Voluntary Association and Non-Aggression
Richard Ebeling says that interest rates need to tell the truth.
Jacob Hornberger suggests to legalize all drugs, and has some further comments on “winning” the drug war.
Max Blumenthal on the other side of John McCain.
John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski with a new book that says that CIA and Saudi Arabia conspired to keep 9/11 details secret.
And WND with an article on Chelsea Clinton teaming up with Fakebook to censor non-hip sex-related counseling.
There was another mass shooting, killing two and injuring several others, this time at a video game tournament in Jacksonville, Florida. The alleged shooter, 24-year-old David Katz, had lost a game earlier that day and apparently was upset about it.
According to this CNN article,
Katz underwent treatment for psychological and emotional issues, according to his parents’ divorce records obtained Monday by CNN.
He was once placed on an antipsychotic medicine used to treat schizophrenia. His father, Richard Katz, objected, saying he “has seen no evidence whatsoever of schizophrenia in David Katz. David seems well aware of reality at all times.”
The alleged gunman was also placed on two antidepressants, which his father said at the time “pose significant and unknown risks to the children.”
The 2006 filing was part of a divorce and custody battle that was so acrimonious, both parents filed to have a guardian ad litem assigned to David, who was 12 at the time.
And according to this Tampa Bay Times article, the suspect “had previously been hospitalized for mental illness,” and “as a teenager he was twice hospitalized in psychiatric facilities and that he was prescribed anti-psychotic and antidepressant medications.”
The article adds that “The records show Katz’s parents disagreed on how to care for their troubled son, with his father claiming his estranged wife was exaggerating symptoms of mental illness as part of their long-running and acrimonious custody battle.”
Now, it’s bad enough when “doctors” give young people those kinds of psychiatric drugs that even adults shouldn’t have, but putting the kid into a psychiatric facility as an in-patient — that’s WAY bad, in my view. Those places are filled with Nurse Ratcheds and Doctors Mengele, as I have learned over the years, over a period of 35 years now since college and knowing people who had been in-patients in those kinds of places, and one kid in high school as well. And I have written about Justina Pelletier quite a bit, and what the psychiatric facility caused her, even though she was not intended to be a mental health patient!
Anyway, the articles above don’t mention whether the video game shooting suspect has been taking antidepressants or other psychiatric drugs in the past 12 years since his parents’ divorce, or recently. But if he was in fact the shooter, then either he has been still taking those things, or it could be that the effects of his having taking them during those earlier years are very strong and long-lasting.
And as I wrote in this post about mass shooters and psychiatric drugs and gun control, for those who are taking any of those drugs and want to get off them, to prevent a possible dangerous reaction to withdrawal, see Dr. Breggin’s book on psychiatric drug withdrawal, Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families.
And avoid psychiatric hospitals like the plague!
In An Open Letter On John McCain to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Robert Wenzel writes:
Dear Chuck,
I see your proposal to rename the Richard Russell Building after John McCain is
catching flak.I don’t know why. Hey, why shouldn’t a criminal enterprise building be named after a criminal? I’m all for it. You have to hand it to McCain, the guy was a lifelong “servant of the people” but still somehow amassed a net worth of $18 million. It would be quite an inspiration for incoming senators/servants of the people. You had a great idea.
But, hey, if you can’t get your fellow shakedown artists to rename the building, here’s an idea: Name coffins carrying American servicemen from overseas, who have died in the fight to keep the global Empire strong, the John McCain Coffins.
Since McCain was probably the most vociferous senator demanding war across the globe, what better way to honor him.
Sincerely,
Robert Wenzel
Editor & PublisherSan Francisco, California
According to Tom Knapp, former Libertarian Party candidate for President Darryl Perry is running in the New York City Marathon on November 4th, which he is doing as a fundraiser for the Innocence Project.
The Innocence Project “exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice,” according to its website. “To date, 362 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA testing, including 20 who served time on death row.”
Here is the place to donate to the Innocence Project via Darryl Perry’s New York City marathon run.
More info at Tom Knapp’s blog.
