People Are Worried About the Supremes Overturning Roe v. Wade

In the discussions over who will Trump’s nominee be to replace Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court, it seems that Trump and others are pandering on the abortion issue. Oooh, I won’t ask candidate if s/he might vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, and so on. “Precedent is important,” and all that. No, precedent is not important, because so many past cases were wrongly decided, including Roe.

Of course Roe v. Wade should be overturned. In that decision, 7 robed bureaucrats decided that the “High” Court was authorized by the U.S. Constitution to micromanage every stage of development of a human being, at least from conception up to birth. This “precedent” thus gives the State the authority to micromanage every stage of any human being’s growth and development, right?

So, in this older post, I wrote,

I’ve seen references to “personhood,” “viability,” “sentience,” and “consciousness, “ and I have some questions.

What is the viability of a born baby? If baby is left alone for a particular amount of time, one cannot survive for very long, because at that early stage of development one is dependent on one’s caretakers for feeding. The same can be said of a 2-year-old, maybe even older children, although the older the child, the more able one is to go out and seek food, unless one is locked inside and can’t get out. Is there a difference between the viability of a born individual and an unborn individual (at whatever stage of development)?

What about “sentience” and “consciousness?” How do we know whether or not a two-month-old “fetus” or a 2-day-old “fetus” can have any physical sensation or conscious awareness? If it is important whether or not that individual has sentience or consciousness in considering whether that individual has any right to life and liberty, and self-ownership, then, what about a born human being or a grown adult who has a neurological disorder and has no “sentience” or who is in a “persistent vegetative state” and has no consciousness, but is still “alive” (or can be kept alive via artificial means)?

I can’t say for sure that a human life begins at conception (although I believe that to be the case and have believed that for 20 years now), but I can sure say without any doubt that, IF a human life begins at conception, then self-ownership begins at conception. And IF that actually were the case, then those of the female gender would have an extra burden–and responsibility–that those of the male gender just don’t have.

In Roe v. Wade, the two dissenting Justices wrote, “I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court’s judgment.” Exactly. But many, many people are sooo worried that the decision might be overturned. If it is, then let the states handle that. If one state makes abortion illegal, then girls and women who want to kill their offspring can go into a different state that keeps it legal. I know, I refer to such actions harshly. And that’s because I’m not going to whitewash these issues or see as valid our culture’s dehumanizing of pre-born human beings in order to have the “freedom” to extinguish them out of convenience. In our culture today, we see powerful groups dehumanizing other human beings and acting against them. Not good.

Benefits of the American Revolution

Economics professor Jeffrey Rogers Hummel says that a strong case can be made “that without the American Revolution, the condition of Native Americans would have been no better, the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies would have been significantly delayed, and the condition of European colonists throughout the British empire, not just those in what became the United States, would have been worse than otherwise.” He discusses the case at length in that article at the Library of Economics and Liberty.

The Revolution was a good idea for those roughly 1/3 of the Colonists who wished to separate themselves from the King and secede from British authority, which they sort of did do. But the new American founders’ forming of an entire nation, a political unit that all the inhabitants of the colonies would have to be a part of whether they liked it or not, and to be ruled over by a centralized regime in “Washington,” was not a good idea. Political centralization is never a good idea. The new U.S. Constitution empowered the centralized regime over the masses, created a Bureau of Elites with monopoly power, and it should have been foreseen that the Bill of Rights at some point would be ignored by the regime and all its apparatchiks (like ICE, which isn’t even authorized by the Constitution).

So in my view, I think the post-Revolution new political Union, at the expense of private property and self-rule, was really the beginning of the tearing down of the Enlightenment and the principles and values it attempted to promote. Revolution good, Union bad.

Anti-Foreigner Police State Criminality vs. Property Rights and Freedom

Besides being a self-destructive dog chasing and biting its own tail with the anti-American anti-free trade central planning idiocy with trade restrictions and tariffs, Donald Trump is also an extreme ignoramus on the immigration issue. I’ve written on that several times.

