Net Zero Will Lead to the End of Modern Civilisation, Says Top Scientist thumbnail

Net Zero Will Lead to the End of Modern Civilisation, Says Top Scientist

By The Editors

Devastating consequences

A damning indictment of the Net Zero political project has been made by one of the world’s leading nuclear physicists.

In a recently published science paper, Dr. Wallace Manheimer said it would be the end of modern civilisation. Writing about wind and solar power he argued it would be especially tragic “when not only will this new infrastructure fail, but will cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment, and be entirely unnecessary”. The stakes, he added, “are enormous”.

Dr. Manheimer holds a physics PhD from MIT and has had a 50-year career in nuclear research, including work at the Plasma Physics Division at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. He has published over 150 science papers. In his view, there is “certainly no scientific basis” for expecting a climate crisis from too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the next century or so. He argues that there is no reason why civilisation cannot advance using both fossil fuel power and nuclear power, gradually shifting to more nuclear power.

There is of course a growing body of opinion that points out that the Emperor has no clothes when it comes to all the fashionable green technologies. Electric cars, wind and solar power, hydrogen, battery storage, heat pumps – all have massive disadvantages, and are incapable of replacing existing systems without devastating consequences.

Manheimer points out that before fossil fuel became widely used, energy was provided by people and animals. Because so little energy was produced, “civilisation was a thin veneer atop a vast mountain of human squalor and misery, a veneer maintained by such institutions as slavery, colonialism and tyranny”.

This argument hints at why so many rich, virtue-signalling celebrities argue not just for Net Zero but ‘Real’ Zero, with the banning of all fossil fuel use. King Charles said in 2009 that the age of consumerism and convenience was over, although the multi-mansion owning monarch presumably doesn’t think such desperate restrictions apply to himself. Manheimer notes that fossil fuel has extended the benefits of civilisation to billions, but its job is not yet complete. “To spread the benefits of modern civilisation to the entire human family would require much more energy, as well as newer sources,” he adds.

The author notes that the emphasis on a false climate crisis is becoming a “tragedy for modern civilisation”, which depends on reliable, affordable and environmentally viable energy. “The windmills, solar panels and backup batteries have none of these qualities,” he states. This falsehood has been pushed by what has been termed a climate industrial complex, comprising some scientists, most media, industrialists and legislators. Furthermore, he continues, this grouping has “somehow” managed to convince many that CO2 in the atmosphere, a gas necessary for life on Earth, one which we exhale with every breath, is an environmental poison…..

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Continue reading this article at Summit News.

This is How Much the Federal Government Makes from Gun Sales in Arizona thumbnail

This is How Much the Federal Government Makes from Gun Sales in Arizona

By Samual Stebbins

America’s gun industry is booming. Over 11.3 million firearms were manufactured in the United States in 2020, more than double the 5.6 million produced in 2010, and nearly triple the 3.9 million guns manufactured in 2000, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Surging demand for firearms has been a boon not only for the balance sheets of American gun makers, but also government coffers.

Between sporting arms and ammunition companies and supporting sectors, the American firearm industry generated $70.5 billion in economic output in 2021, according to the advocacy group The Firearm Industry Trade Association. The federal government also levied $4.6 billion in business taxes from the gun industry in 2021, up 84% from a decade earlier. The firearm industry in some states accounts for a far larger share of government firearm tax revenue than others.

The federal government collected $180.2 million in business tax revenue from the firearm industry in Arizona in 2021. Adjusting for population, this comes out to about $25 per state resident, the 10th highest among the 50 states.

Overall, Arizona’s firearm and ammunition industry, including supporting sectors, employed 11,933 people in 2021. The industry generated $2.3 billion in total economic output, or $320 per capita, the 13th highest per capita figure among states.

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This article was published by The Center Square – Arizona and is reproduced with permission.

Kari Lake: The Fight Continues thumbnail

Kari Lake: The Fight Continues

By Neland Nobel

Editors Note: The Prickly Pear presents two opposing opinions and sides about the outcome of the 2022 Arizona Governor’s race. It is the belief of this publication that multiple factors were at play in the outcome of the election. The voters should always determine the candidates in their respective party via the primary process and the candidates selected by voters are the choice to be made in the general election by the voters. The fundamental question that should be asked is what can be done to prevent election debacles in the future.

That said, those responsible for the conduct of the election in Maricopa County – the County Recorder, the County Supervisors, and the Secretary of State were incompetent, dishonest, corrupt or a combination of all three. The Maricopa County 2022 election was severely compromised regardless of how and appropriately became the laughing stock of the nation for election integrity. We are concerned on all of these levels and very concerned about the integrity of the coming 2024 election given this history and the many questions the public are asking.

Obviously election integrity must be addressed and fixed with the appropriate legislative actions. Citizens should be aroused, angry and insistent on repair of election mechanics and replacement of those managing our elections. As referred to below, the GOP Chair, Kelli Ward, got involved inappropriately by supporting Kari Lake during the primary race. The GOP Chairs at the state and national levels have no business in doing this – it is up to the voters to select their candidate for the November general election, not the Chair. Kelli Ward should step down or be defeated in the coming election for state GOP Chair if only for this reason.

Regardless of how one feels about Kari Lake, she certainly is a fighter. Her battle in court, if she is heard, could further explain the odd outcomes in recent elections. Hopefully, this will lead to changes in both law and procedures in Maricopa County.

Some contend she is a delusional loser, who just won’t admit defeat. She lost because she alienated Republican voters. A good example of that view is expressed in the first video presented. It is true she did get fewer votes than some other Republican candidates.

It is entirely possible that a split between McCain and MAGA forces within the party cost Lake votes. It is also possible, and in fact probable, that the primary battle between Lake and Robson, aggravated by the bias during the primary by GOP Chair Kelli Ward, also was a factor.

But as the second interview suggests, the loss could also be attributed to electoral machinery that malfunctioned on a grand scale, either on purpose or because of ineptitude. We think Lake’s lawyer makes a compelling case. The second video gives the essence of the legal arguments that are being presented to the courts and they are substantial.

There is a third possible view that says choices one and two are not mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible that internal party rifts, or Lake herself, cost Republican votes. Yet whatever that difference was could easily have been made up by Republican voters and independents who either could not wait at the polls and did not vote or those who voted but had their ballots lost or miscounted.  Technical issues affected far more possible votes than the margin of loss because of disaffected Republicans.

In Arizona, the imperfections in the electoral system in Maricopa County in particular are obvious. It has either been a case of malevolence or extreme incompetence, or possibly both. In either case, continued controversial elections undermine the faith voters have in the process. The video below gives the essence of the legal arguments that are being presented to the courts and they are substantial.

However, we let the viewer draw his or her own conclusions.

Pfizer Exec Caught Saying They Plan on ‘Mutating’ Covid to Increase Infectiousness thumbnail

Pfizer Exec Caught Saying They Plan on ‘Mutating’ Covid to Increase Infectiousness

By Catherine Salgado

Last night, Project Veritas released a video that shook the internet. In it, a Pfizer whistleblower caught a Pfizer executive on camera saying that their company was “mutating” the Covid-19 virus to increase infectiousness. Chalk up another one for the “conspiracy theorists.”

Another Pfizer executive previously admitted that the company had not tested its COVID-19 vaccine for effectiveness. It is not only the opposite of effective, but it also causes death and other serious side effects in many people.

In the above video, Jordan Tristan Walker, Pfizer Director of Research and Development – Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning (try saying that three times fast) says that Pfizer wants to mutate the virus to “preemptively develop new vaccines.” That does raise “a risk of like. . .no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f—king viruses.” The experiments with mutating viruses would be performed on live monkeys, the Pfizer executive said. Walker tried to claim that “Directed Evolution” is different from gain-of-function research, even though they sound like the same process. That research is already “ongoing.”

Walker even confessed, “It’s pretty good for the industry to be honest. It’s bad for everyone else in America.” Government regulators who want to work for Pfizer later will be easier on Pfizer’s products, he explained. That’s true for the military, for pharma, across multiple industries, he said. Below are more quotes from Walker (notice how he discusses the financial return to Pfizer on its dangerous and ineffective Covid vaccines):

“You have to be very controlled to make sure that this virus [COVID] that you mutate doesn’t create something that just goes everywhere. Which, I suspect, is the way that the virus started in Wuhan. . .From what I’ve heard is they [Pfizer scientists] are optimizing it [COVID mutation process], but they’re going slow because everyone is very cautious. . .

You’re not supposed to do Gain-of-Function research with viruses. Regularly not. We can do these selected structure mutations to make them more potent. There is research ongoing about that. I don’t know how that is going to work. There better not be any more outbreaks because Jesus Christ. . .Part of what they [Pfizer scientists] want to do is, to some extent, to try to figure out, you know, how there are all these new strains and variants that just pop up. So, it’s like trying to catch them before they pop up and we can develop a vaccine prophylactically, like, for new variants. So, that’s why they like, do it controlled in a lab, where they say this is a new epitope, and so if it comes out later on in the public, we already have a vaccine working.

Veritas Journalist:Oh my God. That’s perfect. Isn’t that the best business model though? Just control nature before nature even happens itself? Right?

Walker: Yeah. If it works. . .Because some of the times there are mutations that pop up that we are not prepared for. Like with Delta and Omicron. And things like that. Who knows? Either way, it’s going to be a cash cow. COVID is going to be a cash cow for us for a while going forward. Like obviously. . .it’d be perfect.”

Veritas previously verified evidence that Anthony Fauci lied under oath, because the US did fund gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in different locations, including Wuhan.

Walker perfectly stated the reason Pfizer will continue to produce and try to force its ineffective and dangerous vaccines on people: “COVID is going to be a cash cow for us for a while going forward.” Your life for their bonus.

*****
This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

British ‘Single-Payer’ Health Care Program Is Cratering. That Should Be Wake-Up Call for US Liberals. thumbnail

British ‘Single-Payer’ Health Care Program Is Cratering. That Should Be Wake-Up Call for US Liberals.

By Robert Moffit

Rishi Sunak, the United Kingdom’s new prime minister, refuses to answer a simple question.

He was asked three times whether he received private medical care or relied upon the National Health Service, the British version of “single-payer” government-run national health insurance.

Sunak dismissed the question as “not really relevant.” But it is.

The prime minister is the head of the British government and is ultimately responsible for the National Health Service, the government agency that’s supposed to provide “free” universal coverage and care for all of Britain’s citizens.

It does no such thing.

According to the BBC, there are 7.2 million British citizens awaiting medical care, or almost 11% of the entire British population. And Sky News reports that more than 400,000 people in England have been awaiting hospital treatment for more than a year.

Right now, the most salient problem is emergency care. According to The Telegraph, December data show that people suffering a heart attack face an average wait of 90 minutes for an ambulance, with some waiting up to two and a half hours. For emergency care, The Telegraph further reports, 55,000 people were forced to wait on hospital gurneys for “at least” 12 hours following emergency department decisions to admit them.

Of course, patients suffering from a stroke or a heart attack are always in a race against time, as medical delays can result in permanent disability or death.

