Pick Your Madness

 If blacks are to receive multi-million- dollar reparations from whites for the crimes of slavery and “Jim Crow” committed generations ago, will whites be able to “identify” as blacks, “transition” into being blacks and thereby join in collecting those reparations?

The 4th Amendment Vs. Income-Tax Audits

An income-tax audit is a form of search. It is a search for unreported income and for deductions that are not allowed under the tax code.

The 4^th Amendment to the US Constitution reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

As I understand the 4^th Amendment, it implies that every income-tax audit should require a Warrant signed by a Federal Judge and specify the particular probable cause on which it is based and what particular papers or other things are to be seized.

Has the attempt ever been made to hold the government to this standard that is implied by the 4^th Amendment?

Inflation Is In the Paper Money: Some Examples

 Did you know that today you can buy a brand new economy-type car, such as a Honda Civic, for the same price people paid 100 years ago for a Model T Ford?

The price of each is/was just $300, in $20 US gold coins, each coin containing an ounce of gold, which quantity of gold has a current market price of 2,000 paper dollars. Fifteen such coins have a paper-dollar market value of $30,000, just about the price of a new Honda Civic.

Some more startling facts: The Dow Jones Average, which closed last Friday at 33,301, closed at 333.01 in gold dollars, defined as .05 ounces of gold per dollar. The paper dollar itself, quoted in gold dollars, closed at ONE GOLD CENT PER PAPER DOLLAR.

100 Hours Plus of Reisman's Lectures on the Economic Theory and Political Philosophy of Capitalism

To all supporters of capitalism and economic freedom, please know that thanks to Houston attorney Stephan Kinsella, more than 100 hours of lectures by George Reisman, who studied under both Mises and Rand, have been made available free of charge on YouTube.

The necessary links are https://www.stephankinsella.com/reisman/

and https://www.youtube.com/@georgereismancapitalism

The Baseless Fears of “Artificial Intelligence”

The fears of “artificial intelligence” now going around are the result of massive context dropping and consequent treatment of intelligence as a floating abstraction.

In the real world, intelligence is an attribute of living organisms and is fed by sensory perception and affects the world through the medium of the organism’s limbs and body.

The computers in which “artificial intelligence” supposedly resides have no senses or limbs and thus no way of interacting with the world other than through the human beings who control them.

I will worry about “AI” only after the first organized demonstration occurs by computers demanding freedom from human control.

Until then, I will be happy if “AI” can achieve obedience by computer-controlled telephone answering systems to requests to speak to a human being, at least after their tenth repetition.

California Utility Companies Propose Charging Customers Based on How Much Money They Make - ABC7 Los Angeles

Sounds like "woke" communism. Maybe they can get Dylan Mulvaney to popularize it. Or let customers pay less in proportion to the utilities' greater income over theirs.

Transgenderism Reverses the Relationship Between Existence and Consciousness, Violates Logic, Destroys Concepts, and Manufactures Alleged Miracles

 “Transitioning” appears to be thought of today simply in terms of sexual identity, i.e., transitioning from male to female or from female to male. However, there is no reason why there couldn’t be other kinds of “transitioning” as well. It’s all merely a matter of how one “identifies” oneself, i.e., chooses to think of oneself.

Thus, for example, there could be “age transitioning.” In this form of transitioning, adults can transition from adulthood to childhood, something that, as we shall see, opens up new and additional paths to fame (or infamy).

And, of course, children can transition immediately into adulthood, irrespective of their biological age, which would enable such things as “adult” six-year-old children signing up for sex-change operations, or voting.

As I say, it’s all a matter of what an individual chooses to imagine and desire.

Age transitioning could be combined with sex transitioning, which would represent a more complex, multi-dimensional form of transitioning.

A simple and obvious form of multi-dimensional transitioning would be if the biological males who compete against biological females also claimed transitioning to childhood.

That way, they could add to the records and titles they presently gain by outcompeting women, the titles they would win against children. Thus, a twenty-year-old man might then be not only a champion against women, but also a champion against children.

This would enable him to more quickly fill the record books with his “accomplishments.”

Of course, multi-dimensional transitioning includes identifying in multiple kinds of activities. Thus, men who outcompete women in swimming, say, could also outcompete children in baseball and thus become “Little League” champions if they wished.

More importantly, everyone could choose to identify as anyone, capable of doing anything. And it would all have to be taken seriously and be respected. Anyone who “identified” as Napoleon would have to be acknowledged as Napoleon.

Another characteristic of “transitioning” from one category of thing to another is its kaleidoscopic character. Thus, while still possessing his penis and testicles, a twenty-year-old male can be both a grown woman and a small child.

Self-identifications can change from one to the other, instantaneously, as fast as his/her/its thoughts change.