In this Market Watch article, Caroline Baum points out some fallacies in Trump’s thinking (if you call it “thinking”). For instance, Baum states that immigrants are more entrepreneurially motivated than U.S. citizens.

Immigrants are twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans, for example. Forty-three percent of the 2017 Fortune 500 companies were founded or co-founded by a first- or second-generation immigrant, according to the Center for American Entrepreneurship. Those 216 companies generated $5.3 trillion of revenue and employed 12.1 million workers worldwide last year, according to the CAE.

In other words, in their role as entrepreneurs, immigrants are providing employment opportunities for Americans — high-paying jobs at established companies — not stealing jobs from American workers.

After listening to Trump and his nationalist-collectivist ignorant claptrap over the years, repeated word for word by the talk radio ditto-heads, I really believe that Trump and his obediently blind followers couldn’t care less about the actual facts of the matter when it comes to immigrants. With them it’s all emotional and no rationality whatsoever. It has to do with hating foreigners, needing to obstruct the lives and take opportunities away from the outsiders, the “other” (“they’re invading our country,” etc.). For them, the whole of the U.S. is an exclusive private club, and to get membership you have to “wait in line” and follow the rules (the Soviet-bureaucracy rules, that is), and so on.

No, people, you don’t wait in line for freedom. There are no authoritarian government “rules” to have to obey to find a better life for yourself and your family. Just don’t steal, don’t defraud, don’t use aggression against others. Duh.

These anti-foreigner, anti-immigrant ignoramuses on the radio I listen to on a daily basis (that I listen to because I’m obviously a masochist), they don’t care about freedom in America or prosperity, and live and let live which is what America used to be all about. And Donald Trump spoon-feeds them with all this nationalist crap.

The talk radio idiots would rather see a police state criminally detaining innocent immigrant families than see a foreigner open up a business in their community. And these “conservative” moralists should shut up about the “police state” with the Mueller-FBI witch hunt after Trump, as well. If it were the Bush DOJ/FBI going after the Obama campaign, the ditto-heads on talk radio would probably remain silent, and in fact they would probably cheer on that witch hunt. And I’m mainly talking about Rush Limbaugh, Howie Carr and Jeff Kuhner being the worst of them. You’ve probably heard Kuhner filling in for Michael Savage, and now you can catch him on WRKO.com. Kuhner sounds like one of those crazy Sesame Street muppet characters.

These guys are good with other issues, such as climate change and ObamaCare. But on this nationalism stuff, they’re off the rails, in the same way the hystericals on the Left are “triggered” by un-PC words at the crazy college campuses. I’m really getting sick of it. And they should shut up about “group identity politics” as well. Just like the totalitarians on the Left, these guys with their group identity politics on the immigration/nationalism issue!

If only we could get rid of all immigration laws, which are not authorized by the U.S. Constitution anyway, and in fact abolish the centralized bureaucracies in D.C. and decentralize this thing called “America,” now realistically “Amerika.” Restore private property rights and freedom of association. Private property borders trump government borders!

Race-Obsessed Higher “Education”

People on the radio are arguing over the Trump administration’s wanting to eliminate affirmative action policies from the colleges and universities. Good! At least there’s something good they’re doing, or thinking of doing. “Diversity” programs (i.e. making sure there are certain numbers of black people, certain numbers of Hispanic, but not necessarily white or Asian), are not supposed to be why we have higher education.

In this article, economics professor Walter Williams discusses the results of affirmative action programs in higher education, how they have caused black students who were not proficient or skilled enough to be admitted to universities but were admitted anyway, which only hindered their success in many cases.

Dr. Williams notes:

In the early 1990s, the Law School Admission Council collected 27,000 law student records, representing nearly 90 percent of accredited law schools. The study found that after the first year, 51 percent of black law students ranked in the bottom tenth of their class, compared with 5 percent of white students. Two-thirds of black students were in the bottom fifth of their class. Only 10 percent of blacks were in the top half of their class. Twenty-two percent of black students in the LSAC database hadn’t passed the bar exam after five attempts, compared with 3 percent of white test takers.

