Entrepreneurship Ascendant: Americans Are Starting More Businesses Than Ever Before.
There are entrepreneurs everywhere who are setting to work to solve the most pressing problems of our present and our future. The businesses those innovators introduce to the world will be all the more significant for the hurdles they surpassed.
The Gulf Between The Rulers And We Who Are Ruled Is Now Unbridgeable.
Democracy will be pushed to the margins in even traditionally democratic countries by the forces of surveillance capitalism, coupled with increasing citizen feelings of powerlessness against these forces, along with manipulation of information and elections.
Change In Washington DC? Hardly. Both Parties Are The Parties Of Big Government.
For evidence, consider President George W. Bush's presidency, when, for a time, Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. During that time, we saw the creation of a new department (Homeland Security) and of a new entitlement (Medicare Part D), and spending exploded. Data confirm that unified government does not keep government restrained, even if the controlling party is supposedly the enemy of big government.
Voting Is No Longer Viable. Focus On What You Can Control In Your Life, Which Is Primarily Yourself.
The key to the cultivation of alternative poles of social power begins with order, specifically the ordering of one’s own life. This is not an idea original to me. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has recently popularized this idea in a secular manner with his refrain of “clean your room.”
Economics For Individuals:Does Twitter Have "Unimaginable Power"? Of Course Not. Only Its Users Do.
So while the suspension of Trump’s Twitter account, Facebook’s ejection of the 45th president, and Amazon’s role in the disappearance of Parler may have conservatives marveling at the power of tech firms bent on insulting them, rest assured that all three of the aforementioned moves demonstrate how unnerved Twitter, Facebook and Amazon must be.
“The Market” Can Deliver Pho and Spring Rolls. It Can Deliver Vaccines.
Markets coordinate the division of labor and the division of knowledge. We cooperate to mutual advantage and deploy for our purposes expertise and skills we don’t have for purposes other people may not understand. Exchange collapses the incomprehensibly complex into simple bids and offers whereby people decide whether or not they want and are willing to pay for what is on offer at the requested price.
Science Recognizes Self-Organization As The Best Strategy To Deal With Complexity. Top-Down Government Is The Worst Strategy.
Top-down political beliefs and the governments they directed were created long before we had any knowledge and understanding of how these natural systems work. But now we do know of these fact- and reality-based processes. Our political beliefs and governmental organizations should adjust to these recently discovered facts immediately.
Centralized Government Controls Imperil The Communities In Which Our Lives Have Meaning.
Freedoms which, until a few months ago, we had taken for granted, have been taken away. We now have to make do with enforced social distancing, stay-at-home orders, and warnings of Armageddon to come if we do not comply. As a consequence of such harsh restrictions, we have been robbed, ultimately, of the freedom to be ourselves.
Why The New Deal Is The Most Undeservedly Deified Chapter In U.S. History.
Painful though they are, recessions are a necessary cleansing, much like a hangover after tying one on the night before. An economy gets purged of its excess and bad practices, and resources are consequently redeployed to more valuable endeavors. When left alone, an economy is much more likely to snap back strongly, quickly.
Jeff Bezos Makes Us 49 Times Richer Than We Make Him.
The new economy's industries are marked by easy entrance and exit: bright ideas were readily funded, but imitators are just as quick to follow. Additionally, information is expensive to produce but inexpensive to reproduce, a factor that will erode the value of intellectual property rights and reduce the durability of Schumpeterian profits in that sector.
Markets Work. Government Doesn't.
California’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Mark Ghaly, let the mask (pun intended) slip on December 9 when he admitted that the newly imposed ban on outdoor dining was “not a comment on the relative safety of outdoor dining”, but rather had to do “with the goal of keeping people at home.”
Get Ready For The Californication Of America.
Californians are witnessing the fruits of the Democrats’ relentless determination to control government. After having successfully shoved Republicans off to the fringes, the state has imposed a seemingly endless series of tax hikes, intrusive environmental regulations, and costly mandates on businesses.
Your Attitude And My Attitude Are The Sources Of Economic Growth And National Prosperity.
With time, the modernist emphasis on increasing knowledge—and the presumption that there is always more knowledge to come—triumphed over traditional emphases on capital, scale, commerce, and trade. But where did that knowledge come from? Whose “ingenuity” was it?
Unions Fight For Teachers At The Expense Of Our Children.
Thomas Sowell points out that while only 10 percent of the traditional public schools he studied had a majority of students passing at the “proficient” level on the mathematics exam, 68 percent of charter schools achieved that level. When it comes to the English test, the numbers are 14 percent and 65 percent respectively.
Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are: Entrepreneurs Must Use The Institutions of Entrepreneurship To Thrive In the Technological Epoch
Within the institutions of entrepreneurship, one should be able to drop down their bucket where they are. Institutions of entrepreneurship should make room for new entrepreneurial participants via technological devices, i.e., smartphones, tablets, laptops. Higher levels of entrepreneurship are not the cause but the effect of technological advancements.
Only Capitalism qua Capitalism Saves the Planet From the Slavery's Equality
by Mark Shupe
The unknown ideal, the ultimate solution to social domination, and its horrid extreme - slavery, is the self-evident morality of capitalism. It is the socioeconomic system that bans force from all voluntary, human interaction. Free markets are rooted in rational self-interest, its foundation is the morally derived principle of rights, and their axiomatic truth is in the primacy of existence.
It's Time to Stop Believing These Political Myths We Are Fed.
Perhaps the biggest myth to die this year was that Americans’ constitutional rights are safeguarded by the Bill of Rights. After the Covid-19 pandemic began, governors in state after state effectively placed scores of millions of citizens under house arrest – dictates that former Attorney General Bill Barr aptly compared to “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since the end of slavery.
These 5 Principles Signal Guaranteed Government Failure.
As with every other government regulation, a one-size-fits-all policy is crude and unjust and usually causes more harm than good. Hayekian “local knowledge” is needed in order to address this issue and this is something government is most unlikely to be able to provide.
Some Of The Things We Said And Wrote In 2020.
For your browsing over the end of 2020 / start of 2021 holiday,…
Government Should Not Regulate Business. Businesses Should Regulate Themselves And Their Customers.
It is never the business of government to regulate business. But it is perfectly acceptable for businesses to regulate the attire and conduct of employees and patrons. Consumers decide if they will go along with them or shop somewhere else. In a free society, the government wouldn’t be involved in any way.
Barstool Sports Is Helping Struggling Small Businesses Far More Effectively Than The Government.
Last week, Portnoy launched a fund to bail out small businesses and alerted his 1.8 million Twitter followers to the cause. It seems he is spending this money out of his own pockets, a heroic and commendable endeavor, and challenging others to join him in the cause. They say when a strong man takes a stand the spines of others are stiffened, and that certainly seems to be the case here.
Corporate Socialism: Intertwined Economic And Cultural Control By Government And Corporations.
Politics and economics become directly interfused. The state does not recognize the limits contemplated for it in capitalism, or in the Constitution for that matter. The economic arena is now also the arena of the state. Consequently, there is no sharp separation between political officials and so-called captains of industry. The captain of industry is, by virtue of his function, at the same time, a state official.
The Law of Causality Solves America's Obsession With Inequality
by Mark Shupe
Reason itself is under attack in 2020 American culture. The popular bromide of these nihilists, the ones who reject moral truth, is "there are no absolutes." The phrase itself is an absolute. As a self-evident contradiction whose purpose is to force artificial equality, let the consequences be damned.
Once The Government Gets Involved In Any Market, Rampant Price Inflation Follows.
One trait all bubbles share is an obscured understanding about the value of a commodity relative to its actual worth. In this instance, it’s why you see people paying $100,000 for a degree in graphic design that might pay them $40,000.
Entrepreneurs Always Challenge The Status Quo - In Business, Politics, Regulation and Institutions.
This mindset and the BAI process - Belief, Alignment, Implementation - can be applied not only in business but in any context or setting where there is dissatisfaction with the status quo on which an entrepreneur can build a belief and a customer can express a preference. As a result, we can imagine a wide range of fields in which the entrepreneurial mindset can be applied to society’s benefit.
Pubic Schools Are Giving Up Their Monopoly Control Over The Minds Of Our Children.
Homeschooling, in particular, is booming. An estimated 3.3 percent of children were homeschooled in 2016, up from 1.7 percent in 1999, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That share roughly tripled this year to nine percent, in an Education Week survey. Gallup agrees, finding that 10 percent of children are now being homeschooled.
Why The People Despise Our Political Institutions: Exhibit 1, The Covid-19 Relief Bill.
Logrolling is essentially the trading of favors among legislators for mutual benefit. Bills often get passed by winning the support of lawmakers by including provisions that benefit their special interests, but which may not align with any public good. As a result, successful legislation tends to be chock full of special-interest spending.
Economics For Individuals:There Are No "Winner Takes All" Markets. Consumers Always Win, And There Are Billions Of Us.
Competition and emulation of superior performance in the eyes of consumers make all of us able to achieve certain tasks better over time. Such increased capabilities mean more can be produced, and that increased production, in a world of scarcity, benefits the rest of us in society. That makes it a positive-sum game, not a zero-sum game.
Was the American Revolution A Culture War?
When it comes to culture, there is little room for compromise. It is increasingly apparent that the only peaceful solution lies in some form of radical decentralization, amounting to either secession or self-rule at the local level with only foreign policy as "national" policy.
The Integration of America's Revolutionary Mind and Body Includes Liberty, Justice, Truth, and Freedom.
by Mark Shupe
Natural law, and the moral laws of nature do not carry the weight of statutory law. They do not protect individuals from force applied by others, which is the only threat to acting on their rational self-interest. Because of this, only objective statutory law was worthy of America's Founders pledging their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor."
"Woke-e-Leaks": Parents (And Others) Against Marxist Political Activism In The K-12 Classroom.
Unless we start teaching the ABCs as opposed to BLM, American students will continue their descent into the dumbed-down, hate-filled hellhole that has been carved out for them by radical activists. And, ironically and infuriatingly, hardworking mainstream American taxpayers are subsidizing the revolution. This is simply outrageous.
Individualism Has Delivered Economic Advancement, Cultural Progress, And Some Miracles.
Nobel prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps has shown that the more individualistic a country is, the greater the dynamism, vitalism, and self expression and the desire to create entirely new things. Geert Hofstede, the famous social psychologist, has established that there is a strong relationship between a country’s national wealth and the level of individualism in its culture.
Tyranny Arrives With Exaggerations, Half-Truths, Distortions, And Outright Lies.
Tyranny, it is believed, does not happen to us, for it’s not really tyranny if its stated goal is our salvation – if it promises to protect us from dangers that we are assured are real, large, and looming. And those few ideological freaks who recklessly insist on calling our saviors “tyrants” do not appreciate the need for quick and decisive action from the top. These freaks should be ignored, and perhaps even forcibly silenced.
Could We Re-Found America? Here Are 7 Principles On Which To Do So.
Today, this common creed has vanished. We are two Americas: Biden’s America and Trump’s America. These two Americas have nothing of importance in common with each other, and no common ground to stand on. There is not a single moral or political principle upon which these two Americas agree.
13 Observations Suggest That This Is Not America Any More.
Our freedoms to speak and worship freely are being diminished almost daily. Dissent from hard-left orthodoxy is punished by job loss, ostracization, and on occasion violence. Rioters, looters and domestic terrorists are being coddled and even encouraged by the media, academia, and rotten-to-the-core politicians.
The Ethic Of Entrepreneurship.
All of us can adopt the entrepreneurial spirit, especially when we exercise it collaboratively with others in a team. That’s the entire concept of the economic principle of the division of labor. We all find and identify our own special contribution - the knowledge and skill that we alone possess and are capable of exercising on behalf of others - and then we deploy it in a joint effort with others towards the shared goal of serving others.
The Scientific Method of Deductive Reasoning Proves the Moral Foundation of Capitalism
by Mark Shupe
If "knowledge and objective truth were open to all men" (Locke's epistemology in Chapter 1), and error naturally flees when "reason and experiment have been indulged," (Jefferson in Chapter 2), then any despot's grip on political power is no stronger than the weak minds that sanction their own victimhood!
The Government's Repression Of Small Business Occurs With The Full Approval And Support Of Big Business.
With lockdowns, politicians get to pick and choose what businesses survive and what businesses don’t. They get to decide who’s essential and who isn’t. By and large, corporations, having interests aligned with politicians, are considered essential. Small businesses aren’t. Walmart lives. Dick’s barbershop dies. McDonald’s survives. Tito’s Tacos doesn’t.
Refusing To Give In To The Absurd Dictates Of Politicians And Experts Is The Only Path To Victory.
There has been increased resistance to illogical, disruptive measures such as closures of schools, playgrounds, and outdoor dining. The more of us who reject the idea that avoiding the coronavirus should inform virtually every aspect of life, the harder it will be for these epidemiologists to achieve their goal of making the new normal last forever.
Firms Don't Want Low-Paid Workers. They Want High-Paid Workers Who Help Them Make More Profits.
More important, the anecdotes about the Lakers, Amazon, Walmart and Target are a reminder of how just how nonsensical all the talk about stagnating U.S. wages these last few decades is. Can economists, journalists and pundits even pretend to be serious anymore? Stagnating wages in the richest country in the world?
Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News? Because Our Negativity Bias Demands It.
Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good… Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.
An Entrepreneur Who Dares To Celebrate Capitalism.
Much of today’s political class sees businesses as sources of funds to be drained to serve leftist purposes. This is plainly unsustainable. As British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said, “the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money” because no wealth is produced, only transferred.
"No Excuses" Is A Good Way To Go Through Life.
That’s why liberals promote excuses for any black failure and disavow any excuse for white failure. If you can control a group’s expectations, you can control their level of success. A generation of black people have had their expectations diminished by Critical Race Theory.
The Scientific Method of Inductive Reasoning Proves the Moral Foundation of Individualism
by Mark Shupe
More complex ideas of morality and law are put together from simple ones by the faculty of reason, that is, the mental functions of repetition, comparison, combination and abstraction. The goal of such knowledge was to guide man in determining what he ought to do as a rational and voluntary agent for the attainment of any end, especially happiness.
The Entrepreneurship Formula To Returning The U.S. Economy To Its Before-Covid Glory.
A strong economy is a simple formula: Greater entrepreneurship, which is created by pro-entrepreneurship public policies, which is created by electing pro-entrepreneurship politicians. Make no mistake: The success of the U.S. over the next few years depends on how well it follows this formula for success.
Intervention Results In More Taxes, More Bureaucrats, More Rules, And More Intervention. And We All Become Worse Off.
The results threaten popular support for free markets because people see poverty and chaos and conclude (incorrectly) that it is an inevitable result of a blinkered “just leave it to the market” ideology even though the problems started when the government expressly decided not to just leave prices to the market.
America Is The Last Remaining Capitalist Country, Sinking In The West. Gradually At First, Then All At Once.
America was conceived in liberty, and an individualistic capitalism…
Entrepreneur Zones: Teaching People To Fish In America's Abundantly Stocked Economic River.
Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963 was actually called the March On Washington For Jobs And Freedom. It was economic activism, as well as political and social activism. Economic activism – teaching more people how to fish in America’s rapidly flowing and abundantly stocked economic river - can be more productive on more fronts than protest, social justice campaigning or welfare legislation.
The Institutions Of Entrepreneurship:An Economist Uncovers A New Market Trend: The Rise of the DIY Consumer-Entrepreneur.
In the long-run, small businesses decrease their market presence, allowing more consumers to become more productive in satisfying their own wants and those of others, which creates a robust (C2C) marketplace. The immediate effect will be to show that consumers are creative and can be entrepreneurial.
Economics Enables Us To See That Racism Exists Only When Free Enterprise Is Taken Away.
If the Davonte Bryants of the world are to be safeguarded, we must embrace private property rights, free enterprise, capitalism. That is their last best hope. This system has done more for the African-American community than any other, Imperfect as is the US economic system, the GDP of all black citizens together would rank 12th in the world, if they constituted a separate country.
America's Founders Gave Individuals Everywhere Their Priceless Possession - Moral Sanction
by Mark Shupe
The principle that freedom is indivisible reflects the fact that humans are an integration of mind and body, spirit and matter, consciousness and existence. It implies humans must choose to exercise their reason – unique to them – to grasp reality, live ethically, and flourish. - Richard Salsman
We Are Deemed By Our Betters To Be Too Stupid, Too Fat, And Too Unhealthy To Make Our Own Decisions.
Experts concede they cannot achieve intelligent risk assessment of the population. And that’s the whole point. That needs to be left to individuals. Central planning does not work for all the reasons that F.A. Hayek explained: the necessary knowledge to make intelligent decisions is decentralized and not available in useful forms for elite overseers or anyone else.
Miscounting, Mis-Classification, Mis-Reporting. The COVID-19 Narrative Is Entirely Based On Accounting Errors.
If the COVID-19 death toll was not misleading at all, what we should have observed is an increased number of heart attacks and increased COVID-19 numbers. But a decreased number of heart attacks and all the other death causes doesn’t give us a choice but to point to some misclassification.
Do You Think There Are More Conspiracy Theories Today Than There Used To Be? That’s So WEIRD.
