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.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
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.”
Me either.
ABOUT JOHN STOSSELJohn Stossel is author of No They Can’t! Why Government Fails — But Individuals Succeed. For other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit http://www.creators.com.
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.
What is it about paternalists that prevents them from minding their own business? They are obsessed with minding everyone else’s business and, even worse, using the power of government to force people to live their lives the way paternalists want them to live them.
Look at the war on drugs. For our entire lives, paternalists have used the force of government, at the both the federal and state level, to punish people for putting substances in their mouths that haven’t been approved by our federal and state masters.
But what business is it of some politician or bureaucrat what I put into my mouth? Why should they have the authority to punish me for putting something in my mouth that I wish to ingest?
The paternalist says: “Jacob, that substance that you’re putting into your mouth is potentially harmful to you. We have no choice but to threaten you with jail if you persist in doing so.”
How does a person acquire a mind like that? My best hunch is public (I.e., government) schooling.
The latest example of this paternalist phenomenon is the federal government’s plan to ban menthol cigarettes. Federal dictocrats say that a large percentage of black Americans smoke menthols and, therefore, they want to protect them from the evils of smoking,
Isn’t that nice? But we know what’s coming, don’t we? Criminal prosecutions of people who don’t comply with the ban. Isn’t that what came with banning marijuana and other illicit drugs? So, won’t that be beautiful — giving bigoted cops another fantastic opportunity to harass and destroy blacks in the name of helping them.
Why not just ban all cigarettes? Well, believe it or not, someone is already proposing that. James K. Glassman, a former federal bureaucrat, has come forward in USA Today with an op-ed calling for a ban on all cigarettes.
Hey, at least Glassman is consistent. Give him credit for that. He writes: “If a smoking prohibition is good for Black people, who comprise only about 1 in 7 U.S. cigarette smokers, why isn’t it good for whites and other Americans as well?”
But hey, why stop with cigarettes? Why not ban alcohol and beer too? Booze is harmful, isn’t it? Don’t lots of people die from alcoholism? Don’t lots of people suffer from cirrhosis of the liver? Isn’t alcohol behind a lot of family abuse and other acts of violence? And don’t forget all those DUIs.
Just think: We could have the feds institute a nation-wide ban on both tobacco and alcohol. America would immediately become a healthy, peaceful, and harmonious society.
Right?
Well, not exactly. Just Google Prohibition and you’ll see what I mean.
This is what the paternalists just don’t get. When you make a peaceful activity illegal, you get a black market that involve massive violence. Not just when then banned booze but also when they banned drugs. Where do the paternalists think all those drug cartels and booze gangs came from?
Do the do-gooders ever take personal responsibility for the deaths and suffering their paternalistic bans cause? Of course not. They exclaim, “Please judge us by our good intentions, not by the actual results of our paternalistic programs.”
I wonder how long the American people will put up with this paternalistic nonsense. When will people rise up and say, “Butt out of my life”? Even better, when will they rise up and demand a ban on paternalistic government?
This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
A gas station in Richmond, VA, charged $6.99 per gallon of gas yesterday when people flooded to get gas because of a feared, impending shortage. One woman getting gas called the high price “ridiculous.” [Breitbart]
Ridiculous — by what standard? Economically, prices (absent government controls) are set by supply and demand. Any time demand for a product rises massively while supply remains the same, you will see a spike in prices. If the government came in and froze the prices while demand rose and supply remained the same, you would find shortages and long lines. That’s what happened in the 1970s with long gas lines and shortages. When the government repealed price controls in the early 1980s, the gas lines went away.
So it’s not “ridiculous” that gas prices are going up. It’s logically inevitable. If you think it’s immoral that prices rise, when supply cannot keep up with demand, then you will get bread lines, gas lines and waiting lines for everything else where prices are controlled. That’s because gas doesn’t come into existence out of thin air; SOMEBODY HAS TO PRODUCE AND MARKET IT. Pain and suffering: That’s what you call “morality” will get you.
Most Americans are CLUELESS about morality and economics. They want the great efficiency and prosperity that capitalism (economic freedom) produces but they also want it cheap. And they want business owners to be something they are NOT prepared to be in their own lives: completely selfless. These poor mask-wearing, CNN-watching, Democratic Communist-voting fools think we can curtail and (within 10 years, as Biden and others promise) eliminate oil production without consequences. Wow, is that ignorant!