And regarding the students’ earlier education:

The K-12 education that most blacks receive is grossly fraudulent. Most predominately black schools are costly yet grossly inferior to predominately white schools and are in cities where blacks hold considerable political power, such as Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia. In these and other cities, it’s not uncommon for there to be high schools where less than 17 percent of the students test proficient in reading, and often not a single student in such schools tests proficient in math. Nonetheless, many receive high school diplomas

Dr. Williams asks if this agenda may have been intentional.

The fact that black students have low class rankings at such high-powered law schools as Penn doesn’t mean that they are stupid or uneducable. It means that they’ve been admitted to schools where they are in over their heads. To admit these students makes white liberals feel better about themselves. It also helps support the jobs of black and white university personnel in charge of diversity and inclusion. The question for black people is whether we can afford to have the best of our youngsters demeaned, degraded and possibly destroyed to make white liberals feel better about themselves.

So it seems that what matters to the education bureaucrats is to admit black students regardless of abilities, because it makes the admission board members feel good. Hmm, they must have extremely low self-esteem if they have to exploit young students of color based on the students’ skin color, to boost the college bureaucrats’ own feelings of self-worth.

And now look at the colleges today. Gender studies, women’s studies, race and gender, gender and race, blah, blah, blah, and we see that these “academics” are obsessed with race and gender, and LGBT issues. Can you imagine how things would be now if there were no taxpayer-funding of colleges and universities? Those aforementioned educrats and crazy professors would probably not have those jobs, jobs which actually wouldn’t even exist.

Articles for “Independence” (sic) Day

James Bovard on that time the media cheered for Gestapo immigration tactics.

Charles Burris discusses the President-Elect of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and his party the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its being a political front for Freemasonry.

Article by John Vibes on an ignorant judge who has rubber-stamped the use of barbaric electric shock punishments on disabled students in Canton, Massachusetts. As I’ve been saying for years now, this is Soviet Amerika. Should we just get used to it, or end it?

Matt Agorist with an article on a police union wanting to ban books in high school because they mention police brutality. (They don’t want people to know.)

Ron Paul on the dollar dilemma: where to from here?

And “Watts Up With That” writes about why the climate change campaign failed — scientists demonstrate.

Both Conservative And Liberal SCOTUS Justices Are Biased

This New York Times article gives some important information about the history of free speech and the Supreme Court in America. The article states that conservatives “weaponized” the First Amendment. Its main examples are the recent Supreme Court rulings which protected non-union workers from having to support causes they disagree with, and protected Christian pregnancy clinics from having to tell patients about how to get an abortion.

In other words, in those two cases the Court said that the First Amendment protects people against compelled speech. Laws in America may not compel people to support a particular point of view or causes they disagree with. That should be a no-brainer in the “land of the free.” Laws compelling speech are authoritarian and violate the basic dignity and freedom of the individual.

And this is in contrast to a private firm requiring “compelled speech” as a part of employment, such as the NFL requiring that players stand for the so-called National Anthem at games. If the players don’t like the rules of employment then they are free to leave and find another job. The team is a privately owned enterprise, not a government owned enterprise, and therefore the rules of the firm are under the owners’ authority.

But the government and its laws may not require some kind of speech or expression. And that’s my view on that as well. But Justice (sic) Elena Kagan thinks that not allowing the government to compel speech is “weaponizing” the First Amendment. You see, the people on the Left are only for freedom of speech when it’s their views being protected. And further they are the ones who want to “weaponize” speech through compulsion and forcing people to have to fund causes they disagree with, or forcing Christians to have to discuss abortion with patients when it goes against their conscience.