I had just made mention of some Second Amendment issues in the previous two posts. Now, Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute has this article, You can’t be both “pro-military” and “pro-Second Amendment.” Yup.
The 2nd Amendment: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”
The writers of that Amendment wanted to protect the “free States” of the United States from federal government tyranny. They generally opposed militarism and were extremely uncomfortable with having a standing army.
I think that many of those today who say they believe in the right of the people to keep and bear arms but at the same time love and worship the military and really believe that the U.S. military has done any good for the past many decades, are suffering from cognitive dissonance, to say the least.
Frankly, if the choice were either having an armed society and a disarmed government, or an armed government and a disarmed society, many militarist, military-worshiping sheeple today would choose the disarmed society with an armed government.
In Arizona, Congresswoman Sally McMartha beat the viciously anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Tea Party conservative Kelli Ward for the Republican nomination to replace U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake. Some analysts believe that had the 86-year-old Arpaio not taken votes away from Ward, she would have beaten McMartha otherwise.
On the Democrat side in Arizona hoping to replace “Flake,” openly bisexual, LGBT-activist Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema won her party’s primary. Sinema is a drooling proponent of ObamaCare. On the issue of feminism, Wikipedia quotes the feminazi Sinema as saying, “These women who act like staying at home, leeching off their husbands or boyfriends, and just cashing the checks is some sort of feminism because they’re choosing to live that life. That’s bull. I mean, what the f- are we really talking about here?” (Who’s the real “flake” here?)
According to Wikipedia, Sally McMartha was a career military Air Force person who actually flew fighter jets from Kuwait, where U.S. military personnel and bases had no right to be, and she aided and abetted in the enforcement of no-fly zones over Iraq during the 1990s, as part of the evil sanctions which were imposed by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton to prevent the Iraqi civilian population from rebuilding their civilian water and sewer treatment centers that U.S. military intentionally bombed and destroyed during the 1991 Bush-military invasion of Iraq. A criminal war of aggression, such bombings, sanctions and no-fly zones led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians by the mid-1990s, with hundreds of thousands more by the year 2000.
McMartha is also pro-U.S. government-imposed sanctions on Russia for no good reason. She loves NDAA and military and security contractors and was right there with John McCain to increase “defense” (sic) spending, which is already through the roof, i.e. welfare for military and security contractors. Wikipedia quotes McMartha as saying, “You want to talk about a war on women? Walk in my shoes down the streets of Kabul. Walk in my shoes down the streets of Riyadh; where women have to be covered up. Where they’re stoned, where they’re honor killed if they’ve been raped, where they can’t drive and they can’t travel without the permission of a male relative. That’s a war on women.”
First of all, Sally, I don’t think your shoes would fit me. And also, you don’t belong in Kabul or Riyadh, except as a private citizen on tour or in private employment. U.S. government employees of any kind do not belong in those foreign areas. But she is right about those repressive areas over there, where civilized people should not go. Do you think the U.S. government should stop supporting the Saudis, stop selling them weapons to murder innocents?
Anyway, if the people of Arizona want an alternative between the two flaky females running for Senate to replace Jeff “Flake,” they might consider Adam Kokesh, the official Libertarian/write-in candidate. Now, supposedly he is running for President in 2020. But based on information I’ve seen, he is listed as an official “Libertarian/write-in” for Senate from Arizona.
Kokesh in the past has shown evidence of personal instability, with drugs, and has directly confronted police or other government law enforcement which is just dumb, in my view. Like McMartha, Kokesh is a veteran of the wars that George W. Bush started in 2001-2003. Despite his past behaviors and incidents, Kokesh seems to have shown considerably more moral character than McMartha and Sinema. He might suffer from PTSD, which could explain some of his past behaviors, and might have some bit of a guilty conscience regarding his participation in the Iraq War. But I don’t know.
I’m not exactly endorsing Adam Kokesh, just pointing out that the people of Arizona have an alternative to the two statists. (However, given what authoritarian sheeple most people are, on the left and right, it is doubtful they would want an Adam Kokesh in Washington. The gullible sheeple LOVE their government controls and intrusions into their lives!)
