“If they could take all that money, they’d solve world hunger.”
No, they couldn’t. Not if they seized all the money in the world.
Let’s say you got hold of $10 trillion. That would feed a lot of people, for a long time — assuming you could get it distributed to all the people without difficulty (a huge assumption).
Nevertheless, at some point: the money will run out. I don’t know how long it will take to run out. Maybe less than you think. Maybe a long time. But we can be 100 percent certain: at some point, the money will run out.
What then? Someone will have to come up with another $10 trillion. But if there’s nobody around to create all the wealth, then how do you get it to the people — whether for food, shelter, health care, schooling, or whatever?
Nobody ever answers this question because it’s never asked. And if you dare to ask the question — you’re greeted with verbal hostility (if you’re lucky).
This isn’t just a mistake the “Democrats” or the Communists make. It’s a mistake nearly everyone makes. You hear everyone saying it, even apart from opinions about the government or politics. “We should take the money and spend it on…” WHOSE money? And HOW? What impact will seizing the money have on the people who are forced into giving it up? Will they keep producing the money? If not, what are you to do when you and the millions or billions of people depending on it run out?
Good economists have already figured it out. The chief challenge for human beings is not distribution, but production. Demand is limitless; supply is scarce.
If those hungry people live in a system where wealth is privately owned, profit permitted and rewarded, then sooner or later the food will reach the hands and mouths of the people who need it and want it. Assuming they’re willing to trade for the food, not merely have it handed to them as passive recipients of an entitlement.
This is not merely an expression of how it should be. It’s an expression of how it IS. If you’re ignorant of this fact — or worse yet, if you choose to remain ignorant of it — then you’re living in the Dark Ages. That’s where the human race is. In the midst of Star Trek-like, 21st Century technology, we’re still moral and intellectual savages when it comes to issues associated with human behavior.
There are very smart people who have already figured this out. But it doesn’t seem to have an impact. As the present decline of America tragically shows, people — by and large — will do the equivalent of jump off a 150 level building before listening to reason on this subject. History will record that even after America briefly created the proverbial shining city on a hill, most Americans ultimately opted to jump off the cliff and (if only be default) revert to some version of the tribal, socialistic, communistic mentality.
Maybe in the future, it will be different. But we’re still in the Dark Ages in the area of ideas. If mankind is to have a future, we’d better start to get this right.
Biden celebrated 9/11 yesterday by praising the Saudis — you know, the same Saudis who produced the 9/11 terrorists. Biden loves the Saudis because they support his climate change propaganda. Well of course they do — anything that will weaken the United States.
And Biden’s puppet regime will also be paying $6 billion to one of our most mortal enemies — Iran.
Tell me we’re not an occupied country. On 9/11/01, we were attacked by foreign enemies. Today, we are an occupied country in far more danger than we ever were on that day.
If our government still had a shred of accountability for anything, none of this would be possible. This is what dictatorship looks like. This is what the final years of the Soviet empire looked like — a parade of unaccountable, toxic geezers. This is what Maoist China looked like — a society overrun by psychosis and hysteria. This is what the declining years of the Roman republic looked like. When the people stop expecting virtue and sanity from themselves or others … they get “President Biden”. Or even worse to follow.
RFK Jr. is being told he will have to pay to enter Democratic primaries. The DNC wants no competition. They have done to their own party what they’re trying to do to the country: eradicate dissension.
Imagine if Biden is still the “president” 5 years from now. What in the hell will he and this country look like?
What I see happening is Biden will step down due to covid (hence mail in ballots) Kamala will step in as prez and PARDON all of the Bidens…they will run Gavin and the dead vote will sweep him into office.” — Jeannie Chmielewski-Royack
Interesting theory. Leftists are capable of anything. Biden isn’t really in charge. Neither is Kamala. Not even Dr. Jill. Goodness knows, these people are too unscrupulous and stupid to be in the positions they’re in from their own abilities or achievements. Whoever put them there certainly has even worse things in store for us. Until or unless we the people rise up and bring about another 1776 or, failing that, another French Revolution, things will continue to spiral downward. Surely they will try another COVID lockdown strategy. Why wouldn’t they? It was the most successful totalitarian move in human history.
