On Maintaining the Police and Army

The essential and only proper function of government is to protect its citizens against the initiation of physical force. This means having a police force to protect them against criminals and a military to protect them against foreign aggression.

Any government which disbands its police force or army thereby vaporizes itself and no longer exists as a government. At that point the right returns to the citizens to create a government, to provide for their common defense.

Those legally responsible for the destruction of the previous government should be subject to arrest and trial for having endangered the lives and property of the citizens through acts depriving them of the force(s) needed to protect them.

This means that there are some mayors, city councils, and possibly governors who should immediately be removed from office, arrested, and put on trial for willful endangerment of human life and property.

For more, read Ayn Rand’s essays “The Nature of Government” and “Man’s Rights.” Both are available in her books Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and The Virtue of Selfishness.

They can be found at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ayn+rand+books&crid=2YSG40JF1I48V&sprefix=Ayn+%2Caps%2C214&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_6_4

Socialism Is Slavery and Worse

Socialism is government ownership of the means of production. Since all work requires the use of means of production, under socialism the government is a universal monopoly employer. Everyone is forced to work for the government. Everyone is the government’s slave.

Lacking the competition of employers for labor, the natural level of wages under socialism is minimum subsistence. Even if it had the means, a socialist state always has something more important to attend to than the standard of living of its citizens.

The moral ideal of socialism is “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.” Since ability is limited while need is unlimited, socialism proclaims its ideal world as one of limitless shortages, in which who gets what is determined by arbitrary, brute force.

This includes the determination of who works at what, where, and to what extent. Under socialism, everyone is a passive tool of the government, waiting to be told what to do, how to do it, and where to do it.

The nature of socialism is revealed in its adherence to the proposition that the individual is the means to the ends of society.

Since “society” has no real existence apart from the individuals who comprise it, what this means is that the individual is the means to the ends of society AS DIVINED BY THE RULERS OF SOCIETY.

And what this means is that the individual is the means to the ends of the rulers.

Slavery under socialism is the worst form of slavery. A slave is the property of the state, not of any private individual, who would experience the slave’s injury or death as his loss. Under socialism, the slave’s life and well-being are valueless. So, millions are slaughtered.

Thus, socialism goes from enslavement to mass murder.
When you hear a socialist or talk to a socialist, know that you are dealing with someone seeking to enslave you and who is an accomplice to potential mass murder.

To learn more, read my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics available at amzn.to/2PM19ut.

Tuition Refunds for Today's Uneducated Graduates

Most college and university graduates of the last generation or more are essentially uneducated in the nature and values of modern Western Civilization and its leading offshoot the capitalist economic system.

The courses that should have given them this education, namely, the courses in the liberal arts and humanities, did not, despite the fact that in many cases the students not only paid for this education but incurred substantial debt in order to do so.

These students deserve a refund. In the case of private colleges and universities they should be paid to the extent possible out of the endowments of the schools they attended, which in some cases amount to tens of billions of dollars.

For the rest, all government financing, direct or indirect, serving to support education in the liberal arts or humanities should be abolished, including in primary and secondary education, as well as in higher education.

In all cases in which licensing laws require degrees of any kind that contain a liberal arts or humanities component, that requirement should be deemed satisfied upon a statement to that effect from the candidate’s prospective employer.

This would make it possible for new centers of learning to be established that either avoided liberal arts/humanities courses altogether or offered new and different varieties of such courses.

It is time to defund "education" whose product is ignorance and savagery.

Riots Are Riots Even Though the New York Times Calls Them "Protests"

The New York Times has described the Minneapolis police force as peaceful and non-violent for the most part———OOPS! MISTAKE!!! MISTAKE!!!

The New York Times has described the “PROTESTS” as peaceful and non-violent for the most part (putting aside the mass looting and destruction of stores in major cities across the US, including the US’s best-known department store, Macy’s at Herald Square in NYC).

Insurance companies in contrast have accurately described the protests as belonging in the category “riot and civil disorder event,” which is a category representing at least $25 million in damage.