And btw, here is a recent debate between Kokesh and Larken Rose on the effectiveness of the political process.
In the Florida primaries, the statist parties’ winning candidates for governor are Democrat Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum and Republican Congressman Ron DeSantis. Gillum is a typical “get government involved in everything” Democrat, and DeSantis is a member of the House Freedom Carcass.
DeSantis actually has some good anti-government views and votes from the conservative side. However, he tends to agree with Donald Trump on just about everything, if not everything then most things. For example, he is ignorantly supportive of building a government wall on the border, even though most people who are in the U.S. “illegally” are those who have overstayed their visas or otherwise violated some bureaucratic rule, and not those who have snuck in through the border. He ignorantly supports the unconstitutional Guantanamo prison, and he sponsored the “Palestinian Accountability Act.” (How about the Israeli Accountability Act? Ya think?) Also, he supposedly supports the right to keep and bear arms, but supports federal background checks, i.e. he doesn’t support the right to keep and bear arms if permission from the gubmint is required.
There are quite a few other candidates on the ballot for governor in Florida, but I don’t see any actual “Libertarians” on the list. There may be a libertarian on the ballot as an independent, but I don’t have time now to look at all of them.
For U.S. Senate, Democrat incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson won renomination, and the current governor Rick Scott won the Republican nomination.
Wikipedia states: “According to Vote Smart’s 2016 analysis, Nelson generally supports pro-choice legislation, opposes U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan, supports reducing defense spending in order to balance the budget, supports an income tax increase in order to balance the budget, supports federal spending as a means of promoting economic growth, supports providing tax incentives to businesses for the purpose of job creation, supports requiring states to adopt federal education standards, opposes reducing restrictions on offshore energy production, supports the federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, supports restrictions on the purchase and possession of guns, opposes repealing the Affordable Care Act, opposes requiring immigrants who are unlawfully present to return to their country of origin before they are eligible for citizenship, and opposes allowing individuals to divert a portion of their Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts.”
i.e. Nelson is a Big Government, central-planning-obsessed statist.
On Rick Scott, he has good “conservative” to libertarian cred on many issues. Wikipedia states that NRA gives him an A+ and that he has signed many “pro-gun” bills into law. However, after the February Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida, Gov. Scott seemed to be asking for a new grade of “F” to bring his average down, signing bills which were mainly hysterical reactions to the shootings.
For instance, he raised the minimum age to purchase a firearm to 21. So he doesn’t mind violating the right to keep and bear arms of people under 21. He also imposed waiting periods and background checks, even though many of the recent mass shooters had passed their background checks. He also banned bump stocks. Just what is banning bump stocks going to do, when experienced gun users can easily fabricate a make-shift bump stock if they want to have that function? The new law also bans “mentally unhealthy” people from possessing firearms. But who is to determine who is mentally unhealthy? Politicians? Bureaucrats? Are there any mentally healthy politicians out there?
The new law also funds the tearing down of the school where that recent shooting took place. Just what is it with tearing down schools that were the place of a shooting? Officials in Sandy Hook demolished that school as well. What, are they covering something up?
And also, when he became governor, why didn’t Rick Scott try to repeal laws that ban possession of firearms in restaurants and bars? In Florida there is such a law, and that law directly contributed to the 49 deaths at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, by disarming law-abiding citizens who were there, including security guards, and preventing them from saving those 49 innocent people from their deaths. (Now, I can’t find the answer online, but it’s possible that Gov. Scott may actually be the governor who signed that into law. It would be informative to know if that’s the case as well.)
While Gov. Scott seems to have good conservative to libertarian positions on other domestic issues, he is still a statist, and according to “On the Issues,” he supports sanctions on Iran (which are an act of war), and it seems he is probably a neocon. But information online suggests he avoids foreign policy questions.
There do not seem to be any Libertarians on the ballot in Florida for Senate as well as governor. But there are some third party or independent candidates. Vote for any of them, but not either of the two statists, that’s my view on that. We need a radical to get in there, someone who promises to dismantle each and every liberty-crushing, police-state bureaucracy in place. Someone who believes in private property rights, freedom of association, the non-aggression principle, and self-ownership. (Where are they? Where are they?)
