How Orwellian has the Democrat Party become? Let’s count the ways…

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In September 2017 Proud Boy Magazine (PBM) published an article by PawL BaZiLe titled “10 Ways Orwell’s 1984 is a Progressive Utopia.” BaZiLe provided ten “quotes and commentary on the left’s relationship with Orwell’s world from 1984.”

As Steven Crowder points out in his political formulas:

Any Word + Socialism = Socialism and Socialism + Anything = A bad idea that’s never worked.

PBM noted in 2017:

If you haven’t read George Orwell’s master piece 1984, run, do not walk, to itunes, or a book store or Amazon and get busy.  The book was written in 1948 so the British author was able to personally live through the age of ideas that brought us such monsters as Hitler and Stalin.  The book itself is so perfect, it has become a clique for a dystopian future controlled by an all seeing authoritarian regime in a world with no freedom.  Upon my recent reading of it, I couldn’t help but notice how eerily similar the world in the book was to the post modernist left’s wish list for the world.

Fox News reported on the Democratic Socialists of America:

The Democratic Socialists of America [DSA] got its start as a culmination of two groups – the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM) – according to Temple University professor Joseph M. Schwartz, who detailed the organization’s history online.

As DSA’s membership grew from its official founding in 1982, it had a hand in “building a strong coalition among progressive trade unionists, civil rights and feminist activists and the ‘new politics’ left-liberals” at the time, led by late chairman Michael Harrington.

Let’s give some recent examples of just how Orwellian the Democrat Party has become using a few the ten quotes from 1984.

Quote 1 – “Who controls the past controls the future who controls the present controls the past.”

Groups tearing down Confederate statues in the name of stopping racism and hate. Hollywood in its film “First Man” leaving out the scene where the American flag is planted on the moon. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stating that “America was never great.” Not teaching the U.S. Constitution in public schools. Teaching social justice in U.S. colleges and universities rather than equal treatment under the law.

Quote 2 – “The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of value.”

Today’s core of the left is a hatred is capitalism. Democratic Socials candidates in the 2018 midterm elections such as Andrew Gillum in Florida and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York portend a rise of anti-capitalists nationwide.

PBM notes, “The Occupy movement was hugely anti-capitalist and led by people who look like they couldn’t manage their deodorant budget let alone everyone else’s money.  If you live in a big city today, or just have a art school student you needed to sit with at Thanksgiving you’re sure to get the evil eye and a lecture if you openly declare you’re a capitalist.  If they could push a button a destroy the free market today, the left would.  The choices these economic “hobbyists” seem to have to replace the open market is nothing or full blown socialism.  This was the message that got a candidate like Bernie Sander so much steam in the 2016 primary.”

Both Gillum and Ocasio-Cortez were endorsed by self-proclaimed Democrat Socialist Bernie Sanders.

Quote 3 – “It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism.”

Ayn Rand in her monograph “Textbook of Americanism” wrote:

What Is the Basic Issue in the World Today?

The basic issue in the world today is between two principles: Individualism and Collectivism. Individualism holds that man has inalienable rights which cannot be taken away from him by any other man, nor by any number, group or collective of other men. Therefore, each man exists by his own right and for his own sake, not for the sake of the group.

Collectivism holds that man has no rights; that his work, his body and his personality belong to the group; that the group can do with him as it pleases, in any manner it pleases, for the sake of whatever it decides to be its own welfare. Therefore, each man exists only by the permission of the group and for the sake of the group.

These two principles are the roots of two opposite social systems. The basic issue of the world today is between these two systems.

These two systems are now represented by collectivist, one world order Democrat Socialists and individualist Republicans.

Quote 4 – “A word contains its opposite in itself.”

Examples of “words that are opposite” used by politicians, the media and those in the Democrat Socialist Party include:

  1. If you are pro-American or voted for President Donald J. Trump you are a Nazi.
  2. If you are concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism you are Islamophobic or a racist.
  3. If you believe that marriage is between one man and one woman you are homophobic.
  4. If you believe in God then you are part of the alt-right.
  5. If you believe in the U.S. Constitution as written then you are not democratic.

Please take the time to read and watch the embedded videos in the Proud Boy Magazine (PBM) “10 Ways Orwell’s 1984 is a Progressive Utopia.”

George Orwell wrote that in the Utopian society of 1984:

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
Big Brother is watching you.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Any of these sound familiar?

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is a 1984 Movie Still, CosmicCatacombs.com.

Socialism vs. Trump after Massive Turnout in Florida’s Tuesday Primary

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Florida is the largest swing state in the union and possibly the most demographically representative with transplants from the Northeast and Midwest, along with natives of the South. Plus it’s the third largest state after California and Texas, which are not as representative.

That makes the results of Tuesday’s primaries so intriguing to the tea-leaf reading set. In this case we can see some real actual trends, because it is not just one special election that both sides were trying to make into a national referendum — it’s a mini three-quarters of America.

One big takeaway: The establishment, “centrist” portions of both parties lost big time. The Democrats went all in on the surging socialism elements of the Party while Trump remains a monstrous force in the Republican Party. That looks like the war shaping up in November, as the Democratic base moves toward the surging Bernie Sanders-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Party and Republicans continue to move toward the strong America First Trump wing.

Second big takeaway: Everyone is jazzed up. The off-year Florida primary broke records across the state for any primary this century — with higher turnout even than in presidential election years. Importantly, the increase is in both parties. The Democratic turnout is up more than the Republican turnout, but in the red areas of Florida, there was a record number of people voting Tuesday.

This is relatively unheard of in off election years and what it portends for November is not so easy to determine. One would have to give an edge to Democrats for historic reasons and greater increase in turnout reasons. However, what we know for sure is that everything could change tomorrow. Mueller could issue his report and who knows what all else. What’s clear is that Trump is turning out Democrats, but anti-Trump hysteria and socialism is turning out Republicans.

Here are the themes from the demographically representative Florida primaries Tuesday:

Trump remains a very powerful force in the GOP

In the race between long-time presumed Republican gubernatorial candidate Adam Putnam, a favorite of the GOP establishment, and one-time longshot Congressman Ron DeSantis, a favorite of President Trump and the Trump wing of the GOP, DeSantis pulled off not just an upset but a landslide upset.

DeSantis was an early Trump supporter and spent a lot of time on Fox News defending the President and attacking his critics. This is something Trump likes and rewards. Going into the election process, DeSantis was not well-known outside of his Congressional district while Putnam had strong name recognition and a ground game that had been built over many years through the GOP. He’s conservative, but definitely seen as establishment.

Eight weeks ago, Putnam was polling with solid and consistent leads of 15 to 18 percent over DeSantis. After Trump endorsed DeSantis on Twitter and then went to Tampa for a DeSantis rally, the polling flipped by an astonishing 30 percentage points and DeSantis won the primary 56 percent to 36 percent. Not even close.

That’s the power of Trump in the GOP. We’ll find out in a few months the power of Trump in a general election.

Socialism ascends in Democratic Party with nomination of Andrew Gillum

Former Congresswoman Gwen Graham, daughter of popular former Governor and Senator Bob Graham, was ahead in the polls going into the primary Tuesday. Wealthy candidates out of Miami spent about $70 million combined trying to pass her. But Gillum worked the grass roots, the black turnout, and the socialist/progressive wing and pulled off an upset that left the pollsters, pundits and media embarrassed. No one saw it — other than a little known but growing outfit of anti-Trumpsters called Change Research. They nailed it.