Surveying the carnage, Dr. Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, estimated that between 300 and 500 people are dying each week because of delays and related problems in the delivery of emergency medical care.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a punishing stress test for Britain, as well as for the United States and other countries. America’s performance in that regard has been crippled by several federal government failures, even as the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the structural weaknesses of Britain’s single-payer health care system.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, public health experts warned in May 2020—early in the pandemic—that the British government was not prepared to respond well to COVID-19.

In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic simply deepened long-persisting problems underlying the British single-payer program. As the BBC reports, the current crisis in Britain’s single-payer system, though aggravated by a nasty flu season, has been building for “decades.”

For Americans, there’s a lesson here.

Liberals in Congress have been saying that the case for an American version of a single-payer health system—abolishing virtually all private health insurance and transferring health care financing and key decision-making to Congress and federal officials—is even stronger in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s a bold claim.

The reality, however, is this: The congressional single-payer bill (HR 1976) contains the key components driving the implosion of the British health care system, including government budgeting, bureaucratic central planning, and reduced pay for doctors and nurses.

Yet, last year, 120 House Democrats co-sponsored the legislation.

In sharp contrast to the congressional liberals’ top-down regime, which would restrict private coverage and care for Americans, British patients are still free to go outside of the British single-payer program and spend their own money on private health insurance coverage and care of their choice.

As noted, Sunak, the prime minister, has that option, even though he won’t say whether he has taken advantage of it.

Big reductions in the pay of medical professionals, as authorized in the congressional single-payer legislation, can indeed reduce health care spending. But there is a big price: You pay less, and you get less.

Britain has the lowest number of doctors per 1,000 patients in all of Western Europe, while British nurses rank third-lowest (ahead of only Italy and Spain) in their availability to patients.

Compared to their American counterparts, British doctors and nurses have relatively low pay. There’s nothing shocking about Britain’s single-payer system being periodically hit by labor strikes, as well as serious shortages of vital supplies and equipment.

As in the United States and among countries with advanced economies, Britain’s COVID-19 lockdowns have imposed a heavy price on personal health in delays and denials of medical care, particularly from pauses in medical treatment, including chemotherapy, as well as in preventive care, such as mammograms.

Last August, The Telegraph reported that an estimated 10,000 cancer patients had been waiting for three months. Professor Pat Price, an oncologist with the Imperial College of London, said, “There will be tens of thousands of cancer patients who die unnecessarily because of the disruptions with COVID.”

Even though the pandemic has been receding in Britain, as in the United States, the number of patients getting a “face to face” appointment with a doctor, according to The Telegraph, is still below pre-pandemic levels in England. There, the newspaper notes, only 2% of general practitioner practices are seeing their patients within a two-week period.

Matters are coming to a head, and a broad consensus on the need for reform is emerging.

The editors of The Daily Mirror declare, “Without radical reform, the [National Health Service] is doomed.” The Guardian, one of Britain’s top left-wing publications, says that the “crisis-ridden” NHS is “falling apart.” Keir Starmer, the leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, acknowledges the gravity of the NHS crisis, is criticizing the system’s “bureaucracy,” and is calling for the private sector to help “clear” Britain’s enormous waiting lists.

The right remedy requires the right diagnosis. Mounting problems with Britain’s ailing single-payer health system are systemic and deeply rooted in the arrogant assumptions of central planning; namely, the bureaucratic decision-making that governs the health and the lives of more than 67 million souls.

No one has better summarized the path ahead than Allison Pearson, a prominent columnist with The Telegraph:

We must break free of the coercive control exercised over us by the NHS. We are not to blame for putting it under pressure.

We are not at fault for expecting a feverish child or a 90-year-old with a broken hip to receive prompt attention. The NHS is to blame. No longer must we listen with hushed sympathy to the pathetic excuses of its elusive managers.

We put tens of billions of our national wealth into health care; what we get in return is broken, embarrassing and dangerous. NHS, heal thyself.

Congressional liberals should heed the warnings of experience. Regardless of their promises to make their version of “socialized medicine” work “better,” the same dynamics of their bureaucratic model will replicate the same problems, waiting lists, and delays and denials of care.

That model is falling apart right before our eyes.

*****
This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

Chinese State Media Cites Klaus Schwab, UN’s Guterres to Support Analysis of Davos thumbnail

Chinese State Media Cites Klaus Schwab, UN’s Guterres to Support Analysis of Davos

By Catherine Salgado

Exclusive: Chinese Communist Party (CCP) state propaganda outlet Xinhua News had its commendations and its complaints about the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Davos 2023 conference, but it particularly cited WEF head Klaus Schwab and United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to support its analysis. When the greatest mass murderer of all time (CCP) running a horrendous authoritarian regime cites someone favorably, that’s a condemnation in and of itself.

But Schwab must especially be in the CCP’s good books, because Xinhua specifically mentioned that “China was given plenty of attention.”

We shouldn’t be surprised at the CCP liking Schwab and Guterres, however. Schwab recently said on Chinese state TV that “China is a model for many nations.” And Guterres has a history of sycophantic pandering to the CCP. It’s all one big global cabal.

“[Xinhua News] This year’s version remained unchanged in some respects. For instance, global elites gathered for brainstorming in the same ‘Davos spirit,’ China was given plenty of attention and climate change was a hot topic.

But there were some notable and lasting changes.”

These changes, Xinhua said, were a divided geopolitical Europe, a “growing consensus that humanity’s challenges have never been greater,” and a shift in focus from growth to resilience (in other words, get ready to be poor and oppressed). But it particularly cited Schwab and Guterres.

“WEF Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab has repeatedly stressed that today’s world is facing multiple unprecedented crises, such as an energy transition, the pandemic, climate change and geopolitical tensions…

‘Our world is plagued by a perfect storm on a number of fronts,’ said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in his Wednesday speech. ‘We are in the worst situation I can remember in my lifetime,’ he warned.”

Xinhua also cited the managing director of the WEF’s Centre for Nature and Climate, Gim Huay Neo, and Michelle Williams, dean of the faculty at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

WEF wants one world government, and the CCP is planning to run it.

*****
This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

Sea Level is Stable Around the World thumbnail

Sea Level is Stable Around the World

By Jay Lehr

We have been studying climate change and potentially associated sea level changes resulting from melting ice and warming oceans for a half century. In the 1970s our primary concern was global cooling and an advancing new ice age. Many believe that increasing quantities of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere could result in rising levels of the sea in general. The record does not show this to be true. There is no evidence whatever to support impending sea-level-rise catastrophe or the unnecessary expenditure of state or federal tax monies to solve a problem that does not exist.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has updated its coastal sea level tide gauge data which continue to show no evidence of accelerating sea level rise. These measurements include tide gauge data at coastal locations along the West Coast, East Coast, Gulf Coast, Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as seven Pacific Island groups and six Atlantic Island groups, comprising more than 200 measurement stations.

The longest NOAA tide gauge record on coastal sea level rise measurements is in New York at the Battery, with its 160-year record which is shown below with a steady rate of sea level rise of 11 inches per century. A slightly slower rate of sea level rise occurs at nearby Kings Point, New York, whose 80-year record also appears below.

Tidal gauges at the Battery (https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8518750) and Kings Point (https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8516945) show sea level rising at a pace of 11 inches per century (https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/). Both locations show a steady pace of increase, with the same pace of increase holding steady despite periods of relatively rapid temperatures increase and periods of cooling. The Battery measurements date back to 1855, showing the same pace of sea level rise well before the existence of coal power plants and SUVs.

NOAA data provide assessments with a 95% confidence level at all measured locations which demonstrate the consistent behavior of location-specific sea level rise over time. The 2016 updated NOAA tide gauge data include four long-term periods between 92 and 119 years for California coastal locations at San Diego, La Jolla, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The actual measured steady rates of sea level rise at these locations vary between four inches and nine inches per century.

In contrast to the steady but modest rise in sea level, revealed in long-term measurements, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) speculates that sea level will almost immediately begin rising significantly more than in the past and present. NOAA records contradict such claims. This pattern of steady but modest sea level rise extends throughout the world, throughout times of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and throughout periods of accelerated warming and cooling.

The IPCC and global warming activists have a difficult time scientifically supporting speculation about accelerating sea level rise, as warming temperatures have yet to push sea level rise beyond one foot per century. Current sea level trends are not significantly different from what they were seven to nine decades ago, when atmospheric CO2 levels were 310 parts per million by volume (ppmv) or less. Dire predictions made decades ago of dramatically accelerating polar ice loss, and an ice-free Arctic Ocean have not come to pass. As Dr. Steven E. Koonin, former Undersecretary for Science for the Obama administration, noted in 2014, “Even though the human influence on climate was much smaller in the past, the models do not account for the fact that the rate of global sea-level rise 70 years ago was as large as what we observe today.”

Fortunately, we don’t need to wonder who is right and who is wrong in the debate over future sea-level rise. We can test the rising-seas hypothesis with real data collected from 10 coastal cities with long and reliable sea level records. Those cities are Ceuta, Spain; Honolulu, Hawaii; Atlantic City, New Jersey; Sitka, Alaska; Port Isabel, Texas; St. Petersburg, Florida; Fernandina Beach, Florida; Mumbai/Bombay, India; Sydney, Australia; and Slipshavn, Denmark.

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This article was published by CFACT and is reproduced with permission.

America’s Systemic Racism Problem Is Mostly In Woke, Anti-Asian Education Bureaucracies thumbnail

America’s Systemic Racism Problem Is Mostly In Woke, Anti-Asian Education Bureaucracies

By Helen Raleigh

Public school officials caused harm to Asian students’ college applications by not notifying them of important academic achievements.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin began 2023 by asking the state’s Attorney General Jason Miyares to investigate the allegation that officials at Thomas Jefferson High School (TJ) intentionally withheld notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s students and families (most of them are Asians) in the name of “equity” and “inclusion.”

Asra Q. Nomani, a human rights activist and a proud mom of a TJ graduate, broke the latest scandal at the school right before Christmas. According to Nomani, the scandal was initially uncovered by another TJ mom, Shawna Yashar, whose son took the PSAT test. He was recognized by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation “as a Commended Student in the top 3 percent nationwide — one of about 50,000 students earning that distinction.” It was the kind of honor that would have helped his applications for colleges and scholarships last fall had the TJ officials not withheld his award announcement. When the TJ officials eventually notified him of his award, the deadline for his college applications had already passed, which rendered the award useless.

Nomani learned that her son, a graduate of TJ’s class of 2021, was never told by school officials that he was a “Commended Student” in 2020. Even more infuriating is that these two young men’s experiences were not the result of some honest one-time mistake.

Nomani discovered that “the principal, Ann Bonitatibus, and the director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, have been withholding this information from families and the public for years, affecting the lives of at least 1,200 students over the principal’s tenure of five years.” These officials’ actions (or inactions) disproportionally hurt Asian students because the majority of the school’s student body is Asian. By intentionally withholding awards and eventually delivering them late and in a low-key way, these officials robbed the students and their families of chances to celebrate hard-earned achievements.

In addition, these officials caused undue harm to these students’ college applications and scholarships. For some first-generation immigrants with no other financial resources to fall back on, the damage caused by these school officials’ actions could have a lifetime effect, with some students having to settle for less prestigious colleges or be forced to take out more student loans.

