Politics without election integrity is meaningless. Discussion and resolution of ideological differences is impossible without freedom of speech, particularly on social media and the Internet. Economic growth without individual liberty and private property will not happen. Health and safety without choice and freedom will be nonexistent. Pretending that political science is real science will not save lives; it will end up killing millions.
Until we grasp, as a society, that the people we have hired to rule us (in government) and govern our thinking (in the arts, media and culture) are WRONG ABOUT VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING, there will increasingly be nothing left worth fighting for. The looming catastrophe of the Biden-Harris regime is a symptom of the tolerance too many people have for utter idiocy, all based on the faulty twin premises of, “It can’t happen here. It can’t happen to me.” It can, and it IS. What to do? Reverse course 180 degrees on essentially everything. A complete U-turn: toward freedom, individual rights, objectivity, common sense, truth-speaking and truth-seeking. Don’t let it go, America.
I’m on vacation. No TV, no computer, just my phone, my iPad, my kids, and my grandchildren — although, of course, I still skim the headlines every day. I am also seeing how eerily familiar the way people in another state are living is, but it’s another blue state, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Since the trip began, I’ve been struck by the abject abandonment of common sense in favor of rote obedience to absurd rules. We are trained monkeys, following senseless pronouncements that improve nothing.
Start with the airport. For some reason, my TSA Pre-check status didn’t make it onto my ticket. So I was in the line that required me to take off my shoes and stand with arms over my head to be scanned.
I put every darn thing in bins, of course. My iPad in a separate one, of course. I was behind another elderly lady, this one with some major physical issues. The TSA agents took her sturdy, three-footed cane and handed her a slim wooden one to get through the scanner ordeal. It was barely enough to keep her upright.
Once she was through the scanner, they pulled her aside, and I watched as she was patted down, head to toe, for about five minutes. This lady was so clearly not a terrorist that a caveman could have told you so. Old, overweight, barely able to walk. Ankles so swollen that it looked painful.
I got to watch her ordeal because they patted me down, too, all because I’d forgotten I had a pill in my pants pocket that I was meant to take on the flight. I was made to take it out, show it to the agent, and then they patted me down, focusing on that darned now-empty pocket. Maybe it was a terrorist weapon?
When I got to my destination, at midnight, the near-empty airport announcer droned on about making sure to keep masks on. After driving my rental through a violent windstorm to my ultimate destination, I settled in. The next day, I noticed that the mask BS was just as bad here as in California. My young grandkids were well trained. Mask on whenever they went out the door. Even outdoors at the farmers’ market, there was a guard making me pull mine up.
The city, a tourist destination, is full of people in the ubiquitous blue Chinese mask, the one that may or may not (Russian roulette, anyone?) have graphene in it. I’ve written about how it’s a known carcinogen, especially when inhaled. A lot of kids walking around with their parents were in those masks.
Then I read the headline that the CDC “guidance” includes keeping kids in masks seemingly forever, even while letting adults breathe. Rand Paul asked them to provide some rationale for it, which I’m sure they will ignore. There simply isn’t one. So I wonder if it’s a lead-up to an attempt at making children take the vaccine.
There are enough horror stories of vaccine reactions, and enough unknowns about the long-term consequences of taking it, that vaccinating those not prone to get the disease anyway ought to be off the table. Common sense would dictate not giving vulnerable children an unapproved substance. But money talks.
The other thing I’ve noticed scanning the headlines is that the Biden administration was apparently surprised by our burgeoning inflation, which even I, no financial brainiac, predicted in print a while ago. Janet Yellen said it wouldn’t be a problem, after all. Common sense, again, suggests replacing her with someone with a brain. Well, replacing the whole administration would be nice, too.
All I can say is, abandoning common sense, they took the things we actually buy off the list of inflation indicators. That was a while ago, during the last Democrat administration. You know, food, gas…the stuff our let-them-eat-cake superiors don’t have to deal with day to day. That way, they could push solar panels made by Chinese slaves and feel good about themselves for “fixing” the planet.
I know people who now need to make really hard decisions. Things like whether to buy overpriced gas to commute to a job that barely feeds the family or just to give in and take the enhanced unemployment benefits being handed out like candy and stay home. Common sense says to take the money and run. That is countered by the pride of providing for the family. Which one will win? And no matter which does, will it be enough to feed the family as prices skyrocket for the common things we buy?
The common sense of the common man was the making of America. What will happen to us now that our hyper-educated, self-styled elite have dedicated themselves to the abolition of common sense?