Graham was seen more as an establishment Democrat in the same way that Putnam was as a Republican. In fact, until Trump’s entry, it was widely believed this would be a race between those two. But the establishment in both parties is being rapidly neutered and that was obvious by Tuesday night.

Gillum spent the least of the five major candidates in his primary race and was barely seen on TV — important elements in a state with 21 million people with at least four major metro areas. He relied on a grassroots campaign, the support of the furthest left in the party and the socialism appeal of Sanders and Ocassio-Cortez to beat four other candidates, including Graham.

Gillum is young at 39, and was endorsed by socialist former Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He was the heavy favorite among Democrats who called themselves progressives. He was supported by California billionaire environmental extremist Tom Steyer. And President Trump wasted no time in going after him this morning as a “failed socialist,” tweeting out:

“Not only did Congressman Ron DeSantis easily win the Republican Primary, but his opponent in November is his biggest dream….a failed Socialist Mayor named Andrew Gillum who has allowed crime & many other problems to flourish in his city. This is not what Florida wants or needs!”

In addition to the socialism label, there are some threats moving forward with Gillum. The FBI is conducting an ongoing investigation of corruption among Tallahassee city officials (it is a long-time Democrat-run city) and no one — including Gillum — has been cleared of anything yet. Will the FBI pull a James Comey and act politically? Who can say in this environment. But that looms out there. Expect the DeSantis camp and allies to use it.

Final point. Gillum was not seen as a threat to win among any of the major candidates, and as such, he received virtually no attack ads and minimal scrutiny by the media and other candidates. That will not be the case in the next few months. (Except for the media part, of course.) A lot will come to light that has hitherto been hidden.

Flipping the Florida U.S. Senate seat just got harder

Everyone nationally is watching the races for Congress, and in this too, Tuesday’s results give the lay of the land.

The race between Gov. Rick Scott and long-time incumbent seat-warmer Sen. Bill Nelson was seen as a strong opportunity for Republicans to pick up a Senate seat and give them a cushion by flipping it to red. However, that goal just got tougher. Having Andrew Gillum, the first black gubernatorial candidate to win his party’s primary, at the top of the Florida ballot will likely ensure high black turnout from the Democratic Party as they can feel something historic to be excited about. It could be a similar dynamic for Florida as was in play in 2008 with Barack Obama.

Bill Nelson excited no black voter ever — well, no voter ever. He is a reliable Democratic vote whose 40 years in Washington have netted virtually no legacy beyond a warm D seat. Scott currently has a small lead in the contest. But Gillum’s presence will almost assuredly deliver votes to Nelson, next on the ballot, that he would not have otherwise received. Flipping the seat is now more difficult to pull off.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act.

PODCAST: Despite Its Rebranding, Socialism Is Still Horrific

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We’re experiencing the rise of a new kind of socialist. The original definition of socialism—state ownership of the means of production—is beginning to fall by the wayside.

What self-proclaimed socialists are asking for now is for the state to control the means of production.

While this might seem like a pedantic distinction, it’s an important one. But the rebranding of socialism by democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez still fails to take into account the most important aspect of sound economics: human behavior.

Join James Harrigan and Antony Davies as they drill down into the pitfalls of socialism and more on this week’s episode of Words and Numbers.

RELATED ARTICLE: 4.5K Christian leaders reject churches’ ‘social justice’ agenda

3 Examples of How Social Security Robs Americans of Greater Income Before, During Retirement

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Social Security takes a whopping 12.4 percent of American workers’ paychecks, but a new backgrounder by The Heritage Foundation shows that workers are getting a bad deal from the program.

Despite its popularity, Social Security typically provides very low—and in many cases, negative—rates of return.

Although the program provided high returns and windfall benefits to its earliest recipients, Social Security is no longer a good deal for workers.

The Heritage Foundation analysis shows that younger workers—even low-wage ones—would receive at least three times greater rates of return from private savings than Social Security will provide.

To assess Social Security’s so-called “rate of return,” Heritage’s analysis compares what workers would receive if their payroll taxes were invested in personal accounts compared with what Social Security will provide under two scenarios: 1) current law, with roughly 20 percent benefit cuts beginning around 2034; and 2) a scenario whereby payroll taxes rise immediately to a level necessary to pay the program’s prescribed benefits.

While virtually all workers—across income levels, both genders, and generations—would be far better off with personal savings than Social Security, younger workers get the worst deal from the government program.

The average young male worker is virtually guaranteed a negative rate of return from Social Security. Take these hypothetical examples:

Marc Perez is 23 years old and earns an average income of $60,006 per year. He will pay $547,088 in Social Security taxes (excluding disability insurance taxes) throughout his lifetime. In return, he will receive a monthly benefit of $2,209 in retirement.

If he instead invested that same amount—$547,088—in a conservative mix of stocks and bonds, he would accumulate more than $1.5 million in a retirement account and could use that to purchase a lifetime annuity that would pay him $6,185 per month, or nearly three times what Social Security will provide.

Even lower-income earners, like Ashley Martin, who generally receives higher returns from Social Security, would be better off saving and investing in their own personal retirement accounts.

Martin is also 23 and makes $19,768 per year. She will pay an estimated $119,426 in Social Security taxes toward a program that will provide her with a $902 monthly benefit in retirement.

If she instead invested that same amount—$119,426—in her own retirement account, she would accumulate $354,731 in savings. That would be enough to purchase an annuity that would provide her with $1,262 per month, or 40 percent more than Social Security can provide.

Given the preceding examples, it will come as no surprise that high-income earners like Courtney Jones get the worst deal from Social Security.

Jones is also 23 and makes $128,400 per year (Social Security’s taxable maximum). She will pay $860,050 in Social Security taxes throughout her lifetime and can expect to receive a monthly benefit of $2,683 from the government program.

However, if she invested that $860,050 in her own retirement account, she would accumulate more than $2.8 million in retirement savings—an amount that could provide her with a monthly annuity of $10,132, or almost four times what Social Security can provide.

If workers did not use their personal savings to purchase annuities, but instead drew down on them as needed in retirement, they would be able to leave sizable bequests to their heirs.

In contrast, workers who die before reaching Social Security’s retirement age or shortly thereafter often receive little to nothing in return for their hundreds of thousands of dollars in payroll taxes.

The ability to leave bequests would be especially meaningful for lower-income workers. Not only do lower-income workers tend to have lower life expectancies, and therefore receive less in Social Security benefits than higher-income counterparts, but their families do not receive the same leg up from bequests that middle- and upper-income families often receive from their elders to pay for a grandchild’s education or to purchase a home.

After payroll taxes and other levies, there simply isn’t much left for lower-income workers to save for the benefit of their heirs.

A young male earning only half the average wage would have enough in a personal account to provide the exact same income that Social Security provides, and to also leave $479,000 to his heirs if he died at the average life-expectancy age of 76. Even if he were to live to age 90, he would have $270,000 left in savings to leave to his heirs.

Allowing workers to more easily save for their own needs today, and in retirement, instead of taxing them heavily to provide them with public benefits would enable workers to accrue higher retirement incomes in addition to greater take-home pay during their working years.

Supplemental Security Income benefits for elderly individuals who face poverty could provide a floor below which no worker would fall, but such income security benefits would require only a fraction of Social Security’s current payroll taxes.