After Nomani broke the story, TJ’s director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, justified her action by insisting, “We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements.” Does she understand that celebrating someone’s achievement and acknowledging someone’s effort is an important part of recognizing students as individuals?

Meanwhile, Bonitatibus “still hasn’t publicly recognized the students or told parents from earlier years that their students won the awards. And she hasn’t yet delivered the missing certificates.”

TJ is a prime example of the woke left’s systemic racism against Asian Americans in our education system. Besides withholding awards, TJ’s woke officials and liberals of the Fairfax County School Board also canceled the school’s merit-based and race-blind admission exam to increase the student body’s “diversity,” which has become a code word for “purging qualified Asians.” The result speaks for itself: Asian students make up 54 percent of the class of 2025, a dramatic decrease from 73 percent of the class of 2021.

Another elite high school that followed TJ’s lead and canceled its merit-based admission in 2021 has experienced disastrous results. San Francisco’s Lowell High School, once the best high school in the city, dropped out of the top 100 ranking of high schools nationwide for the first time in the school’s history after woke officials canceled the school’s merit-based admission and replaced it with a lottery system. After Asian American residents in the city successfully recalled three leftist members of the school board, the new members reinstated merit-based admission at Lowell last year.

At TJ, a group of concerned parents organized a group called the “Coalition for Thomas Jefferson High School,” and they sued Fairfax County Public School District for the school’s “unconstitutional” and discriminatory new admission policy. A federal judge ruled in favor of the coalition last year, but an appeals court stayed the decision.

The coalition filed an emergency petition with the Supreme Court last year, but the high court declined to block TJ’s new anti-Asian admission policy. The high court decided before it heard two cases challenging affirmative action-based admissions policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University. The oral arguments of the two cases have given much hope that the Supreme Court will uphold America’s principle of equality under the law by ruling in June this year that affirmative action-based admission policies are unconstitutional.

But Asian Americans cannot rest our hope in one court’s ruling alone. A lot more should be done at the state level. That is why Youngkin’s announcement of launching a civil rights investigation of TJ officials who withheld awards from students is welcome news. Youngkin said, “Parents and students deserve answers. … I believe this failure may have caused material harm to those students and their parents and that this failure may have violated the Virginia Human Rights Act.” Youngkin was spot on.

What these school officials did was a violation of students’ civil rights. Youngkin’s consistent focus on education and the clarity in his messaging explains why many Asian voters supported him during his gubernatorial race.

I sincerely hope Youngkin’s investigation will not only right the wrongs for affected Asian American students and their families at TJ but also become a rallying cry for all patriotic Americans. The most pervasive form of institutional racism widely practiced today in the United States is the anti-Asian hate in our education system. From eliminating gifted and talented programs in K-12, to canceling merit-based entrance exams to elite high schools, to dropping standard tests from college admissions, the objective is to reduce Asian American representation regardless of our qualification and effort because we are the “wrong” kind of minority.

The woke left’s war on merit in our education system hurts more than Asian Americans. The war on merit is a war on fundamental American values and America’s future. No society can advance or even maintain its current standard of living if its education system discourages the pursuit of excellence, celebrates mediocrity, and treats people differently based on the color of their skin. Therefore, the pushback of the woke left’s war on merit in education should not be just Asian Americans’ fight. We need all concerned Americans to join us.

Hopefully, 2023 will be the year we stop the war on merit.

*****
This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

First Small Modular Reactor Gets Certification From Nuclear Regulatory Commission thumbnail

First Small Modular Reactor Gets Certification From Nuclear Regulatory Commission

By Jeremy Beaman

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced the first-ever certification Friday of a small modular reactor design, a big step in the process of developing a new generation of new and more flexible nuclear reactors.

The NRC approved the reactor design from NuScale Power, making it the first SMR design to be certified by the regulator and only the seventh reactor design cleared for use in the United States.

“SMRs are no longer an abstract concept,” said Kathryn Huff, assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the Department of Energy. “They are real, and they are ready for deployment thanks to the hard work of NuScale, the university community, our national labs, industry partners, and the NRC.”

NuScale is one among many nuclear energy companies working to re-imagine the legacy nuclear reactor technologies developed in the 20th century by scaling them down, with one leading motivation being to make the construction of nuclear power plants more cost-effective.

The company, which was awarded a contract to build an SMR power plant on-site at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory, celebrated certification of the design Friday of its advanced light-water reactor. The reactor uses power modules that each can generate 50 megawatts of electricity.

By comparison, the two new reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia are each rated at 1,250 megawatts.

The Biden administration has prioritized the advancement of new nuclear technologies, as well as the preservation of existing and operating power plants.

The Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ new green energy and healthcare spending law, offers a mix of tax incentives to nuclear power generators and funding to produce the uranium necessary to fuel advanced reactors…..

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Continue reading this article at Washington Examiner.

The Twitter Files: Lenin Would Be Proud thumbnail

The Twitter Files: Lenin Would Be Proud

By Brian Balfour

“The vast majority of commercial and industrial establishments are now working not for the free market but for the government.” V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution; 1917

This Lenin quote leapt to mind amid the recent revelations coming from the “Twitter files” and exposed over the past several weeks. Among other disclosures, the files revealed direct lines of communication between government agencies, including the FBI and Department of Defense, and the social media company.

Twitter was found to not only be a landing spot for many agents in the government intelligence community, but also doing the bidding of agencies to suppress information deemed to be antithetical to the agencies’ goals and preferred narratives. Indeed, journalist Matt Taibbi went so far as to describe Twitter as an “FBI subsidiary.”

And it wasn’t just Twitter that the government targeted. Late last month Elon Musk tweeted “*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government,” illustrating his point by saying, “Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.”

Such revelations undercut many defenders of tech giants, who insist “they’re private companies, they can do what they want.” Instead, we must ask: are these truly ‘private companies’ in any meaningful sense?

Indeed, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrup Grumman are all nominally “private companies.” But they are private in name only because they are in reality appendages of the state, relying on defense contracts (not market transactions) for their success.

We should treat big tech companies with the same skepticism we apply to tools of the military industrial complex. Certainly so after the “Twitter file” revelations.

In his quote above, Lenin was, of course, bragging about the progress made toward complete nationalization of industry in the Soviet Union of the time.

But we can also consider his statement as descriptive. When your main mission is to do the bidding of the state, rather than serving consumers in the voluntary marketplace, you are not really a private company in the true sense of the term. Your company is not a market phenomenon.

It’s no longer possible to defend social media corporations on the basis of private property rights, because big tech are what Michael Rectenwald would describe as “governmentalities,” not private companies.

Michael Rectenwald, former professor of liberal studies at New York University and author of the book “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” provided context for how he believes tech goliaths like Google and Twitter come to do the state’s bidding in a November 2020 lecture.

“In a series of lectures entitled Security, Territory, Population, the postmodern theorist Michel Foucault introduced the term ‘governmentality’ to refer to the distribution of state power to the population, or the transmission of governance to the governed,” Rectenwald noted.

“Foucault referred to the means by which the populace comes to govern itself as it adopts and personalizes the imperatives of the state, or how the governed adopt the mentality desired by the government—govern-mentality,” he added.

Rectenwald, however, went even further than Foucault. “I adopt and amend the term to include the distribution of state power to extragovernmental agents—in particular to the extension and transfer of state power to supposedly private enterprises.”

What transpires, then, is a form of ‘governmentalization’ of nominally private enterprises, rather than the privatization of government functions that free market advocates prefer.

How intertwined with the government are the tech giants? The relationship predates the more recent phenomena revealed by Elon Musk’s divulgences.

“First, both Google and Facebook received start-up capital—both directly and indirectly—from US intelligence agencies,” Rectenwald informs us. In their early days, Google in particular was heavily reliant on CIA contracts and deals with other U.S. intelligence agencies.

As Lenin boasted, “The vast majority of commercial and industrial establishments are now working not for the free market but for the government.” And work for the government, including shutting down dissident voices, is what big tech has indeed been doing for years.

As a result, they can no longer be defended with cries of “but they’re private companies,” and instead be called out for what they really are: tools of state oppression.

*****
This article was published by American Research for Economic Education and is reproduced with permission.

Weekend Read: Soul Dysphoria [A Trans and GenZ Disaster] thumbnail

Weekend Read: Soul Dysphoria [A Trans and GenZ Disaster]

By Spencer Klavan

Understanding the “trans” phenomenon means recognizing it’s about more than gender.

In 2013 the DSM-V, an authoritative diagnostic manual for therapists and clinicians published by the American Psychiatric Association, defined gender dysphoria as “the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender,” where “gender” refers not to one’s biology but to “the public (and usually legally recognized) lived role as boy or girl, man or woman.”

The psychologist John Money popularized this way of speaking in the mid-20th century—it is the lasting legacy of his highly disreputable career. The word “gender” draws a stark—some might say Platonic—dividing line between “sex,” meaning one’s biological characteristics as male or female, and “gender,” meaning the ways in which one behaves, feels, and is perceived. The runaway success of the philosopher Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble in 1990 helped sunder these two ideas more starkly among the leftist intellectual class. Butler was wrestling with French poststructuralists like Michel de Foucault and post-Freudian feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, who had famously written that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Pushing Beauvoir’s idea further, Butler suggested that “sex does not cause gender, and gender cannot be understood to reflect or express sex.”

But then, still more radically, Butler proposed that sex too is an invented idea applied to the body, so that even the most basic facts of our physical selves are subject to transformation and reinterpretation: “gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or a ‘natural sex’ is produced.” Gender is a performance; binary sex is a social construct; our bodies are objects of hostile interpretations fabricated by the powerful. At the time these were explosive statements. Today, they are practically commonplace.

With this new vocabulary came new awareness of a painful split between body and soul. By all accounts, dysphoria is agony—a jagged perceived mismatch between flesh and spirit. In 2016, Buzzfeed asked gender dysphoric people to depict what it was like to feel as they did. Women drew their breasts as balls and chains shackled to their legs; men imagined unzipping their own skin and emerging, newly female, from their old unwanted exoskeleton. In children with gender dysphoria, puberty can be a time of acute distress when the maleness or femaleness of the body suddenly asserts itself in a dramatic way. The thoughts of gender dysphoric adolescents often turn to suicide, which is why many parents are willing to do anything—including irreversible surgery and hormonal intervention—to help alleviate the discomfort.

But it is telling to read in the DSM-V that gender dysphoria occurs in just 0.005 percent to 0.014 percent of natal males, and 0.002 percent to 0.003 percent of natal females. In 2013, those numbers were current. They are already wildly out of date. Girls, especially, are developing gender dysphoria at an alarming pace: between 2006 and 2016, the number of referrals to London’s Charing Cross “Gender Identity Clinic” nearly quadrupled. Between 2008 and 2015, another such clinic in Nottingham saw its referral numbers jump from 30 to 850. A Gallup report in 2020 found that 1.8 percent of Gen-Z kids in the United States (born between 1997 and 2002) identified as transgender. By 2021, it was up to 2.1 percent. A shocking uptick in gender dysphoria, especially among girls, has blown the DSM-V’s figures out of the water. We are simply more uncomfortable in our bodies than we were before.

