Tag Archive for: ownership

You Will Own Nothing and Have Joy!

“A republic, if you can keep it.” — Benjamin Franklin’s response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”


The World Economic Forum (WEF) predicted that, by 2030, individuals would own nothing and be happy and joyful.

Here are 8 predictions made by the WEF:

Does this sound familiar? It should because it mirrors the Kamala’s platform for 2024.

Comparing the WEF’s 8 Predictions for the World in 2030 and Kamala’s 2024 Platform

WEF: You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.

WATCH: Kamala Harris wants YOU to Own Nothing and Be Happy

WATCH: Tim Walz makes the case to elect Trump because, “we can’t afford 4 more years of this!”

WEF: Whatever you want you’ll rent. And it will be delivered by drone.

Remarks by Vice President Harris at a Campaign Event in Raleigh, NC — Homeownership and what that means — it’s a symbol of the pride that comes with hard work.  It’s financial security.  It represents what you will be able to do for your children.  And sadly, right now, it is out of reach for far too many American families.  There’s a serious housing shortage in many places.  It’s too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up.

WEF: The U.S. won’t be the world’s leading superpower. A handful of countries will dominate.

WATCH: ‘Superpower’ USA Struggling To Keep Election Safe? After Trump Claims Iran Hack Attack, Kamala Says…

WEF: You won’t die waiting for an organ donor. We won’t transplant organs we’ll print new ones instead.

The National Library of Medicine published on May 19, 2022 3D Bioprinting of Human Hollow Organs stating, “3D bioprinting is a rapidly evolving technique that has been found to have extensive applications in disease research, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. 3D bioprinting might be a solution to global organ shortages and the growing aversion to testing cell patterning for novel tissue fabrication and building superior disease models. It has the unrivaled capability of layer-by-layer deposition using different types of biomaterials, stem cells, and biomolecules with a perfectly regulated spatial distribution. The tissue regeneration of hollow organs has always been a challenge for medical science because of the complexities of their cell structures. In this mini review, we will address the status of the science behind tissue engineering and 3D bioprinting of epithelialized tubular hollow organs. This review will also cover the current challenges and prospects, as well as the application of these complicated 3D-printed organs.”

WEF: You’ll eat much less meat. An occasional treat, not a staple for the good of the environment and our health. A billion people will be displaced by climate change. We’ll have to do a better job of welcoming and integrating refugees.

WATCH:

Kamala Harris Caught Chanting ‘Down With Deportation’ In Unearthed Video

Invasion of the U.S.A. by Criminal Illegal Aliens

Border Czar Kamala Harris has lost over 325,000 migrant children to human traffickers

WEF: Polluters will have to pay to emit carbon dioxide. There will be a global price on carbon. This will help make fossil fuels history.

In a September 10, 2024 The Washington Post published a column titled Kamala Harris’s climate policies, explained by , and  who wrote:

As vice president, Kamala Harris helped pass the largest government investment into climate and clean energy initiatives, and grants to states to help recover from extreme weather events.

Causes of climate change

Q: Do you believe that climate change is largely driven by human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels? If not, is there a different cause you would cite?

A: Harris calls climate change an existential threat and says the United States needs to act urgently to address it. As a presidential candidate in 2019, she released a $10 trillion climate plan that calls for investing in renewable energy, holding polluters accountable, helping communities affected by climate change and protecting natural resources. As California attorney general, she prosecuted oil companies for environmental violations. As vice president, she was the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided about $370 billion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below their 2005 levels by the end of this decade.

Climate change and extreme weather

Q: Do you believe climate change is making disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires and heat waves more intense?

A: Harris has said the United States must take action to fight climate change in the face of increasing drought, floods, hurricanes, wildfires and sea level rise. As vice president, Harris announced more than $1 billion in grants in 2022 for states to address flooding and extreme heat exacerbated by climate change. “The frequency has accelerated in a relatively short period of time,” she said. “The science is clear. Extreme weather will only get worse, and the climate crisis will only accelerate.’’

How to address climate change

Q: Should climate change be addressed through government action or market forces?