Laurence Vance says that conservatives should be embarrassed for not questioning the legitimacy of taxation, for being against free trade, and for supporting government education, the welfare state, the warfare state, the drug war, government-controlled health care, foreign aid, anti-discrimination laws, and yes, gun control. Shame on them.
And Jacob Hornberger points out conservatives’ cognitive dissonance in their saying that they believe in “free enterprise, private property, and limited government,” yet they support central-planning immigration controls that go against “free enterprise, private property, and limited government.” Shame on them.
John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute analyzes the modern phenomenon of uncontrolled warrior cops, S.W.A.T. team hysterics in Amerika.
Sadly, in 21st Century America many people still don’t get freedom of speech. And there are those who do get it, but they don’t like it, and they want to silence others, in the name of “fighting hate,” being against “discrimination,” etc., etc. Those are very dangerous people, as far as I’m concerned.
The leftists want to suppress and banish those with a different point of view on the college campuses as well as off campus, and the “conservatives” want to send the government police after protesters, and shut down news outlets and websites they don’t like.
For the conservatives, it is taboo to protest the singing of the National Anthem or to kneel and not salute the American flag, etc. Or if protesters burn the American flag, that’s “offensive,” and the flag-worshipers want to censor that and even throw someone in jail for burning a flag. To those confused people, harming an inanimate object is more serious than depriving someone of one’s liberty and security by throwing him in a cage.
Criticizing the U.S. military and all its crimes for 100 years is also taboo. We must suppress such criticism.
And for other people, we can’t criticize Barack Obama, his continuing the Bush wars, NDAA, Patriot Act, TSA, the drug war, being the “Deporter-In-Chief, etc.. As Ed Asner and his fellow moron show-biz celebrities were saying, we can’t criticize Obama because we are afraid of being called “racists.” How nutty is that? But after 8 long years of shouting obscenities about George W. Bush, they did become silent throughout the long 8 years of Barack Obama.
We also can’t say anything about “transgender” lunacy. That’s taboo, too. Look, if someone who is a male thinks he’s a female and wants to put on ladies clothing and lipstick and pretend, then whatever. It’s your life. I believe in live and let live. However, when the LGBT activists want to shut me up and censor my views about that gender confusion stuff, that’s a different story. There are people who want a law punishing me for writing just those very things!
So anyway, Sheldon Richman has this lengthy article on proposals in Congress for a new “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,” which seeks to define anti-Semitism. I’m sure the buffoons in CONgress will define that however they can to encourage even more “sensitivity” so that any reference to “Jewish” can be considered to be anti-Semitism, and encourage even more suspicion of everyone’s neighbors, more reporting on one’s co-workers, more totalitarian paranoia. Criticism of this or that Jewish person will very well be seen as “anti-Semitic,” or criticism of Israel especially.
There are now anti-Semitism laws or policies in certain backwards countries, such as South Carolina. There they apparently define anti-Semitism from a 2010 U.S. State Department propaganda sheet, according to Jerusalem Post: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews…Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
That’s mainly an anti-freedom of speech law, if it means that if someone thinks or believes a certain way that such thoughts and beliefs should be outlawed and punished by the government. But we have many, many politicians in Washington and around the country who pander to not just certain voting blocs, but pander to certain taboos which must be enforced at all times.
For many people the taboo is pointing out anything negative or any criticism of Israel or anything Jewish. But freedom of speech is that I can criticize people I want to criticize and they can respond accordingly. In the article by Sheldon Richman he points out some very good reasons to criticize Israel. The Israeli government is just another socialist, central-planning regime, just another militarist police state, just like the U.S. government. It has nothing to do with anyone being Jewish.
The most recent move by the Israeli regime to declare by law the supremacy of Jews in Israel is a move toward even further authoritarianism and militancy. I don’t think that anyone should have special favors by law based on religious background or race or gender. This is one of the most anti-individualism policies in a whole nation I have seen.