Are these conspiracy theories actually true? Some of them? All of them? None of them? I suspect that a unit within the federal government has looked into this question—perhaps the NSA. And I imagine that by now they’ve been able to ascertain the answer to this question.But they aren’t telling us.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Poetic Justice Warrior William Bradford Discovers the Source of Thanksgiving's Abundance
by Mark Shupe
William Bradford's epiphany was the triumph of capitalism over collectivism, and it completes the chain reaction - freedom, responsibility, self government, capitalism, abundance, and enjoyment. Tomorrow is the day for Americans of all nationalities to enjoy the people they value, take pleasure in the banquet afforded by their enterprise, and be grateful for humanity's newly discovered lives of reason, purpose, and pride.
Don't Go Left, Don't Go Right, Go Entrepreneurial.
We need people who can imagine a better future in entrepreneurial terms, not political terms. People who can identify how to serve their customers in a better way, and claim the reward of a financial profit for improving their customers' lives. We need people who take personal, entrepreneurial and commercial risk because they see opportunity and they believe that they can seize it.
Unsure Of Your Direction In These Turbulent Times? Entrepreneurship Can Provide All The Answers You Need.
Entrepreneurs apply their own judgment based on the information that’s available to them and the insight that’s unique to them; they make a decision; and then they test it against reality by implementing it and adapting based on the results that come back. Independent thinkers are society’s best resource amidst turmoil.
Morality, What Is It? America's Revolutionary Minds Wanted to Know. Some Still Do.
by Mark Shupe
Because the religious morality of the premodern world (ante Age of Enlightenment), and the secular morality of the postmodern world (post Age of Reason) are commonly accepted in 2020's American culture, the moral principles of America's founding are virtually unknown.
Left - Right Is No Longer The Division. It's Now The Ruling Class Versus The People.
Fatally, people agreed to restrict their understanding of things to what the mass media would allow them to hear. They did all of this even as evidence mounted that the “experts” were nothing but agents of the oligarchy.
Soft Totalitarianism, Hard Truth: A Roadmap To Fearlessness.
What we face now is not the deadly totalitarianism of 20th-century monster regimes. It’s the “soft totalitarianism” of cultural institutions, universities, workplace bureaucracies, and big-tech behemoths that will drive you from the public square if you dissent from the prevailing radicalism.
Rome Was Not Built Overnight, And Neither Was the Entrepreneur:What’s The Ideal Age To Be An Entrepreneur? Let Market Conditions Decide.
Products take time to produce; it takes time to develop a network of customers; it takes time for the entrepreneur to develop awareness, it takes time to find the market error that can be turned into an opportunity, and finally, it takes time for the market to adjust to changes in consumers’ tastes, preferences, and perceptions. Entrepreneurs do not acquire human capital in just one day, nor were economic systems created in one day.
The Creeping Collectivizaton Of Our Consciousness.
Not surprisingly, the Fabian Society, an organizational founder of evolutionary socialism, featured a logo with a turtle, symbolizing the slow transition to socialism. Their original coat of arms was the wolf in sheep's clothing, representing the preferred method of achieving a goal.
Individuals Beware! The Tech Collectivism Of The Great Reset Aims At Your Extinction.
The fourth Industrial Revolution provides the potential “to robotize humanity, and thus compromise our traditional sources of meaning—work, community, family, identity.” Schwab predicts that the fourth Industrial Revolution will “lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness.”
How Do We Heal A Divided Country? Entrepreneurship.
The results of the 2020 presidential election suggest that the…
Waking America's Revolutionary Mind!
by Mark Shupe
In July, Center for Individualism created a Facebook study group…
The Founders Outsmarted Presidential Election Fraudsters.
Who chooses the President of the United States?
This question…
It Is Self-Evident That No Person Is By Nature The Ruler Of Other People.
In the Founders’ day, declaring the self-evident truth that all men are created equal was a rebuke to monarchs everywhere. Today, America’s founding truth is a rebuke to tyrants everywhere, and to Americans on the Left who are keen to tear down the system of governance that is the magnificent gift of the Founders.
The Left Will Not Practice Civility, Much Less Adhere To Any Moral System That Would Require It.
In the pantheon of liberal heroes, figures of incivility and violence — from Fidel Castro to Che Guevera to the Black Panthers to the leaders of Black Lives Matter — hold high rank. This reflects the morally relativistic core of liberalism, its willingness to ignore objective standards of right and wrong in the pursuit of power.
Politicians And Bureaucrats Have Created A Simmering Distrust In Our Institutions. Maybe It's Coming To A Boil.
These lapses didn’t just happen during the 2016 presidential election; there is evidence they have been going on for years, unmitigated. Americans have watched, too, as those within our institutions, who are in a position to hold the guilty parties accountable, have failed to do so even as the evidence poured in and as the weeks, months and years have dragged on.
It's A Better World When We Talk About People As Individuals, Not Undifferentiated Masses.
It's a better world when we're talking about people as individuals rather than undifferentiated masses. That's true of behavior on the state level, too. Even in California, about the deepest blue state in the country, voters resoundingly defeated referenda that would have allowed rent control, and unionized dialysis clinics and Uber and Lyft drivers.
The Twelve Evidentiary Fields Of Chicanery That Could End Our Faith In Democracy.
This election doesn’t pass the smell test. I participated…
Economics Is Truth And Light, Beauty And Awe, Hope And Compassion.
The economy is a system in which individuals generate knowledge, communicate it and utilize it in a complex web of interrelationships and interactions among economic actors near and far. It's important for us to appreciate the spontaneous order of the market, which arises through independent but interrelated decision-making.
The Many Ways in Which Freedom Won the Election.
We can take comfort in the realization that court packing, the Green New Deal, and other radically statist items on the Biden-Harris-Sanders agenda are, at least for now, off the table. Indeed, we should also celebrate the fact that there is now unlikely to be a repeal of Trump’s corporate tax cut. Democrats are now quite unhappy at this unexpected failure of their dreams to materialize.
Government Can't Count Ballots. How Can It Possibly Manage a Pandemic or Our Health Care?
America’s governing bodies look incapable of managing something as simple as a vote, something Americans have managed to do efficiently for centuries without the benefit of computers, digital communication, and mass transportation.
Individualism Has A Bad Name, But It's The Best Philosophy For Society.
Individuals strive for what they think is desirable, and markets transmit this striving as exchange and trade that benefits many. The unlimited variety of human gifts and skills is orchestrated by markets even though all the members of society who benefit are unaware of most individuals’ contributions.
Democracy Proves To Be The Death Of The Constitution.
Either the Constitution leashes the rulers, or the rulers leash the people. There is no middle way: there is no such thing as provisional legal inferiority to officialdom. If citizens trust rulers who blatantly violate the Constitution, they place themselves on the political chopping block.
Capitalism Eliminates Poverty, Despite These 4 Common Misperceptions.
Yes, it’s true that the rich (tend to) get richer, but the poor get richer too—especially if we look at a time span of decades or longer, and if we focus our attention on people living in countries where governments adhere to a basic respect for the rule of law and property rights.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: President Donald J. Trump Invokes the Poetic Justice Warrior Society Manifesto at Mount Rushmore
by Mark Shupe
The radical ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of social justice. But in truth, it would demolish both justice and society. It would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance, and it would turn our free and inclusive society into a place of repression, domination and exclusion. They want to silence us, but we will not be silenced.
Let's Secede!
Thanks to relentless growth in federal power over American states and American communities, this issue is unlikely to go away. It appears that Americans are increasingly fearful that national majorities and national political institutions can be used to attack the culture, legal rights, and lifestyles of those who might find themselves as part of a national majority. Secession increasingly beckons as an option.
A 10-Point Manifesto For Individualism
Everyone follows their own individual conscience. Everyone is free to try their best, to see what they can achieve. No-one is qualified to pass judgment on others' capacities or what they can do.
Masks Are A Device To Keep Us Fearful, And We've Complied.
Masks may not be able to block COVID-19, but increasingly they have blocked common sense from the wearers. After so many months of mandates and propaganda, people have a lot invested in their understanding of what it means to be a good faithful American embodied in the face mask. It has become bigger than politics.
Economics Aims At Harmony, Government At Disharmony.
Continually leveraging government power into ever-more areas where people’s views differ dramatically increases how frequently some people’s preferences are forced on others. That guarantees acrimony, not harmony. And the COVID-19 crisis, with a major recession triggered by what amounts to government prohibition of production and exchange in vast areas of the economy, has only supercharged the disharmony.
Are We Reliving "We The Living?"Who is Kira Argounova? Gen Z's Defense Against Losing Themselves to the Siren Song of Equality.
Like Kira, I refuse to be bound to any collective. I will not adhere myself to either side. My highest priority is my own freedom as an individual, the freedom to choose my beliefs rather than have them chosen for me. But to my peers, that is almost worse than choosing the opposite side. They mistake independence for indifference.
What Is "The New Feudalism"? Well, There Are The Imposers, And The Imposed Upon.
The politicians and intellectuals who put this new feudalism in place tossed out all normal concerns over freedom, justice, equality, democracy, and universal dignity in favor of the creation of a strict caste system. So much for Locke, Jefferson, Acton, and Rawls. The medical technocracy cared only about conducting an unprecedented experiment in managing the social order.
The Consent Of The Governed, And Other Fictions.
Presidents perennially echo the Declaration of Independence's appeal to “the consent of the governed.” The primary proof that Americans are not oppressed is that citizens cast more votes for one of the candidates who finagled his name onto the ballot. A politician can say or do almost anything to snare votes; after Election Day, citizens can do almost nothing to restrain winning politicians.
Devotion To Your Rational Life Is The Primary, Essential Force For Human Peace and Prosperity.
by Mark Shupe
Chasing every possibility offered by the Soviet socialist criminal gang, she got Leo to a sanitorium in Crimea to save his life. Now, it was Kira's turn, and this is the extraordinary and beautiful message of We the Living. Your life and happiness is your highest value; not Society, not God, not retribution, not "others."
Whatever You Think Of Google, Please Don't Cheer For The Government's Manufactured Anti-Trust Case.
There is not much evidence for the view that lazy and uninformed consumers are being systematically tricked into using a search engine they would eschew if they were only compelled, rather than merely permitted, to make an active choice.
Are We Reliving We The Living?How Many Americans Will the New York Times Kill?
by Mark Shupe
In 2020 America, we are faced with an important choice. It's either the life premise of Ayn Rand and capitalism, or the death premise of the New York Times and socialism. Lives of motion and purpose or lives of stagnation and retribution. As Salsman explains, putting "democratic" in front of it does not make it humane.
Bottom-Up Solutions Are Better Than Top-Down. There Are Plenty Of Examples.
We all have different talents, experiences and callings. A bottom-up system helps people discover who they could be. Some of us are called to be philanthropists; others are called to be social entrepreneurs; others are called to fight poverty or violence; others fight for equality.
Appalled By Politicians' Pretensions? Inexplicably Blinded By Political Lies? Get Your Magic Spectacles Here.
The economic way of thinking brings into sharp focus a world otherwise invisible! It sees through Pelosi, and Biden, and Cuomo, and Newsom, and other such people, in Washington and in state capitals, who routinely parade in plain view their raw ambition, their delusions of possessing supernatural powers, and their lack of ordinary human decency.
Entrepreneurship Is An Epic Calling.
Entrepreneurs are the drivers of the free market economy that raises everyone’s potential and attainment. They are the pillars of a collaborative culture of achievement and accomplishment. They are the creative catalysts of change. Society is better the greater the role and influence of entrepreneurs.
The Progressivism Of The Future Is Really Just The Socialism Of The Past.
Behind popular promises such as the end of poverty and hunger, healthy lives, equitable education, and gender equality lurks the agenda to impose global socialism. Demands for sustainable consumption and production patterns, and building inclusive societies for sustainable development, are parts of an overriding plan to do away with the market economy and to impose comprehensive state planning.
Existence Proves America's Independent Virtues and Servant Leadership's Sacrificial Vices.
by Mark Shupe
You think everything that breathes can live? You've learned differently, I know. For Kira, her life, and Leo's, were their primary standard of value. They were exceptional because they took ownership of their futures. "Now look at me! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. Something that knows how to want, isn't that life itself?"
Will Gen Z Make America Socialist?
There is a growing resentment of anything considered “capitalist.” Capitalism is a dirty word these days. Based on an analysis of the coming generation of youth voters, America could be at the start of a shift in public policy. It looks like younger generations could favor policies more common in socialist countries, setting the stage for the start of the new decade.
There's No Real Science When Politicians "Follow The Science". It's Scientism, Something Quite Different.
The mantra of “follow the science” is not unique to the politics of the virus. Politicians offer a similar justification for policies on climate change. Just as the science about Covid-19 “justifies” lockdowns, the science of climate change is used to support spending and regulatory policy that will deliver zero net emissions.
Big Government Rules, Big Business Kowtows.
If you were a businessman at the head of a great corporation you would think three times before you spoke out on a major issue: about the IRS getting ready to come and audit your accounts; about the Department of Justice standing only too ready to launch an antitrust suit against you; and about the FTC attacking your advertising; and the FDA attacking the products you produce. You are not free to speak if you are in that position.
Why Are Politicians Wrong About COVID Policies? Because They Use The Wrong Kind Of Thinking.
How can the devastation still be running so rampant — and have segued, unchecked, from deadly disease to economic disaster? Our diagnosis, not as medical experts but as students of leadership, is that many leaders stumbled in the fundamental step of determining the nature of the challenge they faced and identifying the different kinds of thinking that had to be brought to bear on it at different points.
Right Now Is A Great Time To Start A Business.
While many existing businesses have been forced to shut down, optimistic newcomers push ahead, in part out of a joy in being their own boss. The pandemic has produced a supercharged version of “creative destruction,” the theory that a good economy thrives when older businesses lose their way and innovative ones spot an opening.
Setting The Record Straight On Income Inequality.
Income equality has no moral basis: there is no ethical reason why people ought to earn exactly the same, especially when the productivity and importance of different forms of labor vary. Thankfully, the American people agree. It’s why an overwhelming 77% of them value freedom over equality.
Pursuit of Happiness and the Virtue of Selfishness, Or Politics of Pull and the Vices of Selflessness.
by Mark Shupe
Kira was selfish - she wanted to live as people were meant to live. Instead of pounding sand in a society of zeroes, Kira wanted to turn it into cement and glass, or maybe silicon wafers some day. Morozov's looting was an evasion of reality and utterly selfless. It was his death sentence in the court of moral justice.
Government Stimulus Spending Is Extracted From Prior Private Production, And Is Therefore De-Stimulating.
Should the political class that helped depress the economy be empowered to centrally plan its revival? The revival plan amounts to politicians passing around the trillions of others and just adds to the Twilight Zone nature of today’s economic discussion. The economy is weak, so hand trillions to Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell to revive it with.
7,621 Scientists And Medical Practitioners Say: Re-Open Immediately And Completely.
The young and healthy should resume normal activity in order to incur herd immunity and thereby protect those vulnerable to severe illness. The authors urge the adoption of this strategy, which they call “Focused Protection,” in light of increasing evidence that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.
Prosperity, As Measured By Increasing Per Capita GDP, Is Enhancing Everyone's Lives. Why Is the Left Against It?
Despite the astounding success of the free enterprise system in producing unprecedented prosperity, antagonism toward capitalism is growing, and popular politicians are adopting platforms that are essentially socialist. Capitalism has never been more fruitful and never more hated by its beneficiaries than it is today.
Equality, Liberty, And Justice Caused - And Continue To Cause - Great Enrichment For All.
You may object that ideas are a dime a dozen and that to make them fruitful we must start with adequate physical and human capital and good institutions. But the root cause of enrichment was and is the liberal idea, spawning the university, the railway, the high-rise, the internet and, most important, our liberties.
Throughout History, Free Market Policing Has Proven To Be A Better Solution.
Free-market police would not only be efficient, they would have a strong incentive to be courteous and to refrain from brutality against either their clients or their clients’ friends or customers. A private Central Park would be guarded efficiently in order to maximize park revenue, rather than have a prohibitive curfew imposed on innocent—and paying—customers.
Government Corruption Extends Far Beyond What Politicians Admit.
The purpose of the state’s rules is to create a perception of legitimacy for state activities so long as the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats remains within the boundaries which they define. Moreover, these boundaries do not consider the collecting and spending of taxpayers' money, per se, to be an act of corruption.
Pragmatism, Good Intentions, and Proletariat Lives Are All That Matter. To Avoid Death. For Now.
by Mark Shupe
In Chapter 8 of We the Living, Victor Dunaev betrays everything he had ever claimed about self-sacrifice being a virtue and self-interest being a vice. He paid his dues by informing the Soviet secret police about his sister Irina's 'counter-revolutionary' behavior.
Who Controls The Past, Controls The Future. Which Is Why The Left Wants To Rewrite History.
Here is a simple example: students all learn that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder and that he wrote the Declaration of Independence. But you cannot claim him to be a hypocrite unless you study what he says. And what he says consistently about slavery is that it is wrong and must be got rid of.
Fear The New Ideology: Lockdownism.
Lockdownism's vision of hell is a society in which pathogens run freely. Its heaven is a society managed entirely by medical technocrats whose main job is the suppression of all disease. The mental focus is the viruses and other bugs. The anthropology is to regard all human beings as little more than sacks of deadly pathogens.
There Is No Coronavirus Pandemic.
