Tag Archives: Socialism

News

Liberal Democrat Treasury Secretary paid 68K of taxpayer money to gay lover

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Story here from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Treasury Chief Secretary David Laws was fighting to avoid becoming the coalition Government’s first casualty tonight after it was revealed that he funnelled £40,000 of taxpayers’ money to his secret gay lover.

The Liberal Democrat, who is in charge of slashing public spending, is facing growing pressure to quit after he claimed up to £950 a month in expenses for five years which was paid in rent to his partner.

Mr Laws was last night confronted with evidence that he could have breached Parliamentary rules on expenses, which ban MPs from renting from spouses or lovers.

[…]Mr Laws is a multi-millionaire former investment banker who earned a double first in economics at Cambridge.

[…]Mr Laws escaped censure by the numerous Parliamentary inquiries into expenses because he had never admitted his homosexuality, meaning officials had no way of knowing his landlord was also his lover.

But between 2004 and 2007, Mr Laws claimed between £700 and £950 a month to sub-let a room in a flat in Kennington, South London, owned by Mr Lundie, who was also registered as living at the property.

He’s a Liberal Democrat, which is the socialist party in the UK. His secret gay lover is a lobbyist who used to work for former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy. So, Liberal Democrats all around. Lib Dems are not just hostile to capitalism, they are totally opposed to religious liberty, the rights of the unborn and traditional marriage. Their UK leader Nick Clegg wants to force Christian schools to endorse homosexuality, (similar to what Dalton McGuinty tried to do in Ontario, Canada).

Something similar happened a while back in Canada

This is not the first time that a prominent socialist has stolen tens of thousands of dollars. Svend Robinson, a former New Democratic Party Member of Parliament in British Columbia, Canada, also committed theft.

Excerpt:

Former NDP MP Svend Robinson has received a conditional discharge and one year probation after pleading guilty to stealing an expensive diamond ring from an auction.

Robinson faced a range of penalties from absolute discharge to a maximum of 10 years in prison.

[…]Robinson had been shopping for a diamond engagement ring he wasn’t sure he could afford just a week before he committed the act of theft.

[…][Robinson’s defense attorney] read several letters from MPs, friends and other colleagues attesting to Robinson’s good character. The letters were from such high-profile as former NDP leader Stephen Lewis, environmentalist David Suzuki, and cabinet minister Stephen Owen.

In court to show their support were Vancouver NDP MP Libby Davies, and Bill Siksay, Robinson’s longtime constituency assistant who won Robinson’s seat in the June federal election.

Svend was able to avoid jail time, but this scandal did not break before he had played a crucial role in legalizing same-sex marriage and passing Canada’s hate crimes and hate speech legislation.

The NDP is the Canadian equivalent of the UK Liberal Democrat Party or the US Democrat party. Robinson was instrumental in criminalizing speech critical of homosexuality in Canada, (Bill C-250). Speech that is offensive to the secular left can be prosecuted criminally in Canada and in the UK, and Obama also passed a bill criminalizing free speech in 2009.

But all of this stealing by socialists is not surprising when you reflect on what socialism is. Socialism is the view that demagogues should gain political power by promising “victims”, (people who freely choose to make irrational and/or immoral decisions), their neighbor’s money. It’s basically theft. So it isn’t really surprising that two socialists should be convicted of stealing other people’s money. That’s what socialism is – THEFT.

Note: comments to this post will be strictly monitored in keeping with Obama’s law restricting free speech.

News

US money supply contracting at Great Depression levels

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The most-read story today on the UK Telegraph. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The M3 money supply in the United States is contracting at an accelerating rate that now matches the average decline seen from 1929 to 1933, despite near zero interest rates and the biggest fiscal blitz in history.

The M3 figures – which include broad range of bank accounts and are tracked by British and European monetarists for warning signals about the direction of the US economy a year or so in advance – began shrinking last summer. The pace has since quickened.

The stock of money fell from $14.2 trillion to $13.9 trillion in the three months to April, amounting to an annual rate of contraction of 9.6%. The assets of insitutional money market funds fell at a 37% rate, the sharpest drop ever.

“It’s frightening,” said Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research. “The plunge in M3 has no precedent since the Great Depression. The dominant reason for this is that regulators across the world are pressing banks to raise capital asset ratios and to shrink their risk assets. This is why the US is not recovering properly,” he said.

What should we expect from a man who opposes capitalism? Well, we should expect to be poor. We should expect to be as poor as people were during the Great Depression.

I have an idea. Next time, let’s elect someone who is responsible enough to have his own credit card.

News

If government is paying the piper, then government is calling the tune

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Veronique de Rugy

Check out this post from GMU economist Veronica de Rugy on Big Government. (H/T ECM)

First, she puts up this chart.

Veronique writes:

On this chart we can see the changes over time in the composition of personal income in the United States since 1929. The most notable trend is the increase in the portion of personal income coming from government transfers (mainly social Security payments, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and personal and business tax credits.)  And the increase isn’t minor: the proportion of total personal income constituted by government money has grown from 0.9% to 17.2%.

Complementary decreases of wage earnings as percentages of total personal income (from 59.5% to 52.3%) are also going on.

The problem with government giving people money is that it creates a culture of dependency, as with Greece. Politicians take money from job-creating business-owners, or from productive individual workers, and they redistribute it to whiny unproductive, immature victim groups like unions, in order to buy their votes. Eventually, the government goes too far making promises and the productive people just stop or slow their working or they move away, since they keep less and less of their own money for the same amount of work and risk-taking.

And that’s when welfare checks of the losers dry up, and they have no choice but to riot and kill people. Why do they riot? Well, if they were earning their own money by working, then they would know that they are responsible for themselves, not government. They would understand that something might go wrong, and they would know that they had to cut their spending and save for a rainy day. So when things do go bad, they would have known how to live cheaply off of their savings while they find another job.

But people who take welfare don’t save – they think the money will always be there. What do they do when the taxpayers slow or stop production? They have no skills, and they have no savings. They can’t just find a new government because a new government isn’t going to find any more money from somewhere – there isn’t any left. So the only way to get their welfare back is to revolt – which is exactly what the socialists in Greece are doing right now. They’ve been spoiled rotten and they want their welfare back, like little babies crying for their mommies.

It’s sick. And this is what Obama and the Democrats idolize, because that’s how they grew up – begging their rich parents for money and bailouts for their own irresponsible behaviors. Their policies aren’t thought through – it’s just reliving their silver spoon childhoods of never having to work for anything.

Would you like to know what Republicans are like? Consider Michele Bachmann.

At 13, Bachmann was forced to become almost financially independent after her parents divorced. She used her babysitting money to buy her own clothes and lunches at school and saved up enough to purchase her first pair of contact lenses. Between college semesters at Winona State University, she took her hardworking streak to Alaska where on one memorable day she cleaned 280 salmon.

She also quit her job as a tax litigation attorney to homeschool her five kids, because she didn’t like the job the public schools were doing. Her business runs a small business, and she helped him to start it. That’s what Republicans do. We work. And we give.

We need to stop increasing the size of government so they can “take care” of all our needs. We need to take care of all our needs, and to take care of our neighbor’s needs, too. That’s capitalism. Having something to share from what you can make from your own industry and labor.