Perhaps some of this is because gender dysphoric people are more comfortable sharing their feelings as it becomes commonplace, not to say required, to accept and validate transgender people in American culture and society. But it is just as likely, if not more so, that causation goes the other way: maybe boys and girls feel more uncomfortable about their bodies as they are increasingly taught by adults and peers to view their physical sex as something detachable from their gender. Brown University health researcher Lisa Littman caused enormous controversy when she surveyed 250 families with dysphoric children and observed that 80 percent of the kids were female. What Littman called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” is a new phenomenon, a sudden self-identification as trans in girls who never showed signs of bodily discomfort before. Littman was attacked because her results suggested that our massive dysphoria epidemic might not be entirely spontaneous.

More and more public schools have adopted the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s “gender snowperson,” or other similar infographics✎ EditSign, to teach that sex, sexuality, and gender are unmoored from one another. But this kind of messaging goes beyond classrooms. One 2020 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found evidence that in areas where kids are exposed to more media coverage of transgender-related issues, gender therapy clinics receive more referrals. Kids increasingly shape their political beliefs and values (including their sense of gender identity) in conversation with one another in online forums. “Online engagement is not just isolated,” said Tumblr’s director of outreach Liba Rubenstein, “it really is attached to people’s offline identities.”

Typically, this kind of peer-to-peer discussion is represented as a victory for liberation and inclusion. But online life is not just allowing kids to vent their discomfort with their bodies: it’s also creating that discomfort where previously there was none. In this broader context the rise in transgender identification and gender dysphoria seems less like an authentic phenomenon in and of itself, and more like one symptom of an ancient conflict between body and soul, kicked into hyperdrive by the experience of internet life.

Abigail Shrier, a journalist who documents the rise of gender dysphoria in young girls in her book Irreversible Damage, interviewed one teenager whose anorexia morphed naturally into gender dysphoria as if the two sprang from the same source: “My goal went from diet pills to testosterone…. From fantasies about slicing off my thigh fat to slicing off my breasts. I bound them with duct tape. I couldn’t breathe. It made me panic, but I felt brave.” Buck Angel, a transsexual internet celebrity, speculated to Shrier about the association between widespread gender dysphoria and a disgust at the body more generally among teens, who are having less sex than previous generations and seem more comfortable in virtual than physical space. Shrier concludes that adolescent transgenderism “very often seems to be a sad cult of asexuality, like the hand-painted sign in an antique shop reading ‘Please Do Not Touch.’”

Persona Creata

Given the explosion of gender dysphoria among adolescent girls, this phase of the body crisis suggests a particular horror at the idea of womanhood. “Perhaps forever,” writes Shrier, “but at least since Shakespeare’s Viola arrived shipwrecked in Illyria and decided to pass herself off as a man, it has occurred to young women: it’s so much easier to be a boy.” The feminist injunction for women to “lean in”—to hunt out positions of power and dominance in traditionally male industries and pursuits—comes freighted with the implication that traditionally female pursuits are weak, contemptible, and dull. “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession,” sniffed Hillary Clinton, in a classic summation of this idea, during her husband Bill’s first presidential campaign.

Both implicitly and explicitly, our ruling classes express contempt for homemaking and motherhood. But this closes off the most primal path to resolving the body crisis. Women, by creating new life, bear witness to the possibility that body and soul can in fact be reconciled: in childbirth, human flesh becomes the medium of the divine. Poets have expressed this as the “eternal feminine,” the strangely luminous power of women like Dante’s Beatrice or Faust’s Margarete to act as physical conduits for the life-giving power of God. “Woman, eternal, beckons us on,” wrote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the closing lines of his Faust. This is the meaning of the Virgin Mary’s consent to bring God into the world: her body will become the medium to deliver divine life, God made flesh.

Not that pregnancy and labor are some sort of cakewalk that we should regard with misty-eyed sentiment. Ever since Adam and Eve left Eden, creating life has also meant facing pain. The delicate challenge of growing from girl to woman involves coming to terms with the blood and the sorrow of what it means to have a body in a fallen world. Now, though, that hard task is made harder by the constant social implication that to be a mother is to be brainwashed and oppressed. Small wonder girls are fleeing womanhood, and small wonder this has intensified our sense that the human body is nothing more than a dead weight. Childbirth is not the only way to be fulfilled, nor the only way out of the body crisis. But if our bodies are not at least potentially a source of life as well as death, of blessing as well as discomfort, then they are simply a burden. Shucking off that burden means turning women into mere body parts that can be removed, reconfigured, or appropriated at will, reducing the female body to its functions and recasting women themselves as “menstruaters,” “chest feeders,” and “birthing people.”

Thus trans activism increasingly comes along with the implication that the body has no inherent integrity; that its meaning is entirely at the whim of its inhabitant. “Here’s the thing about chest surgery,” said Dr. Joanna Olson-Kennedy, a trans youth specialist and director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles: “If you want breasts at a later point in your life you can go and get them.” Reacting with alarm to Olson-Kennedy’s statement, British journalist Douglas Murray, asked: “Are people like blocks of Lego onto which new pieces can be stuck, taken off and replaced again at will?”

Not yet, but perhaps that is the longing upon which trans extremism plays. Increasingly the objective is to abolish the boundaries of the body altogether, to liberate the human spirit and let it mold the flesh as it chooses. This is what critic Mary Harrington calls “biolibertarianism”: the aspiration to remove bodily constraints, to turn our physical form into a set of customizable parts that can be interchanged or reshaped. Harrington notes an anonymous 2018 paper, Gender Acceleration, which argues that surgical transition from male to female “breaks [a] lucky few free from the horrid curse of being human.” A woman who goes by the handle “whorecress” expressed a very similar attitude in a video that went viral on TikTok: “I’m not body-positive,” she declared, “I’m not body-neutral. I’m body-negative. I wanna be vapor. Or like, a plume of blue smoke. Or mist. Or a rumor—I’d be a rumor… ’cause like, gender? Humiliating. An ache, a pain? Needing to sit down? Spatial awareness? The vulgarity…. Every day I wake up and I’m subject to the burden of embodiment. How dare I be a shape? Disgusting.”

Obviously this monologue was delivered with a certain irony. But like all successful humor, it articulated a real sentiment that the online audience connected with. Whorecress’s cri de coeur against embodiment featured on a Reddit discussion thread called r/voidpunk, which “is a subculture for those who often feel rejected or disconnected from humanity” and prefer to associate themselves with a more spectral or robotic form of life. r/voidpunk has 21,600 subscribers as of this writing, but the trend is much bigger than that: “transhumanism” is a growing movement among technologists, many of whom imagine a future where gene editing, virtual reality, and bionic enhancement render us free from the limitations of physical existence. This is the modern culmination of our extreme body crisis.

The connection between transgenderism and transhumanism is made explicit by transgender activist and scientist Martine Rothblatt. Rothblatt’s book, From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form, argues expressly that gender transition is just the beginning:

I am convinced that laws classifying people as either male or female, and laws prohibiting people’s freedom based on their genitals, will become as obsolete in the twenty-first century as the religious edicts of the Middle Ages seem absurd in America today…. Over the next few decades we will witness the uploading of human minds into software and computer systems, and the birth of brand new human minds as information technology. As we see our selves and our loved ones in these transhuman beings, and they make us laugh and cry, we will not hesitate long to recognize their humanity with citizenship and their common cause with us in a new common species, Persona creatus (the “created person”).

And so the most cutting-edge current expression of the body crisis is not the hormone injection but the digital avatar: pick and choose how you will move through imagined digital space. The movement that began with “gender neutral” pronouns has now produced an enormous constellation of totally invented identities, going far beyond ze and zer to include neologisms like “pupself” and “demonself,” for those who identify spiritually as animals or demons. What’s going on here is bigger than gender: we are dreaming not simply of making men into women, and vice versa, but making ourselves into anything, at a whim.

Desire and Happiness

“Gender? Humiliating.” Whorecress was on to something. “How dare I be a shape? Disgusting.” There is the body crisis in a nutshell.

And yet we can’t escape the body except at a great and terrible cost. Much like virtual reality and online life, transhumanism holds out glittering promises on which it is singularly ill-equipped to deliver. It’s not just that sex-change technology currently comes with gruesome risks and lifelong complications. Even if we imagine that rearranging or reconstructing body parts becomes painlessly easy, will it make us happy? What will “happy” even mean? Already Andrea Long Chu, a major transgender writer, has emphasized that happiness is not the point: “My new vagina won’t make me happy,” Chu wrote in the New York Times, “and it shouldn’t have to.” This is because “desire and happiness are independent agents.” Really? If our desires have no governing aim, such as happiness or virtue, what is the use of them—or us—at all? Surely we follow our desires because they point us toward something desirable—if not, we are just aimless hunks of flesh pulled randomly in all directions by wants that have no connection to goodness or joy. This total dissolution of purpose would be one of the real wages of transhumanism, were it ever to become reality.

If we become fully free from the constraints of physical form, if we even develop the technology to “feel” whatever we want, then we really will become nothing more than the chemistry sets that the crudest materialists imagine us to be: joy will be an electro-chemical occurrence, unrelated to any objective excellence or achievement. In our effort to liberate our spirits from our bodies, we will make our spirits and our very consciousness into the mere mechanical illusion that machinists already imagine it to be. Dissolve the boundaries of your body and you dissolve the boundaries of yourself. If you feel an instinctive disgust at this dystopian futuristic prospect, it is because you have a felt intuition of what we really are.

We can have compassion for gender dysphoric people without making them the central ideal of all our aspirations. Without a trace of malice toward them, we may observe that the measures they take to transform their bodies are not steps in a direction we find particularly attractive or healthy. Treating the body like an endlessly permeable and cumbersome appendage is just as degrading as ignoring it in favor of constant online entertainment, and for the same reasons. Both are means of seeking escape from our physical forms, and both promise liberation while actually leaving us sick, remorseful, and listless. We have indulged for too long in the vague fantasy that if these kinds of life are pushed to the extreme, they will suddenly become fulfilling—that if we just proceed down this path that is currently making us sick and miserable, we will eventually be happy and free. This, as always, is a dubious proposition.

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This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

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Poll: Americans Say Economy is in Trouble

By Casey Harper

Americans think the U.S. economy is in trouble, according to a new poll.

Released by CBS News and YouGov, the poll found that 64% of those surveyed said the national economy is doing “fairly bad” or “very bad.”

The survey found 56% disapprove of the job Joe Biden is doing as president. Those two figures are likely intertwined. Inflation has soared since Biden took office. Gas prices hit record highs last summer and are expected to rise again this year. Food prices have soared as well and show little sign of returning to their previous level.

Notably, 49% of those surveyed say they feel “scared” about the fate of the U.S. in the next year.

The poll also found 65% of Americans said things in the U.S. are going “very badly” or “somewhat badly.” That pessimism is similar to the sentiment found in a recent Gallup poll that found that that about 80% of those surveyed expect a higher deficit, higher taxes, and a worse economy in 2023.

“More than six in 10 think prices will rise at a high rate and the stock market will fall in the year ahead, both of which happened in 2022,” Gallup reports. “In addition, just over half of Americans predict that unemployment will increase in 2023, an economic problem the U.S. was spared in 2022.”