As of this moment, according to the World Life Expectancy tables, total deaths have reached over 44 mm out of a total population of 7.734 bn people. Extrapolating out for this year, total deaths worldwide will be approximately 58.7 million. Average deaths per year worldwide currently average close to 60 million deaths per year, so this year is certainly not abnormal.
Are We Living In A Pre-Totalitarian Society?
America is sleepwalking into soft totalitarianism. If we ignore the prophetic voices of those who survived Communism, we deserve what we get. The best defense ordinary people can mount, said Solzhenitsyn, is to refuse to stay silent in the face of ideological lies.
German Scientists: COVID-19 Presents No Significant Risk To Healthy People, Old Or Young.
In violation of “all international medical guidelines” “every deceased person who had tested positive for the virus entered the official records as a coronavirus victim”. When deaths are counted properly, Reiss and Bhakdi argue, it becomes evident that only those with serious underlying conditions are at risk of dying.
A Sickening Reminder Of How Quickly Politicians - Who Never Miss A Paycheck Or A Meal - Can Wreck Things For Others.
Lockdowns were instituted, supposedly for our own good. Sorry, but economic growth is what's for our own good. It doesn’t just produce resources for those eager to find cures for viruses that make us ill or kill us, economic growth also frees us to quarantine or shelter-in-place if we feel some kind of virus threatens us.
The Price of Priest, Potentate, or Party 'Protection' Is One's Mind, Happiness, and Future.
by Mark Shupe
Kira asks Leo, "This isn't a joke you're playing on me, is it? Or have you lost your mind entirely?" Leo replies, "I'm glad to find some use for it." This neutering of the mind continues at Pavel Syerov's house party, the one celebrating Morozov's business deal with Leo that will make the three of them wealthy,
Economic regulations are a brake on economic growth.
Key Takeaway: Empirical evidence supports the theoretical hypothesis that economic regulations can reduce growth. Policymakers should be very cautious about increasing economic regulation. The burden of proof should be on policymakers to show that such regulation is likely to do more good than harm.
Why Are Scientists So Often Wrong? Publishing Manipulated Results from Unreplicable Experiments Is A Big Part Of The Problem.
Fantastic scientific results, either the kind blasted across headlines or those which gradually make it into public awareness, are often so poorly made that the results don’t hold up; they don’t capture anything real about the world. The problem is the betrayal of scientific ideals by the way scientists do research in practice.
Slowly But Surely, The Truth Is Inexorably Making Its Way Into The News Despite Mainstream Media Resistance.
People are finally looking beyond BLM’s catchy slogan and evaluating the actual agenda. The agenda is Karl Marx’s anti-God, pro-communism political theory. BLM scrubbed its “what we believe” page because smart people are distancing themselves from BLM.
Why Are Experts So Often Wrong? Because They Can't See Out Of Their Silos.
These experts fall into a problem that Roger Koppl calls “siloing.” These experts make decisions based upon their understanding, training, and knowledge. They do not necessarily know (or even know to consider) how their actions affect other elements of society.
Want To Know The Future If Progressives Run America? Observe The Horror Show That Is California Today.
The wealth tax would hit affluent all individuals who have lived in California over the last 10 years. Avoidance is not as simple as moving to another state. I’m reminded of the lyrics from that famous Eagles song, “Hotel California” … You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Why Is U.S. Politics So Polarized? Excessive Centralization Is The Culprit, Decentralization Is The Solution.
The real culprit behind worsening polarization is the gargantuan federal government that has turned the entire country into an unceasing political battleground. When virtually all political issues are settled at the national level, the whole nation becomes a source of potential political opponents.
Intolerant of Independent Minds, Class and Race Theorists Demand a Return Of The Primitive
by Mark Shupe
Peoples know nothing of the spirit of man, for peoples are only nature, and man is a word that has no plural. Petrograd is not of the people. It is a stranger, aloof, incomprehensible, forbidding. Petrograd does not need a soul; it has a mind.
Weekend Long Read: American Sports Are Letting Down America.
As fans, we can only hope and pray that these feckless leaders will reconsider their embrace of the BLM cult—a necessary first step to returning American sports to what it has been in the past: a force for unity and a model of a diverse and colorblind meritocracy.
Reckoning The Full Costs Of Endless War.
Even if we were to exclude Syria from the list of U.S. wars, that would still leave the U.S. bearing at least partial responsibility for wars that have displaced 30 million people since 2001. That is a staggering number, and it is one that we cannot forget when we talk about ending endless wars.
Predicting The Future? 2021 Could Be A Lot Worse Than 2020.
Periodically in Western history twilight ages make their appearance. Processes of decline and erosion of institutions are more evident than those of genesis and development. Something like a vacuum obtains in the moral order for large numbers of people.
The Politicization Of Everything: A Ransom Note From Your Kids' School.
Please think about what was said. It reads as kind of a ransom note. Vote for science-reverent candidate Joe Biden, or else….Really, what else could the utterance mean? What does November 3rd have to do with re-opening schools? Why would it be safer to open on the 4th of November versus the present?
California’s Destruction Can Be Summed Up In The Hypocrisies And Paradoxes Of Its Bankrupt Elite.
How long can a state suffer the rich Bourbons of the Bay Area? As long as its brave nobodies still drive ’dozers right into conflagrations to create lifesaving fire breaks, as long as unheralded pilots fly blind into smoke to drop fire retardant, and as long as there is something left for the parasitical elite of the rich inheritance from California’s brilliant and industrious but now long-dead past.
Economics For Individuals: Save Like A Pessimist, Invest Like An Optimist.
Compounding is easy to underestimate because it’s not intuitive, even for smart people. If the odds are in your favor and you can keep them in your favor for a long time, you shouldn’t just be an optimist. You should be a ridiculous, full-blown, giddy optimistic. Which is also what history tells us, isn’t it?
Reverence for One's Life Is Essential for Justice. Reverence For the Greater Good Is A Life Sentence.
by Mark Shupe
Aunt Maria Petrovna had lived her life preparing for death. Her moral choices were guided by the mystics of the mind - the Church. Upon facing imminent death, Maria realized her error and turned to the only person she knew who chose to live. Andrei's moral choices were guided by the mystics of muscle - the Party.
How Bad Teaching Is Tearing America Apart.
Things are getting worse. Intellectual error has become a threat to the well-being of the nation. A truly massive tragedy is building.” Schools “are diminishing our national unity and our basic competence.”
Honest Authorities Would Concede That The Pandemic Is Over.
The latest reported weekly death count (August 29) was 370. That's out of a population of 330 million people. In a single week, between August 8 and August 15, the number of deaths dropped 85 percent (from 3,169 to 455). The COVID-19 death rate in the U.S. is now barely more than one per million and dropping like a rock.
The Theft Of TikTok By The American Political Class Is Shameful.
It has even been claimed that the shameful mugging of TikTok is an example of the “market increasing business competition and solving a political problem at the same time.” No, that’s not right - it's an embarrassing embrace of plain thievery.
We Have Suddenly Moved A Lot Deeper Into A Totalitarian Police State.
Victoria is now a police state. That is the simple and depressing truth of all this. If the government feels that you are standing in the way of its goals, then your freedoms are forfeited and you will be arrested. If you leave your house after 8pm, you will be fined. If you visit your father on Father’s Day, you will be fined. And if you protest against any of this, you will be arrested.
Is The Left Preparing A Coup? Apparently So - They've Come Out And Said It.
The left will mount what’s come to be known as a “color revolution,” the exact same playbook the American deep state runs in other countries whose leadership they don’t like and is currently running in Belarus. Oust a leader—even an elected one—through agitation and call it “democracy.”
Imagine All The People, Living Pathetic Lives in Peace. I Hope Someday You Will Pay Us, Comrade.
by Mark Shupe
Vasili chose to live in a primitive environment, and used his impressive mental and physical energy to create wealth. Kira was imprisoned in a primitive environment, and using her prodigious mental and physical energy to avoid death.
The Only Country In The Western World That Is Willing To Sacrifice Our Children Out Of Our Own Fear.
Harms from distance learning include, by one estimate, a 30% drop in reading ability and a 50% decline in math skills. Children need socializing, too: “They don’t go to school just to learn what’s in a book.” They learn “maturation, conflict resolution, physical fitness.”
Meet The Visionary Doctor Audacious Enough To Propose A Free Market In Healthcare.
I am now more optimistic than ever that I’ll see it in my career where the people in this country reject the government’s handling of this industry, selling and auctioning all of these factors to the cronies who have ponied up in Washington and we will see a true market emerge and a real rebirth of the great tradition of medicine that for which the United States has been known for quite some time.
Celebrating Fierce Individualism, Inspiring Inequality, And Creative Entrepreneurship.
The inspiring idea that led to the U.S. was the rather novel notion that a very limited government would exist to protect the rights of individuals to live as they want. People would be free to conform, rebel, or somewhere in between so long as their pursuits didn’t trample on the rights of others.
The Noble Lie: Government Is Good.
The Plato/Socrates version may well have been satirical; the notion of the “Noble Lie” may have been a kind of goof on the idea of self-important leaders. But the modern Bernie Sanders / Elizabeth Warren "social justice" version is decidedly unironic, and therefore more dangerous by far.
The Narcissism Of Small Differences Animates Our Political Divide.
Group identity and its insignia are an all-consuming obsession of both the left and the right, just as they were of the fascists and communists who marched in the streets, eager to spill each other’s blood. Both sides carry and carefully guard the kind of sustained righteous indignation that comes with certainty of the religious kind.
Say's Law Of Markets Writes The Code Of Moral Justice For We The Living.
by Mark Shupe
The death premise of Marxism - life is chaos and people are impotent. They demand submission to the collective. Last week in 2020 America, you were exposed to their chaos in Kenosha WI and Portland OR, and the impotence of police departments who were ordered to stand down in submission to the cancel culture of today's organized, violent, Marxist mobs.
Consensus Is An Outmoded Top-Down Concept. Social Media Enables Spontaneous Order To Emerge From The Competition Of Ideas.
We think of social media with its inescapable cacophony as a force dividing us. But the problem is our assumption that “united” means “doing and thinking the same thing.” Ironically, exactly this networked technology enables us to think and do different things while remaining connected rather than isolated, and therefore, be greater than the sum of our parts.
Due To Their Systematic Decision-Making Failure, Politicians Are Never To Be Trusted With Taxpayer Money.
No matter what kind of crisis hits, government officials only have a few tools in their toolbox. These tools are spending money, printing money, bailing out companies, restricting freedom, and otherwise expanding government’s powers. These are the “tools” used during pandemics, recessions great or modest, after terrorist attacks, and in the wake of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.
These Are The 4 Pillars Of The Marxist Framework At Work in 2020 America. Ignore At Your Peril.
Marx suggests that, historically, oppressed classes have materially improved their conditions only through a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large. There is a period of “more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution” and the “violent overthrow” of the liberal oppressors.
Property, Freedom, Peace. To Stand Against The Marxism Of The Left, We Must Be Clear What We Stand For.
Looking at the last century, should we count two bloody world wars, central banking and fiat currencies, income taxes, the rise of managerial superstates, vast social insurance and welfare programs, and diminutions of property rights unimaginable to our grandparents as liberal successes?
Blockchain Can Be An Anti-Corruption Tool, Even In A Deeply Corrupt Government System Like Ours.
Misconduct and financial corruption have always been a headache for central governments around the world. Can technology deal with this deep-rooted challenge? According to the 2019 OECD Global Anti-Corruption and Integrity Forum, the development of innovative technologies like blockchain provides state-of-the-art opportunities to reduce corruption in public administration.
Economics For Individuals:Let’s Talk Time Preference, Democracy And The Decline Through Which We Are Currently Living.
This trend of decivilization is inevitable in a democracy. When unproductive people, such as politicians and government employees, can aspire to powerful roles in a government that has a legitimate monopoly on the transference of income and wealth to reward and reinforce non-productivity, they will seize the opportunity it represents and exploit it to the fullest.
For the Possibility That She Can Live, Kira Argounova Gives the Criminal Gang More Rope
by Mark Shupe
The eminently wise Gen Z'er Kira has exposed Rand's sense of humor and Pavel's greatest weakness - he has nothing without public cooperation. She knows that his object is unearned wealth, his carrot is social justice, and his stick is his criminal gang. Greed, envy, and fear - and today's Democratic party.
Weekend Long Read:Great Innovations Come From The Urgent Problems Of War And Depressions. Which Could Be The Good News About 2020.
All we know is that the most important changes of the last 100 years have taken place during upheavals. And we’re currently in the biggest upheaval of the last 100 years. We know that an irony of technology is that economies often make their greatest leaps forward when the outlook is bleakest. It might be one of the only silver linings of 2020.
“We Have A Lot Of Evidence That It’s A Fake Story All Over The World” – German Doctors On COVID-19.
Why are so many experts in the field being completely censored? Why is there so much information being shared that completely contradicts the narrative of our federal health regulatory agencies and organizations like the WHO? What’s going on here, and how much power do governments have when they are able to silence the voice of so many people?
Bait-&-Switch: How They've Changed The COVID Conversation.
Everywhere the language is changing. “The New Normal” was about beating Covid19, but now it’s about “covid19 and future pandemics”, or the “other colossal challenges facing humanity”….which can mean literally anything they want it to mean. All this is based on the ever-increasing number of cases, without any reference to the fact deaths are falling.
Politicized "Stakeholder Capitalism" Threatens American Prosperity.
As for obligations to the community, every company already needs consumer support to succeed and consumers are free to vote with their dollars for businesses they perceive as socially responsible. But if social responsibility becomes more important than making a profit, the company will fail.
Entrepreneurship And Investment Now Face The Ever-Present Threat Of A Smashing Sledgehammer.
With brute force, a blunt and heavy instrument was swung down on society by the state. Sledgehammers crush. They demolish. That’s their only function. They do not build. With the massive sledgehammer that is the COVID-19 lockdown, there is very little opportunity for human creativity and work effort
Technological Deflation Is A New Economic Phenomenon That Can Pay For Basic Income While Eliminating Income Taxes.
In 1992, rapidly deflating technologies made up about 0.5% of world GDP, 1% in 2004 and it stands today at 2%. Consider how many consumer electronics devices have been stuffed into that rapidly deflating iPhone. With self-driving cars, 3D printers and AI just over the horizon, more and more of the economy is going to become subject to rapid technological deflation.
Leo's Edge of Night and Andrei's Secret Storm Galvanize Kira's Search for Tomorrow
by Mark Shupe
Kira's focus is on what she can control, especially her ambitions, and for the singular reason that she wants it. She has no interest in those who want little more than to avoid death. As the master of her future, and being a naive, idealistic 18 year old girl, her attention is drawn to young men who have not surrendered to their circumstances, whatever that may mean.
When The Government Takes A Dollar From Your Pocket And Spends It, It Doesn't Mean The Economy Grows By A Dollar.
That's right; the belief is that when the government takes a dollar out of your pocket, puts that dollar through the political process, and decides where to spend it (based on input from special interest groups), the economy will somehow return more money in growth than the money invested, even after Washington bureaucrats take their cut. It's magic!
Cato's Letters Remind Us How Far We've Moved From The Intentions Of America's Founders.
Cato's Letters remind us how far we have moved from what George Washington described as “the sacred fire of liberty … staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people,” making their insights worth reconsideration. The upcoming November elections coincide with the letters' 300th anniversary.
From The Optimism Department: Are We Headed Into A New Roaring Twenties?
The good news is that the bad news during the previous precedent - the Spanish Flu - was followed by the Roaring Twenties. So far, the 2020s has started with the pandemic, but there are plenty of years left for the prosperous 1920s to become a precedent for the current decade. If so, the driver of the coming boom will be technology-enhanced productivity, as it was during the 1920s.
Will John Tamny's New Book Start the Anti-Lockdown Movement?
Tamny understands economics with an intuitive and uncanny contrarian eye. He points out: “If the virus had been lethal, the lockdowns would have made even less sense…The biggest enemy of life is poverty. Let’s never again fight disease with the taking of freedom and wealth so essential to knowledge, prosperity, and by extension life itself.”
Our Country Needs A Serious Anti-Lockdown Movement.
Traditional American civic postulates support individual freedom and the limits of governments, as well as universal principles of human rights. If liberty means anything, it means that we are not locked down. It means, moreover, that lockdowns are unconscionable.
Reliving We the Living Teaches Living Is Not the Avoidance of Death.
by Mark Shupe
The first banner read: Comrades! We Are the Builders of a New Life! The other banner read: Lice Spread Disease! Citizens, Unite on the Anti-Typhus Front! The comparative irony Rand presents with these is stunning - to be a comrade is to be lice, citizens are builders where building is forbidden, and life is defined as avoiding death.
The Media Tries To Exploit Economic Ignorance When It Derogates American Prosperity.
How many people take the garbage the Times puts out at face value, and never look at the data for themselves? We have to stop allowing ourselves and our kids and communities to be dumbed down by the media, the government education system, and those with a special interest in fundamentally remaking the world into some dystopian Marxist “utopia.”
Don't Worry So Much About The Politics Of Big Tech, Focus On The Economic Benefits.
One of the basic building blocks of economics is that both parties benefit from voluntary exchanges ex ante, or else they would not be willing to engage in it. The fact that consumers use Big Tech to the extent they do is overwhelming evidence of their value.
