What is socialism? In a free market system, prices are set by buyers and sellers without input from the government. Private property is guaranteed by law. And thegovernment does not have a state-run monopoly in any area of the economy. Socialism is different: massive government spending on welfare, prices set by government, tariffs on imports, nationalizing industries.

Let’s take a look at a case of socialism: Venezuela. Venezuela adopted socialism, and implemented import tariffs, nationalized industry, and imposed price controls. Let’s take a look.

The American Institute for Economic Research explains:

In 1998 [Hugo Chavez] was elected to the Presidency. He immediately worked to deepen and expand the “Bolivarian Revolution,” focused on social welfare programs, nationalizing key industries, and “democratizing” the market system.

[…]The situation eroded quickly, reaching an early head in the summer of 2015. Prices were skyrocketing because of inflation, caused by the government using newly printed money to pay off debts and make payroll. But the government had accused corporations that ran large grocery chains of “price-gouging.”

So, we have inflation in the United States right now. And that inflation was caused by the Biden-Harris regime, which has been in power for nearly 4 years. They caused prices to skyrocket in two ways. First, by raising the price of electricity and gas. They did this because of their climate change alarmism, which caused them to cancel pipelines and deny drilling leases, etc. Second, by spending reckless government spending. And now they, like Hugo Chavez, are trying to blame the inflation they caused on “price-gouging”. Will they adopt the same solutions as Venezuela did? And how will that work out for us?

Here is how the Harris of the Biden-Harris regime intends to respond to the inflation caused by the Biden-Harris regime:

Vice President Harris announced on August 16 that she would place controls on grocery prices.

As attorney general in California, I went after companies that illegally increased prices, including wholesalers that inflated the price of prescription medication and companies that conspired with competitors to keep prices of electronics high. I won more than $1 billion for consumers. (Applause.)

So, believe me, as president, I will go after the bad actors. (Applause.) And I will work to pass the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food.

So, she’s going to go with price controls. Is this the same thing as what communists did in Venezuela? How did it work out there?

Well, here is a report from the Institute for Free Trade:

In 2003, Hugo Chávez declared war on “speculators” and imposed price controls not only on Venezuelan milk, but also on sugar, coffee, beef, chicken, pork, grain, and pasta (he also severely restricted access to foreign currency). According to very unreliable official figures, price controls caused shortages of basic goods to increase from 5% at the outset to over 22.2% in ten years.

Chávez, however, refused to learn the lesson about the price mechanism even as he was unleashing mass scarcity. In 2011, he extended price controls to soap, detergent, shampoo, toilet paper, mouthwash, fruit juice and other products. To take one example, toilet paper was already scarce in Venezuela when Chávez died in 2013, as the government imported 50 million rolls and citizens, downtrodden but not without a sense of humour, shared videos on social media with theories on how to get by without it.

In 2016, scarcity of basic goods reached 82.6% in Caracas according to Luis Vicente León, the head of polling firm Datanalisis. Caracas, León added, was Venezuela’s best-supplied city. Scarcity has only worsened since.

Initially, the Venezuelan regime made up for shortages in national food production with imports paid with oil revenue. However, price controls and expropriations (see point # 2) had already destroyed the country’s productive sector once oil prices began to fall sharply in 2014. Last year, 93% of Venezuelans could not afford food. According to a recent survey, 60% of Venezuelans shed at least 11 kilograms in weight during the last year due to malnutrition.

Right now, supermarkets in America have a profit margin of around 1-2%. If Kamala comes in and artificially lowers their prices, then their suppliers will also have to have price controls. Food producers (especially smaller ones) will stop making products that are price controlled. Grocery stores (especially smaller ones) will stop selling products that are price controlled. Shortages of grocery store products will lead to lines outside of these stores, just like when Jimmy Carter put price controls on gas, and there were gas lines in America. Why think that price controls in America will work any differently than they do in Venezuela? Where is the evidence?