Here’s an example of the “peacefulness” and “nonviolence” accompanying the protests: https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/72C23D5A-A5CE-11EA-9237-EF7B9133097E

Such destruction was not the result of each and every protest but just of a significant fraction of them, enough to cause not only many millions in losses but also the loss of several lives too.

The reporters and editors of The New York Times are all Marxist-educated and thus unwilling or unable to report the news objectively. They simply do not bother to report much of what they dislike and they twist and “spin” much of the rest.

Indeed, our culture and its educational system have deteriorated to the point that for several generations almost everyone has been taught to believe the teachings of Marxism in economic theory and political philosophy.

If you’d like to start flushing this poison from your brain, you need to read the works of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. My writings available at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ provide a good introduction to their ideas and also present some further contributions of my own.

What the Protests Are Protesting

The “protests” are not against the death of George Floyd. His connection is no greater than the length of the fuse needed to set off a vast accumulation of explosive hatred for the United States, the capitalist economic system, and rationality itself.

If the protests were about Mr. Floyd, they would have stopped with the filing of murder charges against the officer directly responsible for his death, and with the filing of charges against the three other officers present.

Despite the filing of charges, the protests went on, virtually without skipping a beat. Perhaps if the officers had been dragged from custody and been hung or beaten to death, the protests might have stopped, simply out of shock at what had been done. But not necessarily.

The protests have the flavor of a pogrom incited by a single incident and taken as symbolic of something vastly larger. They have the same character as the vast destruction of Jewish businesses in Germany in Nov. 1938, in response to the killing of a German diplomat by a Jew.

Generations of miseducation, akin more to a process of protracted lobotomization than to education, especially in the so-called social sciences and the humanities, has produced millions of graduates who are profoundly ignorant and barely capable of thinking.

To protect themselves from ever learning anything by listening to ideas that conflict with their dogmas, they shout down speakers. When the opportunity arises, they seek to get professors with alternative views fired, if they’ve managed to be employed in the first place.

The educational system’s graduates are so ignorant that despite the scores of millions of deaths it has caused, they do not know that socialism is a system of slavery, terror, and mass murder, and want to impose it on the United States.

At the same time, they regard the United States, the first country in the history of the world created on the principle that individuals possess unalienable rights that governments are instituted to protect, as though it were a tyranny ruled by evil “capitalists.”

They ignore the fact that to rid the country of slavery and make it true to its founding principle of individual rights, more than 300 thousand Union soldiers died in the Civil War, out of a population 20 million, which toll is comparable to almost 5 million today.

They are so pathetically ignorant that they do not even know what biologically distinguishes men and women and believe that by wishing, they can override these biological differences.

They do not know that freedom is the absence of the initiation of physical force, and that it is secured by the ability and willingness to counter the initiation of force with greater, defensive and retaliatory force, thereby creating personal safety.

They do not know that a police force and army are essentially the one proper function of government, and that in preventing, or, if necessary, overcoming the initiation of force, it secures the freedom of the individual and respect for his rights.

They do not know that the essential problem in securing individual rights and freedom is keeping the government in check. It must be prevented from itself initiating force, which it does any time it makes illegal something that is not the initiation of force.

In an upside down, inside out, total reversal of rationality, today’s protesters in seeking to achieve socialism seek the use of government force in every area of life. Their newly discovered exception is prevention of common crime. They want to abolish local police departments.

Perhaps there is a logic in all this. Namely, today’s looters and fire bombers might serve as “post-police,” enforcing endless regulations, working as spies, and guarding inmates in the socialist state’s concentration camps. There will certainly be no shortage of such monsters.  

There is practically no hope of any serious news analysis from today’s mainstream media. The New York Times, for example, has sunk to the level of urging people to eat insects (https://nyti.ms/2O0ivSS) and to avoid the use of toilet paper (https://nyti.ms/3aPuZs0). Loathsome.