Lawmakers need to act now—not only to address Social Security’s looming insolvency, but to reform the program in a way that reduces the tax burden on  workers, leaving them with more money to pursue their goals today and to put toward personal savings.

Pairing Social Security reforms that limit the program’s size and taxes with universal savings accounts would help accomplish that goal by allowing workers to save, tax-free, for whatever purposes they want.

The American people, not Washington bureaucrats, should be the ones to decide how much and how best to save for their needs today and in retirement.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Rachel Greszler

Rachel Greszler

Rachel Greszler is a senior policy analyst in economics and entitlements at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. Read her research.

Julia Howe

Julia Howe is a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

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WARNING: MasterCard and Visa Cross the Line into Totalitarian Thought Control

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Like many people, my inbox has been flooded by concerned citizens about David Horowitz and Robert Spencer over MasterCard and Visa, blocking their flow of revenue needed for daily operations. Spencer stated:

This is getting very serious. It won’t stop with David Horowitz or me. The Left is moving quickly to silence all dissenting voices in the run-up to the 2018 elections. The freedom of speech is the foundation of a free society, and it is rapidly being destroyed in the United States.

To add to the heartfelt concerns of those who respect the work of these stalwart defenders of freedom and human rights, all citizens would do well to recognize that the actions of MasterCard and Visa are also a slap in the face to their customers. These companies have infringed upon the rights of anyone who supports the cause of freedom and the efforts of Horowitz and Spencer. Customers who choose to donate to these necessary initiatives have been told that they are financing “hate” and therefore are stripped of their right to donate. They have been dictated to by MasterCard and Visa, who are acting as if they do not have the right to think for themselves as long as they want to use the services of MasterCard and Visa.

As totalitarianism overshadows America, no one can say that they were not forewarned. Both Horowitz and Spencer have been sounding the alarm for years; the Muslim Brotherhood plan for North America has been public knowledge for years. Its Explanatory Memorandum is expansive and detailed in describing its mission:

 “The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheik Mohammed stated:

“We will win because Americans don’t realize . . .we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting.”

Mohammed was correct. Far too many citizens of the West have quit — they take their freedoms of granted and are in denial, having not learned the lesson of history that fascism is insidious and does not take control of societies suddenly, as many seem to think. Its invasion is methodical and gradual.

Some examples of how businesses have joined the totalitarian initiative:

Kellogg Co. announced on November 2016 its decision to pull ads from Breitbart “because its 45,000,000 monthly conservative readers are not ‘aligned with our values as a company.’” Here we see Kellogg’s attempting to control the thoughts of citizens and impose its values on consumers. Fortunately, Breitbart “launched a #DumpKelloggs petition and called for a boycott of the ubiquitous food manufacturer, which lead to plummeting stock and reported $53 million loss in the fourth quarter.” The arrogance of Kellogg Co. was astounding, with CEO John Bryant claiming that the company’s massive losses were just a “coincidence” and not due to the boycott.

In the three months following Kellogg’s war against Breitbart:

the company has faced allegations of racism toward factory workers and has been accused of allegedly profiting from the use of child labor. Its non-profit W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s ties to radical anti-American billionaire George Soros, hate group Black Lives Matter, and deceased Cuban dictator Fidel Castro have been exposed, and the Michigan-based company is set to shutter dozens of distributions centers and lay off more than 1,100 full-time employees.

Last August, Paypal decided that it, too, wanted to interfere with freedom of speech and thought. The company cancelled Jihad Watch’s account, but it was reinstated not long afterward after public outrage. Meanwhile, the Islamic State used PayPal to send money to jihadis inside the U.S., but that revelation wasn’t enough to stop Paypal from pontificating in its letter announcing its reinstatement of the Jihad Watch account:

PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy in our User Agreement prohibits individuals and groups from using PayPal for activities that promote hate, violence, or racial intolerance.

This is a key statement, as Jihad Watch is not a hate site. It is a news aggregate and commentary site dedicated to exposing the broad range of human rights abuses committed in the name of Islam, and reports from a range of news sites are referenced. Take, for example, a few recent Jihad Watch headlines:

These are but a mere few examples, but they go on and on. What normal citizen can point out the “hate” in exposing such news? Every single day, reports emerge from the four corners of the earth about human rights abuses committed in the name of Islam, Islamic supremacist incursions into once-peaceful countries, the slaughter and injury of innocent people committed in the name of Islam, and jihad attacks. If reporting and discussing these facts are an offense to Muslims and deemed to be “hateful” and “racist,” then we need to have serious open discussions about why and how this is so. But there is a strenuous effort to shut down all discussion of these matters.

Meanwhile, who remembers or cares about the victims? Jihad Watch, the Horowitz Center and others that are unashamed to stand for human rights and who are grateful to those who died in the cause of freedom. Fierce battles have been waged against fascism, and if history has taught us anything, we should know that fascist regimes endeavor to control the thoughts and words of their people, as does the Southern Poverty Law Center today. The SPLC has mutated into a hate group itself. In the words of its former spokesman Mark Potok, who spent 20 years as an SPLC senior fellow (according to LinkedIn):

Sometimes the press will describe us as monitoring hate groups, I want to say plainly that our aim in life is to destroy these groups, completely destroy them.

As reported by Breitbart:

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has had their donation processing system blocked by Visa and Mastercard allegedly following a campaign by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Visa has since contacted Breitbart News to deny involvement in the blacklisting of the Freedom Center.

It is by degrees that totalitarians manage to seize control. The establishment media becomes a mouthpieces of the people in power, and soon, the population becomes enslaved to their ideologies, as we see with Islamofascism. It is abusive, oppressive and aims to silence all dissent as it marches against the House of War in order to subvert it and bring it into the House of Islam. This 1,400-year-old doctrine has infiltrated the West in the private and public sectors, and the Muslim Brotherhood, in accordance with its memorandum, has managed to redefine “hate” to mean any criticism of Islam.

Now Horowitz and Spencer stand accused of “hate,” without any semblance of justice or due process. MasterCard and Visa have bowed to the totalitarian impulse, and in so doing have also indicted their customers. This will continue, if there is no resistance. Let’s hope that boycotts and class action suits will soon be in the offing, prompted by both consumers and the leaders of conservative organizations.


EDITORS NOTE: This column with images originally appeared on Jihad Watch. The featured photo is by Two Paddles Axe and Leatherwork on Unsplash.

Elizabeth Warren’s ‘New Deal’ Is Closer to National Socialism than Democratic Socialism

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In an episode of the HBO comedy series Crashing, libertarian Penn Jillette offered this provocative opinion:

The most important revolution in human history, more important than agriculture, more important than writing, is the scientific revolution. The scientific revolution came down to these three words: I don’t know.

Jillette added, “No institution, no church, no king, no power structure had ever said in history, I don’t know.”

The Greek historian Thucydides put it this way: “Ignorance is bold, knowledge reserved.”

It’s hard to find a politician willing to say, “I don’t know.” Senator Elizabeth Warren is no exception. Her ignorance is bold. Recently she proposed The Accountable Capitalism Act. Under her proposed law, Warren and others in government will pretend to know much about that which they know nothing—running every large business in America.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Senator Warren urges Americans to insist “on a new deal.” Under her Accountable Capitalism Act,

Corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue would be required to get a federal corporate charter. The new charter requires corporate directors to consider the interests of all major corporate stakeholders—not only shareholders—in company decisions. Shareholders could sue if they believed directors weren’t fulfilling those obligations.

