Tuesday, March 12, 2024

About the 1960s . . .

This meme showed up on Facebook:


In The 1960’s Ladies Didn’t Have Tattoos, Nose Rings, Purple Hair… What A Wonderful Time!


Being the decade in which I “came of age,” I just had to weigh in:


Race riots, assassinations, a massive expansion of the welfare state, the drug “culture,” the New Left, a no-win war in Vietnam, the brink of nuclear war, the collapse of the Yankees Dynasty—not so wonderful. I’ll take Tattoos, Nose Rings, and Purple Hair (I actually like purple hair, and my wife, 2 daughters, and granddaughter have tattoos.)


Of course, there were a few silver linings—the end of Jim Crow, the rising influence of pro-Capitalist free market thinkers like Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Frederick Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises, and of course the Golden Oldies music. 


Related Reading:


QUORA: ‘How does Black Lives Matter differ from the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s? Which is stronger?’


Racism is Alive and Thriving on the Left


Joe Biden’s Despicable ,Unjust Blame Game

Joe Biden is the latest in a long line of politicians to blame private enterprise for the problems caused by their own policies. 


In Biden’s case, it’s inflation. From “greedflation” to “shrinkflation,” the recent (and ongoing) inflationary spiral is all the fault of business, according to Biden. Note the no-win situation these idiotic terms press onto business. Business is dealing with the same inflationary forces as everyone else—namely, the devaluation of the dollar due to excess money creation—and, like everyone else, must deal with it. So, if a business raises prices to deal with its own rising costs, it’s “greedflation.” If it reduces the size of packaging to avoid a price increase, it’s “shrinkflation.” Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.


Inflation, to put it in a somewhat oversimplified way, is defined as too much money chasing too few goods. In 2020, as COVID tightened its grip, the federal government under Donald Trump flooded the economy with $trillions in Covid “relief” money, all of it Fed-created out of thin air (“too much money”). At the same time, government’s were shutting down large segments of the productive economy, leading to  “too few goods.” You couldn’t get a more perfect inflationary storm. The stage for the coming inflation was set. (Don’t confuse price jumps in specific industries due to isolated problems like supply chain shocks with the general rise in prices that is inflation.) 


Onto this stage, Joe Biden roared into office vowing to “save” the economy, flooding the economy with $trillions in new spending for Covid relief and other spendings, pouring fuel on the emerging inflationary fire at a time when, contrary to Biden’s lies, the economy was already roaring back from the brief 2020 Covid Depression. 


Biden’s blaming of business for the inflation that his own policies fueled is despicable enough, but not unprecedented. Politicians have long resorted to this tactic—e.g. Nixon's price controls and Ford’s”WIN” (Whip Inflation Now) campaign. But Biden has gone further in what can only be termed gangster tactics that would make Al Capone smile—his “Strike Force” to assault private business for engaging in their rightful attempts to deal with their inflationary pressures. 


That a president of a country Founded on the principle that “government’s are instituted to secure these rights” could target private enterprise with such a gangster tactic, and with large public support, tells you all you need to know about where we are as a country. But that’s Biden, who even stooped to the lower low of targeting children for his cartoon economics propaganda, via the Cookie Monster. Shame on Sesame Street producers for embedding the idiotic term “shrinkflation” in its programing; and shame on Biden for channeling this Cookie Monster scene into his unjust attack on America's great business community.


Terms like “shrinkflation” and “greedflation” are senseless, made-up, albeit catchy, political terms geared to economic ignoramuses and other assorted useful idiots. Yet here is a president regurgitating these terms. It is Joe Biden who keeps shrinking, intellectually. Call it “shrink-tegrity.” 


Benito Mussolini, in his defining essay The Doctrine of Fascism,” explains the foundation of his political theory: “a state which controls all forces acting in nature. We control political forces, we control moral forces, we control economic forces.” Can anyone distinguish Biden’s “strike force” tactics from Mussolini’s? Joe Biden keeps finding ways to make it easier and easier to hate him. He is a lying, anti-American fascist reactionary.