If I didn’t have to suffer and live through the shortages and pain I know we will increasingly see under the expansion of socialism in this country, I would frankly find it entertaining and socially just to see the millions of smug, ignorant fools who keep voting for it have to suffer too. The Colonial gas crisis of the last day or two? Under socialism and one-party rule, and as capitalism enters its twilight, you can expect a HELL of a lot worse.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
Last night I delivered the concluding presentation in our conference “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination.” We’ll be posting it online within a few days. If you missed it, I would invite you to watch it. It is around 2 1/2 hours long. It is the most complete singular presentation I have ever made on Kennedy assassination.
Ever since I wrote my book The Kennedy Autopsy, I have said to people who are new to the assassination: Don’t spend time studying what happened in Dealey Plaza — bullet trajectories, witnesses, etc. Instead, just focus on the autopsy that was conducted on President Kennedy’s body. It will lead you directly to what happened on November 22, 1963.
Last night, I made what I believe is an irrefutable case for a fraudulent autopsy. I am convinced that anyone who watches my presentation will arrive at the same conclusion. My presentation is reenforced by almost 100 Apple Keynote slides.
Who conducted the autopsy? That would be the U.S. national-security establishment. That is an irrefutable fact, one that everyone agrees with.
Why is a fraudulent autopsy important? Because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. None. No one has ever come up with one. No one ever will. The plan for a fraudulent autopsy, which was launched at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and then carried out at the military’s Bethesda Naval Medical Center, leads directly to the national-security establishment as the orchestrator of the assassination.
My presentation also detailed the vicious war that was being waged between Kennedy and the national-security establishment over the future direction of America. Their respective visions were irreconcilable. There was going to be a winner and a loser in this war. In the end, Kennedy proved to be no match for the overwhelming power of the national-security establishment.
As I pointed out last night, the same phenomenon occurred ten years later in Chile. The Chilean national-security establishment, with the full support of the Pentagon and the CIA, forcibly removed their democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, from office. The reason? The Chilean national-security establishment deemed Allende to be a grave threat to Chilean national security. If the national-security establishment had not acted, the argument goes, Chile would have become another Cuba — a country under tight communist control.
That was the same justification for removing Kennedy from office ten years before — that his policies for the future direction of America would end up bringing about a communist takeover of the United States.
After the Bay of Pigs disaster, where the CIA had defrauded Kennedy, he was so angry that he fired CIA Director Allen Dulles and is reputed to have vowed to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the winds.” That necessarily means Kennedy was determined to eradicate the CIA from American life. But the CIA would not go quietly into the night. It fought back, and it won.
Why are there so many people who are reluctant to delve into the Kennedy assassination? I believe there are two reasons: One, there is a deep fear of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist.” Some people feel that if they are considered to be a “conspiracy theorist,” their lives will be over. The smearing of people as “conspiracy theorists” has proven to be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in CIA history.
My hunch though is that another reason is that people don’t want to face the prospect of living in a world without the CIA. After all, isn’t that the logical consequence of concluding that the CIA orchestrated the assassination of a U.S. president? How can we justify leaving a vicious and malevolent agency that assassinated a U.S. president and that continues its coverup of that evil deed in existence? Once one comes to the conviction that a regime-change operation took place on November 22, 1963, that inevitably leads to a conclusion that the CIA should be splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the winds.
Unfortunately, however, a life without the CIA scares some people. Thus, they would rather not know about the evil actions carried out by the CIA, especially the extremely discomforting ones, like the assassination of a U.S. president based on protecting “national security.” Thus, they consciously choose not to be aware.
As I pointed out last night, however, if we are going to get our country back on the right track — toward freedom, peace, prosperity, and harmony — it is imperative that we confront America’s dark legacy as a national-security state. To do that, we must not fear to seek the truth and speak the truth.
This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
There is a war in Jerusalem right now, a war that ends the Israeli illusion that the Palestinian cause has somehow faded away or evaporated.
Veteran Israeli General Amos Yadlin, former commander of the IDF’s intelligence and a chief Israeli National Security analyst, described the Israeli reality in the most brutal terms in his commentary on Israeli N12: “The Israeli delusions are over. The Palestinian problem is Back. “
Yadlin believes that Israel’s lack of leadership has led to strategic paralysis, in which Israel and Palestine have practically morphed into ‘one state’ and it has only two options to choose from: either to ‘stop being a Jewish State’ or to be ‘undemocratic’! According to Yadlin, the “Palestinians are engaged in a different discourse today than in the past. After the failure of their three main strategies – terrorism, internationalization of the conflict and reliance on the Arab world, the Palestinians have greatly strengthened the discourse of rights. If they cannot achieve their own state, they seek equal rights as citizens of the Greater State of Israel – with the long-term hope of an Arab majority in one state. In the meantime, they hope to exhaust Israel’s economic benefits and gain points in the campaign for Israel’s delegitimization.”