The New York Times article also mentions how the Supreme Bureaucrats under conservative control have tended to protect more conservative speech. But it doesn’t break down individual SCOTUS members’ own votes on First Amendment issues. And it doesn’t note how liberal members are just as biased. But the NYT did do that a few years ago, which I wrote about in this post, which I will quote from:

Hmmm. It seems that writing about the First Amendment and Christian-majority tolerance of religious minorities, as I wrote in yesterday’s post, really elicits quite a response from people.

But regarding the Supreme Court’s decision that I mentioned in yesterday’s post, there was a study [.pdf] just recently by USC Law and Political Science Prof. Lee Epstein and colleagues which showed that U.S. Supreme Court Justices tend to approve of the First Amendment when it fits their own ideological views.

Here is a chart showing some of the study’s findings, as shown by the NYT:

(Source: New York Times)

It appears as though the more conservative-leaning Justices were more biased against the more liberal speech or speaker, while the more liberal-leaning Justices seem to be less biased against conservative speech or speakers, albeit still biased. (However, the study mentioned above might itself be biased. Who knows?)

But, according to UC, Irvine Law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, the current Roberts Court has shown more of a bias against speech which goes against the State. From the NYT:

“The court has, he said, protected hateful speech at military funerals, allowed the sale of violent video games to minors and struck down campaign finance laws. But it ruled against a government whistle-blower, a student expressing a pro-drug message, a prisoner and a human-rights activist.

“Justice Scalia was in the majority every time.”

Given how extremely and sickeningly authoritarian and fascist Amerika has become, I am not at all surprised. And it’s also no surprise that this “Supreme” Court has recently refused to even hear the case by Chris Hedges et al. in opposition to the NDAA’s provision of indefinite detention of Americans, which the President can use to have the military arrest and detain anyone he or government and military bureaucrats want to have arrested and detained, for any reason, without charges, or even suspicion.

Ron Paul and John Whitehead Discuss the Amerikan Police State

Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams discuss the Amerikan police state with John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute.

Immigrants Are Fleeing to the U.S. Because of Our Government’s Drug War

Jacob Hornberger has this post today on immigration and the drug war. In my view, it’s an uphill battle to try to convince the masses that their own government is the root cause of the very problems it allegedly attempts to solve. But Jacob Hornberger tells it like it is with this issue. What we need is a resurgence of freedom. I wish the people in charge, like Donald Trump and his drunken attorney general (drunk with power, that is), Jeff Sessions, could understand these things. They HATE freedom. They hate it. But they LOVE government power, that’s for sure. They are committing evil with their police state.

Socialism Exploits the Workers, Empowers Bureaucrats and Their Goon Enforcers

Here is some more elaboration on my post regarding the new star socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, specifically in my comparing and contrasting socialism vs. freedom.

I am not going to use “capitalism” because unfortunately there is too much smearing of free-market capitalism by those who think that crony capitalism (i.e. crony socialism) is “free-market capitalism.” So, I’ll refer to freedom and free markets.

Free markets are free of government controls. “Laissez-faire capitalism,” which I’m sure you’ve heard of. Laissez-faire means to let be, to leave it be, or to leave people alone. The right to be left alone by others, especially by the government, is a part of freedom and free markets. Certainly not a part of socialism, and I’ll explain that here. This laissez-faire or to leave people alone is a part of live and let live, which is also a part of the libertarian way of life and the non-aggression principle. All our civil liberties, such as what we see protected in the Bill of Rights, are a part of this free market, libertarian way of life.

This is why the people on the left who want socialism don’t like the Bill of Rights. They especially want to repeal the First Amendment, and they oppose due process.

And no, live and let live doesn’t mean let people steal and defraud others, or let others take a gun and shoot people, and so on. The idea of presumption of innocence is that, if you don’t have reason to suspect someone of violating the persons or property of others, then you leave them alone. The neighbors leave them alone, the government leaves them alone. Government police don’t search persons or property, bureaucrats don’t demand reporting your private matters to them, and no one steals from anyone else. The government doesn’t demand from you a portion of your earnings involuntarily.