Leftist Legislation Has Turned The Traditional US Corporation Into A Vehicle For Socialism. Time For New Organizational Innovations.
Certain aspects of the employment relationship were guaranteed by government enforcement — including overtime, unemployment insurance, paid time off, opportunity for union representation, and other requirements. This required a corporate form of business.
Governments, Major Media Outlets, And Major Institutions Actively Sabotage Innovation And Iconoclastic Entrepreneurship.
There’s a famous story of a Canadian inventor who developed…
To Deal With The Pandemic, Let Everyone Catch The Disease To Get Immunity. My Grandma Knew That.
Perhaps this is a case of Rothbardian-style lost knowledge, similar to how humanity once understood scurvy and then didn’t and then had to come to understand it again. Somehow in the 21st century, we find ourselves in the awkward position of having to relearn the basics of immunology.
To Relive We The Living Is To Choose The Benevolent Universe Premise Of Our Childhood.
by Mark Shupe
Class consciousness is fealty to your political identity group, Communism is the negation of human volition, and the bourgeois exploiters are the manufacturers and merchants who produce every material need and desire for human prosperity. But when a culture's dominant philosophy becomes malevolent, and motivated by envy and fear, force replaces reason and trade is conducted by blood instead of money.
In Pursuit Of Foreign Dollars, Major Corporations Urge American Sports Leagues To Endorse BLM.
There are some good people who have sincere religious faith who recognize Marxism is hostile to religion and religious freedom. There are some good people who believe strong nuclear families are the best weapon against the negative impact of racism. There are some good people who believe it’s unwise to turn the national anthem into the national polarization.
A Belief In Free Markets And Entrepreneurship Gives Meaning To Life.
Champions of free markets regularly point out that capitalism has made life easier, safer and longer. This is true and worthy of celebration. But humanity is an existential species: People want more than safe and comfortable lives; they want their struggles to matter.
Teachers Unions Overplay Their COVID-19 Hand, Undermining The Government K-12 Monopoly.
There are reasons to be optimistic about the future of education. Many parents will be more prepared to home-school their kids than they were in the spring. They or their hired teachers will do a better job of educating children, in many cases, than the public schools.
Are You A Dissatisfied Consumer? You Are One Of The Geniuses Of Economic Betterment.
Dissatisfaction indicates that the consumer is able to dream bigger than the producer. Every new invention that becomes an innovation and is introduced to the market is immediately scrutinized under the lens of dissatisfaction, critiqued and criticized.
Our Sociopathic Political Leaders - Bloodless And Totally Devoid Of Human Empathy - Are Further Divided From The People They Rule Than Ever.
If you are going to push such a line in the face of the mounting evidence showing them to be frauds, if you are going to lie with impunity to keep the game going, you will have to steel yourself against emotion and empathy. You become a sociopath. This might be enough to account for their bloodless posturing.
Who is Kira Argounova? There's No Time Like the Present to Find Out.
by Mark Shupe
Who is Kira Argounova? is an essential question no one has ever asked you, until now. As the lead character in Ayn Rand's 1936 novel We the Living, her story is more relevant than ever. Set in 1920's Soviet Russia, the circumstances of her life and culture are rearing their ugly head a century later in America. To learn more about Kira's life premise and America's degeneration, we have created the We the Living Study Group on Facebook for our readers.
Professional Athletes Side-Hustling Racial Animosity For Social Media Traction Are Diminishing Sports’ Role In American Society.
There’s no risk in taking a knee, especially when you’ve signed a 12-year, $365 million contract. The kneelers aren’t mimicking John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the ‘68 Olympics. The courageous black professional athlete will be the one bold enough to point out the fraudulence of the movement.
Government Spending Creates "Zombie Congestion", Impeding The Betterment That Comes With Entrepreneurial Capitalism.
Over the last 20 years, the falling default rate has also closely mirrored the slowdown in U.S. productivity, which is not surprising. Keeping profitless companies alive naturally retards productivity. A 2017 OECD study found that “zombie congestion” in any industry lowers the productivity of rival companies—and blocks the entry of new companies—by making it difficult to attract capital.
A Special Long Read For Our Times:Liberty's Enemies Are Advancing, Which Makes Antonio Gramsci The Greatest Political Strategist In History.
What is Christian morality, if not, at minimum, the non-aggression principle? Antonio Gramsci understood this more than eighty years ago. It is his political strategy that is at the root of what we see happening today in universities, government, and society more broadly speaking.
The Dial Is Stuck On The Opinion Polling Machine. It's Time To Shake It.
No matter how much money is made, or how many people are fooled, the only real value any of these organizations have is their credibility. How many wrong predictions do pollsters have to make before they are ignored? How many lies do media outlets have to tell before no one believes them anymore?
A Values-Driven Entrepreneur Shares Ten Principles For Success In The Highly Competitive World Of Sports Content.
Jason has thought deeply about – and codified - his own values. He includes them in his personal profile on his entrepreneurial distribution platform, Outkick. He cites Booker T. Washington as one of his guides. The entrepreneurial life is a values-driven life.
The Three Major Reasons Why Representative Democracy Will Fail, And The Combined Solution.
The viability of meaningful political representation withers as the ratio of representatives to voters decreases. There are 435 members in the House of Representatives in a country of 328 million people. This means that each member “represents” an average of 755,000 people. How exactly does one person represent the federal legislative preferences of 755,000 diverse people?
Reliving We the Living - An Invitation to Live and Grow Together
by Mark Shupe
Please reply to the link below if you would like an invitation to join the We the Living Study Group on Facebook, obtain a copy of the novel, and commit to reading it. The time frame is August through October - 13 weeks and about 3 chapters each week. We will consider the virtues, vices, and motivations of each character, and the ethical and political context of their actions.
Mask Theater Past And Present: The Medieval Antecedents Of Our Bizarre 21st Century Ritual.
The beak of the mask would be filled with herbs and spices that would produce pleasant smells, which were believed to protect the wearer from invisible “poisonous emanations” in the air, called “miasma,” which created harmful imbalances in a person’s “humors,” or bodily fluids.
The Progressive Left Promises Heaven And Delivers Hell. "Systemic Racism" Is The Perfect Excuse.
Citizens do not vote to get higher rates of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and crime. They vote for Leftists because they trust them to fulfill their promises to end these social ills through the implementation of “progressive” policies. When reality trumps their ideology and the Left inevitably fails, it needs a reason.
The SBA Claims To Have Saved More Jobs Than Ever Existed.
PPP loans – a.k.a. “Magic Beans” – are so effective that they saved more jobs than the total number of employees in at least 15 industries. Landscape architecture firms “retained 114,000 jobs — more than three times the number of people who worked in that sector in 2019,” the Washington Post reported.
Senseless And Counterproductive: Inspirational Latino Entrepreneur "Cancelled" By AOC And The Twitter Left.
It’s easy to point out how senseless and counterproductive this boycott is. Founded in 1936 by Mr. Unanue’s Spanish immigrant grandparents, the company is a living example of the American Dream. Mr. Unanue hopes his company’s story will inspire other Latino entrepreneurs. He was praised by Michelle Obama for Goya’s big role in her healthy-food initiative. None of it matters to AOC and her comrades.
A Central Issue For Our Times: Education For Children, Not Unions.
Sowell points out that for charter schools to succeed, they must please parents by educating students. Charters do not offer tenure to teachers, and therefore leaders and parents can demand high levels of performance from every teacher. Correct incentives enable charters to succeed, with teachers accountable to the parents and the school. Public schools have perverse incentives: parents often have no choice.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Facing A Mindless Assault on Capitalism, George Reisman Defends the Mother of All Poetic Justice
by Mark Shupe
Scientific analysis shows that while each individual is always economically best off earning as much money as the freedom of competition allows him to earn, people are not better off when earnings increase as the result of government policies of creating money. Absent government money creation, lower GDP signifies increased wealth and human well-being.
These People Can Not be Trusted To Make Decisions On Our Behalf.
These People incessantly display utter ignorance of – or contempt for – basic economic realities. These People have done so for generations. Much of what These People say about economic matters is the economic equivalent of voodoo, and even more of what they do on the economic front is destructive.
The New "Type 2" Socialism Is No Less Lethal To Human Beings Than The Original "Type 1".
Socialism with a capitalist veneer will be plagued with the same chaos that always afflicts plain-faced socialism. Socialism has been cataclysmically lethal wherever it has been tried, and will always be so: it will make no difference whether it emerges through nationalization or intervention.
Politicians Deliberately Feed The Beast Of Public Fear And Anxiety. It Will Take Our Nation A Long Time To Recover.
What’s happening now is a spread of anxiety disorders, paranoid delusions, and irrational fear - serious medical conditions - to the whole population. Here we see a primal fear of disease turning into mass panic. It seems almost deliberate. It is tragic. Once this starts, it could take years to repair the psychological damage.”
Millennials' Ignorance Of Economics Will Recreate The Starving Times.
As any student of human nature knows, people who do not benefit personally from their hard work tend not to work all that hard. The upshot was that more was taken than given. Imagine that.
Arsonist Discovered During the Summer of Love at Capitalists' Hillside Autonomous Zone (CHAZ)
by Mark Shupe
Only those who produce, not those who consume, can be anybody's market. I deal with life-givers, not with cannibals. Here, we trade achievements, not failures - values, not needs. We're free of each other, yet we all grow together. What great wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow.
The Constitution Has Failed America. The Solution Lies In Economics - Free-Market Capitalism - Not Politics.
When it comes to the Constitution's ability to restrain government power, the conclusion is obvious: that scrap of parchment is an obvious failure, and it is apparent that the text of the document is insufficient to prevent interpretations of the text which empower the federal government rather than limit it.
Eschew News. Embrace Frugality. Fight For Liberty And Freedom. Three Lessons From The Government Lockdowns.
To be grateful for our liberties and civilization and never think they can be taken for granted is perhaps the most valuable lesson. Many intelligent people have lost faith in the news, rediscovered frugality, and found a new way to commit themselves to the defense of liberty and human rights.
The Campus Culture Of Radical-Left Professors Is Spilling Into The Streets. We Must Reform Academia.
Political radicalism was rampant among the graduate students who became junior professors in 1965-75, instantly shifting the faculty sharply leftward. Then political pressure for female and minority faculty appointments led more young radicals to join the faculty.
Countries, Companies, Careers, Relationships and Skills Can Be Competed Out Of Existence At Any Time. Always Keep Running.
Things evolve but never actually become better adapted, because threats are always changing. Black Rhinos survived for 8 million years before being killed off by poachers. Lehman Brothers adapted and prospered for 150 years and 33 recessions before mortgage-backed securities. Poof, gone.
Gigantic Case-Counting Deception At CDC Is Vastly Inflating COVID-19 Case Numbers.
And the first paragraph would go this way: “Just when governors are trying to reopen their economies, a gigantic case-counting deception at the CDC is taking the wind out of their sails.
Why Can't Free Markets Do A Better Job Of Managing Their Own PR?
Precisely because free and innovative markets ceaselessly expand our range of opportunities, comparing the economic statistics of today with those of yesterday too often masks the improvements brought to us by markets.
The 1776 Project: Jefferson And Smith. Who Was The Greater Libertarian?
Smith wrote: “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Mel Brooks Found The Independent Virtues for Peaceful Human Progress in Comic Heroes
by Mark Shupe
Brook's transcendence is proven with the first of these movies, The Producers (1967), which was re-created into a hit Broadway musical run nearly 40 years later. For Brooks, absurdity is an art form to be molded into a weapon against the endless absurdities of collectivism, particularly its most vile form, bigotry, whose politically correct version thrives today.
The Media Really Are Lying To You. This 50-Year Old Book Explained How And Why In Great Detail.
America’s mass media aren’t reporting on mass panics and mass protests, they are creating them. They only secondarily “report” on them. Maybe COVID is the pandemic of the century. Or maybe not. The only thing we know for certain is that we can’t trust anything we hear about it on ABC Nightly “News.”
Let's Develop Alternatives To Today's Methods Of Government, So The Politically Impossible Becomes The Politically Inevitable.
We must make the building of a free society once more an adventure, a deed of courage, a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds and best entrepreneurs. If we can regain our belief in the power of ideas, the battle is not lost.
Unhappy With The State Of Your Nation? Restart From Scratch With An International Charter City.
Building an international charter city designed for mass migration from one country to another would turn private enterprise to a business of nation-making.The idea for international charter cities began more than a decade ago. Now, it is a concept that is gaining new momentum.
We've Lost Hollywood, The Media And The Universities To The Hard Left. Can We Win Them Back?
Politics turns out to be far downstream of culture. Doctrinal conservatives stormed the three branches of government handily enough, but not Hollywood, the publishing industry, academia and other trades that form our habits of mind without our knowing it.
Entrepreneurship Is The One Institution We Can Rely Upon To Maintain A Prosperous And Civil Society.
If those who protest and complain today were themselves to adopt the entrepreneurial spirit in their own lives, they would find that they could not only build better platforms for progress, but also introduce more purpose, meaning and autonomy into their own lives.
Atlas Shrugged's Strike by Active Minds Composes The Requiem for Seattle's Mindless Grungelords
by Mark Shupe
The images of woke white protesters brought to their knees across the country, apologizing to the mob for sins they did not commit, is jarring and disturbing. At the heights of elite power – in the corporate board rooms that have decided to blast us with emails touting their payment of indulgences to cement their status as allies.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: The Bourgeois Virtues of Poetic Justice Warrior Deirdre McCloskey
by Mark Shupe
Justice insists on private property honestly acquired. The justice to pay willingly for good work, to honor labor, to break down privilege, to value people for what they can do rather than who they are. To view success without envy, making capitalism work since 1776.
We'd Have Been Better Off Reading A "For Dummies" Book Than Listening To Our Stupid Politicians.
Albert Camus said: "When a war breaks out, people say "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though a war may well be 'too stupid', that doesn't prevent it lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way." Indeed it is true.
Woke Society In America Will Not Allow You To Be Conservative Any More.
Those who hold different views are “deranged.” They’re criminals. Dangerous. They shouldn’t be allowed to hold jobs where they might have some influence over others. They need to be forced into hard labor and sent to re-education camps.
The Chinese Communist Party Is Hard At Work Buying Influence In The Capitalist West And With Global Corporations.
You don't hear these influencers say, “That Communist Party of China is great—we ought to let it run the show!” Instead, they’ll say “doing business with the CCP is good ol’ free market capitalism.” But everything they say and do advances the aims of the CCP
Minority-Owned Businesses Were Hit Hardest By Government Lockdowns, While Corporate America Raked In Windfall Cash.
The lesson here is quite clear. When the government launches massive interventions into the economy, political distortions will result in costs disproportionately borne by disadvantaged groups in society and benefits that skew toward the well-connected.
It Is Class, Not Race, That Divides America.
The next time we hear a lecture about caring from a woke Yale professor, or a sermon on systematic racism from a CEO, or more Hollywood confessional video drivel, we should pause and politely ask, “But where do your children go to school? And why do you live where you live? And dine with whom you dine?”
The State Isn’t Going Crazy; It’s Going State.
The state, in the form of police violence, is asserting its power to control the population. Once you begin to see like a state, you recognize that failing to use violence to exert control would deny the nature, and in fact the very self-justification, of the enforcement power.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Shelby Steele Has Exposed the Secret Weapon of the Progressive Left
by Mark Shupe
What people on the right do, you can say in one word. They practice deference. We defer more and more to the moralism of the left. Will that get it? The left comes back with something else for us to prove our innocence. That's power in American life today.
Markets Signaled Early That COVID-19 Was A Negligible Factor. Politicians-Market Deniers- Refused To Listen.
Markets discerned that the virus wasn’t terribly lethal. If it had been, there’s no way that U.S. equity markets would have reached all-time highs in late February. Again, markets don’t wait for politicians to respond, nor do they wait for doctors and entities like the CDC.
The COVID-19 Lockdowns In The US Represent The Most Destructive And Unjustified Policy Error Since The Iraq War.
The COVID disaster and the Iraq War fit a familiar pattern. As the historian Paul Johnson has observed, most of the worst events of the 20th century were perpetrated by experts who used collective power to shape world events in a direction they believed was beneficial.
The Way Out Of The Current Crisis Lies In The Fundamental American Principle Of Individualism.
It is the individual that matters, not the collective that he or she belongs to. Only an individual can act to pursue his or her own happiness. A collective does not have feelings of happiness or anything else. Only individuals do.
How Entrepreneurs Build Beautiful Businesses.
“Aim to please” is the first principle of beautiful business. To attract people – customers - is simply a matter of understanding what will please them. This requires empathy – understanding people, their hopes and dreams and desires and preferences, and catering to them.
Francisco d'Anconia Combined the Virtues of Clark Gable and the Vices of Rhett Butler
by Mark Shupe
Like Clark Gable did everything he could to preserve Carole Lombard's sense of life and spirit after her passing, Francisco d'Anconia did the same for Dagny during her lifetime. To save her from her only sin, the acceptance of unearned guilt, he sacrificed two very high values for a higher value - help her find out for herself, as he did, that she was paying white blackmail.
Economic Collapse Has Turned Many Europeans against the EU.