I wouldn’t use Yadlin’s misguided terminology, as the Palestinians are already the majority of the people between the river and the sea. Yet, I believe that his dissection of the situation is largely accurate. It is also consistent with IDF intelligence’s reading of the Israeli Palestinian conflict since the early 1980s. IDF generals have been saying it for years: for the Palestinians to win, all they need to do is to survive. Mahmoud Abbas, whom many Palestine supporters tend to detest, also came to the same realization a while back. It is not war that will defeat Israel, it is actually peace which Israel fears the most.
As if the news is not bad enough for the Israelis and their future prospects in the region, the last election made it clear that the new Israeli kingmaker is no other than Mansour Abbas, the Leader of the Islamic party Ra’am. Benjamin Netanyahu was ready to form a government with him just to sustain his primacy, with the hope that this may help him stay out of prison. But an alternative centrist coalition also can’t be formed without the support of Abbas.
The hardcore right wing within the Israeli Knesset do understand that such political power in the hands of an Islamic party empowers their bitterest enemies. It is destined to bring many more Israeli Arabs to the polls in the next election and if Arabs in Israel enjoy the same political representation as the Jewish majority, they can easily become the biggest political force in Israel. Is Israel ready for an Arab PM, or Muslim minister of defence? I’ll let you ponder over that.
The most peculiar fact in all of that is that Jewish lobbies around the world are actually very successful in dominating different nations’ affairs that are relevant to Israel and Jewish interests. A lot has been written about AIPAC dominating American foreign affairs. A lot was said about the power of the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and the Labour friends of Israel (LFI) in Britain. Yet in the USA Jews amount to less than 2% of the entire population. In the UK, Jews are less than 0.5% of the Brits. In Israel, on the other hand, Jews are 80% of the Israeli society and about 50% of the people who dwell between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. One may draw a conclusion that Jews are doing far better for themselves as a marginal exilic identity than being a majority on the land. Zionism, for those who do not know, was born to refute that observation but it failed.
Coercion is everything, in today’s America. The faith and confidence today’s rulers in D.C., academia, Big Tech and elsewhere put into the power of force is limitless. They FORCE us to stay home, even when reason tells us it’s not necessary. They FORCE us to wear masks, in the name of science, when science said the opposite two days earlier. They FORCE us to get vaccinations (and that form of force will come). They FORCE us to pay for the welfare, permanent unemployment benefits, college tuition, child care and virtually everything else of others — that is, if we work and produce and they do NOT. They FORCE us to ignore the information and data we wish to see, and they FORCE us to pay attention only to what they want us to see. They force us to register our guns, and very soon they will FORCE us to hand them over.
It’s a religion of FORCE. And much more is coming. There’s no reason for them to stop, because the great majority of us are docile and compliant, at least behaviorally if not internally.
In a way, however, this is the weakness of the Communists, socialists, fascists or whatever you wish to label them: their unerring, unwavering belief in the power of force. If you look back on the Hitlers and the Stalins of history, you can’t deny they did a hell of a lot of damage with their use of coercion. But what did they ultimately accomplish? Whose hearts or minds did they appeal to, and win over? Certainly not the hearts and minds of anyone even remotely rational or decent.
Force cannot win because it’s not how the human mind operates. The human mind and psyche do not respond to force. Force appeals to one thing only: fear. The hapless Joe Biden and all the others are essentially communicating, “Do what I say — or else. And oh, by the way, do what I say in the name of freedom, liberty and unity.” It’s not new. It’s what totalitarians and tyrants have ALWAYS done. Anyone who grew up in a family run by a tyrant knows the code. Now that code, like it or not, has come to America.
You can be sure that the religion of force will fail in America as decisively as it failed elsewhere. However, the failure of force is no guarantee of liberty. We don’t get liberty simply because force fails again and again. We have to know what we’re FOR, and why we’re for it. That’s the only way out of this mess.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
I read on MSN yesterday that Joe Biden claims he sees “no evidence” for people staying home because of unemployment benefits that surpass the salary of most jobs.