Readers who want serious discussions of leading current issues can start by consulting my Amazon author’s page at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ. The works found there, especially my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, provide references to all the important relevant literature.

Trump Versus Our Enemies

Retired General Mattis has accused Pres. Trump of dividing the country in a time of crisis.(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/politics/jim-mattis-trump-protests.html?searchResultPosition=2) 

This is a false accusation. The country has been growing increasingly divided for many years. The fundament division is between those who want to preserve the American way of life and the capitalist system and those who want to destroy it.

In the last week or more, the division has manifested itself as between looters and arsonists on the one side and their victims on the other. Pres. Trump stands with the victims.

General Mattis apparently does not know of this conflict. He represents the rare case of a general who apparently does not know that his country has enemies or who its enemies are. Fortunately, President Trump does.

Bailouts and the Destruction of the Buying Power of Money

In the first chapter of Capitalism, I wrote, “In the absence of a widespread, serious understanding of the principles of economics, the citizens of an advanced, division-of-labor society, such as our own, are in a position analogous to that

of a crowd wandering among banks of computers or other highly complex machinery, with no understanding of the functioning or maintenance or safety requirements of the equipment, and randomly pushing buttons and pulling levers.” 

Those words describe the recent actions of Congress in enacting multi-trillion dollar legislation the alleged purpose of which is to offset the loss of trillions of dollars of sales and incomes caused by the imposition of “lockdowns” allegedly required to combat the coronavirus.

What Congress has done is not provide any kind of genuine relief for the damage caused by the lockdowns, but rather added to that damage. It has added to a massive forced reduction in the supply of goods and services a comparably massive increase in the quantity of money.

The consequence of this will be that when the economy recovers from the lockdowns, it will face a major increase in the quantity of money and volume of spending, which will substantially raise prices. Tens of millions of elderly people will suffer a major loss in buying power.

What will Congress do then? Create still more money to “bailout” the elderly? As the Constitution makes clear with respect to the power of the states, the Federal government too should have no power to make anything but gold and silver coin or bullion legal tender.

That would protect us from further arbitrary increases in the quantity of money. It would prohibit all new attempts to destroy the buying power of money in the delusion that in doing so, one is rescuing the economic system.

P. S. The Destruction of Hospitals

Since mid-March, elective surgeries have been radically reduced in anticipation of the need to make hospital facilities available for a flood of coronavirus patients that never materialized. The revenues lost from these surgeries have threatened the solvency of hospitals.

How is it possible for such policies to be continued? Are hospital managements robots, unable to change decisions that have been proven wrong? Or are they working under orders from robot-like government officials, who have no financial stake in the fate of the hospitals? 

The Coronavirus Must Not Be Allowed to Make the Dollar into the New Toilet Paper

Do not be surprised if, a year from now, prices are 20 percent or more higher than they are today and that tens of millions of elderly people on fixed incomes suffer greatly as a result.
The recently enacted “stimulus” legislation costing $6.2 trillion can be paid for only by the printing of new and additional money in that amount, which will represent an increase in the M1 money supply to substantially more than double its present height.
This amount of increase in the money supply is sufficient by itself to double or more than double prices and totally destroy the finances of the elderly, if not by next year, then over the next few years.
With today’s mentality of bottomless economic ignorance and reckless irresponsibility, the plight of the elderly will likely be met by still more “stimulus.”
We are in process of destroying the dollar.
The long-run solution is to deprive the government of the power to create money, which can be accomplished by restoring the gold standard and requiring that the issuance of new and additional paper money be limited by the increase in the supply of gold.
The immediate solution is to go back to work and end the seeming need for trillions of additional paper dollars, the consequences of which will be worse than any the Coronavirus could produce.
The lockdowns are in violation of The First Amendment’s prohibition of laws violating the freedoms of religion and of assembly. They are also in violation of the Ninth Amendment’s implicit recognition of the right to work.
Organizing should be started on a million-man march on Washington to demand the end of lockdowns and the government’s ability to create limitless quantities of paper money.
Let all who are at risk from the Coronavirus take precautions. But do not consider as a precaution the destruction of money and the economic system.
We must not allow trillions to become the new billions, and then the new millions, and the paper dollar to become the new toilet paper.

