Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

The Instagram feed from a guy who cut himself off from his family after taking his several hundred million dollar share of the family fortune to promote anti-Semitism in America.

As much as inheritance taxes bug me, if they reduce the opportunity for people who do nothing but promote hatred to continue doing so, it might be worth it.  This, unfortunately, is why every good burst for the American economy is subverted by the generation that grew up comfortable and able to go to college.

Socialism: Belief in an Invisible Friend

I say that it is an invisible friend because wherever it had been tried it has failed to alleviate poverty and human suffering.  Maybe it is real but it sure behaves like an invisible friend: utterly useless for its supposed benefits.

Clarification: the welfare state is not socialism (government ownership of the means of production).  The welfare state relies on taxes paid by corporations and individuals to help those in need (and in incompetent welfare states, those in want).

P.J. O'Rourke Has Always Been One of My Favorite Writers

 He manages to combine a lot of wit with important ideas.  9/12/20 New York Post explaining why young people support socialism:

As soon as children discover that the world isn’t nice, they want to make it nicer. And wouldn’t a world where everybody shares everything be nice? Aw … kids are so tender-hearted.

But kids are broke — so they want to make the world nicer with your money. And kids don’t have much control over things — so they want to make the world nicer through your effort. And kids are very busy being young — so it’s your time that has to be spent making the world nicer.

For them. The greedy little bastards. Kids were thinking these exact same sweet-young-thing thoughts back in the 1960s, during my salad days (tossed green sensimilla buds). Young people probably have been thinking these same thoughts since the concept of being a “young person” was invented.

That would have been in the 19th century — during America’s first “Progressive Era” — when mechanization liberated kids from onerous farm chores and child labor laws let them escape from child labor.

This gave young people the leisure to sit around noticing that the world isn’t nice and daydreaming about how it could be made nicer with the time, effort and money of grown-ups.

I’m all for sending them back to the factories or, at least, the barn. If I hear any socialist noise from my kids I’m going to make them get up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows. And this will be an extra-onerous farm chore because we don’t have any cows, and they’ll have to search for miles all over the countryside to find some.

They’ve got it coming. Young people are not only penniless and powerless, they’re also ignorant as hell. They think of wealth as something that’s limited, like the number of Hostess Ding Dongs on the 7-Eleven shelf. They think rich people got to the 7-Eleven first and gobbled all the Ding Dongs, leaving poor people to lick the plastic wrappers.

Young people don’t know that more Ding Dongs can be produced. They don’t know how or why more Ding Dong production is possible. And they certainly don’t know how to get the cream filling inside....

Young people believe that the way to obtain more wealth is to take it away from rich people.

You can’t do it. Well, you can do it. But you can only do it once.

You can take the Ding Dongs from the Hostess factory for free, but once you’ve eaten them you can’t go back to the Hostess factory and take more Ding Dongs for free. The Hostess factory is out of business. (Which may protect our health, reduce environmental pollution, and preserve various species of animals such as the high fructose corn weevil, which, for all I know, is endangered. Although, considering that Pew Research claims even more millennials [69 percent] favor cannabis legalization than favor socialism, somebody’s going to be sorry when they get the munchies. But I digress again.)

 

 

Centrally Planned Economies

This is a few years old, but shows all the problems of a centrally planned economy.


Yes, 64 million unoccupied homes, built just to pump up the GDP numbers.

The Coming Battle Over Socialism

As you are already aware, many millenials have very positive ideas of what socialism is.  Items to use when trying to talk to junior in the basement.

1.  No European country is really socialist.  Socialism is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as:

any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property

: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state

Every European nation has a mixed economy, with most property owned by individuals or corporations.  Even countries like Sweden which has for most of its recent history been dominated by the Social Democrats, are not socialist.  Most socialist parties in Europe abandoned socialism for a mixed economy as socialism demonstrated its inability to provide the workers with a decent standard of living.  Only Britain's Labour Party has toyed with government ownership of the means of production: airlines; coal; steel and other heavy industries and even then, this tends to change as Labour and Conservative parties swap control.

The U.S. is also a mixed economy with significant government ownership of the means of production in some segments: Tennessee Valley Authority and Bonneville Power Administration being two large examples; Medicare in the case of health insurance and local government ownership of many hospitals.  But nearly every other industry in America is primarily or entirely privately owned: airlines; most public utilities; even the millennials' beloved Facebook, Apple, and Starbucks.

Like most European nations, our government engages in many forms of economic regulation.  Some of these were so obviously destructive to the interests of working Americans that Democrats pushed for deregulation, such as the airline shared monopoly destroyed in the late 1970s.  Many other regulatory processes are so clearly for the benefit of big corporations that neither Democrats nor Republicans are prepared to challenge them: minimum milk prices and farm price supports in general to keep food expensive for the benefit of the 2% of Americans who grow food (many of which are big corporations) and the detriment of the other 98%.  The poor are especially injured by this, because whether rich or poor, you need about the same number of calories.  Higher food prices hurt the welfare family a lot more than the Zuckerbergs.