We either passively accept a centralized future, where the individual becomes irrelevant, valueless, and expendable, or we reclaim control, through the principles of subsidiarity, in which decisions are made on the lowest possible level and all voices are heard.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: John Taylor Gatto Coached the Natural Individualism and Independence of His Students
by Mark Shupe
Individualism and independence are human nature. Throughout history, management has failed to manage independent units. Do not assume what anyone says is truth, especially from upper levels of authority structure. Education should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.
In This Cultural Civil War, We Must Kneel To Ask Forgiveness For Sins We Did Not Commit.
The cultural civil war that has been simmering underneath the surface is now boiling. Consider the image of Senator Tim Kaine, the former Vice Presidential nominee of his party, kneeling on the ground like he’s a hostage, as if only the penitent white man will pass.
There Are Doctrines And Practices That Make It Rational For Some To Fear The Police "Brand".
Practices such as civil asset forfeiture become attached to the police uniform in the minds of civilians. Many cops, I’m sure, would never steal a person’s life savings or confiscate their legally owned property just because the law allows them to do so—but the law does allow them to
Have We Reached A Revolutionary Situation? When The Intelligentsia Can't Bring Itself To Condemn Violence, Yes.
Gary Saul Morson says he has no special insight regarding police actions and the death of George Floyd. But he does have a provocative thesis about America’s current political moment: “To me it’s astonishingly like late 19th-, early 20th-century Russia, when basically the entire educated class felt you simply had to be against the regime or some sort of revolutionary.”
What Are Your Permanent Assumptions? Can They Service The Accelerating Pace Of Change?
Some things are always changing and can’t be known. There can also be a handful of things you have unshakable faith in – your permanent assumptions. Realizing it’s not inconsistent to have no view about the future path of some things but unwavering views about the path of others is how you stay humble without giving up.
3 Ways Lockdowns Paved The Way For These Riots.
It's true the responsibility for the riots lies primarily with the rioters. But we cannot deny that policymakers fuel the flames of conflict when they outlaw jobs and destroy people's social support systems by cutting them off from their communities.
If All White People Are Deemed To Be Guilty Of The Original Sin Of Racism, How Can There Ever Be Cleansing?
Forget sloth. The great moral error today is whiteness. To be white is to be fallen. Whiteness has become a kind of original sin, an inherited moral defect one must atone for throughout one’s life.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Donald Boudreaux's Reason Versus the ESG Investing's Intimidation
by Mark Shupe
In the face of this insanity, Boudreaux is never at a loss for words. As a principled advocate for the genius of free markets, he liberally borrows the classic ideas of the best minds in the freedom movement for his indispensable blog, Cafe Hayek. Here he quotes AIER columnist Max Gulker on the importance of market forces in solving the Wuhan virus supply-side disaster,
The Economy Would Be Better Stimulated By Wholesale Deregulation Than By Profligate Government Spending.
Congress should take a cue from President Trump and employ deregulation as an engine of economic recovery. If government simply relaxed its grip on the economy, then entrepreneurship, innovation, and investment — the drivers of growth - would flourish on their own accord.
Our Sickness Is The Health Of The State.
War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.
Individual Economics Shows Each One Of Us The Pathway To The Good Life.
Every individual plays two economic roles, as consumer and producer. In these roles, every individual is involved in transactions or exchanges. What individual economics has discovered is that, for an exchange to take place, each party to it must feel that they are benefitting. An exchange is mutually beneficial. Economics is never about exploitation, and always about shared betterment.
Politicians Panicked, Plain And Simple, And Brought On Unnecessary Unemployment And Long Term Agony.
Politicians' panic led to exponentially more unemployment and long-term agony than would have been the case had they simply told us adults to be careful. In short, let’s not let the political class hide behind a lack of knowledge and “China.” They need to pay at the ballot box.
Mandatory Masks Aren’t About Safety, They’re About Social Control.
To those looking to benefit politically from emergencies, COVID presents an opportunity to advance plans targeted to transform American freedom and the American way of life. Mandatory-masking policies provide a valuable foundation to weaponize the virus against American liberty—now and in the future.
Perceive a Contradiction? Check the Premises of Francisco d'Anconia's and Michael Bloomberg's Investors
by Mark Shupe
Michael Bloomberg and Chesapeake Energy gave the Sierra Club $105 million to wage war on coal, before the Club waged war on Chesapeake Energy, what some see as Poetic Justice. Warren Buffett and Vladimir Putin cronies also give endless millions to Big Green.
Love The Lockdown? It's Only Possible Because Of The Advances Of Capitalism And The Wealthy Investors Who Fund Technology.
Work from anywhere at any time would similarly have been a challenge. Not only was internet service much slower twenty years ago, not only was so much dial-up, most if not all online connections involved a cord. No moving around the apartment or house to work from anywhere. Assuming you had home internet, it was going to be utilized from a specific location.
Business Is As Honorable A Choice Of Profession As Is Medicine. We Need a New Generation Of Educators To Teach Business To Our Students.
Cooperative exchange is the foundation of honorable business. Honorable business thus calls on businesspeople to seek ways to benefit themselves only by benefiting others—which means, in essence, that they must put others’ needs, desires, and well-being on par with their own.
The Case For Optimism: Post COVID-19 Is The Time To De-Regulate And Get Rid Of The Special Interest Leeches Who Drain Our Economy.
Our economy in the fall of 2020 will look more like an economy emerging from a bitter war than any time since the fall of 1945. All those interest group commitments that normally would be sapping our national vitality will be up for grabs. A fresh start on regulation is actually a great tonic for economic anemia.
Will They Ever Admit The Magnitude Of Their Error And The Gravity of Its Consequences?
Four infectious disease doctors in Canada estimate that the individual rate of death from COVID-19 for people under 65 years of age is six per million people, or 0.0006 per cent – 1 in 166,666, which is “roughly equivalent to the risk of dying from a motor vehicle accident during the same time period.”
Regimes Collapse As A Result Of Stylistic Failure. Are We There Yet?
Stylistic failure happens “when the more alert members of the ruling elite are prompted to realize that the regime’s official ideology and style of government have become totally outmoded, obviously irrelevant and even ridiculous.”
The Public Health Establishment Is Desperate To Maintain Hysteria In The Populace.
The public health establishment is fighting desperately to maintain this degree of hysteria in the populace, in order to prolong its newfound power over almost every aspect of American life. Death will erupt if the lockdowns are lifted, the experts warn every few minutes on the cable news networks, to the angry approbation of the anchors.
We Permit Government To Make Us Fearful, Then Let Them Exploit Our Fear To Ratchet Up Their Power.
Our evolved physiological makeup disposes us to fear all sorts of actual and potential threats, even those that exist only in our imagination. The people who have the effrontery to rule us, who call themselves our government, understand this basic fact of human nature. They exploit it, and they cultivate it.
There Is Mounting Evidence That The Lockdowns Result In No Reduction Of COVID-19 Deaths.
The burden of proof is to show that lockdowns do work! If you’re going to essentially cancel the civil liberties of the entire population for a few weeks, you should probably have evidence that the strategy will work
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Mano Totau's Tonga Party of Six Boys Disprove the Malevolent Universe Premise of Progressivism
by Mark Shupe
The boys had set up a small food garden, hollowed out tree trunks to store rain water, a gymnasium with weights, a badminton court, chicken pens, and a permanent fire. All from handiwork, an old knife blade, and much determination. Their flame never went out.
Almost All Who Are Attracted To Politics As A Career Today Are Totalitarian-Minded Thugs.
They get into politics precisely because they want to wield this monopolistic, totalitarian power against their fellow citizens, whom they often despise and hate, publicly labeling them with such words as “deplorable” and much worse.
How Government Regulation And Failures Of Imagination Constrain The Advances That Innovation Can Bring Us.
Recent decades have seen innovation stalled or rejected in a number of technologies. Nuclear power has been unable to roll out plans for new reactor designs. Genetic modification of crops was effectively rejected by Europe. The flow of new pharmaceutical drugs has slowed to a trickle. Ride-sharing apps have been banned in many cities.
Breakthrough! Wisconsin Supreme Court Slams State Executive For Overstepping Constitutional Bounds. More please!
While many states have already loosened their lockdowns enough to avoid a similar judicial smackdown, it is important to declare unconstitutional all measures that crossed the line into tyrannical power grab so, like the unconstitutional internment of Americans during World War II, it never happens again.
The Schools Shutdown May Dent The Power Of The Government's Public School System.
Many parents who were on autopilot may suddenly be realizing that public schools—even when they were physically open—weren't that much of a bargain after all. Parents can suddenly see exactly what is being taught to their children. They can see the quality of the teachers. They can learn about the content of the educational materials. Many parents may not like what they see,
Francisco d'Anconia and Satoshi Nakamoto Assert the Moral Case and Viable System for Sound Money
by Mark Shupe
Perhaps the only way for moral justice to resume, and ignite a radical change in the dominant philosophy of American culture, is to create a new form of sound money. For a new currency to be accepted globally, it must become a reliable store of value. To achieve this, it must be very difficult and expensive to produce, and solve the portability and security issues of gold.
The Only Role Of Government Should Be To Promote The Economic Life Of The Community, Not To Save Lives.
It is the true economy and the integrity of society that the government should protect or promote. Lockdowns do the exact opposite. They fracture us, harm us, and weaken us all. If maintained long enough, they will disintegrate us.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Isabel Paterson is the Poetic Justice Warrior for the American Ideals of Property, Production and Profit
by Mark Shupe
Fear and want are subjective. Poverty is the absence of wealth. If no man should ever stand naked, who is to produce clothes? Who is to have absolute power over every person? The only condition in which no one can experience poverty, want, or fear, is rigor mortis.
Technology Improves Lives By Generating More Output From Less Labor. The Government's PPP Aims To Achieve The Opposite.
Government cannot ever play investor, lender, or anything else. And it needn’t play those roles. The only answer, as always, is to end the lockdowns as soon as possible so that businesses can resume with market-disciplined investors and the marketplace itself guiding their decisions.
What Have We Learned?
Forecasting is a delicate balance of probabilities. But people want certainty, especially when the stakes are high. The people who make forecasting models probably have less faith in their accuracy than those who read them, if only because things like confidence intervals are rarely discussed in the media.
Democratic Governors Demonstrate That Temporary Possession Of Emergency Powers Reveals The Hidden Tyrant In The Most Unremarkable Politicians.
Virtually all Democratic Governors have overreached their legitimate mandates, and few show any inclination to relinquish their newfound authority. These governors behave as if they recognize no legal boundaries.
More Than Any Other, F.A.Hayek Provides The Enlightenment For Escape From The Collectivist Intellectual Environment.
Over the years, I have again and again asked fellow believers in a free society how they managed to escape the contagion of their collectivist intellectual environment. No name has been mentioned more often as the source of enlightenment than Friedrich Hayek.s.”
The Free Market Solution Is So Obviously Better Than The Government's Solution - To COVID-19 And Everything Else.
The argument is for allowing the market to define the strategy. For example, the elderly might consider taking chloroquine preventively; it has a long history of being taken to prevent malaria in Africa. It is naïve to think that people can’t inform themselves and take appropriate actions for their own health benefits.
There's a COVID-19 War On The Human Right To Work — Led Largely By Smug Intellectuals, Billionaires, And Politicians.
Some especially out-of-touch pro-shutdown "COVID Warriors" rationalize it all by insisting that these prohibitions on earning a living are, as Dr. Anthony Fauci claims, mere inconveniences. It's easy to see why someone like Fauci might think this way. His government salary is $400,000 dollars, and there is little risk he'll be missing any mortgage payments any time soon.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Dr. Amesh Adalja Unmasks the Political Overlords Who Ignore the Medical Principle of Do No Harm.
by Mark Shupe
Dr. Adalja and his colleagues have been talking about this for years and years, writing report after report. This virus isn't going anywhere. We will be dealing with it for at least two more years. We need to find the right balance of controlling the virus and keeping the economy functioning.
We Are Forced To Endure Ignorance And Malfeasance From Those Who Govern Us - Unless We Demand Otherwise.
But as bad as the CDC is, they can only be charged with incompetence, not malfeasance. The latter indictment applies to America’s economic experts, especially those in charge of monetary policy.
What If They Gave A Pandemic And No-One Stayed Home?
The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.
Is There Any Reason To Believe The Chinese Communist Party Is Any Worse Than The Democrats And Republicans?
Suffocated people couldn’t have rebuilt Chinese cities into architectural marvels, with skyscraper density that makes Manhattan seem undeveloped. Thoroughly muzzled people wouldn’t be gorging on all things American at a rate that sets “communist” China up to soon be the largest market in the world for capitalist-produced American plenty.
This Is The Government Economy. Better Get Used To It.
Wednesday’s initial estimate for first quarter economic growth, which shrank at a 4.8% annual rate. Governments shut down private commerce in March, and the private investment and consumption that drive American prosperity fell off a cliff. And we’re only part of the way down.
NYT Economist Paul Krugman and Atlas Shrugged Bureaucrat Wesley Mouch Wreak Economic Destruction
by Mark Shupe
Every mediocrity with the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors, is the foulest of creatures. The double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and blood of the rich, whom men have come to regard as the moral ideal.
We Can't Pause The Economy As If It Were A Machine. We're More Likely To Kill It, Because It's An Organism.
The economic process is just like an organism, it must change and evolve. Consumers' variable and changing situations demand it. There are only two ways this process can go: progress or demise. To 'pause' this process is akin to killing it.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Lara Logan Does Have An Agenda - Principles
by Mark Shupe
What I can control is the work that I do. To date nobody has tried to make me do anything other than that. Nobody. I want to say this loudly and clearly to anybody who is listening. Nobody owns me. I'm not owned by the left. I'm not owned by the right.
Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No.
The correlation coefficient between deaths per million and the speed and degree of imposition of shutdowns was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem.
Politicians Did This. Their Choices To Restructure Society Have Resulted In Desperation For Many Americans.
It should be stressed that the U.S. economy was until recently the world’s most dynamic precisely because emotional puddles like Marco Rubio were not making “choices about how to structure our society.”
A Society That Fails To Encourage Entrepreneurship Is Producing Negative Human Capital.
Although there is a proliferation of goods and services brought…
How To think About Science And Scientific Studies In The Age Of Coronavirus.
Scientists are and should be skeptical, critical, and even unconvinced. They should disagree. It is how our accumulated knowledge grows and is refined. Unfortunately, society has adopted a form of unreflective and normative scientism in which science is assumed to immediately have all the answers.
Our Economic Recovery Will Be A Race Between Smith (Adam), Schumpeter (Joseph) And Stupidity (Government).
Adam Smith long ago recognized that individuals can find workarounds and ingenious ways to realize gains from trade and gains from innovation even in the presence of what he identified as hundreds of impertinent obstructions which human folly may put in the way.
Welcome To the Great Reset. Start Managing For Perpetual Change.
Automate to enhance, not replace. Help workers develop superpowers, reducing the amount of mundane work and increasing their ability to solve tomorrow’s problems. Get inclusive. The least prepared are the most vulnerable. Stop hiring your traditional profile, and prize the transferable skills of your non-traditional candidates. Psychological diversity wins.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Poetic Justice Warrior Douglas Engelbart Bootstraps Individual Production to Collective Knowledge
by Mark Shupe
The Mother of All Demos was presented by Douglas Engelbart 52 years ago in San Francisco. Its goal was to show how technology could augment the capabilities of the human mind. For the first time in the history, the windows graphic user interface, hypertext, display monitor, word processing, file linking, keyboard and mouse were on display.
Progressives Think They Have The Catastrophic Event They Were Hoping For To Destroy Free Market Capitalism.
Historian Sean Wilentz made clear the thinking of those who wear the label “progressive". They harbor the hope that one day, perhaps through some catastrophic event, American capitalism will indeed be replaced by socialism – a discredited system of public property and social ownership. For many, if not all, progressives, that “catastrophic event” is happening right now.
Work Is Happiness, So Politicians Destroy It.
The problem yet again is that politicians on all levels panicked, and having panicked, they foisted cruel, one-size-fits-all solutions on their constituents that resulted in sick-inducing job loss and bankruptcy. In the process, they robbed millions of what gives them daily meaning and happiness.
Fiscal distancing: The Separation Of State And Local Government Bureaucrats From Taxpayer Dollars.
Many states, cities and counties are about to, suddenly, run out of money. Wages won’t be paid. Services won’t be delivered. Institutions will shut down abruptly. Many state colleges may fold.
The Fed Is A Lawless Government Unto Itself - A Reverse Pawnshop Paying Top Dollar For Declining Assets.
The Fed no longer pursues any identifiable public policy other than sheer political expediency. Fed governors do not follow “rules” or targets or models. They answer to no legislature or executive, except when cravenly collaborating with both to offload consequences onto future generations.
Bring Back Laissez Faire Capitalism.
What we need is the laissez-faire spirit of the California Gold Rush to revive risk-taking, investment and as many individual opportunities as possible. The goal should be to clear all identifiable impediments to the restoration of old jobs and the creation of new jobs that didn’t exist two months ago.
Dr. Keith Smith and Partners at the Surgery Center of Oklahoma Scoff at Universal Health Care Victimhood
by Mark Shupe
Because our prices are so low, the quality light is even brighter on us. We have to be even more transparent in our quality metrics than the person who is charging ten times a much. The average hospital infection rate, nationwide, is 3 - 6%, the average surgery center is about 2.6%, but in 2012, the infection rate at SCO was zero.