A video version of this post can be found on YouTube under the title "No Toilet Paper Dollar." It's at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Z8VTiE8iw&feature=youtu.be

Major Inflation and Great Depression at the Same Time?

Re: https://mises.org/wire/why-world-has-dollar-shortage-despite-massive-fed-action
Mises.org: Why the World Has a Dollar Shortage


Dear Bob,

I’ve  just read not only the article but also all the comments that followed it, and I thank you for calling it to my attention. I had not been aware of the extent of the dollar’s use in debt issuance abroad.

If possible, I’d like to get some more information. For example, the volume of dollar denominated debt issued outside the US relative to dollar denominated debt issued inside the US. The volume of externally issued dollar denominated debt relative to Euro, Yen, and Yuan denominated debt. The volume  of dollar denominated debt owed by foreign banks to US banks and of such debt in general owed by foreign firms and individuals to US banks and other US lenders, including corporations selling on short-term credit.

The world’s alleged dollar “shortage” is of the same character as a heroin addict’s heroin shortage. There’s an artificial need that’s created by consuming the supply, getting hooked on it, and then needing an ever growing supply. In this case, cutting back on the supply, not increasing it, would eliminate the “shortage.”

Interestingly, in the German hyperinflation of 1923, there were frequent complaints of currency shortages and the German central bank claimed that it was increasing the supply of marks in response to an increase in the demand for them. What was actually going on was that people were trying to buy goods as fast as possible, before their prices rose still further and needed more cash with which to do so.

The article is making me wonder if we could simultaneously have a world-wide depression as the result of dollars being insufficient to avoid large-scale bankruptcies abroad and their snow-balling effect, and, if not an immediate hyper-inflation, at least a very major surge in consumer prices in the US, because of the massive new and additional money creation now underway with the “bailout” programs.

I’m taking the liberty of publishing my reply to you on my blog and also adding it as a further comment on Mises.org and Dis Cus.



Best regards,

George

How Far Left the Democrats Actually Are

It’s clear that today’s Democratic Party is very far left. But it may come as a surprise to learn that it’s further to the left than the Chinese Communist Party! Much further. For example, China has the world’s second largest number of private billionaires and is proud of that fact!

It's still strongly influenced by the legacy of Deng Xiaoping, who reportedly said, “To get rich is glorious” and “Let some people get rich first.” If these words were said in America, the Democrats would denounce them as the “trickle down” theory.

To learn what's right with capitalism and wrong with socialism, and implicitly what's right and wrong with China, first read the book at https://amzn.to/2N44uTu and then, for deeper, more comprehensive knowledge, the book at amzn.to/2PM19ut. Especially Democrats and all other leftists should do this.

 

Coronavirus March 30, 2020

According to worldometer (https://bit.ly/3bDD6rk), the latest US death toll from the Coronavirus is 2,938, an increase of 538 from the 2,400 I reported yesterday. As a percentage, it’s a 22% increase. Relative to US population, it’s now 9.7 per million up from 8 per million.

At a compound daily rate of increase of 22%, the cumulative total of deaths would reach 71,000 by April 15 and 1.4 million by April 30. Thus, an essential element to watch for is a change (hopefully, a sharp decline) in the daily rate of increase.

The worldometer website is updated throughout the day and thus the updates can affect the percentage change. The update used above was as of 1 PM Pacific Daylight Time (GMT-7).

Reisman has numerous works available on Amazon. See http://amazon.com/author/george-reisman

Actual and Projected Death Rates of the Coronavirus

As of 3/29/20, the death toll in the US is 2,400; globally, it’s 34,000. As a proportion of population (300 million in US and 7 billion globally), that’s 8 per million in the US and less than 5 per million globally.