Warren’s language is vague. Kevin Williamson, writing in the National Review, explains what the Accountable Capitalism Act would mean in practice:

The federal government would then dictate to these businesses the composition of their boards, the details of internal corporate governance, compensation practices, personnel policies, and much more.

In short, Williamson concludes that Senator Warren is proposing “the wholesale expropriation of private enterprise in the United States, and nothing less.”

Today, Warren’s proposal has no chance of passing. In a few years, under a democratic socialist president—I almost wrote national socialist president—Warren’s dystopia could become a reality.

Warren believes firms have an “obsession with maximizing shareholder returns.” Warren mistakenly believes that firms fail to consider other stakeholders. Does the United States Post Office or FedEx deliver a better user experience for you? The only firms who don’t consider other stakeholders are monopolies isolated from the forces of competition. To effectively compete, firms routinely consider the interests of customers, employees, suppliers, investors, and others, including the communities in which they locate.

The libertarian founder of Whole Foods, John Mackey has a name for considering all stakeholders, Conscious Capitalism. Mackey writes in his book Conscious Capitalism,

We believe that business is good because it creates value, it is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange, it is noble because it can elevate our existence, and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity. Free-enterprise capitalism is the most powerful system for social cooperation and human progress ever conceived. It is one of the most compelling ideas we humans have ever had. But we can aspire to something even greater.

The something greater is “higher purposes that serve, align, and integrate the interests of all their major stakeholders.”

In Mackey’s universe, this is all voluntary. For example, Whole Foods has been phasing out the sales of products containing GMOs. This is in response to demand from Whole Foods’ customers. As part of their strategy to maximize profits and attract customers, Whole Foods issues press releases explaining how they listen to customers and farmers and take actions that are good for the environment. Customers are free to buy GMO products from other stores if they prefer.

Warren doesn’t have in mind the voluntary actions of companies which must meet the test of serving consumers. Warner wants corporate decisions to be made by armchair quarterbacks who lack essential tacit knowledge and the knowledge of “particular circumstances of time and place,” as Hayek calls it. Without such knowledge, it is impossible to make decisions that effectively allocate resources to best serve consumers.

Being accountable to all stakeholders is a vague mandate. Williamson warns the intention of the Accountable Capitalism Act is to compel corporations to be “accountable to politicians, who desire to put the assets and productivity of private businesses under political discipline for their own selfish ends.” He adds:

It is remarkable that people who are most keenly attuned to the self-interest of CEOs and shareholders and the ways in which that self-interest influences their decisions apparently believe that members of the House, senators, presidents, regulators, Cabinet secretaries, and agency chiefs somehow are liberated from self-interest when they take office through some kind of miracle of transcendence.

Decision-makers accountable to politicians are a recipe for disaster. Venezuela sits on the worlds’ largest proven oil reserves, yet their socialist decision-makers are so incompetent in running a business that Venezuela has to import oil.

North Korea already has a term for instructions being offered by those who know nothing about enterprise. When Kim Jong-un visits a barely-functioning enterprise and offers inanities prescribing improvements, his instructions are called “field guidance.”

Like his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, and father, Kim Jong-il, Kim tours the county dispensing his bottomless “wisdom” providing instructions for everything from producing more buses to increasing farm yields.

With his “benevolence” and “wisdom” Kim presumably claims to take into account the interests of all stakeholders. In North Korea, there are no messy market dynamics to get in his way.

The North Korean Worker’s Party newspaper has an English-language version. The front page is dedicated to reports of all the places that Kim Jong-un has recently dispensed his field guidance. Recently, he was at a fish farm and Kim “knew” just what the farm needed:

Stressing the need for the farm to become an engine leading the fish farming field of the country and a pioneer, educator and pedigree farm for the dissemination of ultra-modern fish farming technology, he set forth the tasks and ways for it.

He gave valuable teachings concerning the management and operation of the farm and the fish farming field, including the issue of keeping researchers to meet the goal of shortening the catfish production cycle and lowering the feed unit to the worldwide level.

Perhaps you have seen photos of government acolytes engrossed in taking notes as Kim dispenses his “guidance.” Does Warren have in mind the government acolytes she’d like to see running America’s corporations?

North Koreans, having little experience or understanding of a market economy, believe their leader is a living God whose wisdom provides the guidance the economy needs to run. Although citizens barely survive at a level of meager subsistence, North Koreans believe their country is thriving due to their leaders’ greatness.

In her book The Girl with Seven Names, North Korean defector Hyeonseo Lee describes her indoctrination as a child as she came to believe in the divinity of the North Korean despot:

The story of the nativity of…the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, brought me out in goose bumps. His birth was foretold by miraculous signs in the heavens—a double rainbow over Mount Paektu, swallows singing songs of praise with human voices, and the appearance of a bright new star in the sky. We listened to this and a shudder of awe passed through our small bodies. My scalp tingled. This was pure magic.

Another defector, Yeonmi Park, in her book In Order to Live describes how she came to believe Kim Jong Il was sacrificing himself on her behalf as he delivered field guidance:

In school, we sang a song about Kim Jong Il and how he worked so hard to give our laborers on-the-spot instruction as he traveled around the country, sleeping in his car and eating only small meals of rice balls. “Please, please, Dear Leader, take a good rest for us!” we sang through our tears. “We are all crying for you.”

If you tell me America is a ways away from such a destructive mindset, instilled by generations of propaganda and brutality, I would agree. Yet, economic illiteracy is widespread. Those illiterate of economics “teach” each other through school systems and social media. Among journalists are many hostile to economic freedom. Dissenting views are no longer tolerated. For example, Prager University’s mainstream conservative site was recently censored by Facebook and YouTube.

The vast majority of the population believes the government should “strengthen the economy” and many fear the future. The combination is a combustible mixture. Imagine a major bear market and the resulting spike in fear. Then, it is not so hard to imagine a future president, with a mindset like that of Senator Warren, barnstorming the country dispensing field guidance. Is not President Trump managing trade via “bold ignorance” paving the way for more politicians like Senator Warren?

COLUMN BY

Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. To receive Barry’s essays subscribe at Mindset Shifts.

Trump’s Rollback of CAFE Mandates Is a Big Win for Car Buyers, Consumer Choice

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The Trump administration recently proposed the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule. The proposed rule offers modifications to Obama-era Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards with a “preferred alternative” for model years 2021 through 2026.

Without a doubt, the Trump administration’s proposed revision is a welcome victory for consumers’ wallets and for consumer choice.

The Obama administration implemented fuel-efficiency mandates that would force auto manufacturers to have a fleetwide fuel-economy average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The new rule’s “preferred” change would maintain the existing fuel-economy mandate through 2020 (increasing to 37 mpg) and keep the level at 37 mpg through 2025.

New fuel-efficiency standards create a number of unintended consequences, including higher prices for new cars and costly retooling of existing auto plants.

A 2016 Heritage Foundation analysis estimates the Obama fuel-economy mandates increased new-car prices $6,800 more than the pre-2009 baseline trend, and that eliminating the more aggressive standards would save 2025 car buyers at least $7,200 per vehicle.

As my colleagues detail, “Economists and engineers accurately predicted that the [model year] 2016 standards would hurt consumers by at least $3,800 per car.”

