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The Progressive Revolution: From Democratic to Liberal to Progressive to Socialist


Muda69

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1 hour ago, Impartial_Observer said:

Right off the top of my head I cited statistics relating kids from two parent households which you refuted with your own experience. I obviously can’t quote, prior to the last crash, so you have plausible deniability....

Show me the post.

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4 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

I should have known @Impartial_Observer‘S lying, invalid, parasitic ass wouldn’t be able to back up his words. 

Also, I have a flight booked back to Indiana 🙂

Please keep us posted. I'll get the alley behind the Silver Dollar in Elwood reserved for you guys, just give me a date. It gets pretty busy at sundown.

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I am gone for a day or two and I miss all the fun stuff!  Whose making the odds on the fight, and who's holding the money? (Not Muda, I hope!) 

Is it guns, knives, or just knuckles and teeth?

And where in the hell is Elwood!?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Liberal Author: ‘Normal’ People Must Stop Wearing Any Kind of Red Hat Because Red Hats Are Scary: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/liberal-author-normal-people-must-stop-wearing-any-kind-of-red-hat/

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A prominent liberal author has compared the red “Make America Great Again” hats to Nazi swastikas, and told “normal people” — that is, people who don’t support Trump — to stop wearing any kind of red hat, lest they start “making people scared.”

Rebecca Makkai, who has been a finalist for both a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, made the controversial comments on Twitter, according to Fox News.

To be clear, Makkai really was talking about all red hats. In fact, she even specifically asked fans of sports teams that wear red hats — such as the Cincinnati Reds and Washington Nationals — to not wear those hats out in public to avoid making other people afraid.

“Not worth making disenfranchised people feel unsafe,” she wrote.

Makkai also had a problem with MAGA parody hats:

“Also, for the love of God: The clever folks wearing “Make America Read Again” or whatever caps — NO,” she said. “You’re making everyone scared. Don’t do it.”

Honestly, there are so many things wrong with this that I hardly even know where to start.

First of all, there is something totally wrong with her assertion that anyone who does not agree with her political views is somehow not a “normal” person. In fact, part of the reason why some of Trump’s supporters do support him so fervently is they feel like much of the country sees them as “less than” for their views. Trying to paint them all as a bunch of abnormal freaks is not going to turn anyone toward Makkai’s point of view, it is just going to turn them further away. This is a huge problem when you consider how divided by politics our country is already. To far too many people, those on the opposite side of the political spectrum are not just political opponents, but enemies in life. This kind of divisiveness, to which Makkai is unquestionably contributing, is far more harmful to the country than any color of hat. It’s destroying friendships and families. It’s making it impossible to have the kind of open, honest, respectful conversations that we need to have with one another as Americans if we ever hope to solve our country’s problems.

Second of all, if we are going to go around deciding what is and is not “normal,” I would say that a “normal” person does not take it upon himself to decide what color hats other people should be wearing. I mean, seriously. The color red is not and should not be controversial, because well, it is a f***ing color. With all due respect, if someone out there really finds themself scared to go out in public because they might encounter a Red Wings fan wearing a red hat, it seems pretty clear that they’re the one with an issue.

Now just a color triggers these snowflakes.  

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Purdue faculty challenge promise of a Chick-fil-A on campus: https://www.jconline.com/story/news/2019/09/09/purdue-faculty-challenge-promise-chick-fil-campus/2261837001/

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Purdue’s plans to bring a Chick-fil-A fast food franchise to campus – long sought in student petitions and announced this summer as part of a new residence hall opening in 2020 – were called out Monday by faculty members, who suggested the university needed to reacclimate itself with the proper way to treat its LGBT students and staff.

A proposed measure meant to pressure Purdue’s administration to make sure that commercial ventures on campus “uphold the same values and promote inclusivity with their policies, hiring practices and actions” didn’t call out Chick-fil-A by name.

“It’s bigger than that,” said Audrey Ruple, chair of the University Senate’s Equity and Diversity Committee. “We intentionally didn’t want this to be about one business – just ‘The Chick-fil-A’ resolution.”