Some prominent politicians have said roughly half the population will catch the virus. If the death rate in this group were 1%, the implication would be 1.5 million US deaths. The sharply lower death rate of .1% would result in 150k US deaths.

The actual death rate and its acceleration or deceleration can easily be calculated every day and can serve as a guide to judging the worsening or tapering off of the disease. To do this, all that’s needed is the cumulative daily death tolls, which are widely reported.

For Reisman’s works available on Amazon, see http://amazon.com/author/george-reisman

A Soviet-Style Economy in America?

America may be headed toward a Soviet-style economy, with permanent pervasive shortages and waiting lines.

This is because Congress and the media believe that massive money creation can offset the massive reductions in production and supply caused by government prohibitions on working.

(The government’s alleged relief and bailout programs all boil down to just one thing: create new and additional money and dump it into the economic system. Even send it to people directly in the mail, in the form of government checks.)

The truth is that increases in money and spending combined with reductions in supply are a double-barreled blast that works to drive prices up. But the rise in prices is already prohibited by anti-“gouging” laws, to which overt, comprehensive price controls may well be added.

The combination of price controls, more demand, and less supply means shortages everywhere that spending strives to increase in the face of less production and supply. In the best-case outcome, i.e., if price controls are removed, or not imposed, it means a surge in prices.

A surge in prices, of course, would mean yet a further decline in the value of accumulated savings on top of the plunge in the stock market and which may be further worsened by a plunge in the bond market.

When one takes account of the consequences of the government’s efforts to combat the Coronavirus, it looks increasingly like the government’s action has served to make a bad situation even worse.


Visit Reisman’s Amazon.com’s author’s page at http://amazon.com/author/george-reisman

China’s Alleged Overcoming of the Coronavirus

According to the NYT (https://nyti.ms/3bgDFHH), there are no new Coronavirus cases in China except for those brought in from the outside. This is a claim not just about Wuhan but the whole country.

This claim implies that it took no significant time whatever for the disease to spread from Wuhan throughout the rest of China and that now all of China can be assumed to be essentially free of the disease. (There isn’t enough salt to take this with.)

A hypothesis worth considering is that China is desperate for foreign exchange earnings and is getting ready to order its population back to work at risk of being infected or not.

A second hypothesis worth considering is that the Chinese have found that, outside of particular identifiable segments of the population, the death rate from the Coronavirus is much lower than initially believed, perhaps comparable to that of the flu.

P. S. If you don’t like the empty store shelves, wait ‘til you try socialism. Under socialism, empty shelves are so common that it’s such an event when a store has something worth buying that a line immediately begins to form without people even knowing what it is that’s available.

Anti-“Price-Gouging” and the Preference for Suffering Over Profit

The New York Times reports that many hospitals are now rationing hand sanitizer and “crucial respirator masks” while at the same time large quantities of these very items are in the hands of speculators who are prohibited from selling them. (https://nyti.ms/2QwyD1R)

“He has 17,700 Bottles of Hand Sanitizer and Nowhere to Sell Them,” reads the Times’ headline. Thus, people are in desperate need and those who could alleviate their needs are prohibited from doing so.

They are prohibited by a combination of anti-"price gouging” laws, ignorance of economics, and, it appears, a preference for the suffering of the innocent over the profit of those who could supply them.

There is no reason for a shortage of anything if its price is allowed to rise to the point of reducing the quantity demanded to the supply available.

There is no shortage even of gold or diamonds. That is because their price is high enough to limit the quantity of them demanded to the supplies available.

There is certainly no good reason for a shortage of hand sanitizer, respirator masks, bottled water, toilet paper, or anything else. A sufficient rise in price would counter the effect of the sudden increase in the need for these items created by the fear of the Coronavirus.

The rise in price would also serve to increase production, and do so the more rapidly, the greater the rise. For example, a sufficient rise would provide an incentive for round-the-clock production and cover whatever increase in cost of production might take place.