Consumers—not government bureaucrats—should make decisions about what cars they drive.

If consumers value saving money on gasoline, they will simply choose to purchase more fuel-efficient cars, and automakers will meet that demand without a federal mandate. If consumers value other attributes—vehicle weight, engine power, safety—Washington shouldn’t force automakers to ignore consumers’ preferences.

In fact, a 2011 paper from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that if vehicle weight, horsepower, and torque were held constant at 1980 levels, fuel efficiency would have increased 60 percent from 1980 to 2006 instead of the 15 percent increase that did occur.

The reason fuel-efficiency increase occurred at 15 percent instead of 60 percent is because auto manufacturers met buyers’ demands for heavier vehicles with more torque and horsepower. When the federal government comes in and says we need to have a fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon, regulators override those preferences.

Congress established fuel-economy mandates in the 1970s as a response to the Arab oil embargo. A fear existed that the world was running out of oil and that America was too dependent on foreign oil.

CAFE standards were sold under the false notion of scarcity. It makes no sense now that we have an abundance of oil.  But even if the world were running out of oil, fuel-economy mandates were not a good policy then and are not a good policy now.

CAFE standards are not just a relic of the past, but a systemic problem of the way policymakers, regulators, lobbyists, and pundits treat energy markets. Policies and regulations are based on alleged expertise and on making bold predictions about the future of energy supply and demand.

Rather than rely on regulations to tell producers and consumers what to do, we have price signals for that. Higher gas prices communicate information to energy producers to drill for more oil. They communicate information to entrepreneurs to invest in new extraction technologies, alternative vehicle technologies, or more fuel-efficient cars.

Prices also communicate information to energy users to buy more fuel-efficient products, to carpool, or to find other modes of transportation.

When Obama-era regulators set CAFE standards and estimated the alleged savings to consumers, they demonstrated the same level of hubris our politicians did in the 1970s.

When crafting these standards, the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that gas prices would be $3.87 per gallon in 2025, increasing to $4.24 per gallon by 2040. They used these price projections to project how much money consumers would save on fuel costs.

While those price-projection scenarios are certainly plausible, increases in supply could also certainly drive prices down, and consumers would save less money on gas by purchasing a more fuel-efficient car.

Alternatively, gas prices could rise even higher than the government projections, and consumers could save even more money from mandated fuel efficiency.

The reality is, we don’t know. It is difficult to project gas prices 22 weeks ahead, let alone for the next 22 years, and it’s dangerous to base policy on those predictions.

Trump’s course correction on CAFE is a welcome step. Congress should demonstrate similar courage and recognize that we don’t need to mandate energy use for cars, dishwashers, or even clocks on microwaves, and scrap these standards altogether.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Nicolas Loris

Nicolas Loris

Nicolas Loris, an economist, focuses on energy, environmental and regulatory issues as the Herbert and Joyce Morgan fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Read his research. Twitter: .

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokees exhibited at a car dealership in New Jersey July 24, 2015. (Photo: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters /Newscom)

Bank of America and Comcast Back Group Demanding Jack Phillips Bake Transgender Celebration Cake

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With the ink barely dry on the Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission is continuing its crusade to punish Jack Phillips for running his business in accordance with his faith.

Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court reprimanded the CCRC for the “hostility” towards Jack’s religious liberty and, stung by the defeat, LGBT activists have prepared another assault on the cake baker. Just days after the ruling, the state agency found probable cause with a complaint filed by a transgender attorney against Masterpiece Cakeshop and ordered Jack’s business to undergo compulsory mediation.

The alleged violation? Declining to create a pink cake with blue icing in commemoration of gender transition.

However, Jack and his attorneys at the Alliance Defending Freedom are striking back and have filed a lawsuit against the Governor, Attorney General, and members of the CCRC. According to the lawsuit:

It is now clear that Colorado will not rest until Phillips either closes Masterpiece Cakeshop or agrees to violate his religious beliefs. The state’s continuing efforts to target Phillips do not just violate the Constitution; they cross the line into bad faith. This Court should put a stop to Colorado’s unconstitutional bullying.

Not surprisingly, LGBT activist groups are digging in and joining the assault on religious liberty. What is surprising, is that major corporations are funding these efforts with YOUR dollars.

For example, One Colorado, a member of the left-wing Equality Foundation, is working to push an agenda that threatens 1st Amendment protections for Masterpiece Cakeshop and all business owners like Jack. Our research has found several major corporations are sponsors of One Colorado’s annual fundraising event including Bank of America and Comcast.

You can see all the companies that help fund the anti-religious liberty activists at One Colorado here.

Would you do business with a company that works to undermine your 1st Amendment protections? If Bank of American and Comcast are hostile towards religious liberty, we need to hold them accountable and send our dollars to companies that will not fund these radical groups. At 2ndVote we recommend banking with your local community bank where you know the individuals who run the business and know your dollars will stay close to home.

We encourage you to tell Bank of America and Comcast why you’re taking your business elsewhere. Use the links below to contact leadership directly:

Send Bank of America an Email! Send Comcast an Email!

RELATED ARTICLE: The Transgender Language War / Abigail Shrier – WSJ

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Escape from New York: Big Government Is Chasing Away the Small Businesses It Doesn’t Kill

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Big government is crushing small business owners around the nation, punishing decades of hard work and job creation. Too few people speak up as the burdens of the regulatory and nanny states slam down upon them, but every now and then I hear from someone in trouble.

Most recently, I received a call from New York City businessman Eli Amsel. In 2016, he told a New York State Assembly committee that he was inspired to start his own business thanks to his grandfather—a Holocaust survivor—who impressed upon him the value of freedom and the opportunity to pursue the American dream. “And that’s why I had this inspiration, and I made it work, and I’m here 34 years later, after toiling all these years,” he said. Amsel launched his business in 1982 from the basement of his father’s Brooklyn home.

Since then, Amsel has been selling unbranded plastic and paper bags to a variety of shop owners, and he spent decades building his client base. Certainly not a “get-rich-quick” scheme, it required driving the city from one shop to another, finding the right products, and building relationships with shop owners. As the business grew, Amsel began shipping with UPS, hiring workers, and he bought a warehouse to store his products. He had something he hoped to pass on to his three children and eight grandchildren, but now he’s worried that part of that dream may never materialize.

Despite the growing economy, Amsel says his business is down by 20 percent because New York’s regulatory environment is crushing him. In particular, during the past several years, the regulatory state has delivered a triple whammy: an insanely high minimum wage hike, bag taxes, and now a possible ban on his key product—plastic bags.

Goodbye American dream; hello regulatory nightmare.

In this first of two posts about Amsel, we’ll take a look at one of his biggest challenges: minimum wage laws. Supposedly such laws are implemented to help employees, but they do more to put people out of work or reduce their hours than anything else. These laws kill small businesses that would otherwise provide jobs.

Signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2016, the state began phasing in a minimum wage hike starting in December 2017 that will ultimately increase to $15 per hour over the next year and a half. Businesses with more than 11 employees must comply by December 2018, and businesses with 10 or fewer workers have until December 2019. See the chart below from the New York Department of Labor website for details.

Other states and localities are also imposing such anti-employee, anti-business wage increases, including Seattle, Washington, and the entire state of California. The results are not good.