2. Socialism does not have to lead to a totalitarian state.  But news media are a means of production, and even the most open-minded governments are unlikely to accept harsh (and especially if accurate) criticism without reining in government-owned media.  If the national government owned all the TV networks, local stations, newspapers, and magazines, would a supposed Nazi-like Trump not put his own people in charge?

3. Even aside from the confiscation of private property, socialism has one basic flaw: it lacks the signalling mechanism of pricing and demand to tell the managers of the economy what is wanted or needed,  The Soviet Union was famous for building consumer products that no one wanted because consumer demand and prices tell producers what is wanted.  Central planners seldom have a clue.  The Aral Sea environmental disaster is one of those examples of how socialism utterly failed: Soviet central planners decided diverting its water to grow cotton was more important than the fisheries and the health of the locals.

Do you want plain black coffee or one of your oversugared and overpriced Starbucks creations.  Imagine bureaucrats who drink black coffee trying to imagine what the masses want.  Do you think you will have a dozen Starbucks in your city--or even one?

Another Reminder of Why the U.S. Needs Socialized Medicine

1/3/18 Associated Press:

LONDON (AP) — Officials say extreme seasonal pressure on Britain's hospital system means many non-urgent procedures must be put off for weeks.

National Health Service England officials are telling hospitals to delay some procedures to free up staff and beds to deal with emergency patients.

Is This Self-Awareness or Death Rattle?

9/18/17 Daily Mail:

American physician assistants are being enticed over to the United Kingdom amid staffing shortages - with promises of long vacations in Europe.Physician associates, medical professionals who assist doctors in making a diagnosis and analyzing test results, train for two years, roughly a quarter of the training of a doctor. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4896782/Britain-begging-qualified-doctors-staff.html#ixzz4t8SgcXPI Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Comments at Instapundit point out that pay with NHS is about a third of US PA salaries; so much for student loan debt.

Try Not to Laugh

9/14/17 BBC:

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has devised a "rabbit plan" to counter the economic war he says is being waged against his government by "imperialist forces".

The president urged crisis-hit Venezuelans to breed rabbits and eat them as a source of animal protein.

Venezuela is facing record levels of child malnutrition amid persistent food shortages.

The leader did say that the "rabbit plan" had not got off to a good start and the minister of urban agriculture, Freddy Bernal, said there had been a "cultural problem".

'People put bows on them'

President Maduro said rabbit kittens had been handed to 15 communities as part of a pilot project by Mr Bernal.

"When he came back, to his surprise he found people had put little bows on their rabbits and were keeping them as pets, it was an early setback to Plan Rabbit."
"A lot of people gave names to the rabbits, they took them to bed," Mr Bernal said.

The minister urged Venezuelans to start seeing rabbits "from the point of view of the economic war".

More Democratic Party Civil War

9/8/17 U.S. News & World Report:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. prosecutors on Thursday asked a judge to jail Martin Shkreli while he awaits sentencing for securities fraud, after a Facebook post by the former drug company executive about Hillary Clinton prompted an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service.

"Shkreli has engaged in an escalating pattern of threats and harassment that warrant his detention pending sentencing," prosecutors said in a filing in Brooklyn federal court late on Thursday.

They pointed to a Sept. 4 Facebook post in which Shkreli offered $5,000 to followers who could grab a strand of Clinton's hair during the former presidential candidate's upcoming book tour. That led the Secret Service, charged with protecting Clinton, to contact him.

Hedge fund millionaire?  Sounds like a Bernie Bro,  I was not mistaken:

In October 2015, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders acknowledged having received a $2,700 donation from Shkreli, whom he had previously called a "poster child of greed". Sanders, however, said he would forward the money to Whitman-Walker Health, a D.C. community clinic known for its expertise in HIV/AIDS healthcare. Shkreli told medicine news portal STAT that among his reasons for donating to Sanders' campaign was that he supports some of Sanders' positions, excluding the ones about drug prices. He claimed he hoped to raise Sanders' attention in order to explain to him in a private meeting the drug companies' price-setting mechanisms.^[135] In February 2017, Shkreli was invited to speak at Harvard University. The requested travel was approved by a judge.

Why does he support socialists like Sanders?  Why does a leftist enclave like Harvard invite him to speak?  Because he can't control himself and projects his greed:

In May 2014 Retrophin acquired the rights to market Thiola, a drug used to treat the rare disease cystinuria.^[53] Shortly before Retrophin fired Shkreli, Retrophin raised the price of Thiola from $1.50 to $30 per pill; patients must take 10 to 15 pills a day.^[54]

In an article titled "The Most Unconscionable Drug Price Hike I Have Yet Seen", medicinal chemist Derek Lowe wrote of the Thiola action, "This one enrages me, and I do drug research for a living".^[55]Retrophin did not lower the price after Shkreli's departure.^[56] 

Something to Share With Your Bernie-Loving Relatives

You First

5/25/17 CNBC:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called on the need to consider universal basic income for Americans during his Harvard Commencement Speech.