Entrepreneurs Are Always Going To Outsmart Government Bureaucrats And Regulators, And So Innovation And Growth Are Assured.
Because of entrepreneurs, the resources that we need in order to live, and innovate with, will become increasingly plentiful at costs that increasingly drop. No doubt growth would be greater minus all the government waste, but politicians exist to spend. Entrepreneurs will endure them, all the while accessing the resources necessary to innovate around them.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: A World of Ideas, Principles, and Action Define Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Mark Skousen.
by Mark Shupe
Gross Output proves that business supply chain spending is double that of consumer spending, not the other way around. The reason why GDP and CPI dominate Fed policy, academic research, and financial media is because consumers vote, politicians pander, and influence peddling pays well. In soft money, of course. The flip side is that private sector production pays for everything.
Our Highly-Educated, Highly-Credentialed Elites Let Us Down Again. A Little Humility And A Little Common Sense Would Have Helped.
Practical wisdom might warn that one does not erode the Constitution because of a mysterious virus, even though Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci believe their expertise leads them to think it may be a good idea.
In This Lockdown, The Left Openly Favors More Dependency Over A Return To Work.
The left could have chosen to be the political side that would rigorously interrogate whether governments have a reasonable base of evidence on which to halt entire economies, and that would demand lighter and shorter interventions. Instead, the virus disaster has crystallized the divide that has opened between blue-collar and lower-paid workers on one side and urban progressives on the other.
It's Now Clear That China Is No Partner To The United States. A Difficult, But Necessary, Separation Lies Ahead.
By striving to “flatten” the world into a single, borderless entity in pursuit of nothing but profit and prosperity, this worldview has created huge blind spots. It failed to predict that China would build on its early advantage in sheer numbers of low-skilled workers to lock in a dominant and increasingly powerful position for itself.
How We Permit Government To Increase Its Spending And Its Power During Crises, And We Demand Nothing Back Afterwards.
Those individuals who obtain and retain positions of power in government tend to be those who are most interested in possessing and exercising such power. For each crisis, then, the likelihood is that the ideology of the holders of power prompts them, not to keep their power in check, but to expand it.
What's A Good Entrepreneur To Do? Make A Profit, Thereby Serving Society In The Best Possible Way.
A January 2020 Forbes Magazine article titled “Why Doing Good…
They’ve Shattered Society, Suspended Most Civil Liberties And Prohibited Most Activities For Future Vaccine Profits.
Rather than natural, long-lasting immunity to COVID-19, Gates and his colleagues far prefer to create a vast, hugely expensive, new system of manufacturing and selling billions of test kits, and in parallel very quickly developing and selling billions of antivirals and vaccines.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Scholar, Gentleman, Freedom Fighter and Poetic Justice Warrior Murray Rothbard's Radically Unique Sense of Life.
by Mark Shupe
Murray's 1973 book, The Libertarian Manifesto, "More than any other of his works, this book explains why Rothbard seems to grow in stature every year. His influence has vastly risen since his death, and why Rothbardianism has so many enemies on the left, right, and center."
Flatten The Curve! Who Talks Like That? Those Without Empathy Or Sympathy.
Who talks like that? Who uses terms like "flatten the curve" in conversation? Geeks. Mathematicians. Dispassionate technicians who don’t care about people. Theorists. Those with no empathy, and no sympathy.
Hard To Believe: San Francisco Quarantines The Homeless In Commandeered Luxury Hotels.
Many of these future luxury hotel guests are hardcore drug addicts. How will the city manage their drug needs in the midst of a pandemic? It’s likely, for instance, that many guests will overdose in their rooms. Others may detox, alone and in agony.
If You're Not A Libertarian After This Crack-Up, You Should Have Your Head Examined.
Having wrecked citizens' economic situations via lockdown, politicians - who bring new meaning to self-unaware - arrogated to themselves even more of the wealth always and everywhere produced in the private sector with an eye on sending checks to individuals and businesses.
It's The Bureaucratic Mindset That Is Killing Us: Over-Credentialed, Entrusted With Too Much Power, And Dangerously Incompetent.
Backed by the media, Fauci and company have contended that actions by anybody, ordinary citizens, elected officials, or physicians that do not follow proper bureaucratic procedures are illegitimate. Who the hell do they think they are? We belong to ourselves. Not to them.
Integrity is Not Negotiable. Neither is Classical Composer Alma Deutscher's Fidelity to Her Music
by Mark Shupe
What Deutscher and Roark have done is expose the smallness of their detractors. By refusing to accept the arbitrary premise that human life is repugnant, they refuse to accept as guilt, their own existence. They refuse to accept that their freedom to create masterpieces is predicated on subservience to the public good. Their integrity is non-negotiable.
Why Ayn Rand Laughs - Talented and Dedicated Workers Keep Our Polite Society Humming Along
by Mark Shupe
Now is a good time for us to imagine, what if those who work inside the cab of big rig or delivery van, ICU or urgent care clinic, warehouse or supermarket decided to go on strike? Most likely, they would be vilified by national and social media nitwits for price gouging.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Crisis and Leviathan is Why We Need Modern Poetic Justice Warriors Like Robert Higgs
by Mark Shupe
Europe's governments that made life difficult for traders tended to lose their business, and hence a tax base, to competing jurisdictions. Such losses motivated rulers to curb their predation and to allow businessmen room to maneuver.
End The Shutdown Now.
There is no conflict between humanitarian and economic concerns; in fact they are flipsides of the same coin. A poorer America will be a much less healthy America, one more vulnerable to future illness and disease.
Here are 4 Big Social Changes That Will Follow After The End Of The Coronavirus Panic.
The projections of the models are worthless at best, misleading at worst, and provide the fuel for government misbehavior. The credibility of models and modelers has taken a fatal blow.
A Politician Admits: We Were Wrong. Sorry To Have Ruined All Your Lives.
We are enacting extremely severe measures in an effort to do something. However, we have very little evidence-based data on how to guide our next steps. There is a possibility that many of our aggressive measures could be doing more harm than good,
The COVID-19 Models Are Inaccurate. So Are The Climate Change Models.
Professors of medicine at Stanford said “projections of the death toll” reaching 2 million to 4 million “could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.” They believe “epidemiological modelers haven’t adequately adapted their estimates to account for” a number of important factors.
Sweden Is Betting Against Draconian Restrictions And In Favor Of The Free Movement Of People And Goods.
It is interesting that Sweden—the one European country that did not want to shut its borders, did not close schools, and has not banned gatherings of fewer than 500 people—so far seems to be containing the spread better than other countries have.
The Biggest Threat To American Health Is A Shutdown Economy. Don't Let The Machine Stop.
Yet today, we’re living in a radically different world. We are watching our economy and stock market crater before our very eyes, which has led many to speculate that we may be in for a lengthy recession, if not a devastating depression during which businesses will be eviscerated.
Regulations Are Always A Restriction On Production. In This Crisis, We Become Newly Conscious Of The Damage They Do.
A time of crisis only makes it obvious what the results of regulations are: we see the effects, because we feel the pain. But these effects are always present--and by design--only we do not see what it is we're missing.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer Painted Every Day Subjects While Opening the Universe to Humanity
by Mark Shupe
The distinguishing characteristic of Vermeer's paintings was his portrayal of pure, radiant, austere light. It is this combination of subject and style that expose the Poetic Justice of Johannes Vermeer's sense of human consciousness, our life's efficacy, and its proper method of functioning. Reason, purpose, pride.
The Trump DOJ Should Have Filed Lawsuits To Defend Private Businesses From Being Shut Down By State And Local Governments.
The Trump administration could have at least slowed down the horrid vandalism of the economy rather than his administration vandalizing it on its own with a $1 trillion spending plan
The Decline In The Institution Of Journalism Has Dragged Us Back To The Eighteenth Century.
The crisis now confronting American journalism is a crisis of public confidence—a crisis of integrity and trust. President Trump has frequently given vent to the attitudes underlying this loss of trust. “The Fake News Media has never been so wrong or so dirty."
Government Is No Match For The Coronavirus. Thank God For The Private Sector.
The CDC does not have a solution, but it also becomes the classic blocker to progress. Labs cannot act without a lengthy approval process from CDC and the FDA. These government controls violate the principle of subsidiarity (problems should be solved at the lowest level possible).
This Is Not A Recession. This Is A Government Imposed Shutdown Of The Private Sector.
Which one of us has been asked whether we want to sacrifice our livelihood in return for a theoretically reduced probability of a COVID-19 infection? They have the models and they have the political power to order us around.
Mediocrity Worship And Conformity Are The Dominant Forces That Produced Bernie Madoff's Bankrupt Soul.
by Mark Shupe
Now able to leverage his political influence, Madoff quietly attracted thousands of wealthy investors, and inverted his pyramid. The scheme was simple, develop a reputation for delivering consistent, above-market returns by printing bogus monthly statements, and fund the gains with capital from new suckers seeking the Madoff touch.
Dear Uncle Bernie, The Wuhan Virus Ate My Retirement Account
by Mark Shupe
A no pain no gain mindset, and high intensity interval training, are probably bad decisions for most people. In personal finance, bad decisions involve maximum risk tolerance, market forecasts, faulty return projections, beating the market, and staying the course.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: China's Most Impactful Export Is Not From Wuhan; Their Finest Economist Is From Guanghua
by Mark Shupe
The West constructed the road China followed. That China walked faster does not mean that its institutions are superior. Private property, unhampered prices, enterprises, entrepreneurs, and profit are the superior institutions for economic progress.
The Government's Destruction Of The Economy, Small Businesses And Livelihoods Has No Health Concern Justification.
That’s not what those figures show. It’s definitely worse than “a bad cold,” but whether or how much worse than the flu we don’t know. It very much depends on the individual and the country. The media’s repeated and continued invocation of Chinese death rates is simply pathetic.
We Are All Social Democrats Now - But Market Capitalism Produces Better Results.
I know that social democratic policies are emotionally appealing. That’s why they’ve won. Yet objectively speaking, market capitalism should have won because market capitalism offers much better results.
Authoritarian Governments, Like Ours In The US, Take The Opportunity To Ratchet Up Levels Of Control During The Coronavirus Epidemic.
History is littered with examples of such regimes, and their track record is without exception abhorrent. It may seem counterintuitive, but the truth is that decentralized decision-making and market-style systems always beat centralization and power.
The Economic Way Of Thinking Can Help You Make Better Decisions.
Wasting countless financial and environmental resources to save a handful of turtles might marginally benefit some local ecosystem, but it comes at the much-too-steep expense for the climate that the turtle savior so ardently favors.
Political Decentralization Is A Route To Economic Prosperity, And We Need More Of It.
Today, however, we are seeing the impoverishing downside of decades of political centralization in both the US and Europe. Government regulations decreed from Brussels and Washington continue to stifle innovation and entrepreneurship. The antidote to all of this is to decentralize.
There Are Free Market Choices In Dealing With The Coronavirus Scare. The US Chose The Opposite Path.
The quick decision among most countries to deploy their military, force the lockdown of communities, pressure firms to withhold their services, and paralyze individual movement reveals that our liberties are expendable when our ruling class says they are.
The Media-Induced Coronavirus Panic Is Worse Than The Disease.
Now, with potentially thousands of businesses about to close and collectively millions of people about to be (or already) fired from their jobs, where do those business owners and their employees go to get their livelihoods back?
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Temple Grandin is the Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Who Thinks in Pictures and Lives Her Dreams
by Mark Shupe
Grandin's breakthrough, not considered possible for people living with autism at the time, was her successful integration of scientific inquiry, animal husbandry, and object-visual thinking into a highly productive career. This is the essence of the economic way, and active minds, "The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get less autistic, you keep learning, you keep learning how to behave."What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.
In Full-Blooded Socialist Systems, Access To Government Power Is The Paramount Avenue To Success.
But in full-blooded socialist systems—the Soviet Union was prototypical—like Cuba, China, and Venezuela access to government power is the paramount avenue to success. So much so, that all assets pale in importance by comparison.
Organic Agriculture Is Primitive And Inefficient. And Heavily Promoted By The Anti-Capitalist Left.
How primitive is organic agriculture? Organic strawberries yielded 61% less than conventional farms; fresh tomatoes, 61% less; tangerines, 58% less; cotton, 45% less; rice, 39% less; peanuts, 37% less.
Politicians And Government Do Not Create Any Prosperity, Despite Their Claims To The Contrary.
We’re bombarded by news reports and campaign ads boasting of how this president or that governor “created” millions of new jobs. Such claims are on a moral and intellectual par with my claim that I deserve credit for not killing pedestrians with my car.
Why Ayn Rand Laughs - The Audacity of Dopes, the Impostor Syndrome, and Super Tuesday
by Mark Shupe
The clinical term, “Impostor Syndrome,” may be confusing. Technically, it describes accomplished people who think of themselves as frauds. But there are many more among us who are the real frauds, and we all know what that personality looks like. They have accomplished nothing, yet have the audacity to force themselves on society as experts and visionaries with nothing more than monetary dope.
Great Athletes, Artists, Inventors, and Entrepreneurs Forge Principles for Aspiring to an Exultant Life
by Mark Shupe
Unlike Icarus, Simone Biles returned triumphantly to earth, stuck the landing, and inspires millions of young people with her beaming smile rooted in rigid principles. Ayn Rand can laugh because the psychopathology of critics were vetted in her novels, and her heroes live by a philosophy of moral justice that promises a graceful, terrestrial landing for everyone.
Capitalism Is The Best Form Of Philanthropy - As The Philanthropists Are Beginning To Realize.
Like venture capitalists, Rockefeller Foundation is to fund a sustainable business that will eventually build out all those electricity grids. Africa is next, where a lack of electricity helps keep 400 million in poverty.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Garry Kasparov is the Champion for Chess, AI, and Capitalism
by Mark Shupe
My loss to Deep Blue was a victory for humans. It’s hard to look at the big picture during times of disruption and rapid change. But the transfer of human labor to technology is the story of human civilization. Our standard of living gets better, we live longer and healthier lives.
Young People Can Get A Great Start On Entrepreneurship Around The Family Dinner Table.
Cultural factors are critical in developing entrepreneurship. Children who acquire a work ethic and values related to entrepreneurial success will have an advantage over their peers who have not had the same experience.
Can We Americans Remember Our Common Objective, As George Washington Advised Us To Do?
Should they not heed his call for “mutual forbearances and temporizing yieldings on all sides”, he feared for the governance of the country: “Without these I do not see how the Reins of Government are to be managed, or how the Union of the States can be much longer preserved.”
The Bigger The Government, The Greater The Corruption. Bernie Sanders Is Looking To Double It.
Sanders' policies would explode the amount of corruption in this country, no matter how many new rules he tries to impose. If there’s one thing that should be clear to clean government zealots, it’s that the bigger the government, the greater the corruption.
Hate The One Who Is Better Off than You. It's The Animating Force Of Socialism, Of Marxism, And Now Of MMT.
What MMT, the Green New Deal, QE, NIRP, and Helicopter Money have in common is that they are all collectivistic by definition, aimed against the individual and based on the crazy findings of the “Economic School of Zimbabwe” – where everyone became a trillionaire.
Bernie Sanders Ascendant. Stock Markets Plunge.
Investors, always looking into the future, had to price in the possibility of major change in Washington; major change that would have a global impact. This perhaps explains a global rout for shares. Sanders was a big surprise that investors had to price.
Why Ayn Rand Laughs - Cuba's Lost Generation Becomes the Vision for America at South Carolina Debate
by Mark Shupe
Old Havana is rich in the history of the Cuba, and distant reminders of its former sense of life. Light is finally shining on the creative and resilient people of Cuba who have spent the last 60 years faking loyalty to their socialist masters. Cuba's Lost Generation are now in their 50s, ready to show the world their resilience as did Hemingway's Lost Generation of 100 years ago.
AOC Has A Perfectly Good Economics Degree. That Explains Why She Spouts Idiotic Economics.
There's no reason to believe that a student with an economics degree is going to graduate with a deep understanding of how government intervention distorts markets or impoverishes consumers.
Certificate Of Need Laws Threaten Entrepreneurial Freedom.
Because they act as a favor to entrenched industry insiders, Competitor’s Veto laws violate the Constitution’s promise of economic liberty, that is, the right to earn a living free of irrational government interference.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Poetic Justice Warrior Coach Herb Brooks Played Chess at Lake Placid to Beat the Soviets at Hockey
by Mark Shupe
To catch up with Russian skating grace and power, he hired a figure skating coach. Instead of defending the Russian offensive system, he selected players who instinctively attack. For his players to forget college animosities, Brooks got them to hate him instead. To sacrifice themselves for team glory, he appealed to their individualist spirits.
We Ordinary Americans Are Fabulously Rich And Getting Richer. We Take It For Granted (And Sometimes Complain).
Our material prosperity, although historically unprecedented, is now so commonplace that, for us Americans in 2020, this prosperity appears to be the natural state of the world. It appears simply to exist, like rainfall happens in the tropics.
Plastic Bags Help The Environment. Banning Them Serves No Purpose, Except For Activists To Lord It Over The Rest Of Us.
Once discarded, they take up little room in landfills. They don’t release greenhouse gases like decomposing paper and cotton bags. The plastic bags’ tiny quantity of carbon goes back underground, where it can be safely sequestered from the atmosphere and ocean.