Minimum wage laws often force employers to make tough decisions to stay afloat, such as cutting the number of employees and/or work hours. A study conducted in the state of Washington showed that minimum wage laws in Seattle actually reduced worker income because employers reduced the number of hours employees could work. Some people dispute the findings of this study with questionable claims of their own, but it’s really only common sense. No one needs a study to understand that when labor costs are artificially increased, businesses have to find ways to offset them, and obviously that does not help workers.

New York’s law created the perverse incentive for small businesses that have just above 10 employees to cut their employee numbers down to 10 immediately to avoid the fee increase for at least one year, after which they may have to cut more or reduce hours.

That’s what Amsel had to do—eliminate four jobs to bring his total employees below 10. So while some of his employees may have gotten a “raise,” four were left without jobs. And he had to drastically cut the hours and eliminate some paid holidays for his remaining employees. And once December 2019 arrives, he may have to consider reducing hours or eliminating more employees.

Amsel is not alone. The minimum wage hike is harming lots of businesses—closing down historic mom-and-pop neighborhood eateries, and forcing other business to flee to other states.

Restaurants are being hit hard in New York as well. As the wage law is phased in, the tip-based approach for wait staff is largely being replaced by a $10-per-hour salary, plus a guaranteed $5-an-hour in tips the employer must pay if tips don’t amount to that much. This will likely change how dining establishments operate. Expect to see more at-table computerized ordering and fewer wait staff. Such automation is fine when restaurants choose to do it, but many restaurants will basically be forced into making such changes because they won’t be able to afford the labor.

It’s no wonder people are leaving New York.

Some local lawmakers have started to catch on. Although Democratic politicians have traditionally supported minimum wage laws, Washington, D.C.’s largely Democratic (eleven Democrats and two left-of-center Independents) city council is trying to repeal a voter initiative increasing the minimum wage to $15 in the nation’s capital. Apparently, they don’t want to see D.C.’s economic health go down the drain.

Amsel tells me that he would like to see Congress and the president take a similar action nationally—essentially repealing such state and local minimum wage laws by passing legislation to preempt them. He’s got a point. If the Democratic D.C. Council is willing to take a stand, why not Congress? You can learn more about his story in this YouTube video and this New York Daily News story.

Reprinted from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

More than half of refugees in U.S. receive food stamps

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Screenshot (620)

Click on the image to read the full report.

That is from a recent Center for Immigration Studies report by Jason Richwine who analyzed the most recent Office of Refugee Resettlement Annual Report to Congress.

More than half of the annual inflow of foreign refugees arriving in the United States are on food stamps, a government report reveals.

Since 2008, as Breitbart News reported, the U.S. has permanently resettled more than 1.7 million foreign nationals and refugees through a variety of humanitarian programs like the Special Immigrant Juveniles and the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act. This is a foreign population larger than Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — a city with more than 1.5 million residents.

An annual report by the Office of Refugee Resettlement was analyzed by the Center for Immigration Studies’ Jason Richwine, in which the analyst revealed that about 56 percent of households headed by foreign refugees who arrived in the U.S. between 2011 and 2015 are using taxpayer-funded food stamps.

Nearly 30 percent of refugees received cash welfare of some sort, while 34 percent of refugees 18-years-old or older said they had no health insurance. Of the refugees who said they did have health insurance, about 50 percent said they were either on Medicaid or Refugee Medical Assistance, both of which are taxpayer-funded.

More here.

Frankly I suspect the numbers are much worse.

The sampling used by the Office of Refugee Resettlement is tiny and dependent on how many of the refugees they can find via phone calls and how many will even participate by answering questions if they are found.

A large number are not even participating in the survey because of language barriers.

We have told you about the Annual Reports for years. Here is just one post in 2013 where we reported that food stamp use was 70% in Obama’s first year in office—2009!

Even in spite of the possible under counting in the welfare use sections, the reports are treasure troves of information for those of you trying to better understand how the refugee program works and what it might be doing to your towns and cities.

One of the things you will see in the reports is information on how many other grants and goodies the contractors receive over and above their per refugee head payment.

The US is no doubt importing poverty, something that the designers of the original Refugee Act of 1980 promised would not happen.

And, if you are saying to yourselves that new immigrants aren’t supposed to be eligible for welfare, remember that prohibition does not apply to refugees!

Below is the table from the 2016 Annual Report:

Screenshot (621)

SNAP is of course food stamps. Note that nearly 20% receive Social Security disability benefits—yikes!

Screenshot (622)

Next after food stamps, taxpayers fund medical care for a very large percentage of refugees.

Just so you know we admitted 69,933 refugees to the US in FY2015 and for the whole accounting period above (FY11 through FY15) the total was 324,508 according to data at Wrapsnet.

Cutting numbers is a good start and we applaud the President, but the whole program must be reformed.

Do it now!

Contact the White House and tell the President what you think! See contact link in right hand sidebar here at RRW.

5 of the Worst Economic Predictions in History

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Uncertainty makes human beings uncomfortable. Not knowing what’s going to happen in the future creates a sense of unrest in many people. That’s why we sometimes draw on predictions made by leading experts in their respective fields to make decisions in our daily lives. Unfortunately, history has shown that experts aren’t often much better than the average person when it comes to forecasting the future. And economists aren’t an exception. Here are five economic predictions that never came true.

Irving Fisher was one of the great economists of the first half of the 20th century. His contributions to economic science are varied: the relationship between inflation and interest rates, the use of price indexes or the restatement of the quantity theory of money are some of them. Yet he is sometimes remembered by an unfortunate statement he made in the days prior to the Crash of 1929. Fisher said that “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau (…) I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher within a few months.” A few days later, the stock market crashed with devastating consequences. After all, even geniuses aren’t exempt from making mistakes.

In 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich published a book where he argued that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the following decades as a result of overpopulation. He went as far as far as to say that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over (…) nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Of course, Ehrlich’s predictions never came true. Since the publication of the book, the death rate has moved from 12.44 permille in 1968 to 7.65 permille in 2016, and undernourishment has declined dramatically even though the population has doubled since 1950. Seldom in history has someone been so wrong about the future of humankind.

Economist Ravi Batra reached the number one on The New York Times Best Seller List in 1987 thanks to his book The Great Depression of 1990. From the title, one can easily infer what was the main thesis of the book, namely: An economic crisis is imminent, and it will be a tough one. Fortunately, his prediction failed to come true. In fact, the 1990s was a period of relative stability and strong economic growth, with the US stock market growing at an 18 percent annualized rate. Not so bad for an economic depression, right?

In September 2007, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan released a memoir called The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. In the book, he claimed that the economy was heading towards two-digit interest rates due to expected inflationary pressures. According to Greenspan, the Fed would be compelled to drastically raise its target interest rate to fulfill the 2 percent inflation mandate. One year later, the Fed Funds rate was at historical lows, reaching the zero-lower bound shortly after.

Financial commentator Peter Schiff became famous in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis for having foreseen the housing crash back in 2006 (even a broken clock is right twice a day). Since then, he has been predicting economic catastrophes every other day, with very limited success. There are many examples of failed predictions from which to draw upon. For instance, in a 2010 video (see below), Schiff foretold that Quantitative Easing (the unconventional monetary policy undertaken by the Fed between 2008 and 2014) would result in hyperinflation and the eventual destruction of the Dollar. Unfortunately for Schiff, the average inflation rate per year since the onset of QE has been 1.68%, slightly below the 2% target of the Fed.