Related Reading:


Memo to Jersey City Mayor Fulop: The Federal Reserve, Not Supermarkets, is to Blame for 'Hidden Food Inflation'


Economics in One Lesson—Henry Hazlitt


Did the New York Times Just Vindicate Reaganomics?


Thursday, March 7, 2024

Republican Deplorables Win—and Guarantee a 2nd Biden Term

 Republican Deplorables Win—and Guarantee a 2nd Biden Term


In 2016, Hillary Clinton labeled Trump supporters as “deplorables.” This outraged a lot of people, including me. While not a Trump supporter, I did vote for Trump as the lesser of two evils.


But maybe Clinton was on to something. In 2016, there was no alternative to Trump, other than her. But in this election cycle, there was a quality alternative—Nikki Haley—and the Republican majority went for Trump anyway. Apparently, the Republican Party is not above going in a deplorable direction, after all.


I have no beef with those who vote for Trump this November as the lesser of two evils. Once again, there is no alternative. But those who enthusiastically supported Trump in the GOP primary fight, when there was a quality alternative, shows just how far the Republican Party has run from its fundamental principles that were once rooted in this country’s Founding.


What were these Trump Republicans thinking? Trump calls Haley a RINO—Republican in Name Only. This, from a person who has no idea what American Republicanism means. The fact is, Haley is more Republican than any president since Ronald Reagan. 


My belief is that Trump cannot beat Biden . . . or any Democrat. We can of course work and hope for a Republican Congress, or at least Senate. That will thwart some of the worst of Biden. 


I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, despite major misgivings. But Trump’s anti-Constitutional attempts to overthrow the 2020 election crossed a moral line that makes it impossible for me to do the same this time around. In November 2024, I will be abstaining from voting for president. 


Related Reading:


What Nikke Haley gets Right, and her Critics Wrong, about the Civil War


My Vote Will Go to . . . (ARRGGHH!) Donald Trump


Trump vs. Socialism: It’s Still (ARRGGHH!) Trump


Trump’s Ban-All-Muslims Policy Undermines the Fight Against Islamic Jihad


Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Alabama Court’s Inhuman Ruling

In a thoroughly inhuman decision, an Alabama Supreme Court ruling has equated children to mere embryos. Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff reports:


The Alabama Supreme Court ruled Friday that frozen embryos are people and someone can be held liable for destroying them, a decision that reproductive rights advocates say could imperil in vitro fertilization (IVF) and affect the hundreds of thousands of patients who depend on treatments like it each year.


The Alabama case focused on whether a patient who mistakenly dropped and destroyed other couples’ frozen embryos could be held liable in a wrongful-death lawsuit. The court ruled the patient could, writing that it had long held that “unborn children are ‘children’” and that that was also true for frozen embryos, affording the fertilized eggs the same protection as babies under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.


An embryo is obviously not a person. An embryo is a POTENTIAL person, not an ACTUAL person. Persons are actual human entities you can see walking, talking, working, and generally going about the activity of living a life.  The embryo-as-a-person claim is a religious view, not a rational, observable, fact-based view. This law will saddle the IVF industry with unwarranted, potentially crippling liability, preventing countless potential human beings from being brought into existence for people desperate to become parents. It will literally turn innocent people into outlaws, ruin people financially—and ultimately landing innocent people in jail for non-murders, if the principle is developed to its logical end. This law is unConstitutional. It is also a moral abomination. It dehumanizes actual people. If the lives and properties of living human beings can be subordinated and sacrificed to potential human beings, it's the end of freedom and flourishing.

IVF is a crucial human value, and the embryo is crucially important because it is central to that end. But no value can ever be put above the value of an actual, individual, living human being—not the state, not society, not the race, not future generations, not God . . . and not the unborn, including embryos. That is the very definition of evil. This law is based on a thoroughly anti-human premise.


Related Reading:


Shock, anger, confusion grip Alabama after court ruling on embryos By Tim Craig and Sabrina Malhi


What to know about the Alabama embryo ruling and its IVF implications By Maham Javaid and Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff


Alabama ushers in the theocracy by Ruth Marcus


My Facebook Post on the Subject


Friday, February 16, 2024

QUORA: ‘How natural is capitalism to human nature?’