Clearly, Joe Biden doesn’t own a small business. Nor does he know anyone who does. He doesn’t care, either. Why should he? He has made millions (perhaps even billions) off of corruption and pull, thanks to his criminal family’s association with the Communist Party of China.
Joe lives in the world of payoffs. He’s the career politician to end all career politicians. He and his kind only understand what Ayn Rand called “the aristocracy of pull”. And it has nothing whatsoever to do with merit, achievement, or an honest day’s work. NOTHING.
Joe, like all tyrants, is a liar. He knows full well what the purpose of inflated, endless unemployment is: To make people dependent on the government; and to punish small businesses for not paying what elite politicians think employees should be paid. He has no grasp whatsoever of market economics, supply and demand, or the challenges small business owners in particular face every day of their lives.
There’s nothing wrong with big business, by the way. But big business should receive NO benefits or handouts due to pull or connection with the government. The only way to keep big business from becoming corrupt (as it has) is to separate economics and state … completely. A healthy economy will give rise both to big businesses and small enterprises. May the best products and services win, and often there’s room in the free market for plenty of big and small.
But the reality remains: Small businesses comprise most of the economic activity in America. By paying their workers to STOP WORKING, we are systematically murdering those small businesses.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
The lesson of Officer Derek Chauvin’s show trial, a trial as crooked as any experienced by black Americans in the demonized South, is that police training needs to be changed. Chauvin is the victim of many years of media emphasis on police brutality against black Americans.
According to reports, US police, or many of them including those in Minnesota, were trained by Israeli firms. This is the worst possible choice. In Israel, police are used to brutalize and murder Palestinians. The emphasis is on the value and importance of the police officer’s life, not the Palestinian’s. It is training that guarantees excessive police force.
Officer Chauvin was convicted largely because of the influence over the years of national media reports of police shootings of black Americans. As the larger number of police shootings of white Americans was ignored, the reporting gave the police a racist hue. In other words, the presstitutes with their one-sided reporting turned a training problem into a racist problem. This made it easy for the presstitutes to use a misleading video suffering from camera perspective bias to turn Chauvin into a white racist who murdered black Floyd by depriving him of oxygen.
Indeed, the jury was so pre-convinced of Chauvin’s racism that the evidence presented in court of his innocence had no effect.
The failure of Democrat city administrations to understand the situation resulted in the burning and looting of their business districts and the belief among the “peaceful protesters” that they are not accountable to law. Getting back from here is not going to be easy. Many residents of Democrat cities have realized this and are fleeing the cities. Unfortunately for those of us more sensibly located, they will bring their destructive liberal beliefs into our communities and destroy us as well. I wish Florida’s governor would ban white liberal Americans from relocating in Florida. Perhaps we could put out the story that the Black Plague is raging and that would keep them way.
I doubt police training—the solution to the problem—will change. The Democrats benefit too much from the racism angle, and the Red States have seen what happens when police aren’t supported. The Red States are not in the mood for a kind and gentle police force.
When lies prevail over truth, as they do every day in America, the conundrums mount as the energy and courage to tackle them fades. The idiot white liberal Democrat mayor of Portland who called the rioters and looters in Portland “peaceful protesters” is now appealing to the residents to help him “take the city back” from lawlessness.
Only violence can do that, and Democrats only use violence against “white supremacist Trump supporters.”
Violence is spreading. Asians in New York City are now routinely brutally attacked by blacks on subways and in the streets. Within the ruling narrative, how can this be stopped without “racial violence” against blacks?
As I have explained for decades, a Tower of Babel has no common ground. There are no shared values, no shared culture, no shared holidays, no shared history. In their place is the cultivated hatred taught in public schools with critical race theory, the NY Times 1619 Project, and reinforced with sensitivity training in corporations, universities, and the US military. This means there is no basis for law. Whatever law exists is seen as a tool of the ruling race, not as something to respect.
One consequence is that the public interest disappears because there is no public interest—only the interests of the races, genders, classes. As has been clear throughout history, the lack of ethnic homogeneity means multicultural states are dysfunctional. They have no common basis.
White liberals will dispute this even as they live in an increasingly dysfunctional multicultural state that is thoroughly disunited and themselves spread disunity with their screams for death to Trump supporters.
The American people had a good thing going, and they stupidly let it be taken from them.