But it’s not just the economy. Americans are also worried about crime with Gallup reporting that 72% of surveyed Americans predict crime rates will increase, not decrease, this year.

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This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

Study Shows Government’s Family Leave Mandates Have Thwarted Women’s Wage Gains thumbnail

Study Shows Government’s Family Leave Mandates Have Thwarted Women’s Wage Gains

By Rachel Greszler

Men and women alike should be able to take time off from work for family and medical needs without the risk of losing their jobs. Unfortunately, when policymakers turn something that should be voluntarily offered by employers into a rigid legal mandate, unintended consequences ensue.

In the case of family and medical leave laws in the U.S., a recent economic study found that those laws have led to lower relative wages for women and thwarted the convergence of women’s wages relative to men’s.

In the decade prior to the passage of the Family Medical Leave Act in 1993—a federal law that guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected family or medical leave to workers in companies with 50 or more employees—white women’s wages had been converging relative to white men’s at a rate of 0.70 percentage points per year.

In the decade after passage of the FMLA, the rate of convergence fell to 0.03 percentage points. The rate of convergence for black women to white men fell from 0.30 percentage points per year prior to passage of the FMLA to 0.05 percentage points after.

It’s important to note that the raw, so-called gender wage gap—which claims that women made only 82 cents on the dollar compared to men in 2021—is not a scientific metric because it simply compares the wages of all full-time women to all full-time men. After factoring in observable characteristics like occupation, experience, and education, the so-called gap shrinks considerably.

After accounting for changes in such observable characteristics, however, the study authors found that “the introduction of [family leave laws] can explain 94% of the reduction in the rate of gender wage convergence that is unaccounted for after controlling for changes in observable characteristics of workers.”

The authors estimated that “if gender wage convergence had continued at the pre-family leave rate, wage parity between white women and white men would have been achieved as early as 2017.”

These findings were based not only on the introduction of the federal FMLA, but more precisely by comparing wage convergences in 12 states that enacted family leave laws prior to the federal FMLA to convergences in states that did not enact such laws.

This study confirms the basic economic principle that there is no such thing as a free lunch, meaning that with any supposed government-created benefit, there are trade-offs. And it demonstrates the impossibility of providing flexibility to employees and their employers via one-size-fits-all government mandates.

That’s an important lesson for policymakers who, understandably, want to help more Americans benefit from access to paid family and medical leave. If laws that mandate access for some workers to unpaid family and medical leave end up hurting women’s wages, how many more unintended consequences could ensue from laws that impose paid leave mandates or create new government entitlements?

Fortunately, inertia—more aptly, the free market working as it should to reflect workers’ desires—is on our side. Between 2016 and 2021, the percentage of private sector workers who have access to paid family and medical leave increased 77%.

That figure will undoubtedly continue to grow, but government mandates could thwart its rise and cause many other unintended consequences.

Employer-provided paid family leave programs can always be more flexible and responsive to the needs of employees than one-size-fits-all government programs that must establish strict rules, rigid eligibility criteria, and immovable benefits.

And while the vast majority of employers know the value their workers contribute and see them as fellow humans who need time off for personal family and medical reasons, government programs managed by bureaucrats can only know applicants as claimant numbers with leave requests expressed through leave codes.

Additionally, state government-run paid family leave programs—which impose taxes on workers and/or employers to fund government benefits—also crowd out more flexible employer-provided programs because employers who may otherwise have implemented a program are unlikely to add one if they or their workers are already forced to pay into a government plan.

Further, as has already happened in states that have government paid-leave programs, employers that do provide their own programs will typically require their workers to first jump through hoops to get what they can from the government program before they can receive their employer’s benefits.

That could include waiting weeks or months to find out if a worker is eligible to take leave, requiring employees to submit loads of paperwork and receive doctors’ sign-offs, not allowing employees to take unexpected leave, and workers having to pay back government benefits they received if they answer an email or respond to a pressing work need while on leave.

Despite their intent, government-paid family leave programs are regressive. They tax everyone but predominantly benefit middle- and upper-income families. In California, for example, fewer than 4% of claims went to workers in the lowest-income bracket while nearly 21% went to workers in the highest-income bracket.

And government programs are costly. A Congressional Budget Office analysis of Democrats’ proposed Family and Medical Leave Insurance Act found that it would create yet another unfunded entitlement program, with costs exploding to 240% of the program’s revenues within just six years and necessitating about $700 a year in new taxes for the median household. And that’s for a program that would cover only 42% of workers’ paid family leave needs.

Paid family leave is something Americans want, but not with the costs and consequences that federal programs and mandates entail.

Instead, policymakers should help expand access to paid family leave through policies that make it easier and more economically feasible for private employers to offer their own programs. They can do that by passing legislation such as the Working Families Flexibility Act, by enacting Universal Savings Accounts, and by removing costly and unnecessary regulations so that employers have more resources to provide paid family leave that’s better tailored to their businesses and to their employees’ needs.

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This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

MMT Is Dead. It Must Now Be Buried for Good thumbnail

MMT Is Dead. It Must Now Be Buried for Good

By David Sukoff

In the late 1960s Milton Friedman clarified his famous quip by stating that “In one sense, we are all Keynesians now; in another, nobody is any longer a Keynesian.”

In the first part, we are all Keynesians because the government’s out of control spending has forced us to be. In the latter sense, we are not Keynesians because that spending has decimated our financial well-being. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is essentially an offshoot of Keynesianism in that government can spend ad nauseam and commensurately print money without any ill effect. With the historic inflation we are now experiencing, MMT has been thoroughly repudiated. MMT is dead–it must now be buried.

In his basic economic textbooks, Professor Paul Krugman preaches Keynesianism. He teaches students about a government spending multiplier. In his fairy tale, the government spends a dollar and the economy grows by more than a dollar. The student’s first question should be: Where does that dollar of spending come from? The student’s next question should be: If this mystical multiplier were in fact real, then why not spend and spend and spend? The answers are straightforward and form the basis of the repudiation of MMT. A dollar of government spending must come from a dollar of taxation, at some point. On the second, the federal Government believed in both Krugman’s myth as well as MMT, and spent as much as they possibly could. Eventually, the inevitable ending came, and it was not a fairy tale.

If there were no discernible consequence to government spending, then the incentive for any government would be to spray money in every direction. Keynesianism, Krugman’s multiplier, and MMT all attempted to provide cover, and enable government to spend. It is simply impossible, and not in dispute, that at some point, that dollar of spending must come from a dollar of taxation. If there is a budget deficit, the government borrows dollars to make up the shortfall. The government mostly borrows dollars by issuing government bonds. To sustain its insatiable desire to spend money, and to not raise current taxes to unappealing levels, the government issues substantial debt.

In recent years, the debt to GDP ratio has crossed the 100 percent level and is now at a historic high. This creates numerous problems, not least of which is rising interest rates. If the government adds to the supply of bonds, the price should go down, and the yield (interest return) would go up. With that gargantuan debt, rising yields would force the government to spend even more on interest payments, resulting in all kinds of other negative effects on the overall economy.

Enter the magic of Quantitative Easing (QE) and MMT. The Government wants to spend, but not raise taxes too much. It then must issue debt, but not cause interest rates to rise. Well, the Federal Reserve can just step in and buy bonds! Sounds perfect – certainly to government officials who want to spend, and claim they are stimulating the economy. Even better, there is no real limit to how many dollars-worth of bonds the Fed can buy. Trillions upon trillions are possible. The Fed balance sheet rose by approximately $8 trillion over the past 20 years, with more than $4 trillion of that in the last two years alone. There is a crucial problem, and this is where MMT is used to obfuscate: When the Fed buys bonds, it is printing money.

It is a rather straightforward printing press. The Federal Reserve purchases a bond from a seller. The seller delivers the bond to the Fed, and the Fed hits a button to deposit money into the seller’s account. That money is created with a keystroke. The sound of this printing press is Enter-Enter-Enter, click-click-click. And just like that, in the last two years, the Fed “printed” $4 trillion new dollars. The Fed is also by far the largest holder of United States Treasury bonds – with a current balance sheet of more than $8 trillion. But MMT said this is not a problem, and for years and years it seemed to be correct as the Fed was growing its balance sheet with no discernible sign of inflation.

But there was inflation. It simply manifested itself in other places besides consumer prices. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon. It is basic math. If new dollars are added to the total supply of dollars, then the price of everything a dollar can be exchanged for must go up. That is just a mathematical fact – not an economic theory like a multiplier, or printing and spending ad nauseam. Dollars are added, prices in dollars go up. While the Fed was performing QE by adding to its balance sheet and printing dollars, the price of financial assets was shooting to the moon. We witnessed one of the greatest transfers of wealth imaginable to holders of financial assets, from the public at large. Ironically, many who promoted Keynesianism and MMT are the same who grouse the loudest about the wealth inequality that their policies directly caused. Bubbles are inflated with dollars. And since the implementation of QE was the cornerstone of Fed policy, that bubble was not in danger of bursting, because the Fed would simply buy more bonds, and print more money. MMT said it was okay.

Like water, though, money eventually finds its way and breaks the dam. With stocks and crypto and real estate headed to the moon, it was only a matter of time before all that money found its way to consumer goods. Inflation, as we commonly understand it, had arrived. It was mathematically pre-ordained, and yet still somehow unexpected. Historically high. We’re talking 1970s high. Family budget-busting high. Economic growth-crushing high. And all because of the failure to loudly ask and understand those two very basic questions: Where does the money come from, and if the theory actually worked, shouldn’t the government just spend infinite money?

Perhaps those in government simply did not want to ask or understand those questions. It was fun, for some, while it lasted. But it’s over now. Those questions need to be asked, over and over again. Because the answers are obvious, and clear, and indisputable. Sadly, so is the painful solution to our current inflation crisis. The government needs to dramatically reduce spending, and the Fed needs to unwind its balance sheet.

Weaning the government and the Fed off spending and printing will be a lengthy and agonizing process. And entirely necessary. Nobody should be a Keynesian anymore. Certainly not if the goal is to reduce inflation and have a growing, robust, and free economy.

Keynesianism, Krugman’s multiplier, and MMT have all been empirically, logically, mathematically, and thoroughly repudiated.

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This article was published by FEE and is reproduced with permission.

A Little More Poison thumbnail

A Little More Poison

By David Lewis Schaefer

Taking “the hair of the dog that bit you” means curing a hangover with another drink in the morning. Nobody follows that principle as public policy, but current government practice regarding gambling and drug use subscribes to the same logic.

For instance, there haven’t been too many Puritans around in a long time who objected to horse racing or social, Friday-night poker games. And though the “numbers racket” was often under the control of organized crime, the fact that many, mostly poor, people played a number each week, knowing the odds were against them but just wanting to indulge a dream of riches, didn’t bother most of us. When casino gambling was first legalized early in the Depression, creating the potential for much larger losses, it was limited to a remote, underpopulated, and largely resource-free state, Nevada.

All this began to change in the sixties. First, New York State introduced off-track betting, which enabled people to gamble on the ponies from offices scattered around urban areas, without having to go to the track. It became far easier to blow large sums on the races. Next came the 1964 introduction in New Hampshire of a state lottery in order to generate revenue on a “voluntary” basis; other states got in on the lottery game, too, and today only Alabama and Utah lack legalized gambling. Nevada doesn’t offer a lottery, either, but only because the powerful gaming industry doesn’t want competition.

