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Should big government socialists take over the free enterprise system?

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has some ideas about proper economic policy
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has some ideas about proper economic policy

Why did so many people vote for communist regimes in the last hundred years? Communist leaders – who had no demonstrated achievements in economic policy – simply promised voters all sorts of free stuff, e.g. – a guaranteed job, free health care, paid retirement, etc. When the expected benefits didn’t appear, the communist leaders blamed others for their failures, and naturally, those others had to die.

Think that couldn’t happen here? Well, a lot of leading Democrats sure sound like communist leaders. Promising to confiscate legally-owned firearms. Promising to abolish private health insurance. Promising to nationalize private retirement accounts. And promising to replace our current energy industry with a new government-controlled green energy industry.

Let’s look at that last one: the new government-controlled energy industry.

The Federalist reports on the Green New Deal plan.

A number of Democratic Party presidential hopefuls — including Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julián Castro, and Beto O’Rourke, for starters — have already endorsed or expressed support for the “Green New Deal” (GND). Today, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward J. Markey dropped details about her plan.

[…]While some of the specifics need to be ironed out, the plan’s authors assure that this “massive transformation of our society” needs some “clear goals and a timeline.” The timeline is ten years. Here are some of the goals:

  • Ban affordable energy. GND calls for the elimination of all fossil fuel energy production, the lifeblood of American industry and life, which includes not only all oil but also natural gas — one of the cheapest sources of American energy, and one of the reasons the United States has been able to lead the world in carbon-emissions reduction.

  • Eliminate nuclear energy. The GND also calls for eliminating all nuclear power, one of the only productive and somewhat affordable “clean” energy sources available to us, in 11 years. This move would purge around 20 percent of American energy production so you can rely on intermittent wind for your energy needs.

  • Eliminate 99 percent of cars. The authors state that the GND would like to replace every “combustion-engine vehicle” — trucks, airplanes, boats, and 99 percent of cars — within ten years. Charging stations for electric vehicles will be built “everywhere,” though how power plants will provide the energy needed to charge them is a mystery.

  • Gut and rebuild every building in America. Markey and Cortez want to “retrofit every building in America” with “state of the art energy efficiency.” I repeat, “every building in America.” That includes every home, factory, and apartment building, which will all need, for starters, to have their entire working heating and cooling systems ripped out and replaced with…well, with whatever technology Democrats are going invent in their committee hearings, I guess.

  • Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out “highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”

  • A government-guaranteed job. The bill promises the United States government will provide every single American with a job that includes a “family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and a pension.” You can imagine that those left in the private sector would be funding these through some unspecified “massive” taxation.

  • Free education for life. GND promises free college or trade schools for every American.

  • A salubrious diet. The GND promises the government will provide “healthy food” to every American.

  • A house. The GND promises that the government will provide, “safe, affordable, adequate housing” for every American citizen.

  • Free money. The GND aims to provide, and I am not making this up, “economic security” for all who are “unable or unwilling” to work.

  • Ban meat. Ocasio-Cortez admits that we can’t get zero emissions in 10 years “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” The only way to get rid of farting cows is to get rid of beef.

Have any of these ideas been tried in any states? Trains seem to run over budget when they are built, and they fail to turn a profit afterwards. But most of these have not been tried anywhere, so how are we supposed to know how much they will cost to implement, and whether they will actually work?

Now, you might be wondering where the dancing bartender will get all the money for these plans. After all, the cost of the Green New Deal has been figured at $49 trillion over the first 10 years. (And that’s in addition to the government takeover of healthcare “Medicare for All”, which costs $32 trillion over 10 years). She’s going to have to take it from someone… maybe from the top earners?

Just one problem with that:

The plan itself seems to insinuate that billionaires can pay for the whole thing. Of course, best case scenario, it is estimated that instituting a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent would raise a little more than $700 billion over that decade.

Are you beginning to see where the 100 million murders by government came from? When a plan fails to work as promised, what will the communist leaders do? Will they say that communism has failed, and step down from power? Or will they find people to blame for their failures, in order to stay in power? Historically speaking, it’s always been the latter. You can even see how it happens today, in places like North Korea and Venezuela.

From "The Black Book of Communism", (Harvard University Press: 1997)
From “The Black Book of Communism”, (Harvard University Press: 1997)

The Road to Serfdom

I want to recommend to everyone a famous book about how socialism leads to mass murder by government. The book is written by Nobel prize winner F. A. Hayek. This is one of my favorite books on economics. The full PDF of the book is available for download on archive.org.