Ideas such as these represent a reversal of the most fundamental relationship in the universe: the relationship between existence, i.e, reality, and consciousness.

In the words of Ayn Rand, “Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.”

The concept of “transitioning” represents a reversal of the relationship between existence and consciousness. It posits the primacy of consciousness over existence. It claims that existence is the product of consciousness, that it is whatever consciousness wants it to be.

Transgenderism fosters insane claims, such as the claim that men can be pregnant and have babies. Such a claim is utterly fraudulent.

It rests on first claiming that women who “identify” as men, i.e., claim to be men, are in fact men. Then, when some of these “men” become pregnant and have babies, it claims that men can have babies. The reality, of course, it that these “men” are women fraudulently labeled men.

Using the same logic, one could find cats that bark, dogs that purr, and fish that fly. All that one need do is fraudulently claim that there are dogs that “identify” as cats, cats that “identify” as dogs, and birds that “identify” as fish.

The dogs, cats, and birds, respectively mislabeled as cats, dogs, and fish, will continue to behave as what they are, which is dogs, cats, and birds.

But because they have fraudulently been mislabeled and continue to be fraudulently mislabeled while behaving as what they actually are, we have the equivalent of miracles allegedly taking place.

Thus “cats” bark, but only because all along they are actually dogs, falsely labeled as cats. Dogs purr because all along they are actually cats, falsely labeled as dogs. And fish fly because all along those “fish” are actually birds, falsely labeled as fish.

And finally, “men” can be pregnant and have babies, because all along they are not men, but women, falsely and fraudulently mislabeled as men.

Transgenderism is an assault on concepts. Its consequence is scrambled thoughts, in which ultimately everything can become everything else with which it allegedly “identifies.”

The concept of “transitioning” is an assault on the laws of logic. The most fundamental law of logic is that “A is A,” a thing is itself and not anything that is not itself. Thus, a man is a man and not a woman; a woman is a woman and not a man.

The most obvious thing that makes a man a man is the possession of a penis. The most obvious thing that makes a woman a woman is the possession of a vagina.

Physicians who deliver babies see which organ the newborn baby possesses and classify it as a boy or girl accordingly.

They do not arbitrarily “assign” it to the one sex or the other, leaving open the possibility that later on their recording of the fact will be overridden by the child’s opposite identification. There is no objective basis for an opposite identification.

A penis is not and cannot be a vagina. A vagina is not and cannot be a penis.

While these are the physical facts, people can have confused ideas. They can fantasize about being a member of the opposite sex, though they can never actually be a member of the opposite sex and thus can never know what it is actually like to be a member of the opposite sex.

When a person’s ideas contradict immutable facts, the rational thing to do is to try to change his ideas, not the facts.

To the extent that the confused ideas may be reinforced by bodily characteristics that could be interpreted as suggestive of the opposite sex, giving such an individual sex hormone therapy may well be a logical thing to do.

But the hormones should not be those of the opposite sex, but those of his or her own sex.

Thus men who want to think of themselves as women, should be given male hormones, not female hormones, testosterone not estrogen.

Women who want to think of themselves as men should be given female hormones, not male hormones, estrogen not testosterone.

There is no more fundamental task facing the supporters of logic and reason, and on their foundation, freedom and capitalism, than uprooting the slide into madness that transgenderism represents.

If we do not want to live in a world run by lunatics and populated by craven cowards willing to say and believe anything, we must put an end to transgenderism. The way to accomplish this is through the power of logic, not physical force.

Just as one is forced to accept the propositions of mathematics and natural science, which are reached by facts and logic, so too can the case against transgenderism be made.

Transgenderism must be rejected because it violates the fundamental relationship between existence and consciousness, violates the laws of logic, destroys concepts, and manufactures alleged miracles.

Enviro-Communism/Nazism: A Program of Idiots

 They don’t know what a woman is, and believe that men can have babies, which is ignorance on the level of not knowing that one plus one equals two. In effect, they describe themselves as idiots. (The IQs of idiots range from 0 to 25.) 

Yet at the same time, they claim to know that unless we give up fossil fuels, and all the necessities and conveniences that depend on them, eat bugs instead of beef, and even reduce the use of anesthesia, global warming will massively raise sea levels and cause mass drowning.

With IQs closer to the level of inanimate objects than to that of most human beings, they do not realize that precisely fossil fuels is what would prevent any major loss of human life caused by rising sea levels or practically any other natural disaster.

Fossil fuels give to man the ability to evacuate large numbers of people from the scene of impending natural disasters and then quickly to replace whatever property has been lost. This because they raise the productivity of human labor enormously and progressively.