Here is where the “hair of the dog” principle began to make its appearance. Television ads urged people to play the lottery regularly, while also counseling bettors to “bet responsibly,” and even giving toll-free phone numbers for new gambling addicts to turn for help. In fact, a small portion of the proceeds of state gambling receipts were set aside for such counseling programs. It was as if in their pursuit of revenues, the governments had begun to promote cigarette smoking, coupled with an exhortation not to overdo it, and an 800 number to connect lung-cancer patients with medical treatment.

In the next stage, revenue-hungry governments around much of the country legalized casinos. Slot-machine casinos were especially popular since they require no experience and give no advantage to those with skill. The latest generation of slot machines, electronic rather than mechanical, has been designed to turn players into addicts, with fancy gimmicks designed to give them the feeling they are winning even as they keep losing, as MIT Professor Natasha Dow Schull showed in her thoroughly researched 2014 book Addiction by Design. Again, players are offered ineffectual counsel against overdoing it.

Aside from raising hopes of a personal bonanza, the gamblers, and the public at large, were told that the revenues generated by taxes on the casinos would help finance public goods. Indeed, in New York State, former governor Andrew Cuomo, while refusing to allow fracking in the Marcellus Shale (from which people in the neighboring state of Pennsylvania have gained a considerable boost in employment), authorized several casinos to be opened in the impoverished western part of the state as a substitute. (The casinos have not so far delivered any portion of the promised wealth, any more than they brought prosperity to Atlantic City, where they opened decades earlier). Now, New York City is preparing to open casinos in Manhattan to share the good fortune of being able to try your luck. To listen to its advocates, gambling is almost a public duty. Don’t you want your state to prosper?

The most dangerous iteration of the legalized-gambling craze is the spread of sports gambling, advertised on every major televised sports event and accessed through smartphones. Bettors can wager not only on which team will win, or beat the “spread,” but on all sorts of mini-bets within the game, like whether a particular player will hit a home run. Minors are technically banned from betting, but sports journalism and commentary has now become so saturated by the culture of sports gambling that sports fans cannot avoid the message that the real thrill of sports is in the supposed financial gains from gambling on the outcome. Of course, in the long run it’s always the “house”—including the state—that wins. And every ad comes with a mandated warning to gamble “responsibly” and a number to call if you need help in curing your addiction.

The legalization—or at least the effective decriminalization—of drugs, an undoubted vice that has the potential to cause severe physical as well as psychological harm, is either being downplayed (in the case of marijuana) or “decarcerated” (in the case even of the often-fatal drug fentanyl), for the sake of enhancing public revenues (through taxes on pot); supposedly assisting the past “victims” of the now-regretted War on Drugs, or supposedly mitigating the dangers of an overdose in the form of “safe” injection centers, which are taking root in major cities.

In 2018 (following a popular referendum legalizing marijuana), Massachusetts’s newly established Cannabis Control Commission adopted a “social equity program” in the name of compensating individuals and communities that had been “disproportionately harmed by the war on drugs.” Under the program, state authorities prioritize giving “professional training, technical services, mentoring,” and “access to capital” to individuals who had previously been convicted of drug crimes (most of whom will have been found guilty of selling drugs considerably more harmful than marijuana), are married to or the offspring of such persons, or inhabit an area where the War on Drugs (not drugs themselves!) had “disproportionate impact.”

Leave aside the fact that to the extent the War on Drugs—including manifestly life-threatening and life-ruining substances like heroin and fentanyl—has succeeded in mitigating the rate at which such drugs are used, it has particularly benefited, not harmed, the areas where such use was most widespread. How can anyone seriously maintain that the way to combat poverty, family instability, and crime in low-income or minority neighborhoods where drug sales and use are most widespread is to train residents of those neighborhoods to more effectively manufacture, market, and profit from a mind-weakening and potentially addictive drug that also serves as a “gateway” to harder drugs?

As reported in the New York Times at the time Massachusetts initiated its program (since imitated in New York and elsewhere), a scholarly analyst of the problems associated with marijuana, Professor Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University, observed that beyond the drug’s correlation with a wide variety of negative outcomes in terms of physical and mental health, “the real issue is that more than half of marijuana is consumed by people who are high more than half of all their waking hours,” while “Americans with a household income of less than $20,000 accounted for close to 30 percent of all marijuana use, even though they make up less than 20 percent of the population.” Do poor people really need to be encouraged by state-trained drug pushers to consume even more marijuana? And to think of drug-pushing as a respectable career choice?

Promoting the sale and use of marijuana in poor and minority communities is just one more instance of misguided social policies in which public officials, ostensibly aiming to serve the public good, in fact threaten to do the greatest harm to those who can least afford to endure it. Our poor and minority communities stand in need of improved public schools (including more charter schools and expanded programs of vocational training), effective law enforcement, and opportunities to succeed in legitimate, pro-social occupations. They also need encouragement to marry before becoming parents; to work their hardest both on their jobs and as parents so as to benefit both themselves and their offspring; and to become sober, thoughtful, and public-spirited citizens—not people who aim to spend their lives in a drug-filled haze.

But in perhaps the ultimate expression of the “hair of the dog” principle, the New York Post reported on December 4 that three major nonprofit agencies that provide services designed to assist addicts to recovery from drug and alcohol addiction had just won licenses from the state to sell marijuana. The CEO of one of the organizations, Housing Works, told Politico that he aimed to employ “justice-involved” individuals (that is, people with previous criminal records) and create a “vocational training” program that would enable them to open their own “weed businesses.”

In 1714 the Anglo-Dutch political theorist Bernard Mandeville famously argued in The Fable of the Bees that private vices (may) lead to public benefits. He had chiefly in mind such vices of character, condemned by both classical and Judeo-Christian morality, as vanity and avarice. (Both of those vices, unattractive in themselves, benefit others, for instance, by providing employment to others who serve their material desires.) Modified (less shocking) versions of Mandeville’s thesis were subsequently taken up by such liberal political thinkers as Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Friedrich Hayek. But none of these thinkers can have meant that it would be beneficial to encourage poor people to gamble their earnings away, let alone blow their minds, damage their bodies, and waste their lives using addictive drugs—or even worse, to provide capital and training to assist them in purveying such drugs to others. This dog will just keep biting you, your family members, and your country.

*****
This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

They Really Believe You’ll Be Happy thumbnail

They Really Believe You’ll Be Happy

By Michael Watson

As the World Economic Forum (WEF) hosts [hosted] its annual conference of political officials, corporate bigwigs, and leaders of the professional Left-dominated nongovernmental organization world, the organization has come into focus. We brought some of the scrutiny, examining recent writings of WEF leader Klaus Schwab and critics of his “Great Reset.”

But when scrutinizing Schwab and the Forum it is important to separate the true from the false and observe distinctions, not only to not “look crazy” to normal people but also to better understand the professional-managerial class adversaries of individual, limited government. It is important to keep in mind that the WEF, Schwab, and its associates sincerely believe their efforts and managerial ideology will lead the world to a better place. Far from comic-book-movie villains, they would be the “omnipotent moral busybodies” about which C.S. Lewis warned.

So is the WEF a secret conspiracy to replace private ownership with utopian Marxism? No, though there’s less distance between a Danish MP’s infamous op-ed that the WEF published and the vision laid out by Schwab in The Great Narrative than critics will find comforting. WEF is hardly secret, given that it publishes its advocacy in book form and is best known for a highly public conference. But it is at least somewhat misleading for the WEF to defend itself, as WEF executive committee member Paul Smyke did, as just a place of discussion among ideologically diverse stakeholders.

Will We Own Nothing?

Much of the criticism of the Forum falls on its vision of a world in which “you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy,” possibly because the citizenry will eat bugs instead of meat. Here the Forum’s defenders have ground to stand on; the Forum does not explicitly advocate these things. It has, however, offered prominent public figures space to opine about the future. In the notable case of an op-ed written in 2016 about a possible future set in 2030, the writer was Ida Auken, a former Danish environment minister and sitting member of parliament.

And when people write about the future, it is reasonable to think that they are, at least to some degree, writing about a future that they hope and expect to make and see. That is, after all, what Klaus Schwab did at book length in The Great Narrative. So it is worth looking at what that former minister thought the world of eight years from now might look like six years ago, in a piece the WEF thought worthy of publication.

The headline is stark: “Welcome to 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy and Life Has Never Been Better.” The piece suggests that a mere decade and a half from its writing, a Star Trek–style non-economy economy will be in full swing, with free communication, free transportation, free housing, and free food—all underwritten by free clean energy.

Now, from the vantage point of slightly less than halfway to this vision, one question arises: “How?” How did humanity develop free energy from almost nothing in only a decade and a half? And if it would have been so easy, how did the entire world—not just recalcitrant Americans, who occasionally elect Florida men to high public office, but even good Europeans, even Danes!—miss this boat to utopia?

Well, like Schwab’s own predictions about inflation and unemployment in the wake of COVID-19, it was just a bad prediction. But it was a predictably bad prediction: There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there has never been one since humanity entered this vale of tears. Why would one appear ex nihilo in less than half a generation? But if it reflects what the social-democratic green movement (often called “watermelons” by critics) sincerely believe is on the horizon, heaven help us.

That assumes the piece is in fact a prediction; the op-ed reads like a dorm-room bull session product. (The author’s apparent channeling of Karl Marx’s The German Ideology in her musing “When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well, and spend time with other people” also seems worthy of the dormitory.) The concerning thing about this is that the writer is not a sophomore undergraduate writing for a campus literary magazine, but a former cabinet minister published under the auspices of a multi-million-dollar nonprofit.

Auken concedes her utopia is not perfect. “Nowhere can I go and not be registered,” asserts the citizen of 2030’s “our city,” which goes unnamed and un-located; one assumes it is not Copenhagen, since “in the past we filled all free spots in the city with concrete.” Or New York. Or Washington. Or Boston. Or Paris, or London, or Berlin. Or Mexico City, or Cape Town, or Kyoto. Come to think of it, where is this formerly all-concrete “our city” anyway?

But the surveillance dystopia is not the darkest part of the vision. That honor lies with “all the people who do not live in our city”—the narrator’s “greatest concern.” All who “felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took big parts of our jobs” or who “got upset with the political system and turned against it” live beyond a sort of invisible city wall, in “little self-supplying communities” or in “empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.”

At least it isn’t the gulag. Or rather, it isn’t the gulag yet—our citizen whose dreams are recorded betrays fear that “I just hope nobody will use it against me” even as our citizen asserts “all in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on.”

One can award the same partial credit to Auken that one might give to Schwab for acknowledging that surveillance might very well lead to dystopia, while wondering why they suggest the world will and perhaps ought to employ this “one ring” anyway. Perhaps, like Tolkien’s hobbits, the “little self-supplying communities” have the better of the world of 2030 than the citizens of the dehumanizing, dystopian “our city.” The best that can be said is that at least the WEF isn’t trying to build it.