Zuckerberg's comments reflect those of other Silicon Valley bigwigs, including Sam Altman, the president of venture capital firm Y Combinator.

"Every generation expands its definition of equality. Now it's time for our generation to define a new social contract," Zuckerberg said during his speech. "We should have a society that measures progress not by economic metrics like GDP but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas."

Zuckerberg, Altman, and fellow billionaire socialists can show us how to do it.  I am sure they can put together $100 billion easily enough, which should generate $10 billion a year in income.  That  should be enough to take care of California.

When billionaires talk in these terms, they really mean to tax those trying to become rich.  Somehow, that money mostly ends up in the pockets of the rich.  And where are all the great ideas, books, etc. that should have come out of the people who were the beneficiaries of the trillions spent on the Great Society?

How Can You Tell That Someone is a Rich Exploiter?

Who they sleep with.  5/2/17 Seven Days (apparently a local Vermont paper:

Leavitt is one of five people formerly associated with Burlington College who have confirmed to Seven Days that they were contacted, interviewed and, in some cases, subpoenaed by federal authorities over the past 15 months. While much about the inquiry remains shrouded in mystery, documents and interviews suggest that it is a serious criminal investigation focused on a $6.5 million bank loan application the college made in 2010 to pay for a $10 million lakeside campus.

The woman who signed that application? Former Burlington College president Jane O'Meara Sanders, the wife of 2016 presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

The investigation appears to stem from a January 2016 complaint filed by Vermont Republican Party vice chair Brady Toensing on behalf of Catholic parishioner Wendy Wilton, a conservative activist and Rutland City treasurer. Toensing alleged that O'Meara Sanders committed federal loan fraud by inflating the number of fundraising commitments she had secured to buy the 32-acre North Avenue campus from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington. When those donations failed to materialize, the college defaulted on its loans — costing the church, which financed a portion of the sale, between $1.6 million and $2 million.

Note that this investigation is not post-Trump, but started in 2016.

Why I Dare Not Buy A Second House

I might turn Socialist:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the proud new owner of a summer home in the Champlain Islands, Seven Days has confirmed.
The Burlington resident last week plopped down nearly $600,000 on a lakefront camp in North Hero. 
Sanders’ new crib has four bedrooms and 500 feet of Lake Champlain beachfront on the east side of the island — facing Vermont, not New York. The Bern will keep his home in Burlington and use the new camp seasonally.
“We’ve traveled up to the islands many times over the years — almost always on day trips,” Sanders’ wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, told Seven Days in a written statement. “We’ve been impressed with the North Hero community, eaten at the North Hero House and Shore Acres and have suggested them to friends who were looking for a beautiful place to stay or have dinner. St. Anne’s Shrine in Isle La Motte is my favorite church and it is nearby.”
Last Tuesday, the day of the closing, a relaxed-looking Bernie Sanders posed for a photo at Hero’s Welcome General Store on Route 2. The store, a bit south of his new abode, serves a sandwich called “Feel the Bun” in the senator’s honor. The $6.99 deli delight consists of a “HUGE” homemade roll, sliced turkey, fresh apple chutney, hot pepper relish, lettuce, tomato and provolone cheese.

Those of You Planning to Vote for Bernie Should Look At Venezula

6/17/16 Yahoo News:

Caracas (AFP) - Venezuelan police have arrested hundreds of people as the country's food crisis erupted into deadly looting this week, heightening hardship and political uncertainty in the impoverished oil-producing nation.
Dozens of bakeries, supermarkets and hardware shops were looted on Tuesday in the eastern city of Cumana, the latest flashpoint in a crisis that has killed at least four people so far.
"It ended in total ruin because the businesses had not only their stock pillaged but also their furniture. It was total destruction," said Ruben Saud, president of the Cumana Chamber of Commerce.
The chaos started when gangs of looters on motorcycles raided trucks transporting food, witnesses said.
The governor of Sucre state, where Cumana is located, told state television channel VTV that "more than 400 people" were arrested, including three suspected gang leaders involved in the looting.
Arrests have also been reported in other towns.
- Blaming the opposition -
The opposition blames President Nicolas Maduro for an economic crisis in which Venezuelans are suffering shortages of basic foods and goods.
Maduro in turn blames the crisis on an "economic war" allegedly waged against his leftist government by the business elite.
He accuses the opposition of fomenting unrest to spark a foreign intervention to unseat him.

I would like to think most Americans are smart enough not to want to go down this path, but in the HP parking lot the Bernie 2016 bumper stickers are showing up.