But Jo Boileau, Purdue’s new student body president, didn’t mince words about a measure that was purposely broad to make any commercial business looking to open on campus match the university’s affirmative action codes. He wanted to talk about the “much more specific case” of Chick-fil-A.

 

“As student body president and as an openly gay student, this is something I’m confronting on a daily basis, in conversations I’m having every single day with students on this campus,” Boileau said.

If Purdue could give back millions of dollars from Papa John’s founder John Schnatter in 2018 because of racist remarks, Boileau said, he questioned what sort of message the university was sending to its LGBT community by clearing the way for Chick-fil-A.

....

How about doing business with Chick-fil-A, specifically, given the political division its drive-through can inspire?

“I want to be sensitive to it,” Wynkoop said. “But it’s something that students have called for for a long, long, long, long time. Student body presidents and their cabinets have actually run on that platform, to bring it to campus.”

Wynkoop added: “And they’ve been on campus for a year, now.”

Chick-fil-A in 2018 started delivering a pop-up style location three evenings a week in the Krach Leadership Center, a building that also houses an Amazon pickup location as well offices for student groups and student services at Third Street and Martin Jischke Drive.

Also in 2018, Purdue students started a petition at Change.org titled, “Purdue Needs a Chick-fil-A.” As of Monday, 3,416 people had signed the online petition.

Among them was Riley Johnson, a senior studying dietetics, who wrote at the time: “This is an incredible company with strong values, great services and delicious food.” What was his take this week, as faculty members challenged Chick-fil-A’s place on campus?

“The restaurant’s stances do not cross my mind when I go there or affect my eating habits,” Johnson said. “I personally believe a private company should have the freedom to take a political or religious stance if they choose. If people don’t agree with it, then they don’t have to eat there. That is their choice.”

David Bergsma, a sixth-year senior in Purdue’s doctor of pharmacy program, signed the petition, too. He said he was in a room with other students when he heard Chick-fil-A was going to be part of the Third Street Suites North residence hall – news he called “exciting.”

“The general response was cheering and gratitude – gratitude that Purdue actually saw the petition and listened to us,” Bergsma said. “I think the number of people trying to keep Chick-fil-A off our campus because of their political stances is a small minority. Most students couldn’t care less, we just want the amazing food they have. I think this is evidenced by the long lines for sandwiches in Krach whenever the restaurant visits.”

Still, Linda Prokopy, a professor and member of the University Senate’s Equity and Diversity Committee, argued that “there are students, there are staff and there are faculty on this campus who are hurting by a decision made by this university” over the summer. Even if the administration chose to ignore the University Senate, she said, the faculty should still stand up for those who say they’re hurting.

Ruple agreed.

“Many people, when they’re not personally affected by the exclusionary principles of businesses, it’s genuinely a blind spot,” Ruple said. “For me, this is something that’s so central to how we operate as an institution, that to allow organizations onto our premises that don’t follow those same inclusivity principles actually really undermines the core of who we are.”

Hurt by the mere presence of a Chick-fil-A on campus?  Really?   The very definition of liberal snowflake right there.   

 

 

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On 9/10/2019 at 5:17 AM, Muda69 said:

Purdue faculty challenge promise of a Chick-fil-A on campus: https://www.jconline.com/story/news/2019/09/09/purdue-faculty-challenge-promise-chick-fil-campus/2261837001/

Hurt by the mere presence of a Chick-fil-A on campus?  Really?   The very definition of liberal snowflake right there.   

 

 

Isn’t Purdue a conservative school?

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38 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

Isn’t Purdue a conservative school?

The student body or the faculty?

Recent commentary on this issue from the leader of the closest thing Lafayette has to a "megachurch":  https://www.jconline.com/story/news/opinion/2019/09/10/lafayette-pastor-troubling-case-purdue-faculty-going-after-chick-fil/2279469001/

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The Progressive Feeding Frenzy: https://reason.com/2019/09/12/the-progressive-feeding-frenzy/

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In any system of social accounting, it is necessary to reconcile revenues with expenditures. Private firms do so because they fear insolvency and bankruptcy. Public institutions don't have the option of bankruptcy, so they invoke three related strategies to avoid the inevitable: raise taxes, print money, or incur debt to meet their obligations.