Sooner or later, whether through mass passive resistance or more than that, WE will have to stop them. They are NOT going to stop peacefully, or voluntarily.
An impeachment inquiry looms and the shrieks of outrage are beginning.
The Left is now suddenly voicing warnings that those who recently undermined the system could be targeted by their own legacies.
So, for example, now we read why impeachment is suddenly a dangerous gambit.
True, the Founders did not envision impeaching a first-term president the moment he lost his House majority. Nor did they imagine impeaching a president twice. And they certainly did not anticipate trying an ex-president in the Senate as a private citizen.
In modern times, the nation has not rushed to impeach a president without a special counsel investigation to determine whether the chief executive was guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
But thanks to the Democrats, recent impeachments now have destroyed all those guardrails. After all, Trump was impeached the first time on the fumes of an exhaustive but fruitless 22-month, $40 million special counsel investigation—one designed to find him guilty of Russian “collusion” and thus to be removed from office but found no actionable offenses at all.
Instead, dejected Democrats moved immediately for a second try. In September 2019 a few weeks after Trump had announced his 2020 reelection bid, the Democratic House began to impeach the president on the new grounds that he had talked to the President Zelensky of Ukraine and said he might delay offensive arms shipments—unless the Ukrainians could demonstrate that they had ended corruption and, in particular, were no longer influenced by the Biden family quid pro quo shakedowns.
Trump was proven right: the Biden family is not just corrupt, but, in particular, Joe Biden as head of the family and Vice President had intervened in the internal politics of an aid recipient, by threatening not to delay but rather to cancel outright all U.S. aid to Ukraine—unless it fired Viktor Shokin, a Ukrainian prosecutor.
Shokin was then looking into the misadventures of Biden’s son Hunter, and why the Vice President’s imbecilic son was receiving lucrative compensation on the boards of a Ukrainian energy company Burisma, yet without any demonstrable expertise or education in matters of energy policy.
Since Trump was impeached, we now know that Joe Biden did lie that he had no connection with or even knowledge of his son’s business. And we know that the fired prosecutor believed the Bidens were recipients of bribes. We know that contrary to Biden’s assertions, he was not following State Department policy.
In contrast, the U.S. had, in fact, lauded Shokin’s efforts to repress corruption. In sum, Biden was undermining the stated policy of the U.S. government to protect his son’s—and his own—efforts to leverage money from Kyiv by monetizing the influence of his own Vice Presidency. In some sense, Biden was guilty of the very “treason” charge—altering U.S. foreign policy for personal benefit—by which Rep. Adam Schiff had earlier falsely accused Trump.
Given that reality, it is easy to argue that the House impeached Donald Trump in 2019 for crimes that he did not commit, but which the current president Joe Biden most certainly had during his Vice Presidency.
But weaponizing impeachment is just one baleful legacy of the Left. There are plenty more of their own precedents that Leftists now would not wish to have applied to themselves:
Will the next president have the FBI pay social media censors to suppress the dissemination of any news it feels is unhelpful to the reelection of a Republican president?
Is it OK now for the next Vice President to invite his son onto Air Force Two to cement multimillion dollars deals that benefit both, with Chinese, Russian, and Ukrainian oligarchs who enjoy government ties?
Should a conservative billionaire stealthily insert $419 million late in the 2024 campaign to absorb the work of registrars in key voting precincts?
If a Democratic president wins the 2024 election should conservative groups riot at the Capitol on Inauguration Day? Should a conservative celebrity yell out to the assembled crowd of protestors that she dreams of blowing up the White House? And if a Republican wins, should he prosecute any Democratic rioters who once again swarm Washington on Inauguration Day and charge them with “insurrection,” meting out long prisons sentences to the convicted?