I saw it this past weekend, and I really liked it. A lot of people hate Ronald Reagan. The secular left has this crazy idea that religion, free market economics and patriotism will start World War 3. Well, Reagan had a degree in economics, used to teach Sunday school, and he definitely thought that America was better than communism. And he beat the communists, without firing a shot.

Let’s see a movie review, from Focus on the Family:

But whether you’re young or old, whether you lived through the tumultuous latter days of the 20th century or not, Reagan, the movie, reminds us why courage and vision, tenacity and faith remain vitally important character qualities in our leaders.

And even though I did live through a portion of that era, Dennis Quaid’s portrayal of Ronald Reagan here shines a light on chapters of this actor-turned-politician’s life that I had little knowledge of myself.

Along the way, we see how the faith of a mother and the love of a devoted wife played huge roles in shaping the heart and soul of a failed actor into a president whose tenacity arguably bent the course of history.

When I walked out of the theater, my head was spinning from the way that Reagan’s mother Nellie and his second wife Nancy had treated him in the movie. I don’t have any personal experience with mothers looking after their children like this. Taking them to church. Giving them Christian books to read. Having a plan for them. Teaching them right from wrong. My mom didn’t do any of those things. And I am always surprised when I see a wife investing in her husband and supporting him, and getting upset when he cannot achieve everything he was mean to achieve.

Here’s a bit about his mother Nellie:

During Reagan’s youth, we see that his mother, Nelle, takes him to the First Christian Church in Dixon, Illinois. In one service there, we hear 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land” (KJV).

Nelle drills into her young son a sense of divine purpose and calling on his life—lessons that form the bedrock of Reagan’s sense of identity in some tough moments. “God has a purpose for your life,” Nelle instills into her impressionable boy. “Something only you can do.” Elsewhere she reminds him, “Remember to listen to that small, soft voice” when he’s alone and quiet, and to give it his “full attention.” She offers this exhortation as well: “Remember who you are and Whose you are.”

My mother never treated me like that, so I was really just lost taking in all this good mothering. I wondered what I could have been, if I had a mother, too. My mother’s god was money, and she certainly didn’t see me the way that Nellie say her son Ronald. I think a lot of women today want to have children, but if all they want to do is throw them into daycare and public schools, what’s the point of a man signing up to have other people raise his kids? Conversely, it might be worth it to have kids, if the man got to see a very good woman his children about God, and train them to achieve something in the world that respects God.

The review also talks about his second wife Nancy:

[H]is first wife, Jane Wyman, finds Reagan’s flirtation with politics disdainful. “Is there anything worse than an actor with a cause” she quips. And then she adds, scornfully, “You are an actor. That is your job. Not politics.”

Given that discrepancy of values, it’s no surprise that Reagan’s first union doesn’t last. His marriage skids toward the rocks about the same time his career does, prompting Reagan to tell his mother, “I lost a child, I lost my marriage, I lost my career.” That’s one of the points at which she encourages him with strong spiritual counsel (which we’ll unpack in the next section).

Here’s a bit more about his second wife, Nancy:

Near the end of his acting career, when he’s more involved with SAG than actually making movies, Reagan meets Nancy Davis. As their connection deepens, he says of himself, “I’m what you call damaged goods,” noting that he’s divorced, broke and has children from a previous marriage. Nancy gently counters, “We’re all damaged goods, Ronnie.” That prompts him to say, “I just want to do something good in this world, to make a difference.”

In the years that follow, of course, Reagan seeks to make good on that desire, with Nancy constantly encouraging him at his side—first in his run for the governor of California, then his first failed presidential campaign in 1976 (where he lost the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford) and finally in his sunset years as the specter of Alzheimer’s disease looms.

I’ve never had the feeling from any woman that my dreams were important, and that it was important to help me to achieve them. So again, I was just looking at all this excellent wife-ing, and thinking “wow, so that’s what it must be like to have a good wife”. Today, I see a lot of non-traditional women demanding that traditional men give them things, but they don’t want to be traditional wives. They don’t want to help men at all.