Why Ayn Rand Laughs - A Survey of Her Ideas for Human Life on Planet Earth
by Mark Shupe
"Roark is laughing at his dismissal from architecture school." Like Kira's character, he also laughing "because to him these obstacles seem small and inconsequential relative to his prospects for achievement and joy." Our country was based on a man's right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else's. A private, personal, selfish motive.
Why Ayn Rand Laughs — The Las Vegas Democratic Socialism Debate
by Mark Shupe
Democratic socialism is a popular topic in 2018 America, and the Nordic model is frequently hailed as the real-life success story to emulate. Convincing Swedes, Danes, Finns, and Norwegians of that is another story. The real Scandinavian economic success story is brilliant. It occurred in the years 1850-1950, and it was spearheaded by a Renaissance man by the name of Anders Chydenius in 1763.
Economics Can Draw The Line Beyond Which Politics Can Not Reach. We Must Cultivate Economic Literacy To Maintain The Boundary.
Economics must not be relegated to classrooms and statistical offices and must not be left to esoteric circles. It is the philosophy of human life and action and concerns everybody and everything.
A Little Bit Of Bad Can Destroy An Awful Lot Of Good. Be Sure To Root It Out Of Your Relationships And Your Business.
The problem is that “Bad is stronger” than good, so they’re trying to arm the reader with ways to counter what pushes around good. They aim to help the reader “deploy the rational brain to keep bad at bay in both private and public life,” and to even “learn how to stop fights before they can begin.”
Say's Law - Supply Constitutes Demand - Is The Principle Behind The Entrepreneurial Free Market System. Here's A 10-point Summary.
Among the many important implications of Say’s Law is that prosperity and economic expansions are supply-side phenomena, a consequence of entrepreneurs, the profit motive, saving, investment and capital accumulation.
California's Anti-Gig-Worker Law Is A Grave Moral Offense That's Turning Democrats Into Libertarians.
I’m more motivated to change this law than anything I’ve ever worked on because it has such a direct and negative impact on peoples’ lives. I believe very deeply in economic freedom, the right to pursue your calling. AB5 is a grave moral offense.
American Living Standards Have Never Been Better.
The narrative that the US economy is performing poorly and that Capitalism isn’t working for everyone is misconstrued and demonstrably false.
Now Government Is Going To Tell Us What Fashions We May And May Not Wear. (Hint: Not Prada.)
New York City's Commission on Human Rights announced a sweeping settlement with Prada over some of its designs, and the terms threaten artistic expression across the industry.
American Politicians And Administrators Of All Stripes Are Sounding More And More Like Soviet Central Planners.
Just what are conservatives so afraid of? If Huawei is truly a tool of the state as they want to believe, and as they keep telling us, then it’s a safe bet that its efforts to lead the world toward an amazing 5G-enhanced future will fall very short.
How Has The American Political Process Produced An Openly Anti-American Political Party?
Sanders declared that America is “a racist society from top to bottom,” and that the American dream is “more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela, and Argentina” than in the United States.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Voltaire's Independent Mind Revolutionized the Accepted Policies on How to Create a Harmonious Society
by Mark Shupe
Even in his final days, Voltaire relished civilization in every form. In 1778, one month prior to his death, Voltaire embraced Benjamin Franklin. Here two of history's great bon vivants, one of the Old World, one of the New, one a patriarch of Europe, one a republican from America. Voltaire, who had spanned the age of classicism right up to the revolutionary era, was the most famous man of letters in all of Europe.
The Stories We Tell Each Other Are A Far Better Forecast Of Future Economic Events Than Economists' Models And Equations.
These stories, says Shiller, shape policy. Allan Sproul, the recently retired president of the Fed at that time, lamented that the “Federal Reserve System finds itself in the position of having to validate public folly and private greed by supporting increased costs and prices”.
Individualism Offers New Solutions To Hitherto Intractable Problems, Including Homelessness.
Think of this type of local knowledge and interaction as generating countless small moments of accountability instead of a blanket rule. Clients aren’t being offered unlimited help; they’re people helped by other people who can react both socially and with actual aid in real-time.
Economists Can't Forecast The Future, But They Enjoy Pretending When It Helps Them Trash Opposing Views.
Indeed, the complexity of the coming changes in the legal, political, and international landscape is such that any responsible economist should admit that he or she doesn't know what's going to happen.
Are Psychopaths Running The World? Or The Company You Work For? Here's A Handy Checklist.
Most research has pointed towards the understanding that psychopaths are born, not made and therefore cannot be cured. By attempting to heal or help a psychopath, you might actually be strengthening their cunning abilities, as they will find a way to manipulate you
A Thoughtless Immigration Policy Leads To A Society That No Longer Believes In Its Own Traditional Values.
Flooding western democracies with non-western people has created societies without social capital; societies that share no enduring bonds other than the quest to extract as much power and possessions possible from the political process.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Poetic Justice Warrior John Bogle Mines Economic Value in Markets and Reputational Value in Minds
by Mark Shupe
As a unit of account, money is why the price mechanism is essential to efficient markets. As a medium of exchange, its how the most people are able to experience and voluntarily share their pursuit of happiness. As a store of value, John Bogle saw a marvelous opportunity for value creation - exploit the price mechanism of efficient capital markets for the benefit of small investors.
What Is Economic Repression? It's The Squeeze On Our Individual Incomes Due To Excessive Regulation and Taxation.
A rich society that is not living up to its potential due to economic repression, i.e., restrictions on economic freedom, is a tragedy, even if it is more difficult to commiserate with people in such societies compared to those forced to live (often literally) in impoverished lands.
We Are Close To Knowing Which Bits Of DNA Code Determine Which Human Traits.
Over the next decade, geneticists are on track to identify thousands of variants associated with dozens of traits. That achievement will open up the ability to score genetic potential on those traits and thereby revolutionize the social sciences.
Oops! Accounting Adjustment At The Pentagon. $35 Trillion Dollars (Yes, Trillion).
2018 US GDP is estimated at $20.5 trillion. World GDP is estimated at just about $85 trillion. The Pentagon’s accounting adjustments are not only larger than the entire US GDP, but have reached over 40 percent of world GDP estimates.
The Dark Side Of the Plant-Based Movement: It's The Worst Kind Of Large Scale Industrial Food Production.
The trend attracts the megaliths of the agricultural industry to step in, having realised that the “plant-based” lifestyle generates large profit margins, adding value to cheap raw materials (such as protein extracts, starches, and oils) through ultra-processing.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Unlocking the Secrets of the Captive Mind - Poland's Poet Laureate Czeslaw Milosz
by Mark Shupe
Milosz discovered Ketman in Islamic theology. Also known as taqiyya, it is the practice of concealment and deception in order to preserve one's faith. For the intellectuals and bourgeoise in Milosz' Soviet occupied Poland after World War II, it was a matter of life and death. As the iron curtain of Communism's hopelessness fell in post war Poland, Ketman became necessary.
Politicians Who Complain About Intellectual Property Theft Have, As Is Their Norm, No Idea What They Are Talking About.
How insulting for thinkers and policymakers to presume American ingenuity is so easy to recreate. Implicit in this notion that genius can be easily stolen is the mistaken presumption that the present mirrors the future. It doesn’t,
Global Warming Is A Non-Problem That Warrants No Action.
Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels calculated that if the United States eliminated all carbon emissions – which would not only require Americans to give up fossil fuels, but also to stop breathing (to cease exhaling carbon dioxide) – it would only reduce global warming by a negligible 0.052° C by 2050.
It's Not Surveillance Capitalism. It's Just Personalized Advertising - Something We Will All Welcome When Tech Gets It Right.
The big boys don’t share their data as much. The best solution would be to grant users ownership of their usage data, which would help improve price signals for digital services. But for now, the platforms own it—and leverage it.
Why Won't The Left Acknowledge That Capitalism Has Been The Greatest Anti-Poverty Program Ever Conceived By Mankind?
The Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank in Washington, D.C., found that, “for the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty.”
Why "One Man, One Vote" Is A Bad Way To Run A Democracy In Our Federal Republic.
We're told that if Californians and New Yorkers have an overwhelming number of votes, then that's just tough luck for everyone else. The minority must do what the majority says, even if those people have very different interests from the majorities in New York or California.
Progressives, By Applying Their Own Standards, Engage In Effective Self-Immolation.
One strange theme has been dominant since the primary debates began: the more the white frontrunners pontificated on “diversity” and deplored “white privilege,” the whiter the Democratic field seemed to grow—until there were no nonwhite candidates left.
Greta's A Human Shield To Protect The Davos Elite Alarmists From Criticism. So They Allow Her To Lecture Them.
Though only 17, Greta is an accomplished nag. She is perpetually badgering and complaining. She demanded international leaders “immediately end all fossil fuel subsidies and immediately and completely divest from fossil fuels. We want this done now.”
In Economics, What Matters Is The Level Of Production. Everything Else Is Secondary.
Looked at through the prism of the individual, the easy answer for economic growth is always to remove or reduce the tax, regulatory, monetary and tariff barriers that invariably harm individuals.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Terms of Endearment - Galt's Gulch Remembers Neil Peart
by Mark Shupe
I bought the album 2112 because I liked the cover, and it seemed to have something to do with science fiction. It just blew me away. Soon after, I looked up Ayn Rand in the library, and read Anthem. I believe that liner note introduced many of my generation to the works of Ayn Rand. The music was like no others, and the lyrics espoused thought and values.
The Frightening Road To Leftist Utopia.
If you are not allowed your values—if you must shut up if you disagree with The Party—you are not a person. You are an artifact. A thing. The leftist agenda, in a sense, denies your very humanity, by denying your human nature.
The Left Forgets What Martin Luther King Stood For.
Yesterday’s values prepared blacks to walk through the doors of opportunity opened to them through civil rights. Family, faith, character and moral behavior were all crucial to their victories. Today’s social-justice warriors trade on the currency of oppression.
The European Green Deal Is Worse Than AOC's. Hers Is Fantasy. Theirs Will Be Law.
Brussels will legislate economic constrains to target net-zero emissions by 2050, and a plan to boost the bloc’s 2030 target for emissions cuts from at least 40 percent reduction to between 50 percent and 55 percent compared to 1990 levels.
Wages And Opportunities Are Surging For Everyone In The USA. Only The Elite Snobs Fail To See It.
The New York Times reported in 2017 that retail giant Walmart had spent $2.7 billion in the two previous years “on training and raising wages for 1.2 million of its store workers.” Walmart similarly recognizes how crucial is talent acquisition and retention.
Government Bureaucrats Screw Up Our Dishwashers And Our Showerheads, To Name Just Two Ways They Worsen Our Lives.
Not everybody understands that these annoyances are the result of mandates handed down by a few unelected bureaucrats sitting in cubicles in Washington, D.C. By exposing the link, there's a better chance of creating legions of small-government advocates than via lectures about Adam Smith.
Our Natural Behavior Is Virtuous, Sympathetic and Kind, Despite What Economists Say.
Sometimes we do the right thing simply because it is the right thing. Economists tend to see the entire world as a giant cost-benefit analysis. Everything is self-interested. This is the wrong way to think about it.
The Trump Equilibrium Model Beats The Academic Economists' Models In Real Life.
This jarring disconnect between the forecasts and the real Trump economy would be comical if the policy stakes weren’t so high. What is missing from these forecasts is a “general equilibrium” analysis of tariffs, with a “dynamic scoring” of their effects, to account for the new investment tariffs induce.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: The Introverted Drummer and Philosopher of Progressive Rock - Neil Peart Was His Own Hero
by Mark Shupe
What is a master but a master student? And if that's true, then there's a responsibility on you to keep getting better and to explore avenues of your profession." Neil Peart's first master instructor was the legendary jazz drummer Gene Krupa.
Where Are The Entrepreneurs To Bring America The Honest, Trusted News Media We Need?
Having squandered the public’s trust, desperate media liberals can now only satisfy their corporate advertisers’ demand for eyeballs with sensationalized hype. Liberal journalists can’t just report the news now, because—like the boy who cried wolf—no one really believes them.
It's Unequal! Lower Paid Workers' Wages Are Growing Fastest In The Current Employment Surge.
During the Trump Presidency, wages for the bottom 10% of earners over age 25 rose an average 5.9% annually compared to 2.4% during Barack Obama’s second term, according to the latest demographic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It's Not Luck: Recognizing And Acting On Opportunity Is The Way To Get Ahead In America.
The likelihood that someone would only ever experience either good or bad luck during their lifetime is very low. Over many years and decades, in most cases, good and bad luck should balance each other out.
Private Giving Achieves What Government Can’t—Which Is Why Progressives Hate It.
One reason many progressives are so hostile to private giving is that government and charity are often competitors. They function in many of the same areas and sometimes attack the same problems, albeit in different ways.
Climate Hysteria Is A Backdoor For Imposing Personal Interests On The Public.
Professor Kian Goh, who is teaching young minds vulnerable to radical thinking, is also critical of property rights in general. He prefers “government-planned and -built public housing,” as well as “new or reconstituted forms of cooperative housing.”
Regulators Are Regulators Because They're Not Smart Enough To Get A Job At A Corporation That Hires The Best Talent.
Regulators are those who mostly didn't rate acceptance at elite institutions, plus it cannot be stressed enough that for the most part those who presume to regulate are the ones who couldn’t get jobs in the industries regulated.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: The Standard Bearer For The Spirit of American Conservatism And Ideas Of Civilization - Gertrude Himmelfarb
by Mark Shupe
Working class families readily put these values into practice and improved their lives and their communities. The evidence is overwhelming - quality of life rose, fertility rates and population increased, illegitimacy and crime rates fell, and sanitation and health care systems improved. Coincidental to this was the emergence of an impressive network of privately organized social safety nets for people who were unable help themselves.
To Achieve Change, Take Tiny Steps Towards New Habits. And Celebrate Disproportionately.
The alarming levels of obesity, sleeplessness and stress seen in the world—and in the Stanford University behavior-research lab—show a painful gap between the changes people want and what they actually do.
Our Sheltered And Blinkered Elite Are Prone To Misleading Groupthink.
We forget that knowledge can be found at all ages, and in all places. And ethics has nothing to do with degrees or pedigrees.
Today's Technology Enables Entrepreneurs To Reach So Many More People With Their Brilliant Innovations. That's Why There Are Billionaires.
A communications revolution that minted mere billionaires made it possible for computer owners to purchase goods and services on Amazon from around the world. This led to arguably the world first centibillionaire in Bezos.
The Tools For Defending Ourselves In The Surveillance Economy Are Beginning To Emerge, Albeit Slowly.
When we're sick, we go to a doctor. To keep our computers safe, we install anti-virus software. We rely on professionals to help out with lots of complex aspects of modern life: Why not have professionals help with data, too? Call them your privacy co-pilot.
Cognitive Bias: Why Being Smart Is No Protection Against Dumb Ideas.
We have an implicit [but wrong] assumption that intelligence and rationality go together—or else why would we be so surprised when smart people do foolish things?
Corporatism Is An Economic And Social Scourge. Entrepreneurs Are Our Defense.
Corporations become big because they serve the needs of consumers and customers well. It’s what they do after they become big that causes economic problems. It’s the attitude and behavior of big corporations that constitute the problem, not their size per se.
There's No Such Thing As The People Or The Will Of The People.
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem can be summarized well-enough: he proved that a collection of people has no “will” in the way that we understand each individual person to have a will.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Seven Hundred Forty Five Years of Poetic Justice Warriors in Review - A Brief Look at 2019
by Mark Shupe
Because the Manifesto features twelve behaviors and philosophical principles, twelve individuals have been selected who are exponents for the value system that drives their heightened sense of reality
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: She Dropped the Bombshell of Spread Spectrum Technology for Wireless Communication - Hedwig Kiesler
by Mark Shupe
Kiesler's secret communication system allowed multiple signals to share the same spectrum without interference. Thanks to deregulation and the resulting invention of the microchip, it is now fundamental to cell phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and the new sharing economy of companies like Uber, Airbnb, and thousands of media outlets.
A Newly Independent Britain Should Follow The Singapore Model To Become Rich.
Singapore's history shows that anticapitalist hostilities are by no means insurmountable. Singapore’s adherence to a liberal business model reflects the instinctive realization that a small island cannot afford the luxury of self-sufficiency.
The 2% Inflation That Central Banks Target Is Simply A Wealth Redistribution Scam.
Asset price inflation destroys the purchasing power of money in the same way that price inflation of consumer goods does. If stock prices rise from, say, $100 to $200, the purchasing power of the money unit would drop by 50 percent. The owner of the stock becomes richer, while the holder of dollars become poorer.
What Young People Want From Politicians Are Proposals To Drive The Private Economy, Not Schemes For More Government Spending.
The promise of more public spending is no longer an animating political philosophy for most people. It’s just there, a dull humming noise. Britain proved that. America, while it watches the Pelosi impeachment revels, may follow.
A Walmart In The Neighborhood Does More For Affordable Food Distribution Than Food Baskets From Charity.
The proposition "doing good while doing well" refers to the process by which entrepreneurs earn their wealth. It’s the benefit the community realizes as this wealth is accrued. To paraphrase Adam Smith, people enjoy the benefits of meat, beer, and bread as a result of their respective producers’ efforts to earn a profit.