Prince Harry is under fire after referring to the First Amendment of the Constitution as “bonkers” while discussing the media “feeding frenzy” after he and his wife Meghan Markle left the United Kingdom and moved into Tyler Perry’s Beverly Hills mansion while they were settling in the United States.
“I’ve got so much I want to say about the First Amendment as I sort of understand it, but it is bonkers,” the Duke of Sussex said.
Don’t take his views too seriously.
Harry’s hatred of free speech is actually an expression (and confession) of his own unimportance.
When you’re born into the world and made both a celebrity and billionaire for doing absolutely NOTHING and achieving absolutely NOTHING, you resent it when people snicker and talk about it.
Instead of questioning the people doing the snickering, or perhaps doing something constructive (aside from whining to Oprah), Prince Harry — who wants all the advantages and benefits of royal life with none of the costs — blames freedom of speech itself. “If only people weren’t allowed to talk, then I wouldn’t have to listen.” He’s like all the other totalitarians of his generation, even if he has no clue what a totalitarian is.
Like all censors, Harry never states openly WHO should do the censoring and WHO gets to decide what is and is not heard.
He doesn’t really care. He’s not smart enough to be an ideologue, even a wrong or bad one. He’s just acting like an entitled brat. He’s an international fool, and perhaps he senses it, which is why he wants everyone to be shut up. In reality, he’s the one who should shut up. It would be in his own best interests.
You can legitimately feel for a person who’s born into a life he never asked for. Harry did not choose royalty. But he continues to demand all the attention, money and power to which he feels entitled. Power which, in the case of obliterating free speech, the royal charter does not even entitle him. But he wants it anyway. He thinks we should listen to the stupid, tired opinions about life, society and morality spewed out by himself and his wife because of a royal status that he roundly condemns every chance he gets.
We don’t need your opinions, Prince Harry. The world is already full of madness, depravity and insanity. Just figure out your own life and leave the First Amendment the hell alone.
Laurie Rubel, a professor of math education at New York’s Brooklyn College, does not appear to be fond of the discipline she teaches. In fact, she apparently believes math is inherently racist. She recently tweeted, “the idea that math (or data) is culturally neutral or in any way objective is a MYTH.” In a separate tweet, she noted that math “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy” after stating, albeit incoherently, “along with the ‘of course math is neutral because 2 + 2 = 4 trope’ are the related (and creepy) ‘math is pure’ and ‘protect math.’” Appearing drunk on her own peerless wokeness, she added, “I’d rather think on nurturing people & protecting the planet (with math in service of them goals).” Well, maybe just drunk.
What an amazing social justice warrior! What a flawless person! She’d rather “think on” nurturing people! And protecting the planet! Not that she’d actually do anything in furtherance of her stated goals. It is enough that she has stated them. And she wants to take that racist (and no doubt misogynistic, homophobic, and Islamophobic) math and use it “in service of them goals.” It’s a good thing she isn’t an English teacher. Though, to be fair, Ms. Rubel may believe English is at least as racist as math is. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be a better instructor. Or Barney Rubble.
Seemingly every week another professor claims math, data, facts, good behavior, competence, proper hygiene, discipline, a work ethic, speaking ability, or another such basic building block of a successful society is prima facie evidence of the white supremacist patriarchy’s evil and unwarranted hold on American society. (How racist is that?) Yet, Rubel’s assertion that 2+2=4 is a “trope” still boggles the mind.
Here are common dictionary definitions of “trope:”
A figure of speech using words in nonliteral ways, such as a metaphor.
A figure of speech through which speakers or writers intend to express meanings of words differently than their literal meanings.
A word or expression used in a figurative sense: FIGURE OF SPEECH
At the end of the movie/novel “1984,” Winston Smith is tortured by the authoritarian Marxist government until he avers that 2+2=5. “Elites” in government, media, academia, and Big Business now continuously try to brainwash people into believing that 2+2 doesn’t necessarily equal 4, that there is no immutable or knowable truth, that there are an unlimited number of genders, that the U.S. is a systemically racist country, and that they are smarter and more compassionate than their deplorable inferiors living in flyover country. They do this to bolster their own power while simultaneously draining the hope from– and breaking the spirit/will of—middle-class Americans in red states and regions.