Honestly, I think this movie will make self-centered feminists very uncomfortable. It shows women treating boys and men well.

The movie also has some policy, diplomacy and history in it. But it’s at a high level. They talk a lot about religious liberty and about the need to deter aggression with strength. So, it’s a good introduction to conservative ideas. I think you’ll really like the movie. If you go see it, be sure to leave a comment telling me what you thought of it.

Are you having any conversations about transgenderism these days? It seems like there is a big push for transing kids, mostly coming from pharmaceutical companies and their allies in the public schools. They believe that children should be able to request drugs and surgeries based on their feelings. Even if parents disagree. But what if children’s discomfort with their biological sex is temporary?

Take a look at this study, which appeared in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

There’s a nice article about this study over at the left-leaning UK Daily Mail:

The majority of gender-confused children grow out of that feeling by the time they are fully grown adults, according to a long-term study.

Researchers in the Netherlands tracked more than 2,700 children from age 11 to their mid-twenties, asking them every three years of feelings about their gender.

Results showed at the start of the research, around one-in-10 children (11 percent) expressed ‘gender non-contentedness’ to varying degrees.

But by age 25, just one-in-25 (4 percent) said they ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ were discontent with their gender.

The researchers concluded: ‘The results of the current study might help adolescents to realize that it is normal to have some doubts about one’s identity and one’s gender identity during this age period and that this is also relatively common.’

This paragraph was interesting:

According to the findings, females were more likely to report being unhappy with their gender and both increasing and decreasing ‘non-contentedness’ were associated with lower self-reported self worth, more behavioral problems and an increase in emotional struggles.

If you are raising daughters, you might want to have a plan to counter this. I think the best way to build up a girl’s self-esteem is to give her interesting things to do, and help her to excel at them. And I mean things like writing code, reading Thomas Sowell, learning self-defense, shooting guns, fixing machines, understanding classical literature, etc. Useful stuff. Girls need to do useful things together with their Dads, that way, when they have bad feelings, they can think of all the things that they know how to do, and all the people that ask them for help. It’s hard to feel bad when you know how to achieve results. And you know that you are good at achieving results. I’m not an expert in women, but it seems to me that they have trouble when they dwell too much on their own feelings, and too much on what other people think about them, or what other people are doing. Girls should just not care about all that. Girls should just be good at doing things that matter. Girls should know how the world works.

The conclusion of the Daily Mail article features Christian scholar Dr. Jay Richards, was also interesting:

Dr Jay Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, told DailyMail.com: ‘We’ve known for over a decade that most kids who experience distress with their sexed bodies resolve those feelings after they pass through natural puberty.

‘Indeed, we can infer from the DSM 5 [2013] and other sources that as many as 88 percent of gender-dysphoric girls and as many as 98 percent of gender-dysphoric boys in previous generations desisted if allowed to go through natural puberty.

‘These two facts make it clear why “gender-affirming care” on minors is such an outrage. It leads, in the end, to sterilization and in many cases to a complete loss of natural sexual function.

‘There is no good evidence that this helps minors long term. Moreover, it medicalizes what could very well be temporary psychological symptoms.

‘History will judge this medicalized “gender-affirming care” on minors as we now judge eugenics and lobotomies.’

I was pretty impressed with Jay. Of all the people they could have quoted, they went to Jay Richards, who has put a lot of effort into understanding these issues.

Do you know what would be wonderful? If children who take these drugs and submit to these surgeries could then sue all the people who told them to do it. They’re being told one thing, but getting something else entirely. If a child gets hit with sterilization or loss of sexual function, then they should be able to clean out the bank accounts of the people who did this to them. Public school teachers, nurses, doctors, drug manufacturers, etc. Just bankrupt them. Because children shouldn’t be lied to by adults, who know better.