In contrast, America was founded on individualism, supposedly, which is why we have a Declaration of Independence and a Bill of Rights, to protect the life and liberty of the individual. Not so in most (if not all) other countries. How about protecting non-Jewish people who happen to live in Israel? Sorry. What is Israel, a private, exclusive club? Yes, apparently.
And there is the other issue of criticism of Zionism. Zionism is more of a general political movement, while Israel is specifically a country. Since I am not a collectivist, I don’t understand this political movement to bring the world’s Jews to one location, and to Israel and Israel only, and based solely on Biblical scriptures and nothing else. It certainly isn’t based on practicality. Should there be a “Jewish state”? No, of course not. And there shouldn’t be a Christian state, an Islamic state, or an atheist state. There should just be freedom. People should live where they are most comfortable, and where it is economically affordable.
But all that Israel and Zionism stuff is a collectivist point of view. As I have said before, collectivism is a very bad thing. People who think like collectivists are not thinking clearly, in my view.
But you see, my writing those things is so “offensive” to some people, they would want to use some censorship law as proposed now in Congress to silence my thoughts on that. Actually, probably most of the people who would be expressing offense are really feigning feeling offended out of some kind of indoctrinated social obligation to do so, in my view. (Especially the phonies in CONgress!)
And we can’t call someone a “nazi” if they act like Nazis, like the goons of the TSA and ICE, and so on. To some people, the use of the word “Nazi” refers to Nazi Germany, and the term shouldn’t be used lightly. Well, I see it as more of a humorous reference, and people should lighten up. Listen, when a government police officer is beating up on some innocent person and if he or she is acting like a Nazi, then we can say that. And what about Charlie Chaplin imitating Hitler? And Hogan’s Heroes? Col. Klink and Sgt. Schultz?
And this intolerance and lack of sense of humor is worse now than it was 30 years ago. During the 1980s, Jerry Williams on the radio would call someone a “Nazi” if he felt it applied to someone, such as a very nasty caller. And of course there was the “Soup Nazi” on Seinfeld and in New York Mayor Bloomberg was called a “Soda Nazi” for trying to ban large sugary drinks.
And some people will find it “offensive” if I refer to the “special counsel” Robert Mueller and his group of investigators as “Adolf Mueller and his gestapo,” which frankly is how they’ve been acting. Okay, okay, so far they haven’t gathered people up and shot them on the spot, but they have totally trashed the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution which they all swore to support and defend, and have been covering up for questionable characters like James Comey and John Brennan and instead going after mainly non-criminals and for political reasons.
Now, why is it more offensive to call someone a “Nazi” but not as offensive to call someone a “commie”? After all, the communists, especially Soviet and Chinese, were responsible for the deaths of tens of millions more innocent people than Hitler and the Nazis. In my view, it’s all about the Bible, which says that Jewish people are the “chosen” people, or considered “special” or more special than others. “The Jews are more important than Russians and Chinese,” and so on. That’s mainly why. So, it’s okay to call someone a “commie,” and it’s not nearly as offensive as calling someone a “Nazi.” All this comes from thinking in a collectivist way about others. People should stop doing that.
And we are always better off with freedom of speech and tolerance, and worse off with legal suppression of speech and thought. “Thought crimes” is a concept really of Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and shouldn’t be considered a valid concept in America.
I wrote this post in 2015, and will repost it here, slightly edited.
July 19, 2015
Former American Conservative magazine publisher Ron Unz has this article on John McCain’s alleged role as a disseminator of communist propaganda while a POW in the Vietnam War, and notes that McCain may have lied about being tortured in order to cover up his alleged propagandizing on behalf of the North Vietnamese. Unz links to this article from Counterpunch which goes into detail about it. The article in Counterpunch refers to two Vietnam War vets who were also POWs and who are extremely skeptical of McCain’s claims, referring to this article from the Phoenix New Times. Unz also refers to the lengthy article by Sydney Schanberg who in 2010 wrote about the other scandal that most people don’t know about, that of McCain along with John Kerry as U.S. Senators engaging in official cover-up of the many American Vietnam War POWs who were left behind in Vietnam. If you are interested in all this, check out those articles.
Unz writes:
…Placed in this context, John McCain’s tales of torture make perfect sense. If he had indeed spent almost the entire war eagerly broadcasting Communist propaganda in exchange for favored treatment, there would have been stories about this circulating in private, and fears that these tales might eventually reach the newspaper headlines, perhaps backed by the hard evidence of audio and video tapes. An effective strategy for preempting this danger would be to concoct lurid tales of personal suffering and then promote them in the media, quickly establishing McCain as the highest profile victim of torture among America’s returned POWs, an effort rendered credible by the fact that many American POWs had indeed suffered torture.
Once the public had fully accepted McCain as our foremost Vietnam war-hero and torture-victim, any later release of his propaganda tapes would be dismissed as merely proving that even the bravest of men had their breaking point. Given that McCain’s father was one of America’s highest-ranking military officers and both the Nixon Administration and the media had soon elevated McCain to a national symbol of American heroism, there would have been enormous pressure on the other returning POWs, many of them dazed and injured after long captivity, not to undercut such an important patriotic narrative.
…
I must reemphasize that I am not an expert on the Vietnam War and my cursory investigation is nothing like the sort of exhaustive research that would be necessary to establish a firm conclusion on this troubling case. I have merely tried to provide a plausible account of McCain’s war record and highlight some of the important pieces of evidence that a more thorough researcher should consider. Unlike the documentation of the POW cover up accumulated by Schanberg and others, which I regard as overwhelmingly conclusive, I think the best that may be said about my reconstruction of McCain’s wartime history is that it seems more likely correct than not. However, I should mention that when I discussed some of these items with Schanberg in 2010 and suggested that John McCain had been the Tokyo Rose of the Vietnam War, he considered it a very apt description.
Among other things, Tom Woods has more honest things to say about John McCain than McCain’s apologists in the government media:
McCain’s legacy lives on in every politician and journalist who jumps on every propaganda report to justify another round of bombing and destruction.
It lives on in every politician who, 15 years after another idiotic military intervention, finally admits it was a “mistake,” never apologizing to the people he smeared at the time who tried telling him it was a mistake and who predicted every obvious consequence that any damn fool should have known.
It lives on in a media that craves bipartisanship — but bipartisanship in the service of the state, and bipartisanship in which the left gets what it wants and the right gets a nice photo-op.
It lives on in the families who are missing children because of a war that McCain finally admitted had been a hideous mistake and a ludicrous expenditure of scarce resources.
McCain was a man of the state, in every fiber of his being. That is why they cheer him.
And that is why we must tell unpopular truths — about McCain, and the corrupt empire he served.
And Laurence Vance linked to his 2008 article about John McCain, in which Vance wrote:
All wars are not created equal. An unjust war is criminal, and soldiers who participate in it are murderers. No North Vietnamese gook (McCain referred to them as gooks in a U.S. News & World Report interview in 1973) had ever posed a threat to the United States or harmed an American until the United States intervened with military advisors, military aid, the CIA, intelligence missions, puppet governments, and finally, U.S. troops — thousands and thousands of U.S. troops. How could John McCain possibly be considered a war hero? He was not captured, imprisoned, and tortured because he was defending U.S. soil against invading enemy forces. Had this been the case, I would be the first one to congratulate him as a war hero. McCain is a war criminal because he rained down death and destruction on the people of Vietnam during twenty-three bombing missions….If McCain had been executed by the Vietnamese after being shot down, would he not have deserved it? What would you do to the pilot who just ejected and landed in your backyard after bombing your house? Why is it that war criminals are always foreigners?…The real American heroes are the men who refused to go to Vietnam and participate in an immoral, unconstitutional, and unjust war.
Former economics professor Barry Brownstein writes about Elizabeth Warren’s “Accountable Capitalism Act,” in which the senior imbecile from Massachusetts wants the government to impose its own decisions on large businesses as far as diversity of its boards and payment and personnel decisions, and more.