It is the elites that traffic in tropes. Tropes such as “climate change,” “Trump colluded with Russia,” “America was never great,” “Republicans don’t care about science/the Earth/your grandma,” “Systemic racism,” “microaggressions,” “gender is a continuum,” “COEXIST,” and “The Big Lie.”
Speaking of The Big Lie, America, like all nations/peoples, struggled with racism in the past but has not been systemically racist for a long time. It is, however, now becoming so, due to far-left ideas and policy prescriptions like quotas, segregation, critical race theory, multiculturalism, intersectionality, and the 1619 Project.
2+2 does not equal five. Nor do two wrongs make a right.
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It’s hard to comprehend a more toxic, psychologically unhealthy or self-destructive mentality than socialism. Or what today we label “woke-ism”.
Think about the underlying mindset of woke-ism.
Unearned guilt. “You’re a racist. I don’t have to prove it. I know you’re a racist by the color of your skin. If you think you’re not a racist, you’re wrong. If you demand proof or evidence of your racism, or you require me to define my term ‘racism’; — then that’s simply more proof of your racism.”
Envy. “Those with more have harmed you — because they have more. The one percent steal from the 99 percent who supply their wealth. Take it back. Achievement has nothing to do with wealth — including any wealth you earn honestly. There is no honestly earned wealth. All property is theft. Take what’s yours; you deserve ten times more than you’ll ever manage to get.”
Neurotic fear. “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Reason and rationality can solve nothing. Personal responsibility is a total waste of time. There is no power of positive thinking.”
Lack of critical thinking. “So long as the woke media says it, it’s true. So long as the network or website is CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS or NBC, then all you need to do is trust the concerned, worried and professional expressions of the geniuses reading the news. That’s all you need to know; and all you need to think.”
Blind obedience to (woke) authority. “Life sucks. Nothing can help you. ONLY the government can help you — the right, woke government officials, that is. Trust in government. Do what you’re told.”
Rage. “Life is a vale of tears. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. So get angry. At least when you’re in a wild, mindless rage, you don’t have to feel the terror of existence. Act like Black Lives Matter or Antifa. Or at least support them. THEY are the means of destruction, because destruction is all we have. It’s the only alternative to perpetual terror.”
Most mental health professionals (myself excluded) are leftists. Most of them buy into “woke-ism”. Yet the vast majority of these therapists, doctors and psychiatrists would NEVER espouse the mentality that their own sociopolitical ideology imposes on the world. Whatever their errors or failings, they would NEVER seek to impose the wreckless and destructive psychological toxicity on individuals that they happily vote for/endorse for the world-at-large.
Woke-ism is madness unleashed. Buy into it at your own peril.
The brute fact is that the GOP today—unlike its original incarnation—has no rootedness in any specific moral conception of political life. It is an unmoored, mercenary instrument for hire. By Tal Bachman
May 14, 2021
Once upon a time, the Republican Party didn’t suck. Actually, there were lots of times it didn’t suck.
It didn’t suck when, at its founding in the late 1850s, it declared slavery an inhumane, barbaric practice, and eventually ended it. It didn’t suck when it ended repressive and predatory Mormon polygamy a few decades later. It didn’t suck when it declared late 19th-century corporate monopolies to be injurious to representative democracy and citizen welfare, and diminished their power.
It didn’t suck under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who presided over a postwar era of peace and prosperity. It didn’t suck when it fought segregationist Democrats to ensure equal application of the law. It didn’t suck when it fought against communism for half a century, and then won.about:blank
But starting with the presidency of George H. W. Bush, it really began sucking.
It was Bush Senior who pushed America into the first Persian Gulf War amidst a massive PR snow job involving fake stories about little Kuwaiti kids. It was Bush who framed that war as a glorious opportunity and morally obligatory step toward a “new world order”—by which he meant the eventual dissolution of national borders (including those of the United States) and the rise of one-world-government.
He also pushed economic corollaries to his political one-worldism. He relentlessly preached free trade ideology, eventually signing NAFTA in December of 1992. He laid the groundwork for the World Trade Organization, which would officially emerge in 1995. He began pushing for open trade with Communist China. He refused to protect American manufacturing—auto manufacturing, among other types—against subsidized imports intended to destroy American industries. His 1990 Immigration Act triggered a perpetual flood of cheap Latin American labor which inevitably undercut working-class wages at home.
So, obviously, all that sucks. What also sucks is that ever since, the Republican Party—with only a few exceptions here and there—has just sucked more and more.