Reprinted from Intellectual Takeout.

COLUMN BY

Luis Pablo de la Horra

Luis Pablo de la Horra

Luis Pablo De La Horra holds a Bachelor’s in English and a Master’s in Finance. He writes for FEE, the Institute of Economic Affairs and Speakfreely.today.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column with images is republished with permission.

Sanctuary Cities Are At War With DOJ — Here Are Their Corporate Enablers

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One of the simmering legal fights over the last 20 months has been the one between sanctuary cities and the Department of Justice. Despite the fact that illegal immigrants commit serious crimes more frequently than do U.S. citizens, cities like Philadelphia continue the dangerous policy of releasing violent illegal immigrants instead of turning them over to federal authorities.

Fox News has the latest on a rapist and others who have been released by Philadelphia:

The Trump administration is taking aim at Philadelphia’s political leaders for a string of crimes committed by immigrants the city released in defiance of Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests.

The Justice Department this week highlighted the case of child rapist Juan Ramon Vasquez, who just pleaded guilty to illegal re-entry.

The illegal immigrant from Honduras previously was in Philadelphia custody on local charges back in 2014. But when those charges were dropped a year later, city officials ignored an ICE detainer. Vasquez was later arrested and convicted for raping a child and unlawful sexual contact with a minor.

Unfortunately, sanctuary cities aren’t acting alone. Their actions are supported by groups such as UnidosUS (formerly La Raza) and the Center for American Progress. And those groups can only support sanctuary cities because of their corporate backers.

This chain of support for lawbreaking must be halted. The Department of Justice continues to make its push on the legal front — it’s up to 2ndVote shoppers to hold corporate enablers accountable.

2ndVote’s research has found dozens of corporations donate to the Center for American Progress, Hispanic Federation, UnidoesUS, League of United Latin American Citizens, National Urban League, and the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. All of these groups back sanctuary cities and illegal immigration. Below are several corporations which donate to two or more of these organizations:

Bank of America
HBO (Time Warner)
Jiffy Lube (Shell)
McDonald’s
Universal Pictures (Comcast)
Marriott International

We urge you to let these companies know that they must stop letting criminals off the hook. Let them know that they should put victims above criminals, not the other way around — or they’ll lose your business.

Help us continue providing resources like this and educating conservative shoppers by becoming a 2ndVote Member today!

RELATED ARTICLE: Another blast at Stephen Miller: shameless refugee pushers cry foul because Miller works the system

The Good Intentions Fallacy Is Driving Support for Democratic Socialism

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“Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.” – Milton Friedman

hile Venezuela continues to collapse into a living hell for all but Nicolás Maduro and ruling elites, support in America for democratic socialism continues to rise.

Photo: New York Times.

Graphic reports such as the recent New York Times photo essay about starvation in Venezuela abound:

Kenyerber Aquino Merchán was 17 months old when he starved to death.

His father left before dawn to bring him home from the hospital morgue. He carried Kenyerber’s skeletal frame into the kitchen and handed it to a mortuary worker who makes house calls for Venezuelan families with no money for funerals.

Kenyerber’s spine and rib cage protruded as the embalming chemicals were injected… relatives cut out a pair of cardboard wings from one of the empty white ration boxes that families increasingly depend on amid the food shortages and soaring food prices throttling the nation. They gently placed the tiny wings on top of Kenyerber’s coffin to help his soul reach heaven—a tradition when a baby dies in Venezuela…

[H]is father, Carlos Aquino, a 37-year-old construction worker, began to weep uncontrollably. “How can this be?” he cried, hugging the coffin and speaking softly, as if to comfort his son in death. “Your papá will never see you again.”

If you are inclined to believe this is an isolated incident, reporters Meridith Kohut and Isayen Herrera disabuse you of your ignorance: “Hunger has stalked Venezuela for years. Now, it is killing the nation’s children at an alarming rate, doctors in the country’s public hospitals say.”

With reports like these, one wonders how support for socialism in America can be growing?

If some Americans are economically illiterate and ahistorical that would explain their support. If they have mistakenly identified Scandinavian countries as socialist, that would also offer an explanation.

Perhaps people are seeking more meaning in their lives and being part of a mass movement fills a void.

Some students have admitted to me they value being able to exercise power over others. Perhaps they see socialism as a means to acquire power?

These may be some of the explanations for increasing support for democratic socialism; and yet, there is another factor at work. Americans are increasingly allowing their thinking to be influenced by logical fallacies.

Charlie Munger is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the legendary conglomerate he controls with Warren Buffett. In a speech at Harvard University about human misjudgment, Munger tells of a surgeon who removed “bushel baskets full of normal gallbladders” and continued maiming patients for five years past the point he should have been removed.

Munger was curious. Was the doctor motivated by greed? Munger was surprised to learn that the maiming doctor “loved” his patients and was motivated by good intentions. Munger sought insight from a doctor who had been involved in the surgeon’s removal:

I said, “Tell me, did he think, here’s a way for me to exercise my talents,” this guy was very skilled technically, “And make a high living by doing a few maimings and murders every year, along with some frauds?” And he said, “Hell no, Charlie. He thought that the gallbladder was the source of all medical evil, and if you really love your patients, you couldn’t get that organ out rapidly enough.”

For the surgeon’s patients, his good intentions were of little comfort.

When doctors of the ailing George Washington bled him, they were motivated by good intentions; and their unscientific medical practice arguably hastened Washington’s death.

Politicians who trust their seat-of-the-pants good intentions inevitably become authoritarians. They are relying on the limits of their error-prone minds and not on proven principles that promote human flourishing.

Those who rely on their good intentions to guide their actions are arrogant rather than humble. They have little respect or understanding for, as Hayek put it in his essay “Individualism: True or False,” the “spontaneous collaboration of free men [that] often creates things which are greater than their individual minds can ever fully comprehend.”

When Hugo Chavez, the father of Venezuela’s nightmare, passed in 2013, President Carter praised Chavez’s bold leadership saying, “We came to know a man who expressed a vision to bring profound changes to his country to benefit especially those people who had felt neglected and marginalized.”

Carter never doubted Chavez’s good intentions. Indeed, Carter offered those intentions as exculpatory evidence excusing Chavez’s brutality:

Although we have not agreed with all of the methods followed by his government, we have never doubted Hugo Chavez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.

Professor Owen Williamson of the University of Texas at El Paso might say President Carter had fallen victim to the logical fallacy, The Argument from Motives: “Falsely justifying or excusing evil or vicious actions because of the perpetrator’s apparent purity of motives or lack of malice.”

In his book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman argued that there were two threats to freedom, external and internal. In 1962, Friedman pointed to the Soviet Union as an external threat. Seeing an internal danger, Friedman argued, is more difficult because it is “far more subtle”:

It is the internal threat coming from men of good intentions and good will who wish to reform us. Impatient with the slowness of persuasion and example to achieve the great social changes they envision, they are anxious to use the power of the state to achieve their ends and confident of their own ability to do so. Yet if they gained the power, they would fail to achieve their immediate aims and, in addition, would produce a collective state from which they would recoil in horror and of which they would be among the first victims.

That “concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it” has become among Friedman’s most famous ideas. His warning is ignored today by those believing the “good intentions” of politicians, such as Bernie Sanders or congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, will render their destructive policies harmless.