 QUORA: ‘How natural is capitalism to human nature?’


I posted this answer:


Capitalism is 100% consistent with human nature.


Some say Capitalism is not “natural” because it liberates man to alter nature to man’s benefit. The natural world, they claim, is a planet unimpacted by human intelligence, productive work, and ingenuity.


But this is bogus and contradictory—i e, a logical fallacy. There is nothing intrinsically valuable about unaltered nature. Nature “created” man. And like all life forms, man has a nature, an identity, and means of survival. 


Man’s unique means of survival is his reasoning mind, which he can apply to his physical efforts to alter his environment to suit his needs. It is this attribute, which no other known living species possesses, that Naturalists hate and resent.  


The social condition that man needs to successfully apply his means of survival is individual freedom governed by individual rights. The only social system that systematically establishes these conditions is Capitalism. Hence, the Naturalists, driven by hatred of the vastly improved-upon world they see all around, absurdly claim Capitalism is not natural.


Naturalists look around with horror and see roads, buildings, farms, and every other product of human productiveness we take for granted, and see something unnatural. They fantasize about the time when man will return to the state of nature of animals and, like their hunter-gatherer ancestors, live in “harmony” with nature, with the misery, poverty, short, and brutal stone-age existence that that implies.  


The question is: How can an entity that arose in nature, by natural processes, be unnatural? It can’t. How can the social system most consistent with man’s fundamental nature as a being of reason and freedom be unnatural? How can the resulting advanced industrial civilization we see and live in be unnatural?


Of course Capitalism is natural—that is, consistent—with human nature. No other answer to the above question makes a shred of logical sense.


Related Reading:


Why Capitalism is Selfish--and Why That’s Good


Books to Aid in Understanding Rational Selfishness


Capitalism and the Moral High Ground by Craig Biddle


Why Capitalism Needs a Moral Sanction


Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights


The Capitalism Tour


What is Capitalism? by Ayn Rand

Thursday, February 8, 2024

QUORA: ‘I’m black and I wonder when white people will pay us reparation. Why not?’

 QUORA: ‘I’m black and I wonder when white people will pay us reparation. Why not?’ [alternate link]


I posted this answer (pending as of 1/29/24):


The collectivist premise of your question indicates what you are up to. 


When someone collectivizes their argument, they’re usually up to no good.


When someone collectivizes their argument, it ‘s because they have no case.


Let me give you a clue: There is no “us” in any fundamental, real sense. You can only rightfully speak for yourself. Reparatory justice is only valid when you have an actual victim[s] and an actual perpetrator[s] provable by direct evidence of wrongdoing.  In what way are you entitled to reparations? Who harmed you? How? That’s a question for a court of law. 


The idea that you are entitled to be paid off because someone of your dark skin color was harmed in some distant past is textbook racism, the lowest form of collectivism. Racism is the idea that a person’s thoughts, values, character, and moral standing are inherited through one’s body chemistry (genes, bloodline, skin pigmentation, and the like). Your question indicates that you believe that attributes like victimhood and guilt are passed down to future generations of non-victims and innocents through skin pigmentation. The gross injustice is obvious to any morally upright person. The idea that someone else of a lighter skin color owes you because someone of light skin color harmed someone of your darker skin color in some distant past is textbook racism, the lowest form of collectivism. That tribal mindset is not the perspective of an enlightened person. 


To be sure, reparations should have been paid to freed slaves. In fact, the process of reparatory justice was begun in earnest in 1865 by order of General William T. Sherman. Sherman, acting with the sanction of the Republican Lincoln administration, ordered land seized from former slave owners be given to former slaves in 40 acre parcels. Tragically, Lincoln’s assaination lead to Andrew Johnson becoming president. In one of the most shameful presidential acts in American history, Johnson, a Democrat (no surprise there), immediately rescinded the reparations, and kicked the former slaves off of their rightfully awarded land


So I am not unsympathetic to the justice of slave reparations. But at some point, time changes things. It’s been generations since slavery ended. Paying “reparations” today is itself an act of injustice.