A: The Biden-Harris administration’s signature Inflation Reduction Act represents the largest infusion of government cash into climate and clean-energy initiatives. Harris and Biden sought to put the U.S. on a path to cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. Under Harris’s climate plan as a 2019 presidential candidate, she advocated for a blend of government action and market forces to combat global warming. “A climate pollution fee can play an important role as one of several interrelated policies to reduce emissions and hold polluters accountable…” she said. “However, history shows us that reliance on market mechanisms alone can often leave communities behind.”

Clean energy tax credits

Q: Do you support clean-energy tax credits such as those for electric vehicles?

A: In 2022, Harris cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides hundreds of billions of dollars in government subsidies for electric cars and other clean-energy technology, including tax credits for clean-energy and energy-efficiency home projects. She has been a proponent of electric vehicles and as a senator supported a national zero-emissions vehicle standard. In May, she visited Detroit to announce federal grants for smaller companies making electric-vehicle parts.

WATCH: Climate Czar John Kerry: ‘The First Amendment Stands as a Major Roadblock for Us Right Now’

WEF: You could be preparing to go to Mars. Scientists will have worked out how to keep you healthy in space. The start of the journey to find alien life?

NSA.gov states, “Mars remains our horizon goal for human exploration because it is one of the only other places we know where life may have existed in the solar system. What we learn about the Red Planet will tell us more about our Earth’s past and future, and may help answer whether life exists beyond our home planet. Like the Moon, Mars is a rich destination for scientific discovery and a driver of technologies that will enable humans to travel and explore far from Earth.”

WATCH: 6 NASA Technologies to Get Humans to Mars

WEF: Western values will have been tested to the breaking point. Checks and balances that underpin our democracies must not be forgotten.

WATCH: Kamala Harris speaks with Oprah Winfrey about our power in a democracy | Harris-Walz 2024

On September 24, 2024 The Hill published an article titled Harris’s agenda mirrors the Democratic Socialists of America by public policy and political analyst Merrill Matthews who wrote,

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, is a communist and Marxist and refers to her as “Comrade Kamala.” While it’s doubtful that Trump’s name calling helps him win over voters, if he has to call her something, he should have tagged her as a socialist. That’s because Harris’s major policy proposals are almost identical to those promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

The DSA lists 10 policy positions under the heading “Our Platform.”

First up is “Deepening and Strengthening Democracy.” Of course, President Biden, Harris and nearly all Democrats repeatedly claim “democracy is under attack” and that Trump is a “threat to democracy.”

The DSA says it wants to “end minority rule” by getting rid of the Senate and the Electoral College. Harris would likely settle for ending the Senate’s filibuster so bills and all presidential appointments could be decided by a majority vote.

In addition, the socialists want to add seats to the U.S. Supreme Court (court packing) and impose term limits on the justices. Harris and most Democrats are pushing both SCOTUS reforms.

The DSA’s second item is “Abolition of the Carceral State” (“carceral” refers to prison and jail time). The DSA wants to “defund the police” — where have you heard that before? — and “free all incarcerated people.” Harris supported the “defund” movement and eliminating bail for some crimes until those positions became political liabilities. Now she tries to hide her soft-on-crime policies by stressing her background as a prosecutor.

Under “Abolish White Supremacy,” the DSA wants the government to pay reparations to Black people, “extend and expand sanctuary protections across the U.S.” and “end environmental racism.” Harris is on board with all of those, or at least she used to be.

There is a long DSA list of demands under “A Powerful Labor Movement,” including a right to unionize and an end to “right to work laws.” Isn’t the Biden-Harris administration supposed to be the most pro-union in history?

One of the DSA’s biggies is “Economic Justice,” where we find a whole host of demands, including free public college, canceling all student loan debt and medical debt and massive new regulations. Harris’s “opportunity economy” includes all three.

Of course, you had to assume “Gender and Sexuality Justice” would be on the DSA’s list, which includes “reproductive justice for all” (i.e., abortion) and a “guarantee of queer-friendly and gender-affirming healthcare.” Harris embraces both.