That’s what freedom is. “Free markets” go with freedom in a civilized society.

An important part of free markets and laissez-faire is private property and private property rights. This begins with what you have initially, your person, your body and whatever comes from within you. That’s your “property,” and I know some people don’t like the thought of their life and their body as their “property,” but it’s better that you think of it that way, because the government already does, in which your body and your life are its property (e.g. the income tax, drug prohibition and the war on drugs, etc.).

Some people refer to it as “self-ownership.”

So, from your body and your self comes your own creative energy, your talents and abilities and skills, that you are the initial owner of. At some point you will sell those results of your intellectual and physical labor, to employers, to clients, or to customers. Some people like to refer to that as trading and the people involved are “traders.” I know Ayn Rand did.

As long as there is no force, no coercion, no “involuntary servitude,” as long as such trading is voluntary, then obviously such associations and trades are ethical and moral. That’s what’s known as the “free market.” And in a society of freedom.

Socialism is completely different. The U.S. became very socialist with some major schemes that were imposed in the 20th Century, including the income tax, various New Deal policies such as Social Security, and Medicare, and the Civil Rights Act.

In the income tax, the government takes away some of your earnings involuntarily. You are required to report personal information to the government such as your employment, your income and the details of those things.

Can you imagine your neighbors demanding such private information (and at the point of a gun)? You see, that’s one good way to know that a government scheme is no good, is dishonest, and in fact, criminal. If the neighbors tried to impose such things on you they would be arrested. So this scheme is not a part of a “free market.” It is a part of socialism, in which you must do extra labor to serve the government, involuntarily, and if you resist, YOU are the one sent to jail.

Socialism sacrifices the individual to serve the collective or the community. You do not have property right of ownership and control in your person, your labor and the fruits of your labor, and really anything else you think you “own.”

In Social Security the government demands that you forfeit a part of your earnings to allegedly care for the elderly or the disabled. The idea that your Social Security confiscations from your paychecks are then put into some account and saved for you when you retire, is a myth. But many people think that. No, the loot is taken from you and put into the general fund of the U.S. treasury, and Congress spends and squanders it in real time. It is a real time redistribution of wealth scheme. Congress defrauded the people on this from the very beginning (.pdf), and, as Ron Paul observed, the young people are right to fear never receiving their Social Security benefits.

What make Social Security a scheme of socialism are the involuntary income confiscation, the forced redistribution of wealth, and government central planning. Note how the federal government continues to defraud the people, how generations and generations of people still believe that Social Security is “insurance” or an “account” from which you will later receive your benefits. You see, because socialism and its schemes of theft and exploitation of the workers of society to benefit the few (bureaucrats and their cronies), are inherently dishonest, it requires its proponents to deceive the public in bamboozling them to accept it, as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and their ilk continue to do.

“Free health care,” “free education,” “jobs for everyone,” “universal basic income,” etc. And all centrally planned by the gubmint. After all, the government does such a great job with Medicare, veteran health care, immigration, and its wars like Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam, and of course, delivering the mail. Don’t forget that one.

So in socialism you do not have any property rights. You don’t have a right to own your own person and your labor. The government assumes ownership of them. Socialism is government ownership of the means of production, and one of the most important means of production is the people.

In socialism, the individual, one’s life and one’s person and labor, are sacrificed to serve the collective. This is where the real “exploitation of the workers” comes from. In the private sector, where everyone is expected to be accountable under the law, stealing and defrauding are forbidden. In the government sector, the rulers are not accountable under the law, because the government IS the law.

Have you considered yourself a “socialist,” but are not sure now? I hope so. Study the Soviet Union and why it collapsed. Study the human rights abuses of socialism. And Cuba, North Korea, the U.K. And of course the U.S.

For more information, read these:

Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (.pdf).