Done prudently, it is possible for governments to keep their books in balance. But not when these three tools are in the hands of modern progressives and would-be socialists who use them to save the world from environmental disaster, to equalize income and wealth, to codify an ever-widening class of positive rights, and to rectify an ever-greater set of supposed grievances through private lawsuits or government regulation.

These goals may look plausible—even tempting—when taken in isolation. It might seem churlish to argue anyone should be denied a cleaner environment, a college education, universal health care, or guaranteed housing. Perhaps cost should be no object. These proposals are often strategically vague on matters of detail so as to make it impossible to put a price tag on each separate initiative, let alone all of them in combination. The excuse is then made that wealth production is best handled by a combination of monetary and fiscal policy. The first makes credit cheap, and the second uses government purchases to pick up any slack.

How then are these gargantuan expenditures to be funded? The first problem is that the private sector will be so debilitated that government revenues will fall even if tax rates are kept at their current rate. But taxes won't stay at their current rate, because the progressive mindset ignores incentives and treats all wealth transfers as zero-sum. They assume that no amount of taking will ever lead to less earning and that the top 1 percent of Americans, who earn about 20 percent of total income, comprise a deep well.

But that well has already been tapped; today these same rich people also pay 40 percent of federal and state taxes. Some of that money generates return benefits in the form of government goods and services. But today, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and lesser entitlement programs consume an ever-larger fraction of public wealth. We are on the wrong side of the Laffer curve, where higher taxes will generate even smaller revenues. Foreign investors will stay away or pull up stakes and move elsewhere. Many older professionals will choose to retire rather than take a cut in after-tax income. Meanwhile, everyone else will lobby to get on the government gravy train.

None of these prospects seem to deter progressives, who insist, despite strong evidence to the contrary, that they can fund annual trillion-dollar deficits with increased taxes on billionaires and near-billionaires.

Look at the roster of proposed reforms: Cut the estate tax exemption from its current level of $11.4 million to about one-third that amount. Next, make the income tax more progressive. Finally, enact something along the lines of Elizabeth Warren's annual wealth tax of 2 percent on personal estates worth between $50 million and $1 billion, and 3 percent on estates over that amount. These numbers are just a starting point, of course. Proponents will soon say, now that the principle of the wealth tax is established, that the numbers are a mere detail and can be adjusted upward without any serious constitutional limitation.

Should this economic coalition succeed, the American system will fall into the kind of death spiral that has characterized so many socialist regimes. Wealth will flee, revenue will fall, and the entitlements will become nominal, not real. You will have a right to education, health care, and housing, Just not today. Wait obediently on a queue until your name is called, at which point it may be too late. But never even dream that you should be allowed to escape the clutches of a well-intentioned monopoly that demands exclusive public support. Forget those pesky charter schools that provide better education at lower costs.

Trust that government-run firms will continue the private sector's legacy of tech and transportation innovations. Rest easy knowing that America's most powerful and productive companies will be governed by boards of directors with members chosen by government bodies that champion "responsible" investing.

For the past 80 years, the United States has managed to balance the trade-off between innovation and equity without imposing any mortal threat to our social institutions. Not anymore. The progressive agenda, if enacted with full rigor, will create massive economic dislocation that will threaten our democratic institutions to their cores.

And they must not be allowed to succeed with their agenda.  If they do I suggest Americans who values personal freedom, responsibility, sovereignty, and the future of their children/grandchildren leave the country for greener pastures because the USA will no longer be the the land of opportunity.  It will simply, and horribly, become another Venezuela.

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

Socialism Is the Greatest Threat to the Environment: https://mises.org/wire/socialism-greatest-threat-environment

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If we want a true alternative to fossil fuels that improves the environment, reduces emissions, and strengthens global welfare, it will only come from the free market

Historical evidence and economic incentives show us that interventionism and socialism never protect the environment; they only use it as a subterfuge to increase control of the economy while subsidizing polluters under the excuse of “employment” using the term “strategic sectors.”