The threat of the Coronavirus has created an urgent new and additional need for such things as hand sanitizer and respirator masks, particularly on the part of the elderly, who are at the greatest risk.

The elderly need to be able to outbid younger people, whose need is less urgent. In a free market, the greater urgency of their need would enable them to outbid younger people even of considerably greater wealth and income, but with a much less urgent need.

This outbidding would not be confined to such things as respirator masks directly, but rather extend to alternative products of the same factors of production as required to make respirator masks.

Thus, the elderly would gain respirator masks, and to make that possible, younger people would somewhat reduce their consumption of other goods that required the same factors of production as required to make respirator masks.

Prices are a reflection of the changing relationships between needs and wants and external facts. When these change, prices must be allowed to change so that the buying and selling decisions of people can change accordingly.

Price controls of any kind prevent people from adjusting their behavior to the changes confronting them. They paralyze people and leave them standing helpless in the face of change.

They are the kind of response one would expect from someone who has made himself deaf, dumb, and blind, utterly oblivious to the changes going on around him.

There is one set of prices appropriate to conditions in which there is no threat of the Coronavirus and another set of prices appropriate to conditions in which there is the threat of the Coronavirus.

It’s insane to ignore the difference and pretend that nothing has changed and thus that prices must not significantly change.


Recognize the difference, allow prices to reflect reality, and such things as the shortages of hand sanitizer and respirator masks faced by hospitals will immediately disappear. For the hospitals are in a position to outbid virtually all other competitors for such things.

For one thing, they could immediately obtain the supplies held by speculators, who, under present conditions, are prohibited from selling them, a situation that is insane.

What is preventing these sales is an apparent preference for the suffering of hospital patients over the profit of the speculators, who have assembled the supplies the hospitals and their patients need.

Ironically, forcibly keeping speculators’ supplies off the market, serves to further increase the price of whatever speculators' supplies do manage to reach the market, because the market’s supply is correspondingly reduced.

The pathological hatred of speculators’ profits and their forcible prevention through threats of fines and jail terms is a cause of hoarding over and above the need to prepare for staying at home to avoid catching the Coronavirus.

If there were no price controls or threat thereof, prices in the present situation would be high enough to keep stocks on the shelves. Thus, people would know that while they might have to pay a very high price for it, what they wanted would at least be available.

They would not have to stockpile against the threat of vital supplies simply not being there when they needed them and thus of taking every opportunity to snatch up supplies whenever they appeared.

(For a critique of all aspects of price controls, see my The Government Against the Economy, available at https://amzn.to/2TSrMS4)
The Government Against the Economy

Capital Must Not Be Meat for Socialism’s Ravenous Wild Dogs

Under capitalism, one man may own a string of automobile factories, and one man may own a string of oil fields, pipelines, and refineries. From their wealth comes tens of millions of automobiles and the fuel to power them and to heat the houses of the millions.

Socialists—as immense in their ignorance as they are small in their minds—resent the wealth of those who sustain them and provide them with a civilized existence. They want that wealth for themselves, in the delusion that their consuming it would make their lives easier.

Intellectually, socialists are still in the Dark Ages, when the only use of wealth was in the frame of one’s own consumption. They have never learned that under capitalism, wealth is used in the production of goods for the market and in the purchase of others’ labor to help.

Socialists do not know that the wealth so used, i.e., capital, is the foundation of the supply of products and the demand for labor and thus of the standard of living of everyone, and that the greater the capital, the greater is the wealth and well-being of all.

Socialists, in their small-minded ignorance and envy, call this fact “the trickle-down theory.” Their theory, in contrast, is the loot-and-plunder theory, a theory fit for ravenous wild dogs.  

As I wrote yesterday, socialism is not an economic system. It is merely the negation of capitalism, leaving in its wake chaos, famine, and death.

For more, read the writings of Mises, Rand, and Reisman.

The Environmentalist Left’s Remarkable New Principle

If we destroy the energy base needed to produce and operate the construction equipment required to build strong, well-made, comfortable houses for billions, we shall be safer from bad weather, environmentalism alleges, than if we retain and enlarge that energy base.