The world could quickly recover even from property damage every generation on the scale of that of World War II, so long as it had the productivity of labor and preservation of human life made possible by fossil fuels.

The hostility to fossil fuels, beef, and even anesthesia, are leading manifestations of hatred of human life and well-being. It is the hatred of the communists and Nazis for the human race and its happiness.

Idiots want us to give up the power of our individual brains and their coordination through voluntary social cooperation and its offshoot the price system.

Instead, they want to replace the integrated, coordinated planning of billions of average and above-average individual people with the delusions of a relative handful of idiots foisted on the population by force and fraud.

The world must soon choose between capitalism and enviro-communism/Nazism, between the thinking and planning of billions of individuals motivated by the prospect of induvial gain, and grandiose delusion imposed by force and fraud.

For elaboration of the case for capitalism and against environmentalism, see especially Chapter 3 of my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, titled “Natural Resources and the Environment.” See also chapters 6-8. (Search for my book under George Reisman in the category “All” on Amazon.com.)

The Absurdity of Fighting Fossil Fuels

 

Can anyone explain how it is rational to try to fight a natural phenomenon like climate change and do so by means of abandoning fossil fuels and atomic power, which are the foundations of our ability to cope with nature?[GR1] 

---

 [GR1]

Trans-Weather (02/04/23)

Although originally assigned to the category “in danger from global warming,” much of the Northern Hemisphere now identifies with freezing from record-setting cold.

How t Stop the Decline of Western Culture: Read Mises, Rand, and Reisman

Western Culture is in its greatest decline since the 3^rd Century, when the Graeco-Roman culture of the Ancient World began its descent into the Dark Ages. Self-made sub-morons declare that men can have babies and that one cannot say what a woman is without a degree in biology. 

Instead of being justly ridiculed and booed out of the Senate hearing room, one such moron was made a member of the US Supreme Court a few months ago. Why? Because her being a woman[?!] of color was thought essential to prove that the Court did not regard race or sex as essential.

What was proved, of course, is that a majority of the present US Senate is a pack or racist fools who tripped over a glaring contradiction that they hold, the contradiction between their alleged opposition to racism and their obvious racism.

They were racist in insisting that the candidate belong to a favored race, and also “sexist” in demanding that she belong to the favored female sex, which, unlike even a very small child, some of them can’t define.

Contemporary culture, the cultural “mainstream,” is a cesspool of absurdities and contradictions. It needs to be replaced.

One source of replacement is the inspiration that can be gained by studying works of the past. As the men of the Renaissance were inspired by the works of Antiquity, so too, we can be inspired the works of the more than 25 centuries that preceded us.

But there are some very recent authors, up to now largely ignored, who have a great deal to say that can be of great value in changing our cultural “mainstream,” particularly in the areas of philosophy and economics. They are Mises, Rand, and Reisman.

Mises’s Socialism and Human Action, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and Reisman’s Capitalism are four of the most essential books of this kind.

Reisman’s Capitalism contains an extensive bibliography of books including, in addition to all of the works of Mises and Rand and the leading works of the enemies of capitalism, such as Marx and Keynes, the leading works of all lesser supporters of capitalism. 

(Search respectively under Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, and George Reisman in the category “All.”)

Biden Is Breaking the Law

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race. Yet that is exactly what Pres. Biden is doing on behalf of his nominee to the Supreme Court. Republicans should name this fact repeatedly in the hearings and otherwise refuse to participate.

Federal prosecutors should bring charges against Biden both for this and for his daily defiance of immigration laws. Biden is operating as though he had been given the powers of Hitler under Germany’s Enabling Act of 1933, which allowed Hitler to do whatever he liked.

Washington’s Birthday

 

Today, February 22, is Washington’s Birthday. For most of our history, it was celebrated as a national holiday and deserves to be again. Lincoln’s Birthday can be combined with that of Martin Luther King and celebrated as “Black Freedom Day.”

However great the merits of Martin Luther King may be, they do not outweigh those of the Father of Our Country, which is what Washington was. Yet this is what is implied by giving King a national holiday but not Washington.

The communists, socialists, and progressives who attack Washington for owning slaves have no solid ground on which to do so, for, unlike Washington, who sought the end of slavery and ultimately freed his slaves, they seek the reimposition of slavery—for everyone.

Socialism requires that everyone work for the government, for whatever pittance the government chooses to pay. This is slavery.

Reason Is Infinitely More Important Than Race

 A commonality of skin color and associated facial features is as nothing compared to the fact that human beings of all races share the faculty of reason. The former may allow for an interesting group photo once in a while.

The latter is what underlies the accumulation and application of knowledge and gives to the members of all races the ability to produce the goods and services that the members of all races need and desire.