Interventionism, in fact, puts all obstacles to technological innovation and disruptive developments:

First, because technology and competition reduce government power when it comes to price formation and economic vertebration of society. This means the state is the one picking winners and losers, as well as when, where, and how to spend.

Second, because disruptive technology is disinflationary and it does not allow governments to fill bloated companies with political jobs in inefficient conglomerates controlled by political power. The fundamental reason why interventionism will never defend the environment and innovation is that it detests competition and technology and competition weaken its power.

However, in the protests we see in the media throughout the West, the silence is deafening about the most interventionist economies controlled by governments and their state-owned companies, which are the world’s worst polluters. That is why it is sad that something that we should all support — protection of the environment — becomes (like so many other objectives shared by all)  a propaganda instrument to whitewash the most deplorable and absolute form of interventionism.

This is not about protecting the environment, but about protecting political rent-seeking, which is very attractive to the most interventionist politicians because it is the only way to continue exercising a power that escapes their hands when there is real competition, technological improvement, and transparency.

The reality is that the interventionist systems never defend the improvement of the environment, but aim to appropriate the climate banner to do the opposite and then blame the nearest external enemy. The politicization of climate action does not defend the environment, but whitewashes interventionism. Hence the silence on the environmental records of highly interventionist regimes like China and Iran.

China has approved to build more installed coal capacity in the next twelve years than the entire current US capacity and almost double that of the European Union. Meanwhile, Iran is the country that subsidizes fossil energies the most. 

The biggest subsidies to pollution are, surprise, all in countries with low economic freedom, governments with maximum control of the economy and with state-owned companies. Of the 147 countries that have ratified the latest environmental agreements, in more than 90%, the companies, and polluting sectors are 100% public (the producers of the petro-states, the largest coal plants, steelworks, etc).

Subsidies-by-country-2011.png

Of course, it is very easy to be an “activist” in open economies, railing against publicly listed companies that are the solution, not the problem. It is very easy to raise taxes on citizens with an environmental excuse while subsidizing the most polluting sectors.

EFfavJhXoAAiQRs.jpg

Don’t you find it amusing to read that countries that tell us that they have an unquestionable environmental commitment have, at the same time, refineries and coal plants as large pillars of state investment in the next ten years? Not because they are needed – these are two sectors where there is overcapacity at a global level. This is done because what interventionists always promote by definition are white elephants. They build things for the sake of building.

When competition is ignored or rejected, and economic logic in investment is abandoned, governments never promote change, they only disguise inefficiencies with good words.

Those activists – not all – who are attacking innovative leading companies and open economies, which are the solution, do not do so due to lack of information or ignorance. They do it because their goal is different. Some climate activists are happy to join totalitarian governments, theocracies and dictatorships (whether pollutants or not) to destroy what little is left of the free market in a western world that is drowned precisely by interventionism.

Some climate activists seem fixated on attacking companies that have been successful at leading technology, sustainability and environmental change, because the goal is not to have efficient champions who are capable of leading by creating employment, strengthening their position and growing in the world. The goal is to expropriate them to fill them with political positions, exactly what has led global state oil companies to destroy value, efficiency and perpetuate overcapacity.

It is not that the interventionists are foolish or incoherent in their silence with Venezuela, China, or Iran and their attacks on US companies that improve the environment by innovating and growing. The objective is that competition and private innovation, the two factors that will continue to improve the world, reduce poverty and create wealth, disappear.

This is the sad thing about politicians who call themselves progressive and in reality are regressive, what they want is to have state conglomerates that sink competitiveness, and distribute positions by political designation. This is the perfect formula to annihilate innovation and change.

There are only two ways to solve environmental challenges: competition and technology. No government obsessed with power and price controls will defend those options. They will eliminate them. And it’s happening in a country near you right now.

Interventionist governments want inflation and control. Technology and competition destroy those two factors.

Technology and competition can only happen in a capitalist system where the incentive to innovate is rewarded by success and creative destruction of the obsolete sectors with the growth of the productive and innovative ones generates more and better welfare for all. This can only happen in capitalism. Economic freedom is the only guarantee of environmental protection.