Take W’s tenure. It includes an FBI which failed to intercept a devastating 9/11 terrorist attack, months in the making, which killed 3,000 people, despite many opportunities for detection.about:blank
It includes W’s proto-Woke demand, immediately after the attacks, that we all become as reality-resistant as he was and deny, against all sense and reason, that Islamic terrorism had anything to do with Islam. It includes his refusal to consider any alteration of Middle Eastern immigration into the country.
It includes the legitimation and foundation of the lawless, panoptical surveillance state we now live in.
It includes large-scale Middle Eastern wars poorly prosecuted, initiated with little or no exit strategies, fueled by delusions that Iraqis and Afghans not only wanted something like American-style secular, liberal democracy, but also were capable of maintaining it.
To top it all off, it includes policies which helped trigger the 2008 financial crash. And once again, establishment Republicans supported him the whole time. So that sucks, too. Subsequent presidential candidates Mitt Romney and John McCain also sucked, as did the whole do-nothing lot of Congressional Republicans between Bush and Trump.
Unsurprisingly, the Republican Party continued sucking once Trump arrived.about:blank
Nearly all its leading lights lined up against the only candidate in decades to address the concerns of the party’s own base. For every Newt or Rudy, there were dozens of snarky, Romney-like Republicans who tried, overtly and covertly, to take him down. Those who didn’t mostly sat by in silence as rogue federal agencies tried to remove Trump from office based on false allegations fabricated by the agencies themselves.
And now, post-Trump, the Republican Party still sucks.
Consider, just for starters, that as the Biden Administration resumes the national demolition job started by Barack Obama, but interrupted by Trump, Republicans overall have remained oddly passive. Where’s the robust resistance? The alternative proposals? The focused effort on a party rebuild? Nowhere, or near nowhere.
Yes, the party finally found the cojones to remove the Deep State Drizella, Princess Liz Cheney, from her House leadership position. But just as quickly, they revealed their cojones to be illusory: they chose the worst possible replacement they could find. New York representative Elise Stefanik’s voting record on all the important issues is indistinguishable from that of any garden-variety Democrat: pro-Paris Climate Accord; pro-amnesty; anti-wall; anti-energy-independence, etc. So why choose her? Because they’re the Republican Party. Sucking is what they do.
The current Republican Party sucks so bad, it can’t even manage to stick up for the reality of biological sex anymore. The obligation to protect female athletes from unfair competition, and indeed, injury, as well as female athletics as an institution, is clearly no match for Chamber of Commerce, NCAA, and Walmart money. That Governors Asa Hutchinson and Kristi Noem had the nerve to cynically justify their corporate kowtowing by invoking the virtues of “limited government” would once have been shocking. Sadly, it isn’t anymore. It’s just what they do. We expect it. Because they suck.
The brute fact is that the Republican Party today—unlike its original incarnation—has no rootedness in any specific moral conception of political life. It is an unmoored, mercenary instrument for hire. And members of a would-be permanent ruling caste have hired it.about:blank
That’s why to the extent the pre- and post-Trump Republican Party represents any kind of philosophy at all, it is an economic neoliberalism which in practice enables, and acts as cover for, a crony capitalism heading toward state capitalism—the full fusion of big business and big government into one giant blob of increasingly totalitarian control freakery.
It says a lot about Republicans that the most notable recent example of a politician standing up to this noxious fusion came from a Democrat. In 2018, Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos (personal net worth: $200 billion) announced he’d build a new corporate headquarters in Queens, New York—but only on condition the city and state give his company $3 billion in tax breaks and subsidies. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) opposed Amazon’s subsidy shakedown. We want you to come, she said in effect, but only if you play by the same rules as everyone else. In the end, an affronted Bezos pulled out. He’d build his headquarters elsewhere.
Establishment Republicans—with perfect predictability—immediately erupted in jeers. Airhead Cortez has cost Queens thousands of jobs. She has no idea how markets work. Dumber than a rock!
Unnoticed by the jeering Establishment Republicans was that Amazon’s initial offer amounted to the commencement of a negotiation. Team AOC made a counteroffer. Bezos threatened to walk. Team AOC refused to budge. Bezos then walked. But in the end, Team AOC won, and won big, because only a few months later, Amazon came slinking back into Queens and decided to build its new headquarters there anyway—and pay all the taxes all the other businesses there pay, just as Team AOC had originally insisted. In fact, there was good reason to suspect Amazon would cave all along. And they did.