My advice to the questioner is to stop living in the past, and start looking forward to making your own life the best it could be by your own efforts. I’m sure you are capable without begging for handouts dressed up as reparations. You are not a victim. The people from whom you want to seize money from are not perpetrators. The only person standing in the way of your economic success is you.


Related Reading:


Should Reparations Include White Victims of Anti-Black Racism?


On New Jersey’s Proposed Bill to Study Racial Reparations


SUPPLEMENTAL TO ‘New Jersey’s Proposed Bill to Study Racial Reparations’: The ‘Slavery is Good Economics’ Argument


‘Reparations’; Another Leftist Path to Socialism


The Dem's Jim Crow 2.0


Sunday, February 4, 2024

You Can’t be Pro-Rights and Anti-Rights Simultaneously

Alyssa Rosenberg has an interesting opinion piece in the Washington Post—interesting, but not in the way she means it. 


I’m pro-choice, but I’m grateful for what pro-life groups did this week, Rosenberg opines. Why?


In today’s fractious political world, it’s important to extend credit where it’s due. And so, as a pro-choice liberal, I want to thank a group of pro-life organizations that spoke up this week in support of a congressional deal to improve the child tax credit. Antiabortion Americans United for Life hailed the bill, which will primarily help lower-income families and families with a larger number of children, as “a core part of an American pro-life and pro-family future.” Pro-choice Center for American Progress President Patrick Gaspard described the legislation as “an unmissable opportunity to reduce poverty among low-income children and families.”


Why is Rosenberg grateful?


The often-justified liberal criticism of pro-life conservatives has long been that they elevate the lives of unborn babies over the lives of mothers, and that they’re eager to prioritize children in the womb but not in the world. [true] After birth, it becomes more important to refuse “attempts to expand the welfare state” [true] than to feed poor children when school is out during the summer [which means, to feed poor children at taxpayer expense]; more vital to enforce a traditional heterosexual nuclear family where women stay home than to make sure children have access to safe, quality day care [“access” here means access to other people’s wallets to pay for the day care]; more essential to reject federal help than to make sure children have health insurance [again, meaning at taxpayer expense].


The contradictions in the stances of liberals and conservatives becomes obvious here, though the contradictions are flipped. Both the welfare state and abortion bans are rights-violating. The welfare state, which is based on forced redistribution of wealth, violates the individual right to decide how, when, and if to use one’s own money for charitable purposes. Abortion bans violate the individual right of women to control one's own body and doctor’s right to perform abortions if the doctor so chooses.


Now, as far as welfare statism goes, the tax credit is one of the least bad options, because it allows the parent or guardian to keep more of what they earn. True, sometimes the tax “credit” is not a credit at all, but becomes “refund”—i.e. a handout—at taxpayer expense if the parent’s tax liability is less than the allowable credit. But at least the tax credit idea requires the parent to file a tax return, which means to be working.


But the broader point here is a moral one: To be a principled individual rights advocate (individual rights properly understood), one must be against the welfare state and in favor of legalization of abortion. 


Note what is going on here. Both conservatives and liberal are supportive of rights violations in their own spheres of interest. But it is the conservatives who are caving, and moving toward the liberals’ pro-welfare state principles. The liberals, the most consistent violator of individual rights, is winning, thus validating the truth of Ayn Rand’s observation that “In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins [italics in original].” 


Related Reading:


Biden’s Concept of Freedom is the Path to Slavery


A Right to Pursue versus a ‘Right’ to Provision: The Declaration and its Reactionaries


My Challenge To the GOP: A Philosophical Contract With America


The U.S. Constitution is About Individual, Not ‘Human’, Rights


Collectivized Rights—Ayn Rand


Moral Rights and Political Freedom—Tara Smith


Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights: The Moral Foundation of a Free Society—Craig Biddle for The Objective Standard