Friedman challenged his readers to consider, “Which if any of the great ‘reforms’ of past decades has achieved its objectives? Have the good intentions of the proponents of these reforms been realized?”

Related to the Good Intentions Fallacy is the Positive Thinking Fallacy. As Professor Williamson puts it, positive thinking is “an immensely popular but deluded modern fallacy of logos, that because we are ‘thinking positively’ that in itself somehow biases external, objective reality in our favor even before we lift a finger to act.”

Let us grant “good intentions” to today’s cadres of democratic socialists. Let us assume they are “thinking positively.” No matter. No good intentions or positive thoughts will overcome how reality works. The destructive outcomes of socialism will follow as history repeats itself.

COLUMN BY

Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein

RELATED ARTICLE: UCLA makes students pay classmates to promote ‘social justice’

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. To receive Barry’s essays subscribe at Mindset Shifts.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column with images is republished with permission.

Welfare Spending Did Not Decrease Poverty, Capitalism Did

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Last September, I shared some very encouraging data showing how extreme poverty dramatically has declined in the developing world.

And I noted that this progress happened during a time when the “Washington Consensus” was resulting in “neoliberal” policies (meaning “classical liberal“) in those nations (confirmed by data from Economic Freedom of the World).

In other words, pro-market policies were the recipe for poverty reduction, not foreign aid or big government.

Sadly, the Washington Consensus has been supplanted. Bureaucracies such as the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are now pushing a statist agenda based on the bizarre theory that higher taxes and more spending somehow produce prosperity.

To add insult to injury, some people now want to rewrite history and argue that free markets don’t deserve credit for the poverty reduction that already has occurred.

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, writing for Our World in Data, wants readers to conclude that redistribution programs deserve credit.

…the share of people living in extreme poverty around the world has fallen continuously over the last two centuries. …many often say that globalization in the form of “free-market capitalism” is the main force to be thanked for such remarkable historical achievement. …this focus on “free-market capitalism” alone is misguided. …Governments around the world have dramatically increased their potential to collect revenues in order to redistribute resources through social transfers… The reach of governments has grown substantially over the last century: the share of total output that governments control is much larger today than a century ago.

And for evidence, Mr. Ortiz-Ospina included this chart.

I shared a version of this data back in June, asserting that the explosion of social welfare spending made this “the western world’s most depressing chart.”

So does Ortiz-Ospina have a compelling argument? Does poverty go down as welfare spending goes up?

Nope. Johan Norberg points out that there is a gaping flaw in this argument. An enormous, gigantic hole.

Wow. This isn’t just a flaw. It’s malpractice. It’s absurd to argue that welfare spending in developed nations somehow led to poverty reduction in developing countries.

I hope Mr. Ortiz-Ospina is just an inexperienced intern because if he really understands the data, one might be forced to conclude that he’s dishonest.

But let’s set that issue aside. Johan closes his video by explaining that poverty in rich nations declined before modern welfare states. I want to expand on that point.

Johan cited Martin Ravallion, so I tracked down his work. And here’s the chart he put together, which I’ve modified to show (outlined in red) that extreme poverty basically disappeared between 1820 and 1930.

And guess what?

That was the period when there was no welfare state. Not only is that apparent from Our World in Data, it’s also what we see in Vito Tanzi’s numbers.

Here’s Tanzi’s table, which I first shared five years ago. And I’ve circled in red the 1880-1930 data to underscore that there was virtually no redistribution during the years poverty was declining.

The bottom line is that poverty in the western world fell during the period of small government. Yet some people want to put the cart before the horse. They’re making the absurd argument that post-1950s welfare spending somehow reduced poverty before the 1930s.

That’s as absurd as Paul Krugman blaming a 2008 recession in Estonia on spending cuts that took place in 2009.

P.S. For those who want U.S.-specific data, it’s worth noting that dramatic reductions in American poverty all occurred before Washington launched the so-called “War on Poverty.”

Reprinted from International Liberty.

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell is a Washington-based economist who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.

Trump Further Chips Away at Obamacare by Expanding Short-Term Health Plans

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The Trump administration moved Wednesday to expand health insurance options and affordability for Americans, with a new rule allowing cheaper new and renewable health insurance plans that consumers can use for up to a year.

The Department of Health and Human Services, Labor Department, and Treasury Department released the final rule that allows consumers to buy “short-term, limited duration” health insurance plans that are not subject to the Obamacare requirements. Consumers can have the plans for up to a year, instead of three months under the new rule.

The average monthly premium for an individual with a short-term plan in the fourth quarter of 2016 was $124, compared to $393 for an unsubsidized plan in the Obamacare exchange, according to HHS.

“They can be as much as 50-80 percent lower cost than the Affordable Care Act exchange plans,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar told reporters Wednesday. “We believe this could provide relief for well over 1 million people.”

The new rule is largely a return to the existing rule before 2017, when Americans could keep the plans for almost a year, which changes as President Barack Obama was heading for the exit. To encourage more people to join the exchanges, Obama reduced short-term limited duration coverage to less than three months in an executive action just three weeks before leaving office.

The plans again cover an initial period of one year, as before Obama’s action. The difference is that the plans come with a renewable maximum period of no longer than three years.

Azar said he would like to see Congress repeal and replace Obamacare, but until then, he is going to work to expand more private choices for consumers. He said this would not undermine the Obamacare exchanges, where 87 percent of consumers are subsidized. But this does offer a choice for those who don’t qualify for subsidies, he said.

“If someone decides, ‘I’m paying too much for insurance I don’t value that gives me an inadequate benefit and I find what you allow to be offered here in the short-term, limited duration plans to be something that is more financially attractive and more attractive as a health benefit for me in terms of coverage,’ that type of voting with their feet, I would find quite meaningful,” Azar told The Daily Signal during the press conference Wednesday.

Azar also noted during the press conference the new rule requires more consumer notification of what the cheaper, short-term plans won’t cover.

“These may be a good choice for individuals, but they also may not be the right choice for everybody,” Azar said. “One of the things we are doing is requiring consumer protection notice on the plans. In fact, it’s a more robust notice than President Obama’s administration had on these very same plans to ensure the patient, the consumer, knows going in what they are getting and what they’re not getting through the plan.”

Beyond that, the plans will remain under state regulation, which can decide benefit or rate structure.

The low-cost, sometimes low-coverage, plans could be good for people transitioning from one job to another, students who anticipate a job but aren’t yet employed, independent contractors, and part-time workers, Azar said.

The administration has taken a strong step, but Congress should also act, said Marie Fishpaw, director of domestic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation.

“The Trump administration is right to provide more options to Americans who have suffered under Obamacare and, in many cases, been priced out of health coverage,” Fishpaw said in a statement. “States should have more authority to regulate short-term, limited duration health plans. Unwinding Obamacare’s damaging regulations is just the first step.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in October directing executive branch agencies to look for ways to increase choice and competition in the health care market.

A release of three recent reports by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges is only stable for subsidized consumers, but has declined by 20 percent for nonsubsidized consumers. Meanwhile, premiums increased by 21 percent.

“We continue to see a crisis of affordability in the individual insurance market, especially for those who don’t qualify for large subsidies,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a written statement. “This final rule opens the door to new, more affordable coverage options for millions of middle-class Americans who have been priced out of ACA plans.”

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Portrait of Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of HHS Secretary Alex Azar. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/Newscom)