Next is the “Green New Deal,” which isn’t green or new. The GND has always been a social justice program masquerading as environmental policy. Harris was one of the original GND co-sponsors.

Under the topic of “Health Justice” the DSA supports Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) Medicare for All bill — which is a government-run health care system and has no resemblance to Medicare. Harris was a co-sponsor until she decided it would be a political liability.

The ninth DSA item is “Housing for All.” Wait, has Harris been talking about expanding government-built housing and providing a $25,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers? Yes, come to think of it, she has.

The DSA’s last heading proposes “International Solidarity” and “Anti-imperialism.” It’s not clear what Harris’s foreign policy is, but it likely reflects Biden’s appeasement policy with respect to China and Iran.

To be sure, the DSA’s agenda goes into much more depth on each major point than Harris does. But then who doesn’t go into more depth that Kamala Harris? So, while it’s possible that Harris would disagree with some DSA sub-points, it’s undeniable that she agrees, or has agreed, with the socialists on their major themes.

Harris has tried to separate herself from some of her past publicly stated positions — thus hoping to be “unburdened by what has been.” But she hasn’t made a meaningful shift on any issue. She made that clear in her softball interview with CNN’s Dana Bash when she asserted her “values haven’t changed.” That was a wink to anyone who was concerned Harris might have moved toward the center.

Her values — and those of today’s Democratic Party — are essentially identical to those of the Democratic Socialists of America. The only major difference is DSA members aren’t trying to hide their socialist beliefs; Harris is.

The Bottom Line

Mary Rooke in a Daily Caller column titled Walz Solidifies Harris Policy Position That Would Transform Country As We Know It wrote, “The issue is that Democrats like Walz and Vice President Kamala Harris use the expression “fire in a crowded theater” to excuse the suppression of a wide variety of speech protected under the First Amendment. Anything Democrats consider ‘hate speech,’ ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ is grounds for censorship in their view.”

The destruction of the First Amendment will fundamentally transform America into a Marxist dictatorship.

The Harris platform mirrors that of the World Economic Forum.

That is the reality of what is as stake on November 5th, 2024.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness under our Constutional Republic or Democrat Socialismo under Harris/Walz.

©202. Dr. Richard M. Swier, LTC U.S. Army (Ret.) All rights reserved.

“We All Declare for Liberty, But We Do Not All Mean the Same Thing” by Eugene Volokh

A comment on my freedom and hypocrisy post reminded me of one of my favorite quotes, from Abraham Lincoln, in his Address at a Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, Apr. 18, 1864:

The world has never had a good definition of liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in need of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.

With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name — liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names — liberty and tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed by others as the destruction of all liberty.

I’ve long found this to be a thought-provoking piece, and a useful reminder that “liberty” in the abstract is not self-defining. Most rhetoric that simply refers to “liberty” — whether in the context of slavery, where Lincoln said this, or abortion rights, or national sovereignty, and so on — rests on the assertion about the proper definition of people’s or institutions’ rights; and it’s that definition that should often be at the heart of the debate.

Of course, this analysis doesn’t itself tell us what the proper result is in any debate (such as the debate about abortion). But it should remind us that many questions can’t be resolved by just talking about “liberty” in the abstract, or “not imposing one’s beliefs on others” in the abstract.

If liberty means freedom to do things that don’t violate the rights of others, the important questions are (1) what constitutes those “rights,” (2) what counts as violation, and (3) in some contexts (e.g., abortion, animal rights, slavery), who counts as “others.”

This post first appeared at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Eugene VolokhEugene Volokh

Eugene Volokh teaches free speech law, religious freedom law, church-state relations law, a First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic, and tort law, at UCLA School of Law, where he has also often taught copyright law, criminal law, and a seminar on firearms regulation policy.

Who Do Economic Profits Belong To? by Sandy Ikeda

Do we deserve to keep the profits that result from our actions?

Most libertarians would maintain that any economic profit — the residual of revenue over cost — that you earn from voluntary exchange is indeed moral and rightly belongs to you. The puzzling thing is that standard microeconomic theory, which libertarians as well-known as Milton Friedman have used to defend their free-market beliefs, is completely irrelevant in justifying that belief.