Yes, The WEF Has an Agenda

So, if the World Economic Forum isn’t about surveilling our dreams and using our living rooms for other people’s business meetings, what is its agenda? If you, like the Washington Examiner did, ask WEF executive committee member Paul Smyke, the answer is that the Forum doesn’t have one. This is an odd position to take for a man whose other title is WEF head of the regional agenda, North America.

To the extent what Smyke told the Examiner is true, it is true only in an incredibly misleading rules-lawyered literal sense in that the WEF does not have a formal policy program that all attendees endorse. It does have an ideology, and creditably, Klaus Schwab has been open about that ideology for 50 years, since he published the first Davos Manifesto on stakeholder capitalism, a forerunner to today’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement.

As is made clear in COVID-19: The Great Reset and The Great Narrative for a Better Future, the Forum’s leader is a stakeholder capitalist who hopes to advance ESG, to see greater power lie with organized labor and the (overwhelmingly professional managerial class-oriented and politically liberal-to-socialist) nonprofit sector, and to harness the technologies of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” which he believes is now upon the world, to advance his ski-chalet environmentalist and chardonnay socialist policy goals.

It is true that the annual Forum meeting at Davos meeting is a place for policymakers and businesspersons of various ideologies to gather and discuss. But the people with whom one discusses determines the outcome of those discussions. If, as Schwab and co-author Thierry Malleret did in The Great Narrative, one discusses the path to a better future with left-of-center academics, former officials involved in the Chinese Communist Party–aligned Chinese People’s Consultative Conference, and environmentalist campaigners, one will find one answer. If one consulted with Republican governors; Hungarian, Polish, and Italian government ministers; industrialists (even soft-environmentalist ones like Elon Musk); or Abrahamic religious leaders, one would receive a quite different answer. When one discusses the world with left-wing, utilitarian, environmentalist, and animal liberationist philosopher Peter Singer, one knows (or should know) to expect different answers than if that discussion is with Catholic conservative philosopher Robert George. To choose a discussant is to decide the discussion.

Conclusion

The World Economic Forum’s position and aspirations—think “Great Reset”—invite justified scrutiny. Schwab may be one of the most influential nongovernmental figures in the world, simply because events like the Davos meeting put him and his organization adjacent to the “room where it happens” in dozens of countries and corporate boardrooms.

To the Forum’s credit, its ideology and events are largely public and subject to public criticism. To the Forum’s discredit, when that scrutiny is hostile, the Forum has hidden behind its most “out-there” critics to invalidate by association more level-headed disputation. But while it is not the secret governance of the whole world some claim, it is more than just a discussion forum for the world’s high and mighty.

“Davos man,” a reference to the annual WEF Davos meeting, has become a common metonym for a certain bien-pensant, liberal, trendy environmentalist, and redistributionist ideology because that is the technocratic ideology that underpins the World Economic Forum, even if not all Davos attendees subscribe to it. (During his presidency, Donald Trump, who does not hold that ideology, attended Davos twice, in 2018 and 2020.) One can discern the ideology that underpins Davos because one can read Schwab’s books, look at the WEF’s marketing materials that promote possible breakthroughs toward an environmentalist future, and read op-eds the Forum saw fit to publish. That that ideology might lead to places the public does not want to go—something Schwab admitted in The Great Reset about digital COVID contact-tracing surveillance regimes and something Auken’s narrator concedes about “our city”—does not make it a conspiracy.

*****
This article was published by Capital Research Center and is reproduced with permission.

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Our National Debt Crisis – Let’s Begin by Throwing Big Bird Off The Cliff

By Neland Nobel

The initial sparring and positioning over the debt limit have begun and not surprisingly, the Democrats are pulling out their past winning arguments that have kept any of the huge entitlement programs off limit to any kind of reform. The past arguments can be summarized as “pushing Granny off the cliff”, a theme derived from the famous TV commercial where a Paul Ryan lookalike kills his grandmother. It was one of the most deceptive, yet effective political TV ads ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGnE83A1Z4U&t=2s

Voters will be told that any kind of proposed cut is equivalent to ruining Social Security and Medicare. This effectively ties the attempt to cut spending to cutting off the elderly who have been given government promises, around which they have planned their retirement.

The counterargument would be to tie cuts in spending to egregious programs which only help rich liberals.

At one time, Republicans had a slogan of “defund the Left.” It basically was designed to cut programs where progressives have mobilized tax dollars to use on their side of the political fight. This can range from NPR and PBS, and government agencies funding nonprofits for “voter registration”, to funding UNESCO and other UN left-wing initiatives. How about cutting funding for research so Chinese scientists cannot make new plagues to harm mankind? Is there not a dollar of waste in the defense budget? How about cutting all funds for Critical Race Theory in the Pentagon? I mean, talk about a target-rich environment!

It is also possible to roll back any program not associated with Social Security and Medicare, such as ObamaCare and Medicaid expansion. That could include a modest cut in so-called discretionary spending (spending other than entitlements, defense, and interest payments.)

In truth though, the long-term deficit problem cannot be addressed without eventually getting around to these two demographically flawed programs as they are growing at such speed and consume so much of the budget already that they are becoming the blob that will eat the entire budget.

Looking at the chart above, it really is amazing how little is spent on law enforcement, for example, a primary function of government, and how much is spent on income transfer programs.  Today, the government has largely become a mechanism not to protect safety and liberty but to move money from one taxpayer to another and move money from one generation to another.

But for the time being, baby steps are necessary.

America has not exercised its budget-cutting muscles in a long time. They are so completely atrophied, that success should first be realized with more modest steps. We need to show the political parties, the populace, and the markets; that actual cuts, however modest they may be, can be accomplished. Right now cynicism dominates because previous attempts have led to political disaster for those daring to cut any kind of government spending.

We suspect Republicans will learn from past mistakes and will use the debt ceiling to effectively cut wasteful, politically motivated spending. If we are reading the political tea leaves correctly, it appears that McConnell understands the newly elected House has the power in the negotiations to be had and that in turn, a hard core of conservatives holds excessive power because of the very narrow victory. Let’s hope they use that power wisely and in a politically savvy way.

What could be the argument to maintain NPR and PBS? Not only is its biased coverage lavishly funded by tax-free foundations and the public donations, but its fundamental purpose was also designed in the era of three dominant TV networks. But today, there are so many channels, podcasts, streaming services, and networks that have educational and nature-inspired programming, news programming, and cultural programming, it is redundant and outmoded.

Before we even attempt to reform Social Security, let’s throw Big Bird off the cliff first.

Op-Ed: Social Security’s impending bankruptcy doesn’t resonate with voters, yet thumbnail

Op-Ed: Social Security’s impending bankruptcy doesn’t resonate with voters, yet

By Brenton Smith

I am not a constitutional lawyer, but I see nearly zero chance that funding Social Security out of the general fund would be allowed for any significant length of time. It is at best a fool’s errand to hold out hope that Congress will be able to float the program’s imbalances out of the general fund.

This thought comes to mind because of the 2022 midterms and the inherent contradiction between the importance of Social Security and the weight that voters have placed on the program on Election Day despite two decades of continuous financial decline.

No group should be more interested in the prospects of the program than women who are over 50 years old. Yet, an AARP poll revealed that Social Security placed a distant fifth in voting priority in the 2022 midterm elections among people in this segment of the population.

At this point, a woman turning 77 today expects on average to outlive the system’s ability to pay scheduled benefits. If that voter doesn’t care, no one does.

The only explanation for the indifference to the program’s ability to keep its promises that I can imagine is voters have reached the conclusion that Congress will simply never allow Social Security to fall into crisis.

Apparently, Americans have faith in politicians that would make the Pope covet.

To provide an example, one of my readers wrote to me, “And, as I pointed out, the general fund is already going to be on the hook for the SS shortfall, one way or the other.” The reader reasons that no matter what happens, he will get paid. Hence, he has nearly zero interest in the prospects of the system.

It is a misplaced faith. The general fund is not on the hook, and likely never will be. Funding Social Security from the general fund would likely be deemed unconstitutional in court.

Yes, Social Security was determined to be constitutional in 1935 in Helvering v. Davis. That doesn’t mean that a legislative change in the way that the program is financed would be exempt from judicial review.

Just because the law is called the Social Security Act does not grant the pieces and parts of the law a special status.

The Supreme Court is not interested in the wisdom of how the power is exercised. Rather it deals with deciding whether that power is granted by the Constitution to Congress. In the Helvering case, the Supreme Court held that “Congress may spend money in aid of the ‘general welfare.’” Further, the Court held that the “concept of welfare is shaped by Congress, not the states.”

The Court added a caveat that earns your attention: “The (definition of welfare) belongs to Congress, unless the choice is clearly wrong, a display of arbitrary power is not an exercise of judgment.”

Here is the problem. Social Security is not universal nor equal. The highest payment goes to the man or woman who had the best job over the longest period. It is very difficult to explain taking money from the working poor to provide a stipend to the wealthy retiree particularly when many of our poorest seniors are not even eligible for benefits.

When the money for benefits comes from the general fund, someone is going to ask whether giving money to the idle rich is a sound way to aid the general welfare of the nation. The benefits formula works when the money comes from workers who are contributing to a plan that pays them a future benefit. It is very different when we take money that could be spent on other priorities.

Back in 1935, the Court indicated that it wasn’t terribly interested in the wisdom of the benefits arrangement. According to the Court, the law was a well-researched solution to a well-established problem. In its decision, the Court cited congressional studies, presidential commissions, advisory councils, and extensive public hearings.

The Court ruled, “A great mass of evidence was brought together supporting the policy which finds expression in the act. “

Imagine if this standard were applied to an annual subsidy from the general fund. Funding would require a similar exercise of judgment demonstrating that Congress thoughtfully valued this expense against every other expense that money might have served. That is every year, where the reasoning is we are spending the money today because the politicians of the past didn’t do their job. In the coming years, it would behoove voters of all ages to take this issue more seriously.

In 1935, the Supreme Court allowed Congress the power to provide a legislative solution to a well-documented problem that threatened a growing number of Americans. Today, the Court would be tasked with considering whether Congress should be given the power to deal with a very different problem: voters have not paid attention.

*****
This article was published by The Center Square – Opinion and is reproduced with permission.

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Election Fraud Database Tops 1,400 Cases

By Hans von Spakovsky

The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database now includes 1,412 proven instances of election fraud, and our legal center is monitoring many other ongoing prosecutions.

The database, which provides a sampling of recent election fraud cases, demonstrates the vulnerabilities within the electoral process and the need for reforms to secure free and fair elections for the American people.

The database doesn’t list potential fraud discovered by election officials and others that is never investigated or prosecuted, and it obviously cannot list fraud that goes undetected when states with poor security don’t have the tools in place to even realize such fraud is occurring.

But states—especially now that many state legislative sessions are beginning—should make stopping fraud and ensuring the integrity of their elections a top priority.

Here are a few examples of cases that were recently added to the database.

We’ve written before on the ballot-trafficking scheme orchestrated by Leslie McCrae Dowless, a political operative who was working on behalf of North Carolina 9th Congressional District candidate Mark Harris, a Republican, in 2018 involving stuffing the ballot box with fraudulent absentee ballots for Harris.

State election officials determined that Harris had no knowledge of what Dowless was doing.