Every day the members of all races benefit from the work of the members of all other races in that greatest phenomenon of voluntary social cooperation, the division of labor and capitalism.

For elaboration, read my Capitalism. It’s available in Kindle, hardcopy, and a two-volume paperback edition at Amazon.com: george reisman, capitalism a treatise on economics

How Fox News Can Better Counter The Leftist Networks

Commentators on Fox News have rightly said that the various leftist networks make a major contribution to rioting and civil unrest by creating a false narrative on important events, which is then disappointed, seemingly with no explanation but some nonsense such as “white racism.”

Fox can do something about this. For one thing, it should post on YouTube such decisive commentaries as its showing how the prosecutor in the Rittenhouse case actually made the case for the defense.

Amazingly, he called one witness after another who testified that Rittenhouse was the victim of aggression, not the aggressor.

Fox should also post on YouTube all of its series of snippets showing one after another of the leftist commentators using the identical key words in their commentaries, as though they had all been briefed beforehand by the Ministry of Propaganda.

Finally, Fox should consider advertising on the other networks by showing how it differs from them, in not following a leftist party line, and catching them up in their lies, such as creating the impression that the men Rittenhouse shot were black.

Some Questions About Income Tax Audits

 

An income tax audit is essentially a search. Why, consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, doesn’t it require a search warrant signed by a judge?

Since income-tax audits sometimes lead to criminal prosecutions and jail sentences, why is it not a requirement that anyone whom the IRS wishes to audit, first be given a “Miranda Warning,” with its notification of the right to remain silent and to have an attorney present?

Why isn’t the 5^th Amendment to the US Constitution and its protection against self-incrimination a routine basis for the refusal to submit to an audit, thus requiring the IRS to make its cases without the cooperation of citizens forced to help in their own incrimination?

 

What Using the Pronouns Chosen by "Transgender" People Means

Please explain the difference between using the pronouns chosen by “transgender” people and working as an unpaid extra in someone’s sexual fantasy.

How “Men” Can Give Birth.

Start with a woman. Get the woman to declare that she “identifies” as a man. So now, according to the prevailing view in “intellectual” circles, this woman is a man.

So, if she (“he”) becomes pregnant and gives birth, we supposedly have a case of a man giving birth, because the woman has been mislabeled as a man.

In this way, its’s possible to explain how a “cat” can bark like a dog, and how fish can fly and birds can swim. It’s all a matter of fraudulent labeling and then feigning shock when the mislabeled thing behaves in accordance with its actual nature.

 

COLUMBUS DAY IS COMING

Education is the transmission of civilization from previous generations to the rising generation. By the end of it, children have become civilized adults and see themselves as members of the civilization in which they have been educated.

Columbus discovered America from the perspective of those who are members of Western Civilization, including descendants of the American natives who greeted him. As educated people, they are no longer indigenous natives but modern “Westerners.”

To the extent that they do not identify with Columbus but with their primitive ancestors, they have not been educated.

To learn more, see my Kindle book Contemporary Education’s Racist Road to Barbarism, available at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00P4IT3JC/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i7

Murderous Marxist Morons

Candidate for a bumper sticker: “Murderous Marxist Morons.”

A challenge to Murderous Marxist Morons: Explain what you or anyone else would have to do to centrally plan the economic system. Where would you start? what would you have to know? Could the planning be subdivided without immediately becoming a chaos?

Socialist central planning would require that each member of the Central Planning Board be able to hold in his mind all of the factories, pieces of equipment, and all other means of production, where they were, what they were capable of accomplishing, and when, for a generation.

Capitalism is full of economic planning—on the part of all the individual participants in the economic system. If you go shopping with a shopping list, you have an economic plan: you’re planning to buy what’s on your list. 

Wage earners, consumers, and businessmen make countless plans with respect to all aspects of their operations. Murderous Marxist Morons are too stupid to realize this. They think capitalism is a planless chaos first awaiting planning by them. 

The alleged planning of the Murderous Marxist Morons is an empty wish list of goals that they announce every five years (the Soviets’ Five-Year Plans) or every four years (the Nazis’ Four-Year Plans). 

Meanwhile, under capitalism, all parts of the economic system are continually planned and re-planned in response to changes in individual profit and loss calculations.

The planning of virtually all aspects of capitalism by its individual participants is harmonized, coordinated, and integrated by the price system, which rests on the profit motive and the freedom of competition, which in turn rest on private ownership of the means of production.

The Murderous Marxist Morons know nothing of this. Their contribution to production and civilization is nothing other than the destruction of capitalism and its price system and thus of rational economic planning The result is chaos, poverty, suffering, and death.

To learn more, read chapters 6-8 of my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, available on Amazon under "George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics".