Personal Economics 101

 

From International Liberty By Dan Mitchell Nikole Hannah-Jones has said that that Cuba is a role model of equality, largely due to socialism. But she sees the world through the lens of racism, which is like having blinders on. Hannah-Jones is the creator of the  academically shoddy   1619 project . Two years ago, the New York Times unveiled the “1619 Project,” which largely argues that slavery and racism are part of the nation’s DNA. The NYT states that the project “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery…at the very center of our national narrative.” The "history" is based on Marxist thinking and Critical Race Theory.  But back to Cuba. It's a disaster. It that's the kind of equality that the left in this country is aiming for, I'll opt out. The two charts below tell the story.  But even if she's right and Cuba genuinely has equality, it's only because socialism has impoverished everyone, including the ruling class. O...

These are written and published by Daniel Mitchell, is a libertarian economist and former senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is a proponent of the flat tax and tax competition, financial privacy, and fiscal  sovereignty. His blog is International Liberty. Part 1 This video from Dan Hannan crams 10,000 years of human history into 5 minutes. We learn about the “stationary bandit” of government and find out how our ancestors endured pervasive oppression and misery. But there’s a happy ending to the story. It’s called capitalism. Part 2 Yesterday, in Part I of this series, we enjoyed a video from the U.K.-based Centre for Economic Education, about how capitalism lifted the world from deprivation and oppression (also see videos by Don Boudreaux and Deirdre McCloskey). Today, in Part II of the Case for Capitalism, here’s a video from CEE that explains how markets provide you a cup of coffee. Part 3 Part I of this series featured Dan Hannan explaining how the emergence of capita...

It seems things have gotten a bit upside down. I have been confused about the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life... so hate filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. You can't justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost it's collective mind!  Somehow it's un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.  Russians influencing our elections are bad, but illegals voting in our elections are good.  It was cool for Joe Biden to 'blackmail' the president of Ukraine, but it's an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquires about it.  People who never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves. People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took huge loans for their degrees.  Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you'd better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated...

Omar, Sanders and AOC have called for dismantling our economic system and replacing it with Socialism. This article was written by a 26 yr old college student by the name of Alyssa Ahlgren, who's in grad school for her MBA. “My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity Around Us! I'm sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis (Florida) trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of presidential candidates calling for policies to "fix" the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around. I see people talking freely, working on their MacBook's and ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me; we live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous Nation and we've become completely blind to it. Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose. These things are so ingrained in our American way of life...

A sampling of policies from the Biden campaign and/or Democratic Party platform (as stated either in writing or by Party members): End cash bail  Abolish death penalty  End solitary confinement  Give government healthcare to illegals  Expand welfare for new immigrants  Expand asylum for all new illegals End border detention End all travel bans, including from jihadist regions  Amnesty for all illegals  Rejoin Paris climate accord  Eliminate all carbon emissions by 2030  Free public housing for all former inmates  Require federal reserve to end racial inequity  Universal government healthcare Zero-emissions transport nationwide  Appoint social justice prosecutors  Implement “restorative justice”  End mandatory minimums  Incentives prison closure  Penalize “absentee homeowners” to clear way for affordable housing  Dual language instruction in public schools Outlaw charter schools that earn a profit  ...

Dan Crenshaw, R-TX, speaks to Arizona State University students on socialism, taxation, gratitude, the role of government and other subjects of interest. Liberty is ordered freedom. Well worth the 51 minutes of your time. https://youtu.be/Z45r0OUS4Gg

https://youtu.be/XXMuj9axUZE Dan Crenshaw represents a congressional district covering north Houston, Tx.

Congressional stalemate deepens as Pelosi, Schumer say they won’t budge on coronavirus funding demands :  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer said Monday that they won’t agree to the Trump administration’s insistence on more money for small business loans unless their demands are met for additional funding for hospitals, state and local governments and food stamp recipients. Nancy Pelosi Reveals Plan To Steal 2020 Election : In an interview with CBS News, Pelosi claimed that not supporting vote-by-mail is “not what our founders had in mind” and claimed that the effort would be something Democrats focus on in the next bill… 'Absolute chaos' as businesses try to tap into rescue funds :   NEW YORK (AP) — Desperate small business owners who hoped for a quick government lifeline to help them survive the coronavirus crisis are still without funds, instead battling red tape, wary banks and swamped computer systems. Michigan Gov...

By Hayden Ludwig The Heartland Institute Population control is back in the news—and for Progressives, what’s old is new again. In November, a group of 11,000 signatories calling itself the Alliance of World Scientists released a dire public letter urging the return of population pseudoscience by declaring “clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency. “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected,” according to these experts, whose ranks are rife with psychologists, computer consultants, sociologists, and about 1,100 PhD students. “It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.” Left unchecked, global warming could “potentially [make] large areas of Earth uninhabitable.” In other words, it’s a typical news day for the climageddon folks, who have ratcheted up the alarmism so much recently that Oxford dictionary made “climate emergency” its 2019 word of the ye...

Excerpts from an editorial by Nick Searcy, actor, director and writer: The most overused quote in 21st Century conservative columns and speeches has got to be this one, and the reason it is so overused is that we have not addressed it to this day. As the late great Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics is downstream of culture.” We have let the Hollywood Left define the culture for at least the last 50 years. We had already conceded academia to the leftists, and as a result of their long march through the institutions, we have an army of socialist youth that rally to socialist superstars like Bernie Sanders and AOC because of their sheer ignorance of the death cult that is socialism. But now, we have been given an opening... We ceded academia to the Left 70 or so years ago, and they have been running up the score in our school systems and universities ever since. You can see the consequences of that at any Bernie Sanders rally. We now have a vast number of historically ignoran...

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. 2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. 3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. 4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. 5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

First a few comments. Democrats want to go after the "greedy billionaire class." No matter there are only 621 billionaires in the United States (163 live in California). You could tax all their wealth at 100% and still not pay for all the "free" stuff promised by the Democratic Party. The desire to increase your own wealth isn't viewed as virtuous by certain politicians; but they have become millionaires serving in Congress. (Sanders and Warren come to mind). Here's my quote of the day, from Ben Shapiro at Townhall: ...the problem for Democrats isn't Bloomberg's spending. The problem is that the Democratic Party now treats wealth itself as an indicator of immorality. This week, Sanders tweeted, "Together, we are going to end the greed of the billionaire class." Never mind that creating tens of billions of dollars in value via voluntary exchange, employing tens of thousands of people, and providing goods and services to millions is far l...

Quantum Economics Today’s economists may think that’s [inductive reasoning] what they are doing, but they often aren’t. They begin with models that purport to include all the important variables, then fit facts into the model. When the facts don’t fit, they look for new ones, never considering that the model itself may be flawed. Furthermore, as I have shown time and time again, they assume away reality in order to construct models that are in “equilibrium” with themselves. This is supposed to give us insight into the reality that has been assumed away.  Comparing Capital Gains Tax Proposals by 2020 Presidential Candidates In less than two months, voters will cast their choice in the Iowa caucus to begin the process of selecting the next Democratic presidential candidate. The candidates currently in the top 3 polling positions —former Vice President Joe Biden , Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)—have all proposed sweeping changes to the t...

Luke Skywalker to Yoda. "I'm not afraid." Yoda to Luke: "But you will be. You will be." If you pay attention to the news, it's hard not to be a little bit fearful, or at least concerned. But the world has always been a dangerous place. So don't think things are worse today than in the past. In many ways, they are much, much better. But we still have problems. We still need to attend to our surroundings. Here's why Warren Buffett's record $122 billion cash pile could be a worrying sign for stock markets Warren Buffett's mountain of cash may be a warning to investors that stocks are overvalued and that a crash is around the corner. MANDATORY TEACHER TRAINING DENIGRATES CHRISTIANITY, EXALTS ISLAM Christian scriptures described as “corrupted” while the Koran contains the “pure” word of God. To take back America, we need to take back the schools The fact that socialists are openly running for public office in America — that social...

Why Socialism, and Why Now?  (by Victor David Hanson) Today's students romanticize Che Guevara and Fidel Castro because they are clueless about their bloody careers. The Castro government for over a half-century was responsible for the murders of thousands of Cubans and Latin Americans in efforts to solidify Cuban "socialism" throughout Latin America. When our schools and colleges do not teach unbiased economics and history, then millions of youth have no idea why the United States, Great Britain, Germany and Japan became wealthy and stable by embracing free-market capitalism and constitutional government. Few learn why naturally rich nations such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela -- or entire regions such as Central America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia -- have traditionally lagged far behind due to years of destructive central planning, socialist economics and coerced communist government. The handmaiden of failed socialist regimes has always been ig...

The sub-head on this reads: Bernie Sanders Unveils His $16 Trillion Green New Deal.  I don't normally cover politics, but when candidates start promoting plans that have dire economic consequences, I think we should all pay attention. I'll list some of his proposals and why they are not tenable. But first, let's look the progress that has been made and what plentiful energy has done for our Gross Domestic Product and overall well-being. The following two charts show this. Now that this is out of the way, let's look at Bernie's plan:  No more fossil fuels. “Reaching 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization by 2050 at latest.”  I don't know what decarbonization actually means, since it's really not a word. I assume it means no use of carbon-based fuels. Also, most studies show that 100 percent renewable for electricity and transportation is not technically feasible in 10 ...

Climate change activists are not just interested in reducing carbon emissions in order to "save the planet." Their underlying desire is to overturn capitalism and replace it with socialist governments worldwide.  Our story starts with the IPCC, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. organization. "And any settlement of the Global Warming issue by the UN would entail massive transfers of wealth from the citizens of wealthy countries to the politicians and bureaucrats of the poorer countries." (1) In 1992, at the first U.N. Earth Climate Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Program Executive Director Maurice Strong stated, very candidly:  " We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse. Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?" (2) Former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO), then representing the Clinton Administration as U.S. undersecretary of state for global ...

"Talented Democrats Are All Running for President. It's a Problem". It's a Bloomberg opinion piece , but it still made me laugh at the choice of the word "talented."  Then it goes to discuss two democrat candidates from Texas, who I guess are going to run for President (which Democrat isn't), because they can't win local Texas elections.  These, and all the current Democratic hopefuls, are not talented. They are just popular with left-wing liberals.  Here's some other scary stuff to make you glad it's TGIF. A recession? Financial advisers say it's right around the corner — or not  (This from a publication that is written for Certified Financial Advisors).  The sub head reads:  A case can be made that the economy is headed for an imminent slowdown or still has some juice left. If this is the best analysis CFA can come up with, caveat emptor. New York City Experienced Worst Decline in Restaurant Jobs since 9/11 After $15...