Dowless, who died last April, was known in Braden County for ballot trafficking. He would “assist” certain candidates who hired him as a consultant for their campaigns, and those candidates or causes that Dowless supported seemed to have a sure way to win elections.

Authorities finally caught up with Dowless after his absentee-ballot trafficking scheme caused so much election fraud that, for the first time in 40 years, a congressional race was overturned, and the North Carolina State Board of Elections had to order a new election.

Dowless instructed his hired fraudsters to mark blank absentee ballots for Harris, complete unfinished absentee ballots, forge signatures on absentee ballots for individuals who were unaware ballots were being cast in their name, and then mail the ballots to election officials.

Officials became suspicious when 61% of the vote-by-mail ballots were cast for the Republican candidate, despite the fact that only 16% of the ballot-by-mail voters were registered Republicans.

Ginger Shae Eason, Tonia Gordon, Rebecca Thompson, Kelly Hendrix, James Singleton, Jessica Dowless, and Caitlyn Croom all pleaded guilty to felony charges related to this absentee-ballot fraud scheme. They were all sentenced to probation, ordered to complete community service, and assessed fines and court fees for their involvement in the fraud scheme.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only example of absentee-ballot fraud by an activist among our latest cases added to the database.

Janet Reed, an Evansville, Indiana, Democratic Party activist, sent illegally pre-marked absentee-ballot applications to voters ahead of the 2020 primary election. To make matters worse, Reed pre-selected the Democrat Party where voters were supposed to choose to receive either a Republican or Democratic primary ballot. Reed included instructions with the applications stating the party affiliation “needs no input.”

Despite receiving several warnings from election officials and even from the Democratic Party to knock it off, Reed kept sending out the pre-marked applications that interfered with the ability of voters to decide which party primary they wanted to vote in.

Reed pleaded guilty to a felony charge of unauthorized use of absentee ballots, was sentenced to 18 months of probation, and was ordered to pay restitution of $2,740 and court costs of $925. She was also barred from working on any elections while on probation.

Our latest update also features several instances of convicted felons voting.

In Florida, Marc Crump and Dedrick De’ron Baldwin were felons who were recently convicted of illegally voting in the 2020 general election.

Crump, who voted in the August 2020 primary and November 2020 general election, pleaded guilty to one count of false swearing and one count of illegal voting. He was sentenced to 10 months in jail and assessed $668 in costs and fees.

Baldwin was charged with two felonies after he voted in the 2020 Democratic primary and 2020 general election. He pleaded no contest to both charges and was sentenced to 364 days in prison on each count. Baldwin was already serving a 12-year sentence for manslaughter and aggravated battery.

The fraudulent conduct of those two ineligible voters was discovered following an investigation by Florida Department of Law Enforcement of Alachua County election supervisor Kim Barton, a Democrat, who organized voter-registration drives that improperly registered felons to vote.

In Arizona, Victor Aguirre, a convicted felon, registered to vote and then voted in the 2020 general election. Aguirre pleaded guilty to a felony charge of attempted illegal voting and was sentenced to a minimum term of six months in prison, to be followed by a period of supervised release, and was assessed fees and fines.

In Texas, Francisco Tamez Jr., another convicted felon, voted in the 2017 city of Edinburg municipal election. Tamez pleaded guilty to the felony charge and was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

In Minnesota, Linda Maria Stately, of Little Falls, a convicted felon, registered and voted in the 2020 general election. Stately pleaded guilty to a felony charge of ineligible voting and was sentenced to five years of probation and assessed fines and fees. Her charges will be reduced to a misdemeanor if she successfully completes the terms of her probation.

A new case from Florida demonstrates the importance of implementing safeguards in the voter-registration system to detect election fraud, particularly in states that use online voter registration.

Anthony Guevara was charged with two felonies after he changed the voter-registration address of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the state’s voter-registration database online.

After the fraudulent address change was registered in the system, it was flagged, and law enforcement officers were able to trace the IP address to Guevara’s home. He pleaded no contest to the charges and was sentenced to two years of probation, 100 hours of community service, fined $5,421.39, and assessed $515 in court and prosecution costs.

Another example from Florida demonstrates how system safeguards of the type recommended in The Heritage Foundation’s Election Integrity Scorecard can prevent fraudulent votes from being counted in the first place. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

Larry Wiggins, a registered Democrat from Sarasota, requested a mail-in ballot on behalf of his late wife during the 2020 general election. Election staff discovered the fraud during a routine check of the voter rolls, which revealed that his wife had died two years earlier.

Wiggins forged his deceased wife’s signature on the ballot-request form and admitted that he intended to mail it back once he received it, but he was stopped by law enforcement. He pleaded no contest to one count of vote-by-mail fraud, and was sentenced to 24 months’ probation, 100 hours of community service, and assessed $738 in court costs, fees, and fines.

If Florida hadn’t had such safeguards and preventative checks in place, that ballot very well could have been cast and counted in the election.

It should come as no surprise that Florida—tied with Louisiana for the No. 6 ranking on our Election Integrity Scorecard—has demonstrated a commitment to improving its laws, regulations, and procedures to ensure secure elections.

We also recently added a couple of instances of ineligible aliens voting to the database.

In Ohio, Irnatine Boayue, an ineligible alien, registered and voted in the 2016 general election. Boayue pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of attempted false voter registration and was sentenced to one day in the Franklin County Correction Center. The court waived fines and court costs on account of the defendant’s indigency.

In Minnesota, Abdihakim Essa, also an alien, forged his father’s signature as a witness when submitting absentee ballots in Hennepin County. Essa pleaded guilty to four felony charges and was sentenced to 180 days in an adult correctional facility, 90 days of which were stayed pending successful completion of two years of supervised probation. He was also assessed $78 in court costs.

Zameahia Ismail, another alien, registered and voted in person in two different precincts in a Hennepin County, Minnesota, election in 2017. She voted in St. Louis Park, where she actually lived, and a second time in Minneapolis after being encouraged by an acquaintance to vote for Abi Warsame, a Democratic candidate for Minneapolis City Council.

She was not required to provide any identification in Minneapolis because her acquaintance vouched for her identity. Ismail, who pleaded guilty to the charge of registering in more than one precinct, was sentenced to a year in prison, with all but 20 days stayed pending successful completion of two years of supervised probation. She was also assessed fines and fees totaling $78.

As the latest updates to our Election Fraud Database illustrate, threats to fair and free elections continue to exist. As the more than 1,400 cases in the database should make abundantly clear, states should get to work implementing election reforms designed to improve the integrity of the election process.

*****
This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

How Individuals Enable Tyranny thumbnail

How Individuals Enable Tyranny

By Barry Brownstein

It is easy to think the roots of tyranny lie outside of ourselves, but perhaps we are looking too far away.

In Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a Czech refugee living in Paris joins a protest march against the 1968 Soviet invasion of her homeland. To her surprise, the refugee could not bring herself to shout with the other protesters and soon left the rally. Her French friends didn’t understand her reluctance. The refugee silently mused that her friends could never understand that “behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.”

Beware of groups marching in lockstep, even for a seemingly good cause, Kundera warns.

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill pointed us in a similar direction when he observed a tyranny as terrible as any imposed by “public authorities.” Mill called it the “tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”

Mill described “the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.” Mill counseled, “individual independence” protected from “encroachment” from the tyranny of the majority “is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

The tyranny of societal mandates, Mill warned, can be “more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, … it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

On Liberty was published in 1859. Sadly, the tendency Mill described is all-too-common among individuals living in 2023 who believe “their feelings… are better than reasons, and render reasons unnecessary.”

Often such “feelings” are based on the prevailing orthodoxy disseminated by The New York Times, NPR, and other such media outlets.

Worse, feelings-driven individuals up the ante and demand others conform. Mill explained, “The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct, is the feeling in each person’s mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathises, would like them to act.”

Others may share your feelings and preferences. Yet, Mill reasoned, even when shared, individual preferences are not elevated to a guide for living for others:

No one, indeed, acknowledges to himself that his standard of judgment is his own liking; but an opinion on a point of conduct, not supported by reasons, can only count as one person’s preference; and if the reasons, when given, are a mere appeal to a similar preference felt by other people, it is still only many people’s liking instead of one.

Here is Mill’s bottom line: “[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” Your feelings, your opinions, your sense of what is good for you, your sense of what will make you happier “is not a sufficient warrant” to interfere with the individual sovereignty of any one else.

Mill was unequivocal about the wrongness of silencing dissenting voices: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

There has never been a dystopian novel, nor a totalitarian society, where freedom of speech was not suppressed.

The haunting question is why do so many enable totalitarians by demanding others conform to their personal feelings?

Mill taught us how to resign as an enabler of tyranny. Our feelings about an issue, no matter how widely shared, are never justification for coercing others or censoring competing views. Mill wrote, “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.” He argued that suppressors of other views “have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.”

Those who believe they should impose their opinions on others are probably not reading this essay. Among them are people who act as though they are infallible.

Hearing Mill’s arguments, some readers may see they silence themselves, believing their opinions are socially unacceptable. When we remain silent we co-create “collective illusions” which Todd Rose wrote are “social lies” occurring “in situations where a majority of individuals in a group privately reject a particular opinion, but they go along with it because they (incorrectly) assume that most other people accept it.”

Rose explained, “We often conform because we’re afraid of being embarrassed. Our stress levels rise at the thought of being mocked or viewed as incompetent, and when that happens, the fear-based part of the brain takes over.”

The choice to remain silent, to self-censor, is connected to the erroneous belief that by going along with the majority our “personal responsibility for our decisions” is diffused, “making it easier to bear mistakes.”

A person who values liberty understands the high costs of assuaging feelings by eschewing responsibility.

Václav Havel was a Czech playwright, dissident, and the first president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of communism. In his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel explored the dynamics of mindlessly going along with prevailing sentiments. A grocery manager places in his shop window a sign: “Workers of the world, unite!” Havel revealed the manager placed the sign, not out of real support for the slogan, but to avoid “trouble” and “to get along in life.” No big deal, the manager may think: “It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee [me] a relatively tranquil life ‘in harmony with society.’”

Havel’s shop manager hopes his sign signals, “I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”

Havel wrote his essay in 1978. Could Havel have imagined that virtue signaling would be the norm in the West in 2023?

Had the sign read “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient,” Havel reasoned, the grocer would not eagerly degrade his “dignity” by signaling his fear.

“Ideology,” Havel wrote, “is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”

Havel revealed a purpose in adopting an ideology you do not believe in: you can live under the “illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.”

Havel called this a “post-totalitarian system,” filled with “hypocrisy and lies,” in which “the lack of free expression [is claimed to be] the highest form of freedom.”

Havel was clear: to prop up hypocrisy and lies, we must behave as though we believe the lies. Individuals, he wrote, “confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”

Havel kindled hope as he ended his essay: “The real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?”

Mill, Havel, and Kundera all point us to a terrible truth: our moral weakness, desire to evade responsibility, and illusion that the majority makes right have led us down the slippery slope of forfeiting our freedom.

How do we respond to those working to undermine human rights? The solution is simple, but not without personal costs. Stop lying, stop degrading yourself, stop pretending to believe what you don’t, and resign from the role as an enabler of tyranny.

*****
This article was published by AIER, American Institute for Economic Research and is reproduced with permission.

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