Is Joe Biden now vulnerable to being impeached for systematic family corruption, or using the Department of Justice to obstruct the prosecution of his son in his last days in office, and then being tried in the Senate as a private citizen?
If the Republicans gain the Senate, will they move to end the filibuster in agreement with Democratic assertions that it is “racist” and a “Jim Crow relic”?
If the midwestern Electoral College “Blue Wall” seems to reappear, or if Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada recreate new blue walls, will there be a conservative effort to end the constitutionally mandated Electoral College?
If in 2024 there is a narrow Democratic win in the Electoral College, should conservative celebrities conspire to run ads urging the electors to reject their constitutional duties and not vote in accordance with their state’s popular vote that went Democratic? Should a Republican third-party candidate sue to stop a state’s selection of its electors on grounds the voting machines were rigged?
If Supreme Court decisions begin to appear to favor the left, will Republicans talk of packing the court, or have the DOJ turn a blind eye when mobs began to swarm the homes of liberal justices? Should the conservative media go after liberal judges with serial accusations of corruption? Should the Republican Senate leader assemble a mob of pro-life protestors at the doors of the court and call out Justices Sotomayor or Jackson by name, with threats that they will soon reap the whirlwind they have sowed, given they have no idea of what is about to “hit” them? Should conservative legal scholars urge the country to ignore Supreme Court decisions deemed liberal?
Will local prosecutors in red jurisdictions begin filing criminal charges against leading Democratic candidates on various charges, among them accusations of old inflated real estate assessments, campaign finance laws, questioning ballot results, or taking classified documents home? If Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton were to run in 2024, will their past illicit behavior gain the attention of a city or state attorney in Utah, West Virginia, or Wyoming?
If Joe Biden continues to decline at his present rate, will Republicans demand he be given the Montreal Cognitive Assessment? Will they subpoena Ivy League psychiatrists to testify that an intervention is needed to remove him from office? And will an FBI director and a deputy Attorney General plan to wear wires, and record Biden in his private moments of senility, as a way of convincing the cabinet or Congress that he is demonstrably mentally unfit for office?
In the 2024 election, should the Republican nominee hire a foreign ex-spy to compile falsehoods about the Democratic opponent and then seed them among the media, and Department of Justice? Should the FBI hire such a Republican contractor and likewise use him to gather dirt on the Democratic nominee?
If there appears incriminating evidence concerning a Republican nominee, should the FBI retrieve such evidence, keep it under wraps, lie about its veracity, and instead go along with media and ex-intelligence officers assertions that it is a fraudulent production of Russian intelligence?
Will conservative CIA and FBI directors, and the Director of National Intelligence be given exemptions from prosecutions for systematically lying while under oath in Congress or to federal investigators?
Will conservative celebrities ritually on social media, without fear of censorship, brag about ways of decapitating, shooting, stabbing, burning, or blowing up the Democratic nominee?
Since in many states the statues of limitations have not yet expired for arson, murder, assault, looting, and attacks on 1,500 police officers during the summer 2020 riots, will state prosecutors now begin identifying those 14,000 once arrested and mostly released, and begin refiling charges of conspiracy, racketeering—and “insurrection”?
Will they also file insurrection charges against those who torched a federal courthouse, a police precinct, and a historic Washington DC church, or conspired to riot and swarm the White House grounds in an effort to attack the President of the United States?
Will they file charges against Vice President Kamala Harris for “inciting” ongoing violent demonstrations with monotonous, emphatic, and repetitive threats in the weeks before her nomination? Contrary to liberal “fact checkers” at time of nationwide violence, Harris certainly did not distinguish violent from non-violent protests, but in fact implied that they were intimately tied to the upcoming election and beyond. So given the hundreds of police officers injured, the hundreds of millions in property damage, and the dozens killed, what exactly did Harris mean by tying that ongoing summer of often violent protests to Election Day?:
“But they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop, and this is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day. Everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up — and they should not. And we should not.”