I attended a talk recently given by Professor Israel Kirzner in which he addressed the question of whether economics can tell us who does and doesn’t deserve profit. I won’t summarize the entire lecture here, which I expect Professor Kirzner intends to publish, but I will touch on an important and often-neglected point he made.

Specifically, it’s that because microeconomic theory is utterly useless in morally justifying economic profit, we need to look beyond one of the most cherished slogans of economics: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, or TANSTAAFL for short. Indeed, in order even to begin seeing economic profit as moral, you have to set TANSTAAFL aside. (I wrote on a related theme in “But There ARE Free Lunches!” in May 2011.) Now, how does that relate to the question of who, if anyone, deserves economic profit?

The Value of the Marginal Product

Let’s say you want to sell a new kind of musical instrument. You buy or hire every single ingredient you need to produce it: the various kinds of skilled labor and equipment, the working space, management and financial knowhow, and whatever computing and power needs you require. You also contribute to production as the owner of the firm, and your contribution includes the risk you take to start the business as well as your industriousness, tenacity, and courage.

You then pay each and every one of these factor owners, including yourself, its “marginal value product,” which is the revenue the business earns from selling what each input produces. You pay wages or rents to everyone and a return to yourself to compensate for the resources you bring. Economists since John Bates Clark have used the marginal value product and continue to do so to explain how income from production is distributed. But there’s a problem.

Suppose, after paying all the input owners including yourself, there’s still something left over. That something, the residual of all actual revenue over all actual costs, is economic profit.

Again, you’ve paid every factor owner all of what each has contributed to the value of the musical instruments produced. That means that the value of the marginal product, the central concept in the modern microeconomic theory of income distribution, cannot explain who deserves to keep the economic profit because it cannot explain profit.

It’s important to keep in mind that economic profit is not “earned” in the same sense that wages and rents are earned. It is what’s left over after all other earned income has been paid out according to the value of its marginal product.

To whom then does economic profit properly belong?

The Concept of Entrepreneurship Offers a Clue

For Kirzner and other economists working in the tradition of Austrian economics, the key to answering that question, though not the complete answer, begins with the concept of discovery.

There is knowledge that we don’t possess because we choose not to know it. If someone asked me for the phone number of a person whose name is drawn randomly out of the New York City telephone directory, the chances are very good that I won’t know it. Although I’m aware of the existence of the directory, I haven’t memorized it, simply because I haven’t deemed it worthwhile. I’ve chosen not to know.

But if I didn’t even know of the existence of such a directory and I needed to call a particular person, my learning about the directory would come as a revelation. Moreover, I would have found out that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know — what Professor Kirzner calls “sheer ignorance.” He then defines entrepreneurship as that aspect of human action that discovers, and thereby removes, sheer ignorance.

What does the discovery of sheer ignorance result in? Economic profit!

Why marshal all the resources to produce a new musical instrument? Because you believe you see what no one else sees. You believe that it offers a better investment for you than what you’re doing now. Why do you think that? Because you’ve realized — made the discovery — that after compensating all the factors of production with the value of their marginal product, there will still be a pure residual left over that you couldn’t have gotten doing anything else. If you’re right, you get that residual, the economic profit; if you’re wrong, you suffer the economic loss.

This means, of course, that TAANSTAFL is wrong. Opportunities to make economic profit do exist. There are free lunches. In fact, in a world of sheer ignorance, such as ours, free lunches are everywhere.

Toward an Answer

I haven’t mentioned how Professor Kirzner addresses the issue of whether economic profit is moral or deserved. To get a good sense of what he says in the remainder of that lecture, have a look at his 1989 book, Discovery, Capitalism, and Distributive Justice.

(Also, see this book review by FEE writer Charles W. Baird.)

A good economist needs to have a firm grasp on standard microeconomic theory: supply-and-demand analysis and all that. At the same time, it’s important for her to appreciate its limits, which are severe indeed on the question of the morality, or even the origin, of economic profit.

Sandy Ikeda
Sandy Ikeda

Sandy Ikeda is a professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.