EFfWj4PXoAENFqH.jpg
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Decarbonization is unstoppable, but it would be even faster without the pitfalls of those who today present themselves as saviors of the Earth while in reality they just tax citizens to perpetuate polluting “national strategic champions”.

Technology and competition can achieve decarbonisation faster and more efficiently. But technology and competition reduce prices and curb government control, two things governments hate.

Only free markets give the solution to climate challenges.

 

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31 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

Then, for the sake of the planet, the government must step in.

FTOP:

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This is not about protecting the environment, but about protecting political rent-seeking, which is very attractive to the most interventionist politicians because it is the only way to continue exercising a power that escapes their hands when there is real competition, technological improvement, and transparency.

The reality is that the interventionist systems never defend the improvement of the environment, but aim to appropriate the climate banner to do the opposite and then blame the nearest external enemy. The politicization of climate action does not defend the environment, but whitewashes interventionism. Hence the silence on the environmental records of highly interventionist regimes like China and Iran.

You need to realize Dante, that big government is not the benevolent and altruistic overlord you desperately want it to be.

 

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7 minutes ago, DanteEstonia said:

The things on this planet that don’t have to breathe air saturated with lead disagree.

If there is no demand for these products then they won't be produced. If they are produced to supply a small demand then they will be expensive and anyone with a brain in their head will look for a cheaper and more available alternative.

In the case of lead paint, the prospective tenant or real estate buyer can ask for verification that there is no lead paint. If the seller or landlord lies then the buyer can sew them. It's easy and cheap to test products for lead so both parties can easily find out the truth.

 

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  • 2 months later...

Bad Capitalism and Good Socialism: https://mises.org/power-market/bad-capitalism-and-good-socialism

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Is socialism the enemy of the civilized order? It depends on what kind of socialism we are discussing. There are several varieties, not only one. If it is the version calling for government ownership and control of all the means of production, the complete nationalization of all industries, then yes, socialism is the work of the devil. All we need do to demonstrate this is mention economic basket cases like Venezuela, East Germany, Maoist China and the USSR. They produced dire poverty and the deaths of millions of innocent people.

There is a second, just as historically accurate definition of socialism as the first. It is predicated on the Marxian nostrum “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” If this goal is attained on a coercive basis, then, yet again, this compulsory egalitarianism is surely uncivilized. It amounts to stealing from the innocent rich. But suppose people agree to live under this principle? Ayn Rand might not like this too much, but, if it is truly voluntary, then instead of being incompatible with civilized principles, it is a paradigmatic case of them. That is, the rich agree to be “expropriated” in favor of the poor.

Are there any such institutions that actually flourish? Here are a few: the convent, monastery, kibbutz, commune, syndicalist association, cooperative. I teach at a Jesuit school, and all members of this order subscribe to the “from each, to each” philosophy. True, kibbutzim were initially subsidized by the state of Israel and are now shadows of their former selves, and Robert Owen’s commune in New Harmony, Ind., is no longer in operation. But neither does every business last forever. Then there is the average American family. It, too, lives according to this Marxian doctrine. The three-year-old girl eats, gets toys, and is clothed not in accordance with her ability to earn income, but based on her needs.

Capitalism is likewise divided into several varieties. If it is free market capitalism we are contemplating, or as near to that system as we can approach in this vale of tears, then this—along with voluntary socialism—is the very foundation of the civilized order. All boats rise on a tide of profit maximization and untrammeled entrepreneurship, as long as personal and property rights are respected. The experiences of places with expansive economic freedom, such as the US, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore—and yes, Bernie, Scandinavia too—give ample testimony to this claim.

Yet under the veneer of economic freedom, markets have their dark side, too: crony capitalism. Uber is brutalized by the taxi industry in the name of protecting the public; young women who braid hair are hassled by licensed beauticians; domestic manufacturers lust after protective tariffs; farm states tried to outlaw dyeing margarine yellow; labor unions champion minimum wage laws to price their unskilled competitors out of the market. As Adam Smith wisely said, under this type of capitalism, “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

No, not all versions of socialism are the enemy of humanity and decency, nor are all types of capitalism their friend. It all depends on which variety of each we are discussing.

 

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