The audio version is available FOR FREE on YouTube:

Outline:

  • 00:17 Foreword
  • 37:58 Preface
  • 41:51 Preface 1976
  • 50:09 Introduction
  • 1:08:46 Ch1 The Abandoned Road
  • 1:37:31 Ch2 The Great Utopia
  • 1:54:46 Ch3 Individualism and Collectivism
  • 2:18:32 Ch4 The Inevitability of Planning
  • 2:45:52 Ch5 Planning and Democracy
  • 3:20:06 Ch6 Planning and the Rule of Law
  • 3:54:33 Ch7 Economic Control and Totalitarianism
  • 4:23:01 Ch8 Who, Whom
  • 5:00:49 Ch9 Security and Freedom
  • 5:31:27 Ch10 Why the Worst Get On Top
  • 6:11:01 Ch11 The End of Truth
  • 6:38:41 Ch12 The Socialist Roots of Nazism
  • 7:09:40 Ch13 The Totalitarians in Our Midst
  • 7:54:43 Ch14 Material Conditions and Ideal Ends
  • 8:33:17 Ch15 The Prospects of International Order
  • 9:14:55 Ch16 Conclusion

All you need is 8.5 hours to listen to it. You won’t regret it, I promise. I have listened to the audiobook at least a dozen times. If that’s too long, there is a condensed version of the book.

They Hayek Center talks about condensed version of the book:

Max Eastman and the editors of Reader’s Digest wrote the condensed version of Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” (pdf), which was read by millions of Americans at home and by servicemen all of the world when it was published in April of 1945.  It was the Reader’s Digest condensed version which turned Hayek’s little book into an American sensation — and Hayek into a public celebrity. The Reader’s Digest had a circulation at the time of more the 5 million copies, and the little journal was provided to each American serviceman, at home and abroad.

[…]An additional 600,000 copies of the condensed version were later printed and distributed through the Book of the Month club and by non-profit civic groups.

Can you imagine what it would have been like to live at a time where everyone clearly understood the danger of letting government administrators centrally plan an economy? But the new generation of young Americans have lost that knowledge, and they are voting for the people who will lead them down the road to serfdom.

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Democrat senator imposes religious test to disqualify Trump judicial nominee

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Court of Appeals nominee Neomi Rao
Court of Appeals nominee Neomi Rao

If you listened to the state of the union on Tuesday night, you heard about some very good results that the Trump administration has produced. I disagreed with some of his policies, especially the infrastructure spending. But one thing Trump has done wasn’t emphasized enough: nominating conservative judges.

Unfortunately for Trump, the Democrats are doing everything they can to block his judicial nominations. And they are even trying to discredit them because of their religious convictions.

The Daily Signal reports:

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday held its first judicial confirmation hearing of the year for Neomi Rao, who is President Donald Trump’s nominee for the vacancy left by new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

[…]The daughter of Indian immigrants, Rao is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Chicago Law School. After graduation, she clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit and for Thomas on the Supreme Court.

She then served in the White House Counsel’s Office under President George W. Bush and on the Senate Judiciary Committee as counsel to then-Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.

Since 2006, Rao has been a faculty member at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where she focused on administrative and constitutional law.

Sounds like a pretty good resume. And she is conservative, too. Republicans need to nominate conservative women and conservative visible minorities in order to destroy the false narrative pushed by the secular left that Republicans are “racist” and “sexist”. And it’s for exactly that reason – to preserve their false narrative – that Democrats attack female and minority conservatives the hardest.

Here are some of the attacks against Rao:

Several senators brought up an article Rao wrote about date rape while she was an undergraduate at Yale. In the article, she suggested that women should take measures to avoid becoming victims.

Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Kamala Harris, D-Calif., both implied that Rao was placing the blame on victims rather than on rapists. Rao clarified—several times—that she was simply advocating commonsense steps young women on campus could take to avoid becoming a victim. Chief among them is not excessively drinking alcohol.

It’s the same advice her mother gave her, she said, and it’s what she tells her children today. Rao clearly stated that the blame for a horrendous crime such as rape always lies with the perpetrator and never with the victim.

So now, telling women to be responsible with alcohol consumption is a disqualification for being nominated as a judge. Because you can’t give women any advice about how to live wisely – that’s “anti-women”. It’s anti-women to warn women about the possible consequences of their choices? Democrats say it is.

PJ Media reports on some especially troubling questioning from Cory “I’m Spartacus” Booker.

Here’s the video:

Here’s the text:

Booker seized on Rao’s 2008 article opposing the Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized homosexual activity. He then directly asked her, “Are gay relationships in your opinion immoral?”

“I am not sure the relevance of that,” Rao responded.

“Do you think gay relationships are immoral?” he continued.

“I do not,” Rao said.

“Do you believe they are a sin?” Booker pressed.

“My personal views on any of these subjects are things I would put to one side,” the nominee said.

“So you’re not willing to say whether you believe it is sinful for a man — for two men — to be married?” the senator pressed once again.

“No,” Rao responded.

“Excuse me?” Booker said.

“My response is that these personal views are ones that I would put to one side. Whatever my personal views are on the subject, I would faithfully follow the precedent of the Supreme Court,” the nominee said.

Disgusting. It’s like the Spanish Inquisition, except from the secular left. Democrats think that if you are a religious Jew, Muslim or Christian, then the Democrats don’t thin that you can serve effectively as a judge. The only morality that is acceptable to them is based on secularism and leftism. And this happened in America, where we the right to be religous in our Constitution.