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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the recently released The Dying Citizen.
It’s official. Back in 1957, Ayn Rand was writing about America and the world of 2023. With stunning accuracy. It wasn’t psychic power. It was a grasp of the logical power of philosophical ideas — specifically, the toxic ideas now taking hold of our culture.
“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are.”
People are often surprised when I suggest that one of our coaching goals will be to help them think, i.e., trusting their senses, and integrating reality into abstract conclusions. Rational thought is necessary to intelligently answer big questions like, “Should I get married?” Or, “Should I quit my job?” It also helps ensure a happy day-to-day life. People often say, “He should get help!” Or, “She’s in denial.” He or she simply needs to think. Choosing not to think sets the stage for “needing help,” denial and more serious psychological problems.
People sometimes tell me that they’re uncomfortable thinking about personal matters. Denial is a good example. Life goes on around us whether or not we choose to think about it, and actions indeed have consequences — even if we’re not paying attention. Thinking grants us the power to control what happens to us. People who are perpetual victims of “circumstance”, “bad luck” or whatever, are guilty of one central offense: Failing to think.
Of course, thinking doesn’t guarantee accuracy, but mistakes can be corrected with even more thinking. Life is a work in progress. Refusing to think can turn existence into one continuous mistake, putting us squarely in the path of chance events. And whining about “having a bad day” won’t make a bit of difference.
No wonder the world is filled with anxiety disorder, depression, low self-esteem! We blame the economy, hormones, brain chemistry, or whatever “disorder” happens to be the latest vapid topic on Oprah. But nobody ever stops to say, “Y’know, maybe there’s not enough thinking going on.” Ironically, arriving at such a conclusion presupposes that thinking did, in fact, take place.
In the middle of a discussion such as this, people sometimes say to me, “Just because you think doesn’t mean you’re being rational.” Of course that’s true. Mental activity assumes that there is an objective reality and that this reality can be discovered through the use of reason. If your reasoning rests on arbitrary assumptions, unfounded generalizations, fact-dropping or fantasy, then you’re not truly thinking. So yes, in that sense, thinking doesn’t always lead to rational conclusions.
That’s why professional help sometimes seems to be a waste of time. If our mental activity breaks with actual facts, then the computer-age proverb, “Garbage in, garbage out” applies. But the possibility of error doesn’t lessen the value of thinking. In fact, it demonstrates how important it is to achieve a solid interaction between the mind and reality, and then form conclusions within that framework.
The laws of logic and reason (aka, common sense) must be applied to daily life, not just to abstract subjects. This point was made perfectly by educator Maria Montessori: “The greatest sign of success for a teacher … is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’” Unfortunately, we all know that nowadays this is not the outcome for many students or schools.
Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to self-responsibility because they think of it as having to “suck it up.” But it’s a lot more powerful than that. It requires the active use of your mind. It requires being thoughtful and tuned in, and it’s the cornerstone of empathy and compassion. Thinking does not mean having to be right, but it does mean using logic and facts to figure out what “right” is. The resulting self-confidence and mental health is well worth the effort.
Introspection is a form of thinking specifically relating to personal decisions and emotions. Thinking, in the rational sense (i.e., integrating your perceptions into objective reality) is the common theme that runs through it all. You can change your life by paying attention to what’s around you and then acting accordingly. See facts for what they are, and then form conclusions based on them. Will you be right all the time? Of course not. But rational thought and reflection, based on objective data from your senses, can lead to independence and genuine self-respect.
Biden has reportedly spent 40 percent of his presidency on vacation. This shows two things. One, he’s not in charge. He’s a figurehead. Two, we are living under an occupation that merely replacing Biden will not resolve. We need a revolution, not an election. We need a restoration of the Constitution and the severely limited government our founders envisioned and gave us. What we have now simply cannot stand.