America’s Great Depression by Murray Rothbard (.pdf)

The Myth of Efficient Government Service by Murray Rothbard

Other schemes that are socialist are government-monopolized and centralized law enforcement. i.e. the police state. The police state is a product of socialized community policing and security. It is not a product of the free market. I wrote this article on police socialism, and Anthony Gregory has this article on law enforcement socialism. And see Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (.pdf), Chapter 12. Also, see Chaos Theory by Robert P. Murphy (.pdf)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Her Socialism vs. Freedom

The newly nominated Democrat candidate for Congress from the Bronx, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, says she is a socialist. She is for Medicare for all, and single payer health care meaning the the government pays for and provides the health care of everyone. She is for free college education and guaranteed jobs for all.

Hmm, let’s see. Socialism is usually defined as the government ownership of the means of production, of industry and property. Some people like to say it’s “public ownership of the means of production,” because the word “public” is a little buzz word that makes socialism sound nice, like the “social” in socialism. We love everybody and want to take care of the whole “public,” and all that.

Socialism also involves government central planning. Bureaucrats in a centralized location like Washington attempt to plan the economic activity for an entire population. Socialism also involves taxation, the process of bureaucrats stealing wealth and earnings from the workers and producers of society. And yes, taxation is theft because it is via a lack of voluntary contract. For every transaction and contract to be legitimate ethically and morally, it needs to be voluntary.

And enabled by taxation-theft, socialism also involves forced redistribution-of-wealth schemes. The wealth is stolen from the workers and producers, and redistributed to the bureaucrats, their bureaucracy fiefdoms of control, the banksters, the military-industrial-complex, crony Big Insurance, crony Big Pharma, and of course, the drug war racket.

Throughout history there is one example after another of the destruction of socialism, government takeovers of economic sectors, government central planning and government theft of private wealth and income. Look at Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, most African countries, and, worst of all, the U.K.

And currently? Well, we can take a look at Venezuela. The Maduro government has seized the means of food production and distribution. As we have already seen, the results of that are distortions in such food production and distribution, shortages, empty store shelves, long lines, starvation, and chaos.

In contrast, in the U.S. where the means of food production and distribution is mainly under the control of private companies, we have well-stocked store shelves, and, no very long lines.

In the U.S., prior to the imposition of Medicare and Medicaid, medical care was handled privately and there were no major wide-spread problems with the general population being able to access health care. Usually if someone couldn’t afford to see a doctor or go to hospital, the doctor often would provide care for free. But now, because of Medicare and subsequent seizures by government of the health care sector, such as ObamaCare and Medicare Part D, many doctors can’t afford to provide care for a patient for free. You see, socialism causes distortions in every area that it has been imposed, including health care.

Socialism also results in the police state, with the socialized and government-monopolized system of community policing and security taken away from the free market. Thus socialism, government controls over the people, produces the most violations of human freedom. Freedom is most sacrificed when the government takes control over everything.

One thing that could help Ms. Ocasio-Cortez to understand that socialism is a fantasy and can and will never work in reality, is that most of the dysfunctional schemes that we see in Washington that have been imposed on others unwillingly are socialist schemes. The military-industrial-complex is a socialist scheme. And immigration restrictions, and the police state criminality now inflicted by armed government goons in attempting to control the movements of millions of people who are peacefully trying to seek and make a better life for themselves and their families.

In this video, Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling explain the immorality of immigration controls that are a part of socialism and government central planning.

One intervention by government causes chaos and government’s own solution is further intervention and thus further chaos. As I have written here before, the immigration crisis with people fleeing Central America or South America has as one of its main causes the drug war, another socialist scheme.

Anyway, another thing about socialism is that it enriches those in power, as we have see with the Chavez and Maduro families in Venezuela, and many of the people who go to Washington unwealthy and leave ultra-rich. That’s because we have an immoral, criminal socialist system of taxation-theft in place. And many of those who have a socialist point of view seem to be very generous with other people’s money, money seized from the people involuntarily. The same socialist-minded people don’t seem to be that generous with their own money in the private sector (as studies have shown that conservatives donate more to charity than progressives, and as we have already had a glimpse of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez in that respect).