RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/07/killing_with_kindness_the_dangers_of_moral_hazards.html

Moral hazards are easy to understand on a personal level but, when it comes to encouraging “the government” to give “free” money to an erstwhile “good cause,” virtue signaling easily trumps a cost/benefit analysis.

It has not been easy to rein in federal government spending. Lurid tales of federal government collapse fall on deaf ears. Ditto for pleas that “while it might be a good idea, we just cannot afford it.” As with drug addicts, appetites overwhelm reason.

This aversion to restraint is particularly notable in the liberal reaction to President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that cut tens of billions in “safety net” programs. Critics portrayed the bill as a death sentence for America’s poor and desperate people overseas. For these free-spenders, surely Uncle Sam can come to the rescue, print more money and save the world.

Fortunately, a compelling argument against overspending exists, albeit one seldom heard in today’s debate: moral hazard According to one definition: ‘a moral hazard is a situation where an economic actor has an incentive to increase its exposure to risk because it does not bear the full costs associated with that risk, should things go wrong.” Moral hazards encourage excessive risk-taking.

Consider the “Trump will Kill People” panic surrounding the bill’s reducing funding for the Supplemental Food Assistance Program (SNAP) or, colloquially, Food Stamps. SNAP is designed to help poor people supplement their diets, and while administered by individual states, it is largely Washington financed. Purchases were initially limited, but it now permits recipients to buy nearly everything except alcohol and tobacco products, pet food, prepared meals, cleaning supplies, cosmetics, paper products, and food containing marijuana. SNAP guidelines do not exclude soft drinks, snacks and “junk food.” There are currently 42 million SNAP participants, with 62% of them families with children.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/07/15/is-there-no-cure-for-democrats-derangement/

We’ve noted before that today’s Democrats are operating with a mental deficit. A new poll further confirms they are a broken people. While it’s good for a cheap laugh, because they are often smug, condescending and hateful to those who disagree with them, their fragile psychological state poses a threat to the republic.

A Rasmussen poll released Monday found that 60% of Democratic voters still believe “the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election.” As disturbing as that is, 69% of those who self-identify as “liberals” believe Donald Trump conspired with Moscow to beat Hillary Clinton.

The poll indicates that Trump Derangement Syndrome is not limited to the Democratic side: 45% of moderates also believe in the Russia hoax, while 27% of conservatives hold the same view. (Are there really that many Never Trumpers on the right?)

For the record, the Trump-Russia partnership was a fabrication set loose by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and a number of Democratic Party minions. More than two years ago, special counsel John Durham released a report, compiled over three years, that, according to CNN, “concluded that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.”

The FBI probe, said Durham, was based on “raw, unanalyzed and uncorroborated intelligence” and corrupted by “confirmation bias.”

In other words, there was nothing to investigate, because the entire rancid stew was concocted to drive Trump from the presidency. “President Obama” and then-CIA Director John Brennan “knew before the FBI opened up on that information that this was a dirty trick by Hillary Clinton,” says John Solomon, chief executive and editor in chief of Just the News.

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/qed/the-devouring-state/

There is a quiet but powerful assumption that underlies much of the modern political left: that people are fixed. You are who you are—because of your upbringing, your environment, your skin colour, your class, your chromosomes—and you are stuck that way. This is not a fringe belief. It is foundational. It determines how the left writes policy, how it talks about people, and ultimately how it justifies its own existence.

This deterministic worldview—where the future is something done to us, not something we build—is no minor quirk. It is the lifeblood of leftist politics. Without it, the left’s policies begin to unravel, its rhetoric loses force, and its claims to moral authority collapse. For if people are truly free—if they possess the capacity for self-betterment, resilience, and growth—then the left’s vast machinery of redistribution, intervention, and protection becomes unnecessary, or worse, infantilising.

To understand this dynamic, the work of Carl Jung provides a useful framework. His archetype of the devouring mother—the figure who smothers her children with care, robbing them of the challenges that build independence—is an apt metaphor for the modern welfare state. The devouring mother does not act out of cruelty but out of a pathological need to protect, to provide, and to be needed. She denies the child the trials that would make him strong—because his weakness justifies her role. This is exactly how many modern governments behave: offering more and more, doing more and more, until the individual no longer knows how to stand.

In psychological and behavioural literature, the case for agency is overwhelming. The belief that one’s actions matter—that personal responsibility and effort shape outcomes—is one of the most robust predictors of success across nearly every domain of life. Children raised to believe in their capacity to overcome hardship fare better academically, emotionally, and economically. Adults who take responsibility for their choices are healthier and more resilient. Communities that foster self-reliance tend to be safer, more cohesive, and more innovative.

But here lies the problem: individuals who believe they can lift themselves up don’t need bureaucrats to do it for them. Citizens who believe in their capacity to act don’t require constant intervention, assistance, or redistribution. And so, from the left’s perspective, this belief in human potential is not just inconvenient—it is dangerous. It threatens the very foundation of their legitimacy.

It is no accident that the Left tends to frame people as helpless victims, be it of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchal oppression, or genetics. These narratives are not just analytical tools; they are political necessities. They serve to delegitimise personal agency while legitimising the expansive role of the state. If individuals are seen as powerless it becomes the state’s sacred duty to rescue them. And just like the devouring mother, the State can feel morally righteous for doing so.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2025/07/13/former-ny-governor-criticized-comrade-mamdani-and-then-this-happened-n4941716

David Paterson was the governor of New York from 2008 to 2010, when he was succeeded by Andrew Cuomo as the Democrats’ one-party rule of the state continued drearily on. Yet although he is another New York Democrat, Paterson is not thrilled with Zohran Mamdani, his fellow Democrat who stands on the brink of becoming the next mayor of New York City. 

Yet when he criticized Mamdani, Paterson found to his dismay that not only was he inundated with angry phone calls from the young Communist’s supporters, but his family was targeted as well. And so once again we see the new feature the left is intent on introducing into American politics: intimidation. 

Paterson said Sunday that after he said that either Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams should drop out of the mayoral race so as to try to block Mamdani from winning, the reaction from those who see Mamdani as the Democrats’ new hope was swift and severe: “I got a whole lot of nasty, negative phone calls — really vitriolic — from Mamdani supporters,” Paterson recounted. The enraged Marxists “called my home. They called my wife. It was really kind of difficult for those 48 hours after the press conference.”

Paterson refuses to bow to intimidation, and restated his position: “If Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams both stay in the mayor’s race, it will be [an] open door for Zohran Mamdani to win the election in November for mayor. My proposal was that there be a way to make a decision [on] which of these two candidates should run against Mamdani.” 

All three of these candidates are Democrats, although Cuomo and Adams are running as independents, as Mamdani is the official Democrat nominee. There is a Republican in the race, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, but he doesn’t stand a chance: New York City is a one-party entity, to the degree that even if Adolf Hitler himself were running on the Democrat ticket and the Archangel Michael on the Republican, New Yorkers would still dutifully reject the GOP candidate and pull the lever for the man with a D behind his name. 

Three Democrats in the race, however, will just split the Democrat vote and likely hand the city to the candidate who is the official party nominee, and that’s Mamdani. Evidence of how deep the rot goes in the Democrat Party is the fact that Paterson’s problem with this Communist is not so much a matter of principle as simply that he is a young upstart who has not fully sketched out the details of how exactly he plans to destroy New York City.