A Republican Party that didn’t suck would see this episode as a victory for small businesses, taxpayers, Queens, New York state, common sense, fundamental fairness, equal application of the law, and even for republican government over a politically corrosive crony capitalism. Instead, establishment Republicans don’t mention it anymore. These self-styled geniuses of market capitalism would have handed $3 billion in corporate welfare over to the 200-billion-dollar man the second he asked, and then congratulated themselves on their business acumen and communitarian bona fides.
Because, again, they suck.about:blank
No one has any clue what the Republican Party stands for anymore except for whatever its fat cat owners and operators tell it to stand for at any given moment, or barring that, whatever the Democratic Party stands for at any moment—except less of it.
Those of us in favor of what Burke called “ordered liberty” and a revitalized America view the Democratic Party as a target worth destroying. Before that can happen, however, we need to destroy—or at least conquer and completely recreate—another target altogether: the Republican Party.
Tal Bachman is a writer, Sirius XM host, and musician best known for his 1999 hit, “She’s So High.” Join Tal and his Dad online every Friday night at 6 PM PST/9 PM EST for their unrehearsed live musical show, “Friday Night Trainwrecks.” Tal can be reached at tcrbachman@gmail.com.
On taking the oath of office, Jan. 20, Joe Biden may not have realized it, but history had dealt him a pair of aces.
The COVID-19 pandemic had reached its apex, infecting a quarter of a million Americans every day. Yet, due to the discovery and distribution of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the incidence of infections had crested and was about to turn sharply down.
By May, the infection rate had fallen 80%, as had the death toll.
Thanks to the Operation Warp Speed program driven by President Donald Trump, the country made amazing strides in Biden’s first 100 days toward solving the major crises he inherited: the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1918-1919 and the economic crash it had engendered.
But Biden’s pace car has hit the wall.
Where economists had predicted employment gains of a million new jobs in April, the jolting figure came in at about a fourth of that number.
One explanation: The $300-a-week in bonus unemployment checks the Biden recovery plan provides may have been a sufficient inducement for workers to stay home until their benefits ran out.
Workers might reasonably ask: Why go back to work when we can take the summer off, with full unemployment, plus $300 a week?
After the crushing jobs report came the inflation figure from April.
Consumer prices had risen 4.2%, the highest rate in a dozen years.
April’s combination of inflation and near-stagnant job growth recalls the “stagflation” of the Jimmy Carter years, which led to the Democratic rout of 1980 at the hands of Ronald Reagan.
And while we may not be suffering from stagflation just yet, the present symptoms in the U.S. economy are certainly consistent with it.
The bad news from the inflation front also sent the Dow and other markets plunging and raised fears of future Fed intervention to raise interest rates to choke off the inflation.
Moreover, rising prices, driven in part by our historic federal deficits, stiffened the spines of Republicans in their resistance to Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure and jobs program, his $1.8 trillion in added domestic spending and his $4 trillion in taxes to pay for it all.
Sen. Mitch McConnell came out of Wednesday’s White House meeting with Biden to say that any tampering with the Trump tax cuts crosses a “red line” for him and Senate Republicans.
The odds on Biden getting any of his taxes has just fallen dramatically. And he may be forced to come down closer to the GOP proposal if he hopes to get any of his infrastructure package through.
At present, Biden does not have a single sure Republican vote for his spending proposals — and even some Democrats in the evenly divided Senate oppose his plans for social spending and higher taxes.
Added to this economic news was a stunning ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, which feeds fuel to states from Texas to New Jersey.
Within days, the shutdown of the pipeline had induced panic buying of gas at the pumps, resulting in a sweeping closure of gas stations from Delaware to the Gulf Coast.
As alarming as the ransomware attack was, more alarming is what it portends if cybercriminals abroad can, with the flick of a switch, inflict such instant damage on the U.S. economy.
If cybercriminals can pull this off, what cannot our adversaries, with their sophisticated and superior weapons of cyberwarfare, not do to the United States?
But that was not the end of the bad news for Biden this week.
A shooting war erupted between Hamas and Israel after a dispute over ownership of homes in East Jerusalem led to clashes between Arab protesters and Israeli police at the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount.
The clashes brought barrages of over 1,000 rockets directed at Israeli towns and cities including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Ben Gurion International Airport was forced to shut down.
Those who believed Trump’s Abraham Accords, where Israel was recognized by the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, had ensured a more tranquil future suddenly seemed to have been as wrong as previous generations of optimists.