Brownstein writes that Warren “wants corporate decisions to be made by armchair quarterbacks who lack essential tacit knowledge and the knowledge of ‘particular circumstances of time and place,’ as Hayek calls it. Without such knowledge, it is impossible to make decisions that effectively allocate resources to best serve consumers.”
So really Pocahontas wants corporations to be accountable to bureaucrats who are basically parasites who live off the labor of others, while businesspeople make a living by actually being productive and serving consumers’ needs.
Brownstein considers Warren’s proposals more like national socialism than “democratic socialism.” So she is not very much different from Donald Trump, in my view, the self-described “economic nationalist,” which really means “national socialist.”
In national socialism, the government gets into the economic affairs of the people, in the name of the “nation.” For example, Trump’s idiotic trade policies, in which he wants to tell American consumers what they may or may not buy and from where, at least attempt to control those matters by imposing huge costs on them. And Trump wants to dictate to American producers from where and from whom they may buy the capital goods they need to run their manufacturing plants and so on, by imposing huge costs on them (which eventually will reverse the positive effects of his tax cuts!).
A more extreme example of national socialism, which actually Elizabeth Warren’s ideas are closer to than Trump’s, is Nazi Germany. When Hitler took control he then became an obsessed central-planning control freak, dictating to businesses every aspect of the business in an attempt to make it better serve the nation, or at least so Hitler thought.
Back to Elizabeth Warren’s irrational ideas. You see, as far as “accountability” is concerned in a free-market economy (which Hitler hated, and for which Warren and Trump both show utter contempt), businesses are accountable to the consumers. When businesses are no longer serving the consumers’ needs or if the competition serves the consumers better, the failing businesses just go bankrupt, reorganize, or close down.
Meanwhile, as far as “democratic socialism” is concerned, as Robert Wenzel reports, the Young Democratic Socialists of Amerika are now urging members to infiltrate the schools by becoming teachers. Wait, haven’t they already done this? Like 100 years ago?
Jacob Hornberger has this post today on people who try to avoid being labeled a “conspiracy theorist” in regards to the JFK assassination. He brings up several important people involved in the investigation of the assassination and their testimony. Hornberger is an expert on many facts and details of the JFK assassination.
Michael Rozeff has a post on the nutty nationalist nudnik Ann Coulter. He quotes Coulter as stating, “We need to apply the First Amendment to social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google, because it is a public square, and there is precedent for that and it’s gotta be done…”
You see, like most collectivists and nationalists, Coulter doesn’t understand the difference between private property and public property or government-owned property.
No, Twitter, Facebook and Google are not a “public square,” in comparing them to the street corner and sidewalks, etc. Those social media companies are privately owned.
The First Amendment applies to them in which the owners of those companies have the right to decide who and what may or may not participate on their forums, and for any reason, ,just as the owners or publishers of a newspaper and the editors decide which columnists may or may not be published in their newspaper.
No one has a First Amendment right to use the property of another to express one’s views. But you do have a First Amendment right to express your views on your own property or with your own privately owned media, or in the “public square” which generally is “publicly owned.”
Some people can make the case that Google especially is “doing the government’s bidding,” by censoring content that government bureaucrats want censored. But that is a totally different issue. I’m not dealing with that here.
Nevertheless, Coulter has a choice to make. Either choose the free market and private property, in which she will approve of the private control that Facebook, Twitter and Google now have and have a right to exercise (and if the users don’t like the rules they can use some alternative social media platform for their rants, their stupidity and their pictures of Grandma getting drunk, etc). And the free market will provide for competitors to get in the social media business and provide a platform that the SJW censors of the Establishment platforms have banned, etc.
OR, Miss Coulter can choose her fascist scheme of government taking control over those social media companies, or her socialist scheme of government taking ownership of those social media companies, turning them into “public squares.” (If it’s the fascist scheme, that is still a de facto ownership, so it would be socialist either way.)
And I must say that Ann Coulter is now sounding more like those SJW whiners (“Oh they’re not being fair to us conservatives, waaaaa”), isn’t she?
UPDATE: Ryan McMaken has some further analysis on Ann Coulter now favoring anti-discrimination laws.
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