The Class Warriors Are Wrong. Skyrocketing Inequality Is A Myth.
Contrary to progressive belief, America is not divided into rigid economic strata. The incomes of the wealthy often decline, while many taxpayers go from being poor at one point to not-poor at another.
Environmentalist Fanatics Believe In The Opposite Of What Economically Aspirational People Want.
They point accusing fingers at non-recyclers. In environmentalists’ eyes, those who unquestioningly disregard the value of one resource (time) in order to spend it on the conservation of other resources (wood, plastic and glass) are righteous while those of us who value and conserve time are sinners.
There Is Inflation Everywhere Government Gets Involved: Housing, Healthcare, Education.
The CPI might tell us that inflation is "subdued," or "muted," but there are plenty of people whose budgets are taking big hits anyway. Home prices are a big part of most households' monthly expenses and healthcare spending and higher education cause big increases in the cost of living.
Professor Arthur Diamond Praises The Creativity In Creative Destruction, And Teaches Us To Welcome The Destruction, Too.
Arthur Diamond helps us understand where new ideas come from, how they diffuse, how they improve people's lives and importantly, how they can be throttled by regulators, special interests, and even cultural commentators.
Here Are The Top Ten Economic Trends Of Our Time - And They're All Bad For Government.
Across the world, whole peoples have shifted their own view of government from trust to disgust. This has profound implications for the status of any ideology that longs for central control and command. It also raises the question: if not government, then what?
Economic Growth Is Good For Everyone. Why Can't The Anti-Capitalist Left Recognize This Simple Fact?
Through history, economic growth has alleviated human misery, improved human happiness and opportunity, and lengthened human lives. Wealthier societies are more stable, offer better living standards, produce better medicines, and ensure greater autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun.
Minimum Wage Legislation Cost This Foodservice Worker A Job, And Threatens To Destroy An Entire Industry.
I’ve lived in this city for almost 20 years, supporting my family thanks to the full-service-restaurant industry. Today I’m struggling because of a policy meant to help me. I’m proudly progressive in my politics, but my experience shows that progressives should reconsider minimum-wage laws that hurt the very workers they’re trying to protect.
Is This The End Of The Gig Economy In California?
AB 5 will also enable powerful labor unions to influence and coerce the millions of individuals it will deem as new employees. People have the right and freedom to join unions, but the government should not enact public policy that essentially increases the number of people who will potentially pay union dues.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: The Modern Poetic Justice Warrior's Relentless Defense Of The Soul Of Civilization - Alan Charles Kors
by Mark Shupe
Intellectuals continue to disavow the connection between socialism in theory and the unimaginably evil communist regimes in practice. At the same time, they loudly decry the fault of our society. One that in practice, has raised human beings to a dignified free life protected as never before from hopelessness before nature and men.
The Politicians Who Rig Our System Learn How To Make "The System Is Rigged" Trend On Social Media.
Nobel Laureate Robert J. Shiller explains why this may be the case in his new book, “Narrative Economics.” As Shiller points out, when a story is repeated enough, the viral message may be accepted as conventional wisdom, more like an article of belief than a matter of reason
The World's Have Nots Flock To America To Participate In Our Capitalism For The Common Good.
Of course, Rubio’s droolings about China likely explain why he believes what he does about capitalism. In each instance, the Senator believes capitalism can be planned by those like him who have no experience with it. Sorry, but capitalism is far too glorious for politicians to engineer.
Economics For Individuals:An Old Banana As Artwork Explains The Economic Concept Of Subjective Value.
Value is a judgment economizing men make about the importance of the goods at their disposal for the maintenance of their lives and well-being. Hence value does not exist outside the consciousness of men.
Free Market Capitalism Is Morally Superior To All Other Economic Systems.
In the free market society - and only there - people are morally and legally viewed as sovereign individuals possessing rights to their life, liberty, and honestly acquired property, who may not be coerced.
Decivilization: Negative Interest Rates Mean It Makes No Sense Any Longer To Produce And Save.
The outcome of this policy is that time becomes worthless. As one’s hard-earned money, set aside for a rainy day or for their children’s education, instead of appreciating, instead diminishes day by day, it does not make sense any longer to produce and to save.
Working In Amazon's Fulfillment Center Is Quite Fulfilling, And Can Open The Gate To A Better Life.
Peak Season has been made out to be like a scene out of Ben-Hur when Charlton Heston and his fellow prisoners are rowing that galley to the beat of a drum. Such comparisons are ludicrous. Obviously we were driven to give nothing less than our best performance, but management went out their way to make the experience a cheerful one.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: The Inspiring Teacher and Leader With The Incredible Power to Heal Broken Spirits - Marva Collins
by Mark Shupe
The fourth grade students interviewed in the original 1979 60 Minutes feature were asked who their favorite authors were. Some of the answers were Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Chaucer, or Kipling. One learning method was Socratic dialogue, and years later Collins explained that since they're great at memorizing rap lyrics, Plato becomes easy. Many went on to wonderful careers in law, medicine, business, and education.
The Next Stupid Move Of Our Political Class Will Be To Tell Us We Must Become More Like China.
The next major event that will be used to further centralize power and escalate domestic authoritarianism will center around U.S.-China tensions. Politicians will try to sell you on the monstrous idea that we must become more like China to defeat China.
Anti-Capitalism Is Trendy But It Totally Ignores The Data Regarding Prosperity And Exit From Poverty As A Result Of Capitalism.
The average income in the most capitalist countries is six times higher, in real terms, than the average income in the least capitalist economies. More than 27 percent of people in the most socialist economies live in extreme poverty but that number is just 1.8 percent in freest economies.
Adhering To The Law Is No Longer Obligatory For The Democrats' Favored Groups.
The creation of an implied multi-tier justice system expressly violates our fundamental value of the law applying equally to citizens from all walks of life and most importantly results in the increasingly intolerable and dangerous conditions existing on the streets.
America Is Hooked On Transferism. It's Not Quite Socialism, But It's Definitely Not Capitalism.
Politicians like Transferism: a system in which one group of people forces a second group to pay for things that the people believe they, or some third group, should have. Transferism is the forced redistribution of what’s produced.
The Interagency Is An Unauthorized Body Making Decisions and Allocating Tax Dollars Without Executive, Legislative Or Judicial Approval.
What is the interagency, and why should its views guide the conduct of American diplomatic and national-security professionals? The Constitution grants the president the power to set defense and diplomatic policy. Where did this interagency come from?
There Is An Active, Energetic and Clear-Eyed Populist Patriotism That Rejects Exploitative Elites Of Both Parties.
Elite liberals too often talk about patriotism as if it’s a set of blinders preventing Americans from recognizing their country’s flaws. Likewise, conservative elites dismiss patriotism as a trifle to be set aside when there are higher investment returns to chase or markets to open.
Government Intervention To Address So-Called Market Failures is Largely Superstition.
There’s no good reason to think that estimates made of social costs by even well-intentioned and sparklingly brilliant government officials will be close enough to accurate to trust that a government empowered to correct market failures will, on the whole, raise social welfare.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: The Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Who Brings Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek to Life - Russ Roberts
by Mark Shupe
Almost no one understands or appreciates the spontaneous order and emergent nature of complex economic systems. At the same time, government economic planners and progressive public policy think tanks deny it exists. It would make them irrelevant. Fortunately for enlightened civilization, Russ Roberts is hastening their irrelevance.
Justice And Social Justice Have Nothing In Common. They Are Opposites.
The concept of social justice is rooted in the Marxist theory of man-made exploitation. Advocates of social justice argue that social inequalities are based upon the fact that those who have access to resources, do so because they have deprived the have-nots of these same opportunities.
3 Lessons In Protecting Us From Politicians Via The Most Popular Economics Book Ever Written.
Given that Economics in One Lesson focused on seeing through the logical problems with political proposals that ignore economic realities, it could also have been titled One Lesson in Protecting us from Politicians.
The End Looks Near For Iran’s Ayatollah Regime.
The root cause of the uprising is 40 years of repressive rule. The clerics’ plundering of the wealth and dignity of a nation, astronomical corruption, denial of basic freedoms, and suppression of women are over the top.
There Is No Such Thing As Society, And The Ultimate Values Are The Values Of Individuals.
The ultimate values are the values of the individuals who form the society; there are no superindividual values or ends. Nations may be convenient administrative units; nationalism is an alien creed.
When Politicians Create Divisions, The Assimilated Culture Of America Itself Is Called Into Question.
The dominant American view until the late 20th century was that “we welcome all kinds of people but we expect them to assimilate into some range of standard values, behaviors, aspirations, ambitions.” Now, diversity itself has become the paramount value.
20 Questions About The Illogical Beliefs Of Progressives About Economics And Politics.
Why do so many American Progressives wish to put even larger swathes of our lives under political control given their belief that politics is so very easily corrupted by oligarchs and big-money donors?
The Noble Idea Of "The West" Has Been Destroyed By Democracy. Time To Look East.
Western governments could have chosen to leave people alone, they did not. They could have chosen sound money, they chose political fiat. They could have chosen peace, they chose entanglements.
It's A Dangerous Omen That America Is Worrying Less About The Future Than It Used To.
The overall results suggest that the United States became less future-oriented beginning around 1970. This change has persisted.
More On The Deep State: The Headless Fourth Branch of Government.
Few regular people possess the resources necessary to mount a defense against the Justice Department's gargantuan budgets and legions of attorneys that can be aimed at any American who becomes annoying to these federal law enforcement bureaucrats and their friends.
Clean Energy? Solar Panels Produce Tons Of (Very) Toxic Waste.
There are some chemicals used in the manufacturing process to prepare silicon and make the wafers for monocrystalline and polycrystalline panels. One of the most toxic chemicals created as a byproduct of this process is silicon tetrachloride.
Democrats' 2020 Candidates Portray America As Racist, Greedy And Corrupt - The Worst Country In The World.
It’s as if Travis Bickle, the violently disturbed Robert DeNiro character in “Taxi Driver,” had it right when he told fictional presidential candidate Sen. Charles Palantine it was “like an open sewer. It’s full of filth and scum,” and the next president “should flush it down the toilet.”
Why Are We Supposed To Cry With And For Out-Of-The -Loop Ambassadors And Jobless Assistant Deputy Undersecretaries?
What we are watching now is the slow burn of our democracy, not at the hands of Donald Trump, but by the Left and its eager servants in the swamp.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: Rose Wilder Lane Blesses The Thanksgiving Season With The Ultimate Purpose For Celebration - Freedom.
by Mark Shupe
In one century, human energy has created an entirely dynamic world, constantly changing under the drive of terrific, incalculable energy. What explains this? What explains the effectiveness of any kind of energy ? Nothing but the existence of conditions which permit that energy to operate naturally. Only the protection of men's rights can keep their natural freedom operating on this earth.
The Antifederalists Predicted The Results Of The Constitution With Eerie Accuracy.
This group defended states’ rights—the very essence of federalism—against the Federalists, who would have been more accurately described as Nationalists. Nonetheless, what they predicted would be the results of the Constitution turned out to be true in most every respect.
Donald Trump Versus The Deep State Versus The Rest Of Us.
In the mind of this mid-level bureaucrat, American foreign policy is set not by elected officials in Washington DC, but by the bureaucrats themselves.
The Deep State Started In 1883, And Has Become Progressively More Dangerous Every Year Since Then.
The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act (1883) created a salaried class of government employees. Three flaws in the design of the reforms would set the stage for the next phase of evolution in the American Deep State.
Don't Try To Change The World. A Better Strategy Is To Go Home And Hug Your Kids.
The only way is through a deeper appreciation and love for family, church, community, and nationality. For too long, these centers of civic life that strengthen the individual and diminish the state have been neglected.
The Real Reason Nobody Takes Environmental Activists Seriously.
What bothers the opponents of environmental activism is not the environmentally conscious goals or even facts presented, but the activists’ blatant hypocrisy and aura of sanctimonious religiosity.
A Bleak Future? Young Americans Should Be Worrying About Entitlement Liabilities Rather Than Climate Change.
For Social Security and Medicare to stay as they are, the payroll tax rate may have to rise to 25 percent of wages over the next decade. And a payroll tax rate of 40 percent is not unlikely by the middle of the twenty-first century.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: The Poetic Justice Warrior Who Eternalized the Great Terror Behind the Berlin Wall - Anna Akhmatova
by Mark Shupe
For many people in the United States, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a ho-hum events. For America's intelligentsia and their ignorati, Reagan was still a doofus B movie actor and socialism was the dominant philosophy of America's national media and universities. Josef Stalin's Great Terror was not taught in schools, and neither was Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.
Eastern Europe Sees Liberal Orthodoxy As Just As Tyrannical As Communist Orthodoxy, Charts Its Own Path.
The definition of liberalism changed within the West itself, expanding to include values such as ethnic diversity and LGBT rights after politicians embraced what he calls left-liberal democracy. Liberalism no longer solves the people's problems.
Climate Activist Mayor Gets On The Wrong Side Of The City's Own Workers.
“When you hurt the advancement of a region and their ability to feed their family and have a better life, that’s when it becomes an issue for us,” said Darrin Kelly, the city firefighter who heads the Allegheny County Labor Council.
Africa's Socialism Is Keeping It Poor.
What Africans have failed to grasp about capitalism and the free market is that, it is not a system intrinsic to Western culture. It is a system intrinsic to human nature regardless of race, ethnicity, or the local culture.
Urban Democrats Are Driving Jobs And Prosperity Out Of American Cities.
The primary losers in this formula are middle-class workers. Between the loss of jobs and revenue, these states and cities press even harder on millions of middle-income taxpayers to make up the difference.
A Little Bit Of Knowledge Sharing Goes A Long Way: Let's Learn From Switzerland How To Administer A Healthcare System.
Do we have a national auto insurance plan? A system paid for with taxes so that everyone gets covered? High insurance taxes for rich people and no tax at all for the poor? No.
The Sharing Economy Increases Human Wealth While Decreasing GDP. Let's Try To Measure The Right Things.
The idea that price-based “standards of living” have been stagnating is just misguided. New measures of GDP would help, but the larger problem is that any purely market-focused metric will miss the ability, and in fact the desire, of human beings to cooperate in groups.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: The Literary Poetic Justice Warrior Fighting Hollywood's Progressive Bigotry on Broadway - Atticus Finch
by Mark Shupe
Harper Lee's masterpiece was an enlightening study of human nature. Her characterization of Finch illustrated the classical liberal values of self-reliance, compassion, tolerance, justice, and most of all, the essential role of a loving, dedicated father in the life of a child. Yet, there were very few examples of fatherly affection or life lessons in the play - the children were played by young adults.
Splinternet: The Balkanization Of The Internet.
Another idea is to develop “club”- or “zone”-based approaches to running the internet—discrete, interconnecting blocs whose nation-members would make commitments to liberal principles like free trade, privacy and freedom of expression.
6 Charts Show The Overwhelming, Never-Ending Growth Of Big Government.
By what measure are governments getting smaller, weaker, and less involved in the daily lives of human beings? In this country, at least, this case certainly can't be made by consulting the data on government taxation and spending.
The World’s Least-Free Countries Reveal Just How Much ‘Socialism Sucks’.
Socialist tyrants were the greatest mass murderers in history, and the young must be apprised of this melancholy fact. “Stalin ranks just behind Mao as history’s second greatest mass murderer, with Hitler coming in third—all committed socialists of one sort or another.”
California’s Disastrous State Illustrates The Limits Of Progressivism.
California is nearing the logical limits of progressive adventurism in policy and politics. Californians flip their switches unsure of whether the lights will go on. Many are careful about what they say, terrified of progressive thought police who seem more worried about critics than criminals.
Two Bernies. One Creates Value and Jobs and Improves Lives. The Other Destroys.
Home Depot currently employs more than 400,000. Since its inception, it has created millions of jobs. Home Depot also provided health care insurance for millions of families whose husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers have worked for the company. Home Depot's vendors, many of them small businesses that have increased in value, have also created jobs as they have grown along with the chain.
What Exactly Is Political Economy? It's Nothing But Three Big Myths (Busted Here).
Another Big Myth: because all that is good in our social and economic relations is made possible by the state, each of us is deeply and forever in debt to the state. The state is supposed to be owed by each of us everlasting thanks and offerings.
Poetic Justice Warrior Spotlight: The Modern Poetic Justice Warrior Who Rejects Hollywood's Totalitarian Lovefest - Clint Eastwood
by Mark Shupe
Like a great artist integrates abstract concepts into a philosophical theme, Clint Eastwood delivered a complex assortment of characters, each wrestling with conflicting moral choices, and all operating in an environment of fear. For the moviegoer, it challenges everything we thought we knew about the heroes and villains of the Wild West.
Is Democracy Doomed To Die? Unfortunately, That's Just Wishful Thinking.
Moral and social consensus is breaking down in Western countries; and to whatever extent it is still present, it is being increasingly imposed from above. Present trends toward intrusive bureaucratic government providing “democratic” socialization will not likely be reversed in the near future.
Universities Breed Anger, Ignorance And Ingratitude.
Campus activism has replaced the old university creed of disinterested inquiry. Students are starting to resemble military recruits in boot camp, prepping to become hardened social-justice warriors on the frontlines of America’s new wars over climate change, gun control, abortion, and identity politics