Senator Ted Cruz came to the defense of Rao:

Cruz said:

The Senate Judiciary Committee should not be a theater for mischaracterizing or twisting nominees’ records or views. Nor should it be an avenue for persecution.

We’ve seen a growing pattern among Senate Democrats of hostility to religious faith. I have to say I was deeply troubled a few minutes ago to hear questioning of a nominee, asking your personal views on what is sinful.

In my view that has no business in this committee. Article Six of the Constitution says there should be no religious test for any public office. We have also seen Senate Democrats attack what they have characterized as religious dogma. We’ve seen Senate Democrats attack nominees for their own personal views on salvation.

I don’t believe this is a theological court of inquisition. I think the proper avenue of investigation is a nominee’s record. So Ms Rao, let me talk about your record. Let me ask you about your actual record, which is what this committee should be looking at, not our own personal religious views or your religious views, whatever they may be.

Remember since isn’t the first time this has happened – they did the same thing with Amy Barrett, telling her that her Catholic dogma was unacceptable in a judge.

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Atheist Lawrence Krauss offers the best argument against Christianity

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Richard Dawkins on atheism, morality, free will and human rights
Richard Dawkins on atheism, morality, free will and human rights

Although there are some pretty smart atheists out there, none is smarter than the venerable Lawrence Krauss. Well, Krauss has been thinking about atheism quite a bit since his debate with William Lane Craig, and he’s come up with an argument that simply can’t be defeated.

Buzzfeed reports on Krauss’ new argument against Christian theism:

When Melody Hensley first met Lawrence Krauss, she was a 29-year-old makeup artist at a department store, and he was one of her intellectual idols. She ran an atheist website in her spare time and had just started volunteering for the Center for Inquiry (CFI), a nonprofit group committed to promoting science and reason above faith. She was hoping to build a career in the burgeoning “skeptics” movement, and Krauss was one of its brightest luminaries.

At a CFI event in November 2006, Krauss asked Hensley for her card, and later, as she was leaving, asked her if she was “of age.” She brushed off the odd question, excited to meet a star skeptic. When he later emailed to invite her to dinner, she accepted.

“I didn’t care if he flirted with me, I just wanted to be around somebody important, and I also wanted to get a job in this field,” Hensley told BuzzFeed News. “I thought I could handle myself.”

They made a plan to eat in the restaurant at the Washington, DC, hotel where Krauss was staying, Hensley recalled. But first he asked her to come up to his room while he wrapped up some work. He seemed in no rush to leave, she said, ordering a cheese plate and later champagne, despite her suggestion that they go down to dinner.

Then, Hensley said, Krauss made a comment about her eye makeup, and got very close to her face. Suddenly, he lifted her by the arms and pushed her onto the bed beneath him, forcibly kissing her and trying to pull down the crotch of her tights. Hensley said she struggled to push him off. When he pulled out a condom, Hensley said, she got out from under him, said “I have to go,” and rushed out of the room.

Krauss told BuzzFeed News that what happened with Hensley in the hotel room was consensual. In that room, “we mutually decided, in a polite discussion in fact, that taking it any further would not be appropriate,” he told BuzzFeed News by email.

But Hensley said that is untrue. “It was definitely predatory,” she said. “I didn’t want that to happen. It wasn’t consensual.”

The argument is supported by many interlocking evidences from different fields of study:

BuzzFeed News has learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging allegations of Krauss’s inappropriate behavior over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave. In response to complaints, two institutions — Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario — have quietly restricted him from their campuses. Our reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people.

So, here is how the argument goes formally:

Premise 1. If Christianity is true, then sex outside of a natural marriage is wrong.

Premise 2. Sex outside of a natural marriage is not wrong.

Conclusion: Therefore, Christian theism is not true. (MT)

This argument seems to hold a lot of sway with many atheists, like Richard Dawkins, Richard Carrier, Michael Shermer, and so on. Pretty much everyone who makes a career out of disproving Christianity is familiar with this powerful argument.

Although this is an excellent argument (I call it the argument from immorality), it should be noted that it is not a new argument at all. It’s actually discussed in the Bible of all places, in Romans chapter 1.

Romans 1:18-25:

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness,

19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools

23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.

25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised.Amen.

In my experience, atheists reject the evidence for Christianity because they don’t want the moral changes that come with Christianity. Even the atheists I know who claim to be “moral” nevertheless promote immorality through their political actions, voting for a world where moral evils like abortion and pedophilia cannot be judged. They also vote to suppress the disagreement of Christians, and celebrate when the state silences Christian expressions of disapproval for immorality. Actions tell what is going on much more than words.

UPDATE:

New York Times: Arizona State Suspends Lawrence Krauss During Inquiry Over Sexual Misconduct Accusations

Gizmodo: Science Organizations Cancel Lawrence Krauss Events After Sexual Harassment Allegations

Positive arguments for Christian theism