wage, most workers earn raises or find jobs that pay more. Increasing the minimum wage merely hastens the point in time where they would naturally — that is, without government coercion — have increased their incomes.

Minimum-wage increases are therefore wholly responsible for the devastating losses of unemployability, but for little if any of the apparent benefits of higher earnings.

Opponents of minimum-wage laws have been pointing out the long-run harm they inflict on low-skilled workers for many, many years. They have shown particular instances of workers who were let go and businesses that had to close, as well as economic research on the extent to which minimum-wage laws increase unemployment generally. But I have never heard of a single politician who said that the evidence has caused him to change his mind and vote against minimum-wage increases, much less to advocate repeal of the law.

That, I contend, is because minimum-wage laws are not really intended to help the working poor. They’re intended to help politicians get and keep what they crave: power.

The intention

My argument is based on Public Choice theory, which looks at politicians not as high-minded devotees of the social welfare, but as ordinary people who are interested in their own welfare.

When they vote for minimum-wage increases, politicians get to bask in the light of their supposed compassion, claiming credit for having “raised people out of poverty.” That gets them votes and financial support from those who believe that it is the government’s job to reduce poverty.

But what about all the people who are thrown out of work, or aren’t able to land their first job? A few of them might accurately pin the blame for their plight on their “representatives” who supported the minimum-wage law, but most won’t know that. They don’t follow politics that closely. Losing those few votes is piddling in comparison with the gains for the politicians who favor higher minimum wages.

Moreover, unemployed workers are easy marks for the rhetoric we constantly hear from progressives about their plans to create an economy “that works for everyone.” Frustrated workers who can’t find jobs but don’t understand why they can’t, are easily lured into the web of statism with promises from politicians to help them through governmental welfare and training programs.

Finally, those same politicians love to foster the illusion that the way for people to better their lives is to demand action by the government. The big “Fight for $15!” rallies are a delight for politicians who want people to believe that good things come from the state rather than from voluntary action by individuals and private organizations. Minimum-wage laws don’t just inflict economic damage, but they also damage the fabric of civil society by encouraging a “the government is your savior” mindset in people.

Frequently we hear criticism of minimum-wage laws that goes like this: “The laws are well intentioned, but have bad consequences.” I cannot agree. Minimum-wage laws are not well intentioned. They are evil in their methods (coercion) and evil in their goals (to make people believe they’re dependent on government.) If we could ever abolish them, the United States would be a much better nation.

This post was written by: George Leef

George C. Leef is the research director of the Martin Center for Academic Renewal in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was previously the president of Patrick Henry Associates, East Lansing, Michigan, an adjunct professor of law and economics, Northwood University, and a scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.