If we destroy our ability to produce and operate refrigerators and air conditioners, we shall be better protected from hot weather than if we retain and enlarge that ability, environmentalism claims.

If we destroy our ability to produce and operate tractors and harvesters, to can and freeze food, to build and operate hospitals and produce medicines, we shall secure our food supply and our health better than if we retain and enlarge that ability, environmentalism asserts.

There is actually a remarkable new principle implied here, concerning how man can cope with his environment. Instead of our taking action upon nature, as we have always believed we must do, we shall henceforth control the forces of nature more to our advantage by means of our inaction.

Indeed, if we do not act, no significant threatening forces of nature will arise! The threatening forces of nature are not the product of nature, but of us! Thus, speaks the environmental movement.

(The above passages are adapted from p. 88 of the author’s Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, now available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle editions at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KCWY0Q.)

Bernie's and the Left's Homicidal and Suicidal Philosophy

Bernie’s and the Left’s philosophy of socialism and environmentalism, with its hostility to fossil fuels and industrial civilization, is homicidal and suicidal. It is the product of hatred of humanity and human happiness.  

Our survival and well-being depend on industrial civilization. They require that we stop government efforts to manipulate the world’s climate by sacrificing industrial civilization. Only industrial civilization allows us to deal with nature successfully.

Don’t listen to fears of coastal cities being wiped out by rising sea levels allegedly caused by industrial civilization. Without industrial civilization, those cities wouldn’t exist in the first place. With industrial civilization, they can be saved if endangered.

Environmentalism and the Left want them gone. They are not interested in saving them. If they were, they would not be calling for measures making their existence impossible. They would not desire a world with more animal habitat and billions fewer people.

A coming warmer climate and higher sea level, if real, is a miniscule price to pay for a world capable of supporting billions more people and doing so at a level incalculably surpassing that of the pre-industrial ages.

Don’t lose this world out of fear of hot weather and possible floods. And don’t confuse hot weather and floods projected to occur centuries or millennia in the future with what will occur in your lifetime or that of your children or grandchildren, if it ever occurs.

For more, read the author’s Kindle essay “The Toxicity of Environmentalism” and his magnum opus Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Both are available at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KCWY0Q.

Bernie’s Financial Plan

If you thought Joe Biden must have some kind of mental problem to say that 150 million people had been killed by guns in the hands of random shooters, you should consider what Bernie Sanders has been saying.

Bernie hopes to raise the trillions needed for The Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and the forgiveness of student loans, by such means as suing the fossil energy firms. Bernie knows that at current market values all these firms taken together are worth trillions.

He plans to make their activities illegal and yet collect those trillions. He hasn’t asked who would buy their assets if their use is illegal. All that he would be able actually to collect is their cash and marketable securities and the scrap value of the rest of their assets.

The disastrous plunge in the value of their assets would be accompanied by a comparable plunge in the average standard of living in the United States. People would be deprived of gasoline, heating oil, and all other such products and products whose production depends on them.

Bernie and his followers do not see the enormous positive contribution that fossil fuels have made both to the number of people able to survive and to the quality of life of virtually all who do. His program is that of a suicidal, murderous moron/maniac.

Why Washington’s Birthday Must Be Restored as a National Holiday

Today is Washington’s Birthday. If we value the principles on which the United States was founded, then Washington’s Birthday deserves to be ranked as our most important national holiday after Independence Day, July 4, for there would be no United States without him.

The relegation of Washington’s Birthday to the shared, ill-named holiday “President’s Day” reflects a marked degradation of his status and of the status of the founding principles of our country.

It should be seen as a half-way mark between reverence for the United States and its founding principles and the contempt shown toward our National Anthem and implicitly toward our country and its founding principles.

As an important step in the restoration of respect for the principles of individual rights and limited government, on which the United States was founded, Washington’s Birthday must be reinstated as a national holiday.