Today, even inside Israel, Arabs and Jews, both Israeli citizens, are battling in the streets.
Meanwhile, in Kabul, three bombs outside a high school killed 50 people and wounded scores more, many of them teenage girls — a portent of what may be coming when the Americans and allied troops are gone from the country by the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
But the defining crisis of the Biden presidency may be the crisis on America’s southern border, where another 170,000 illegal immigrants entered the country in April after an equally high number in March.
That is an annual rate of 2 million people walking into our country uninvited, the advance guard of a Third World invasion that will change the character and composition of the United States.
The America we grew up in is disappearing — without our consent.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
What we have here is a case of self-loathing and fear of not being liked by her woke peers in D.C. that is SO INTENSE that she can barely function. And, oh yes, she projects her neurotic and irrational thoughts and motivations on to others. Sheer madness. These days, it’s everywhere.
Politicians always promise that public investment will return more in benefits to taxpayers. But it’s not true.
Congress passed the $2.2 trillion Heroes Act.
House Democrats said it gives money to “governments who desperately need funds.”
But it also gives lots of money to people who don’t need funds.
Maryland, which even The Washington Post admits is “flush with cash,” got enough extra money to pass a budget that “hands bonuses to every state worker.”
Even Atherton, California, where the median home price is $6 million, got Heroes Act money.
“There was no means test!” complains Lisa Conyers, author of “Welfare for the Rich,” in my latest video.
Omni Hotels & Resorts received $68 million in loans. Major airlines got $25 billion in loans from the CARES Act.
“Who wouldn’t like to play Santa Claus?” asks Conyers. “Who wouldn’t like to just be able to give everybody some money?”
Welfare for the rich didn’t start with coronavirus relief bills. Politicians have done it for years, and a pandemic didn’t stop them.
Nevada politicians gave Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis $750 million for a new stadium. A stadium designer says Davis insisted on the very best, including natural grass on a field that “moves in and out of the building in one piece.”
Cool. But why didn’t Davis pay for it himself?
“I’m not a billionaire,” he said.
But he is. The team is valued at more than $3 billion, and Davis and his mom co-own 47% of it.
Politicians screw taxpayers to build stadiums for lots of rich people.
Minnesota gave the Minnesota Vikings $348 million for their new stadium. Santa Clara, California, gave the San Francisco 49ers $114 million, plus $850 million in loans. Team co-owner Denise York and her family are worth $3.5 billion, says Forbes. She ought to fund her own stadium.
“The taxpayers often vote for this stuff,” I say to Conyers, “so they must like it.”
“(T)hey’re promised there’s going to be all these jobs,” she replies, “not only at the stadium but at the hotels that are going to rise up around the stadium.”
Politicians always promise that public investment will return more in benefits to taxpayers. But it’s not true.
A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found new stadiums bring in about $40 million in jobs and tax benefits, much less than the $188 million that taxpayers pay.
Handouts to other corporations fare no better.
Ohio politicians gave General Motors millions in tax credits to keep its Lordstown plant open. GM then closed the plant. Politicians let GM keep a third of the money.
Wisconsin gave nearly $3 billion in tax breaks to Foxconn because it promised to create 13,000 jobs. Now the company promises to create only 1,454.
“If you look at the cost of each job, it was a million dollars,” Conyers points out.
Actually, it was more than a million.
Politicians often justify this corporate welfare by saying, “We didn’t give cash, just tax breaks.”
But “If some big company is in that town and they are not paying property tax, that means every other taxpayer is covering for them,” Conyers points out. “(F)ire departments still have to be paid for. Police departments still have to be paid for. Schools still have to be paid for!”
Then there’s the farm subsidy scam.
Both Republicans and Democrats eagerly give your money to agribusiness, even though farmers are now richer than the average American.
The politicians claim the handouts are not a payoff for political contributions but to “make sure there’s enough food to go around,” since “farmers have no control over price fluctuations and the weather.”
But that’s absurd. Other businesses adjust to price fluctuations and weather. America doesn’t subsidize fruit and vegetable farmers — yet we have plenty of fruits and vegetables.
The politicians claim they want to help “small family farms,” but they give 90% of the subsidies to the biggest farms.
Such welfare for the rich persists because, years ago, politicians voted for a handout, and once they start giving your money away, they never stop.
“I’m an American taxpayer,” says Conyers. “I don’t understand why money is leaving my pocket and going into the pocket of somebody who is wealthy.”
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 ARTFUL DILETTANTE 
